Sunday, April 25, 2010
The Condition for the Possibility of the Control of Time
For Kant, time is the condition for the possibility of all intuitions. As simplistic as it sounds, time allows us the possibility to understand things temporally; without this it would be quite difficult or perhaps quite easy to make it to class on time. But I wonder to what extent we have sensible control over time. If time is a condition for all sensations, and does not exist as a thing itself, what do we make of our ability to control the progression of time? It seems as I write now I can concentrate on the time passing, making it “go slower” or focus on the text I write, making time seem to “go quickly”. While this is touching on the practice of psychology, I think it has some significance with the transcendental aesthetic. If we can control such basic condition for the possibility of experience, in some way it would seem that we can control our own ability to experience. If this is true, is that ability a condition before the transcendental aesthetic? If it is not, there would have to be some strange type of regression in the way we can manipulate experiencing; we would have to have the condition for the possibility of experience be partially dependent on our ability to control it. I do not mean that we control it as a thing in itself, but that we control the condition as it is implied in our intuitions. If this control is not a part of or before the transcendental aesthetic, then it would seem that it is an appearance and not an actual control. Maybe we think we have control when in fact that control we perceive is nothing more than an intuition. Thoughts?
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It seems silly to talk about time as if we can control it. You may "feel" as if time is going slower or faster, but you have no actual control over time in regard to your experiences. You will observe motionless Ball A move only after rolling Ball B hits it. Time and space are conditions for the possibility of experience. Though we cannot say that they exist independent of us, moving these ordering principles to the individual does not mean that we gain control of them.
ReplyDeletePerhaps to say more explicitly what Mr. Price was getting at, even if we can "control" time in such a way, the basic nature of time as a condition for the possibility of human experience remains unchanged. No matter how slow or fast time goes, time is one-dimensional and unidirectional.
ReplyDeleteBesides, I don't think that Kant is speaking about time in the sense of "objective" time measured in seconds and minutes, but rather our subjective experience of it. If one hour seems to us to go by faster than the previous hour, it is with reference to a transcendental time, which I will illustrate below.
(I apologize that this is getting so long.) In our personal experience of time, let us say that an hour of objective time generally takes X units of subjective inner experience. When time seems to speed up, we experience, say, two objective hours in that same X units of subjective inner experience (perhaps because we are so absorbed in whatever activity that there isn't much inner activity going on). When time seems to drag, we only get through half an objective hour in that same X units of subjective inner experience.
I am not saying this is what actually happens, but it is at least a possible response to the claim that time speeds up or slows down.
"It seems silly to talk about time as if we can control it. You may "feel" as if time is going slower or faster, but you have no actual control over time in regard to your experiences."
ReplyDeleteMr. Price, I do not claim that we have actual control over time as a thing in itself, or as time "actually is" but we have control in some way of our perception of time. I address that in the second to last sentence.
Mr. Lefavor, your point hits on what i was saying a bit. (well, the second part of your point). I do caution that this borders on the realm of psychology; I am not saying we have control over the thing that we experience, but that we have some limited control over how we experience that thing. Maybe it would clarify to say that we have control over some judgements about time that we experience via outer and inner sense. And if this control is not an illusion, (such as is fitting to Mr. Price's point) then we have in some way caused confusion for the transcendental being the only thing that is a condition for experiencing. We may even have some conditioning power over time.