The Possible Present

Ugo Perone, Silvia Benso, Brian Schroeder, Silvia Benso, Brian Schroeder

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781438437460, 9781438437453
• eBook ISBN: 9781438437477
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Phenomenology in Philosophy

The Possible Present unfolds from within a freely reinterpreted hermeneutic perspective and provides an original theoretical proposal on the topic of time. In dialogue especially with the philosophies of Husserl and Heidegger, but resorting also to suggestions coming from a theological background (Barth and Bonhoeffer), the work proposes a personal and original theory of time centered on a conception of the present that does not reduce temporality to a succession of mere instants. When one claims that time is ungraspable, one refers neither to the past (which is rather irretrievable) nor to the future (which is rather uncertain) but to the present. The present in which we are is in fact what fades from our hands without break. The present is a decisive threshold for finite existence. It is the threshold where past and future meet and can give birth to a livable horizon of meaning. Dilating the present and giving it a meaningful chance to be is a task for philosophy. It is the attempt of giving time to time and also giving it shape, place, and space. To succeed at this task while rediscovering the sources of a narrative way of thinking that in truth it has never abandoned, philosophy must go back and turn time into the primary object of discourse, like in stories, which are precisely the attempt at disposing the temporal flow of events according to a meaning. Perone argues that in time, however, what passes is not simply decline, but rather something irreducible, an exteriority that must be said.

CHAPTER ONE

Dramaturgy of Thought

WARNING FOR THE NON-PHILOSOPHER

Philosophers have something in common with children: like them, they play with freedom. Before beginning to play, they love to set up the scene and situate their pieces and any other item in the appropriate place. This too is play, because it is the construction of the theater, that is, of the place where the novelty that is going to be played out will come to light.

Children's materials, which are very complex and mysterious as to their most hidden meaning, are very simple in their immediate signification; anyone can easily understand them. If later the imagination fails, however, then one finds oneself riding a broomstick rather than a horse. Conversely, philosophers' materials are complicated and technically loaded. Coming to terms with them without some codified technical skill is difficult, similarly to what happens also in other fields closer to our experience (one could think of the representational codification of a simple geographic map). Such technical skills inexorably lie at the beginning, because they work as the key for what is to come. Despite all my eager attempts, I could not completely avoid all these preliminary remarks and the risk, of which I am well aware, of appearing too technical for the philosophically inexpert, but also (I am afraid) too hasty for the expert. I nevertheless think that documenting, through the evocation of some fundamental scenes, the philosophical scenario from out of which I move is important.

In particular, I think that acquiring these points is significant:

1. In nineteenth-century philosophy and theology, the theme of the present appears as decisive (Barth, Husserl) despite all contrary intentions.
2. Such determinant importance is not accompanied in these authors by an equally sharp recognition of the finite dimension of temporality.
3. In Heidegger, where such recognition is powerfully thematized, the lethal assimilation of the present with the criticized ontology of presence causes disastrous consequences by introducing the primacy of the future, which, far from opening up to the unexpected, has a nihilist coloring and drift.

These few schematic remarks can sustain those who wish to proceed to further details. They could also be enough for those who, accepting these historiographical presuppositions as premise to the discourse, wish to devote themselves to such a discourse and its unfolding. Covering a path without having first indicated from where it sets out and how it differs from its origin would not have seemed fair to me. As is the case for all hermeneutics, the origin is nourished by a dual matrix, philosophical and theological, even if, as is the case for all hermeneutics, what ultimately decides is philosophy, because it is the finite subject who discriminates and dares.

THE ICE SHEET

Through its impossible conditions, theology helps to set thinking into motion. How can one speak of this and that, of the worldly and the otherworldly, the mortal and finite existence, and of the revealed and saving word? Or in any event, how can one say such a word with our words? Within modernity the theologians' impossible task, that is, the task that in obedience they cannot escape, which in faith they know is due but which they never know as guaranteed, is not the application to the supernatural of consolidated philosophical conceptual schemes. It is rather a provocation. Nor is it simply an added productive difficulty, as when the rules of metrics unleash creativity by putting constraints on words. It is much more: it is an impossibility. At the same time, however, it is a command. The dialectics between impossibility and command opens unexpected scenes. The command has an impossible content; yet the command commanding [such content] in turn makes it impossible to live as if the impossible were also inexistent. It is not by chance that Barth himself, and precisely in 1933, titles one of his essays Theologische Existenz heute! (Theological Existence Today), and shows that precisely the pure command of theology also originates a manifesto with political value: absolute time is at the origin of historical temporality.¹

Zwischen den Zeiten (Between the Times)² is born within this context and with these meanings. The times between which one is are first of all the absolute times, that is, the worldly eon and the eon of divine time. They are the contestation of the one by the other; they are the ancient Augustinian struggle of the two cities. This conflict between times is also the key to give a name to a widespread and indeed nameless discomfort. It is the discomfort of the human beings who, at the beginning of the new century, no longer recognize themselves because they are no longer the human beings of the past, but neither have they yet found their own consistence. Giving a name to the discomfort means, as Barth teaches, pushing it back into its very ungroundedness; it means contesting what constitutes its strength and asserting that it is not being but neither is it non-being, as it would claim. The old debate on the nature of evil has fluctuated between these two extremes—that according to which evil is non-being [non-essere] and that for which it has no reality whatsoever; it is not being [non è essere]. What perhaps has not been sufficiently remarked is that evil is a positive claim to non-being; yet it is an ungrounded claim or, more precisely, it is a being that claims to constitute itself in the form of non-being. When pushed back toward itself, when recognized as evil, or religiously as sin, its claim of giving form to being as non-being (this constitutes its strength and even its charm) is unmasked and is restituted to its nature of a weak being that wishes itself to be otherwise, to be non-being. For this reason, once the process of recognition, which actually is tantamount to a purification, is brought to its end evil can even be forgiven, because the positive nothingness has been reduced to nothing, like in a progressive de-coloring that lets only the possible albeit unmasked (and therefore rendered useless) support of evil subsist.

The superficial discomfort of human beings, their sickness onto life [mal di vivere], the sickness onto nothingness that pretends to be something and even be the whole, is also called, in the various forms that it assumes and Barth describes, “sin”; therefore, once it is recognized, it is condemned. For this very reason, however, it is also redeemed. As we know, God's No is also God's Yes.

We are always between times, and today more than ever. What is this “between,” this thin ice sheet on which one walks precisely between times? It is the present as Barth describes it: the present that is deconstructed, delegitimized, condemned by God's great No; but it is also the present that is constructed, legitimized, redeemed by God's Yes. It is the instant [attimo], the almost nothing, as found already in Augustine's Confessions. In that sense it is the instant qua time that falls and is lost. Or it is the instant of saved time, the kairos and the eternal of the encounter between Your history, O God, and mine, the face-to-face, again as in the Confessions.

Two absolute scenes: the present is this thin, frail, almost invisible strip of ice separating heaven and earth, almost “the zero-point between two branches of a hyperbola stretching to infinity,”³ because there we are not only what we are, but also what we are not. “The present time” is called as such “because of that which it obscures and of that to which it bears witness,”⁴ and the sufferings of the present time are not “simply characteristic of our life in this world, but actually … mark the frontier where this life is dissolved by life eternal. The time in which we live and suffer is the present time, the time when glory is made manifest in suffering.”⁵ The present is the impossible command of eternity, which saves time but, even more, makes it precipitous and precarious, because the instant that ties other instants to itself until it becomes history is rejected. Is it the one or the other, that is, the present instant or the eternal? Or is it the one and the other, that is, the present instant and the eternal? How can human beings cross paths with the eternal without such instants of existence? Does the thin ice sheet separate or unite, oppose or join? It is certainly first of all “crevasse, the polar zone, the desert barrier,” cipher of the “distance between God and man”; yet it must be crossed.⁶ Transparent and frail, it appears to be both: threshold of opposition and of crossing, without Barth's being bothered by this. Actually, at times he turns it into the “line of intersection between time and eternity, between the present and the future world” that runs “through all history”;⁷ at other times he enunciates the (equivocal) principle of the “contemporaneousness of all times”;⁸ and still at other times he asserts the impossibility of “stretching or elongating or developing” from time to eternity.⁹ The present stands thus in balance, a step before the abyss, a step before salvation. Yet it remains as the ice sheet that relates the one to the other. It is a difficult, committing present, which could however be also exalting and joyful, as is theology, Barth writes. In any event, it is a present that, if it has a foundation, certainly does not get its own fundament from itself. It is a present that, almost or rather certainly without willing it, in the thematization of the “between times” brings to the foreground the invisible ice sheet of existence, the smooth and fragile terrain of interposition. In sum, when one sets out for oneself the absolute task of speaking of God, even of letting God alone speak, one ends up encountering existence, being unable to elude human beings. Aware of the hermeneutic tangle, Bultmann, who was never understood, kept repeating this to Barth. Thus it happened that for the one who only had eyes for the eternal instant of God's interruption, the present, that is, the place where No turns into Yes, became unexpectedly important, even decisive.

With its prohibition to think finitude and its command to think God's absolute alterity, theology gives us back the thin ice sheet of existence, which can neither be suppressed nor disowned.

TIME UNDER THE MICROSCOPE

As shown especially in the lectures on time which we will consider, for Husserl, a contemporary of Bergson but also—it should not be forgotten—of Barth, the matter is that of following a completely different procedure so as to approach time, and secure the present and its depth.¹⁰ It is not [a case of] the grand scenes of the absolutes, but rather of the minute handling of the watchmaker of consciousness, a working with a magnifying glass, even the patient focusing of the one who works with a microscope.

Husserl's Lectures on the phenomenology of internal time consciousness are the attempt to let time surface by suspending its objective dimension through an act of epoché. What matters is not time and its duration, which fades away, but rather its lived dimension [il suo vissuto], the immanent mode of its lasting and fading. What is the retention, the “comet's tail”¹¹ of the now that is perceived and then configured as retained now? Or what is the now of the originary impression that is transformed into the now of the retained presentness, the holding of what moves away, the bringing the recent past (that is, the just now) back to the present and the attribution to the just past of an intuitiveness that is proper to the present? What else is recollection, through which I can represent to myself a retained lived anteriority, but a new memorial reduplication of the instant—a reduplication through which the instantaneousness of the instant is pluralized, thereby gaining depth like a probe perforating the smoothness of the sea and scratching the abysses? In the following quotation that has an Augustinian flavor, let us consider the thickening of times of which we have spoken:

Every tone itself has a temporal extension: within the actual sounding I hear it as a now. With its continued sounding, however, it has an ever new now, and the tone actually preceding is changing into something past. Therefore, I hear at any instant only the actual phase of the tone, and the Objectivity of the whole enduring tone is constituted as an act-continuum which in part is memory, in the smallest punctual part is perception, and in a more extensive part expectation.¹²

What suddenly opens up is an infinitesimal and multiple “between times,” which concentrates entirely in the focus of the miniscule present, the perceived now, the now as retention, and the now as recollection, as staying and contraction of a flux, which is bracketed not so much with an exclusionary gesture but rather with a gesture of punctual concentration. The light of the microscope focusing on the instant retains [the instant].¹³ Retention occurs, however, within a flux (like the molecule that in focusing comes to the forefront but that continues its own agitation within the flux to which it belongs and from which it is not extrapolated but rather provisionally and visually isolated). The field modification enabled by the microscope again brackets, yet without excluding, the intentional subject that directs its own look toward the instant. It is not the subject that is here regarded, because it rather regards. What is regarded is the act of regarding as an act that produces the reduplication of perception, doubled into retention and recollection (which in the end is retention of the retention, a consciousness of consciousness). It is peculiar how flux and consciousness, which are the two presuppositions of the entire observation, end up disappearing from the horizon thanks precisely to the process of micrologization of perception. They simply disappear from the visual field due to an excess in magnification of the field on which one focuses. On the one side, as we already know, the bracketing of time and more generally of the objective world leads Husserl to say that there is no longer any coincidence between temporal flux as perceived by consciousness and a hypothetical flux of objective time. On the other side, which is the side of consciousness, the warning is no less sharp: “We can no longer speak of a time of the final constitutive consciousness.”¹⁴

Through this path the present, which is instant and retained instantaneousness, acquires a thickness that comes to it from the doubling of recollection and consequently from the interposition of a minimal, micrological, albeit perhaps saving “between times.” The retained and recollected retention is the retention whose caducity is redeemed although without denying its character of fading away. Husserl's between times is certainly not Barth's emphatic ice sheet; rather, it is an almost nothing, a trifle, which cannot be perceived outside the work of observation carried out by phenomenological focusing. Nevertheless, this light thickening produced at the margin between retention and recollection is a recollection that is endowed with consistence; it is a stayed retention: the thin thread enabling flux to unfold and reveal a direction.

Because it is endowed with thickness and depth, the plural projects a shadow of itself that is similar to the growth of flux in consciousness. Depth is not only a vertical but also a horizontal thickening, and the internal time of consciousness extends in all directions. Recollection is, in fact, not only memorial retention of retention; it is also recollection of recollection that projects an increasingly wider but also fleeting cone (up to imperceptibility). One should think of Husserl's diagram, commented on by Merleau-Ponty and Ricoeur, and of its complexity, which is appropriate to the willingness to restore depth to the simple plane. Here depth is not only the volume and thickness of time, but also its fading away, which is, however, not a going away. The frequent acoustic metaphor with which Husserl accompanies his lectures gives a good idea of this wave; once it has reached its exact depth—that is, the “tone” that intentionally belongs to it—the wave expands on all sides through the play of retention and recollection exactly like a sound, up to its own dispersion, which perfectly coincides with its maximum expansion.

Here, too, the between times that Husserl construes is peculiar. As already seen in Barth, the Yes and the No, salvation and negation, end up intersecting and in the end coincide perfectly. The present exhibits, contains, shows, stays, and recollects them both. One should therefore turn to the present.

The thickened line of this present is difficult to retain and withhold. The scenes outside the visual field become present again as soon as one turns the microscope off. It is not true that here the epoché is an act of intentional exclusion; it is rather the consequence of an intentional inclusion that intersects and pierces through, and then works on instantaneousness. Bergson and Merleau-Ponty are haunting. Consciousness, which Bergson turns into an object and not only a subject, encompasses time and unrolls it as its own internal object. Where is here the present, which is by now the eternal albeit in the form of the eternal and coalescent becoming of evolution? Where is the precarious between times of the present, which is, conversely, entirely cont...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Introduction: Struggling with the Angel
• Preface
• Chapter One: Dramaturgy of Thought
• Chapter Two: The Present as Threshold
• Chapter Three: Ethics of the Present
• Chapter Four: Tale without Author
• Chapter Five: The Tale of the I
• Chapter Six: The Tale of Finitude
• Chapter Seven: The Great Tale of Time
• Chapter Eight: Hermeneutics of the Positive
• Notes
• Bibliography