An introduction to the progressive accumulation and enrichment of the experience of time ought to consist of negative remarks concerning the potential dogmatic limits which thought may come to place upon itself as well as on time.
1. Music is said to be the sensuous or real form of time. It is also said that music is the most fundamental of the arts, that it underlies all other forms of art and works of art, and that it even underlies the ways in which the human will itself can and will exist. In the immediate experience of music, however, the simple linearity or succession which is the most basic empirical determination of time is necessarily present. This is the dogma of all music, and this is to be further questioned by a different experience of time.
2. Space is said to be an external image or trace of time. Or, conversely, space is said to be an ideal form of time, the being of time as potentiality. A space can predetermine the traces which time will experience were it to actually follow through them. Once again, however, pure space is bound by the experience of time as stopped, stilled, or simultaneous, and thus is likewise limited.
3. Neither space nor music guarantees a free standpoint from which the development and observation of time can begin. In fact, a reflection upon the experience of time will justify the idea that time has no beginning, and that the science of time will also, if it were to be free in any meaningful sense, have to begin from somewhere in the middle or even at the very end. For beginning is itself a temporal idea, and no matter how it is interpreted, whether as an infinite purity or simplicity, or as an infinite richness or potentiality, makes no essential difference.
4. The beginning as such is a dogmatic idea which will limit time to linearity. The idea of a non-beginning, however, is equally limiting in that it arbitrarily rejects linearity as a form of development.
5. Writing [écriture], understood in its broadest significance, has been interpreted as the house of time, the deep sea from which all times first find their own grounds. Despite the richness of writing, it too confines time to the level of endlessness or to the lack of an absolute determination. More precisely, writing cannot give time its actuality, it only points towards a possible endless series of constructions of time. The distinction between this virtual interpretation of a text as a form of time from the present science is important, for in the latter case time must have its actual moment, the brutality of the present
6. The distinction between objective time and existential time is an elementary gesture towards a richer comprehension of time. Perhaps one may also add here Schelling's unique concept of "age" as a designation for yet another time. The distance between the word "time" and the various other words ("before" "after" "earlier" "later" "older" "younger" etc.) create a point of differentiation for the science of time, and yet it is precisely these distances that also give rise to various tensions. The fundamental issue here is the extent to which one is able or permitted to expand and elongate the word "time" - in a sense, all experience, both sensuous and intellectual, empirical and transcendental, analytic and dialectic, can be understood as a "particular" kind of time. But if time and temporality permeate our experience to its outermost peripheries, it is all the more essential to take the greatest care in developing a language which will do justice to the richness of time itself. It is easy to avoid a facile unity of "time" by noting that the word "time" does not on its own point towards any intelligible being or entity, but it rather serves as a place-holder or as a "scale" for organizing everything that might come under it. At the very outset, thus, the scientist of time does not have any explicit conception of time, but only implicitly understands it.
6. The distinction between objective time and existential time is an elementary gesture towards a richer comprehension of time. Perhaps one may also add here Schelling's unique concept of "age" as a designation for yet another time. The distance between the word "time" and the various other words ("before" "after" "earlier" "later" "older" "younger" etc.) create a point of differentiation for the science of time, and yet it is precisely these distances that also give rise to various tensions. The fundamental issue here is the extent to which one is able or permitted to expand and elongate the word "time" - in a sense, all experience, both sensuous and intellectual, empirical and transcendental, analytic and dialectic, can be understood as a "particular" kind of time. But if time and temporality permeate our experience to its outermost peripheries, it is all the more essential to take the greatest care in developing a language which will do justice to the richness of time itself. It is easy to avoid a facile unity of "time" by noting that the word "time" does not on its own point towards any intelligible being or entity, but it rather serves as a place-holder or as a "scale" for organizing everything that might come under it. At the very outset, thus, the scientist of time does not have any explicit conception of time, but only implicitly understands it.
