Let us begin with a thought experiment and imagine an archaeological site in which we ourselves are implicated. Aggregates of time compressions of the past, we find ourselves all of a sudden in the contemporary moment, enabled to reflect on our presence in the world by means of a certain temporal asymmetry—a lag—between perception and perceived, and thereupon, between one image (ourselves) and another (the world). The world appears not as coeval, but to be prior to us, as already there, awaiting cognition. This asymmetry arouses our curiosity and presses upon us to find out more, to attempt to dig our way past the awkward weight of little understood archaic residues, images, encrustations, and cultural debris—the temporal deposits of any archaeological site—that are entangled in us giving us a sense of burdened unfreedom. Besides, there is the nagging feeling that freedom from encumbrance may lie just ahead, temporally and spatially, as we continue to be bombarded by incoming sensations. But how might one rise past the stream of current perceptions to a plateau from where to seek bearings—a seemingly perennial task before us? One may not, indeed, one cannot in the ordinary sense, for perceptions are not my perceptions—they too are prior to me, just as the world is. “I” am merely a locus, a contingent site of their pre-temporal appearance. One simply cannot get ahead of time, as “I” discover, to find out about the world—in fact, I am always falling behind, and things are sliding off into a past. That fact leads us to search for a logical starting point for finding out about the “world” as it is, which insistently points to the conundrum of time (of past and future). It leads us to the fact that the primary unit—apperception or a temporal lag—ought to be the principal focus of our reflexive efforts about our condition, rather than the world. But the buildup in self-understanding or the historical arrangement of temporal sedimentation in the psyche is unused to this extraordinary truth, with the result that it becomes the victim and carrier of a fundamental error—the error that establishes the primacy of chronic arrangements over the ontological character of time itself. Befuddled by the interminable succession of “nows,” we sink into the bog of external time—a temporal order we ourselves have imposed upon the world, as we shall see. Consequently, my archaeological struggles tend to become distended and misdirected, struggling against my own impositions and orderings.

As a kind of allegory bearing on the educational situation, the little thought above nudges us head first into the deep end of our inadequacies in relation to it. Also, we realize that the above alludes not just to pedagogy but to all agogos—there is little distinction here between the adult and the child, between teacher and taught. The entire situation requires a new orientation, a need to go back to first principles. Pure sensation is prior to temporal organization and hence in a different dimension than the time of the clock or chronometric succession. In general, education confuses the two, ensconced as it is within the preponderance of the cultural belief system. A clear differentiation is pedagogically called for between phenomenological-ontological time and time of the clock—the one creational and the other mechanical. Time produced knowledge, we know, brings control over the organizing of phenomena, but it does not lead to emancipatory understanding precisely because it is the stuff of contingent succession that reveals nothing about the relation between perceiver and perceived.

Should not then probing into the conundrum of time, not merely formally but experientially, be a foundational task of education? Should not the wonder of temporal perception beg for educational attention? If yes, then such a task itself suggests to us the conceptual framework within which the problem of time must be ideally considered. That framework is the phenomenological, or the consideration of the essence of experience. Time must be understood through the experience of time and not through the succession of events. The central problem of phenomenology, as outlined by Husserl himself, is eidetic reduction—a way of returning to the “things themselves” beyond all interpretation and synthetic representation. It is the apprehension of a certain essence prior to applying external coordinates. Hence, we might even say that the central problem of phenomenology is also the problem of time since to reach essence we must deconstruct time.

Subjectively, time, as Augustine had observed, is a source of great perplexity, besides being a central problem of metaphysics.¹ But this puzzle is deflected, historically suppressed by the arrival of the subject who begins to focus mainly on sequentiality and succession, ordering and control, with a strong propensity toward establishing control and fiefdom.² We do not remain focused long enough on the nature of temporality for it to be able to disclose itself, to cast its subtle light. We simply take it for granted and move on. “Descartes and particularly Kant detached the subject, or consciousness, by showing that I could not possibly apprehend anything as existing unless I first of all experienced myself as existing in the act of apprehending it. They presented consciousness, the absolute certainty of my existence for myself, as the condition of there being anything at all; and the act of relating as the basis of relatedness.”³ The constitution of the experiencer as a temporal construction got buried in the process of establishing the primacy of the subject. In other words, these thinkers unwittingly fell into the “ chronic ” trap—the temporally emergent self attempting to sit on judgment on something which is of a qualitatively different order. “It is understandable, in view of this, that Husserl, having accused Kant of adopting a ‘faulty psychologism’, should have urged, in place of a noetic analysis which bases the world on the synthesizing activity of the subject, his own ‘noematic reflection’ which remains within the object, and, instead of begetting it, brings to light its fundamental unity.”⁴ For Kant, reality is the noetic or intellectual synthesis of sense perceptions produced in the subject. Husserlian phenomenology rejects this psychologistic interpretation and offers in its place a noematic reflection. Noema does not synthetically reside in the subject (observer); rather, it is the sensus communis drawn together in the object.

Merleau-Ponty clarifies: “Perception is not a science of the world, it is not even an act, a deliberate taking up of a position; it is the background from which all acts stand out, and is presupposed by them. The world is not an object such that I have in my possession the law of its making; it is the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts, and all my explicit perceptions. Truth does not ‘inhabit’ the ‘inner man’, or more accurately, there is no inner man…”⁵ Reading Husserl in a radical manner, Merleau-Ponty gives us the most penetrating understanding of the phenomenological approach. The world as such is not within our purview that we can specify laws about it. Rather, we (the sensory agglomerate or microcosm) can come to be in co-relation with some aspects of the macrocosm and be in reflective resonance with it. What we call the world is the unknown “field” which supports thoughts and perceptions like a medium supports a precipitate. The medium is presupposed by the precipitate which cannot conclude anything definite about the medium itself. And then Merleau-Ponty makes that poignant statement refuting the existence of the “inner man” in the context of world-making that takes phenomenology beyond humanism, making the humanist/post-humanist debate an empty exercise where phenomenology as method is concerned. In the final working note, written two months before his death, Merleau-Ponty wrote: “[My work] must be presented without any compromise with humanism, nor moreover with naturalism, nor finally with theology…”⁶ Contrary to the oft-held view, the basic unit of analysis in phenomenology is not human experience, but experience; not human perception but perception. The human is a post hoc label granted to itself by the species, which then uses it reflexively for self-description in a disingenuous manner.

From the point of view of the present volume, this discontinuity with humanism is an extremely important realization, for the discussion of time requires us to cross over into zones where time must be approached immanently, from within, shorn of the assumption of a transcendental observer. This “within-ness” is not the inwardness of a pre-given self, but an autonomous duration that relates to the movement of the sensory-perceptual complex. What then is the connection between outer time and inner time? Each perceptual moment, the world rolls in and out of us again, akin to the tides, leaving some residue. This “tidalism” ma...