Time: From Concept to Narrative Construct: A Reader (Narratologia: Contributions to Narrative Theory)

Time

Narratologia Contributions to Narrative Theory

Edited by Fotis Jannidis, Mat´ıas Mart´ınez, John Pier Wolf Schmid (executive editor) Editorial Board Catherine Emmott, Monika Fludernik Jose Angel Garc´ıa Landa, Peter Hühn, Manfred Jahn Andreas Kablitz, Uri Margolin, Jan Christoph Meister Ansgar Nünning, Marie-Laure Ryan Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Michael Scheffel Sabine Schlickers, Jörg Schönert

29

De Gruyter

Time From Concept to Narrative Construct: A Reader

Edited by Jan Christoph Meister Wilhelm Schernus

De Gruyter

ISBN 978-3-11-022208-1 e-ISBN 978-3-11-022718-5 ISSN 1612-8427 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Time : from concept to narrative construct : a reader / edited by Jan Christoph Meister, Wilhelm Schernus. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-3-11-022208-1 (acid-free paper) 1. Time in literature. 2. Narration (Rhetoric) 3. Time — Philosophy. I. Meister, Jan Christoph, 1955— II. Schernus, Wilhelm. PN56.T5T56 2011 808.84'9384—dc23 2011016182

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. © 2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston Printing: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen f» Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Contents

Acknowledgements

VII

Foreword

IX

HANS REICHENBACH

The Tenses of Verbs

1

PETER BIER:

Time Experience and Personhood

13

PETER JANICH

Constituting Time through Action and Discourse

29

ROBIN LE POIDEVIN

Time, Tense and Topology

49

GUNTHERMULLER

The Significance of Time in Narrative Art

67

KATE HAMBURGER

The Timelessness of Poetry

85

EBERHARD LAMMERT

The Time References of Narration

101

ALFONSO DETORO

Time Structure in the Contemporary Novel

109

ROLAND HARWEG

Story-time and Fact-sequence-time

143

VI

Contents

JANCHRISTOPHMEISTER

The Temporality Effect Towards a Process Model of Narrative Time Construction

171

INDERJEETMAM

The Flow of Time in Narrative An Artificial Intelligence Perspective

217

Bibliography: A Guide to Further Reading

237

Subject Index

253

Name Index

257

Acknowledgements The editors are grateful for permission to translate and reproduce the following material: Peter Bieri: 'Zeiterfahrung und Personality,' in: Heinz Burger (ed.): Zeit, Natur und Mensch. Beitrage von Wissenschaftlern zum Thema "Zeit". Berlin: Berlin Verlag Arno Spitz 1986, 261-281, by Peter Bieri Alfonso de Toro: 'Versuch eines erweiterten Modells fur die Analyse von Zeitverfahren nach G. Genette,' in: Alfonso de Toro: Die Zeitstruktur im Gegenwartsroman am Beispiel von G. Garcia Marquez' Cien anos de soledad, M Vargas-Llosas La casa verde und A. RobbeGrillets La maison de rendez-vous. Tubingen: Gunter Narr Verlag 1986, 26-52, by Alfonso de Toro Kate Hamburger: 'Die Zeitlosigkeit der Dichtung,' in: Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift fur Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 29 (1955), 413-426, by Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach Roland Harweg: 'Erzahlte Zeit und Sachverhaltsfolgezeit,' in: Folia Linguistica 25 (1991), 41-73, by Roland Harweg Peter Janich: 'Die Konstion der Zeit durch Handeln und Reden,' in: Kodikas/Code 19.1-2 (1996), 133-147, by Peter Janich Eberhard Lammert: 'Die Zeitbeziige des Erzahlens,' excerpt from Eberhard Lammert: Bauformen des Erzahlens. Stuttgart: Metzler [1955] 81990, 19-24, by Metzler Robin Le Poidevin: 'Time, Tense and Topology,' in: The Philosophical Quarterly 46 (1996), 467-481, by Robin Le Poidevin Inderjeet Mani, orginal contribution to this volume

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Jan Christoph Meister, original contribution to this volume Giinther Mullen Die Bedeutung der Zeit in der Erzahlkunst. Bonner Antrittsvorlesung 1946. Bonn: Universitatsverlag Bonn 1947, by Angela Martini Hans Reichenbach: 'The Tenses of Verbs,' in: Hans Reichenbach: Elements of Symbolic Logic. New York: The Free Press 1951, § 51, 287298, by Maria Reichenbach

Time only belongs to the existent J. Ellis McTaggart

Foreword In this anthology, we present eleven texts on 'time': an existentially omnipresent, but philosophically evasive concept and phenomenon. As the title indicates, we have tried to assemble a range of contributions which, as an ensemble, relate the philosophical perspective onto time to literary theory's attempts to clarify how time appears, functions and is construed in and by narratives. Interrelating these distinct disciplinary approaches toward time, our anthology's aim is to contribute, by way of grouping seminal texts in a fresh context, to a new approach in which a philosophical, a narratological and a computational perspective onto narrative-based time construction might be fruitfully integrated. Read in sequence, the eleven contributions therefore also implicitly unfold a theoretical argument: if over time we have come to acknowledge that time is indeed a cognitive construct, then building a functional model that makes the process of construction more transparent might offer new insights into how time 'works'. And in this respect the process of narrative time construction offers a particularly fascinating object of study. The intricate relationship between time and narrative has met the interest of various disciplines, a fact accounting for the variety of methodological perspectives represented in studies on the subject. Among the most influential that appeared during the latter half of the 20* century count Bakhtin's essay on Chronotopos (1975),1 which investigates the semiotic interrelation of time and space in fiction and drama, and Paul Ricoeur's ambitious three-volume investigation Temps et recit (1983-1985),2 which postulates narration as the privileged mode of human conceptualization and experience of time. A quarter century later, the philosophical relevance of the narrative-based conceptualization of time is re-emphasised by Mark Currie in his recent About Time. Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time (2007). Curne's Husserl-in1 2

Bachtm, Michail M. (2008). Chronotopos. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Ricoeur, Paul (1983-1985). Temps et recit, t. 3. Paris: Semi, transl.: Time and Narrative, 3 vols. Chicago: U of Chicago P 1984-1988.

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spired (if not subtly Heideggenan) thesis contra torrentem and contra Ricoeur is that narrating constitutes less a phenomenon of retrospection, but rather and primarily one of prospection and projection.3 Its unique function, according to Currie, lies not in the objectification of memory and in the backward-oriented re-presentation of the past that enables the positioning and self-affirmation of ourselves within a biographic and historic continuum. Rather, what counts is the peculiar dialectic of an anticipated retrospection upon the present. Phrased in Genettian terms, the thesis thus proclaims not analepsis, but prolepsis to constitute the differentia specifica of narrating. Moreover, in Currie's perspective the philosophical relevance of narration stems from its power to reflect, on a structural level, the anticipatory mode of being that has become the signature of modern human society and existence. As Currie argues, the acknowledgment of this fact is bound to have far-reaching consequences not just for philosophy, but also with a view to establishing a tense-based narratology that 'takes as its starting point the possibility of inferring a metaphysics of time from the temporal structure of narrative.'4 Not everybody will underwrite such far-reaching conclusions and support the attempt to relate a philosophical definition of time to the historical and the aesthetic domain, and vice versa. Perhaps the most outspoken opponent to the idea of approaching the concept of time via the phenomenology of narration is Mark Currie's namesake Gregory Currie. In 'Can There Be a Literary Philosophy of Time?' (1999),5 he reaches a decidedly negative verdict, stating that literature per se cannot contribute anything of philosophical relevance to our understanding of time in that whatever is represented and mediated by literary narration is, by force of its illusionary potential, always experienced as a present occurrence. However, to narcologists and structuralists this analytic counter-argument will probably seem reductionist, for in their perspective what matters about narratives is in any case the how of narrating, rather than the what of the narrative's illusionary story world. The fruitfulness of an analysis of the former has been clearly demonstrated by, among other, Genette's narratological theory with its sys3

4 5

Currie, Mark (2007). About Time. Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP 2007. - On Currie's book also see: Meister, Jan Christoph (published 25.01.20092009). 'Erzahlen als vorweggenommene Rilckschau. Uber Mark Curries About Time; in: IASLonline, (30.11.2010). Ibid., 151. Currie, Gregory (1999). 'Can There Be a Literary Philosophy of Time?' in: The Arguments of Time, ed. by J. Butterfield. Oxford: Oxford UP, 43-63.

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tematic distinction of duration, frequency and order as the key parameters for narratonal control and manipulation of how readers experience time in and through narratives.6 The process aspect of representation is also prominent in the Artificial Intelligence perspective onto time and in its attempt to reconstruct the human faculty of handling time information in a bottom-up mode, rather than deducing it from high-level philosophical premises. Cognitive science's approaches such as Poppel's analysis of Time Perception (1978)' have systematically laid a foundation for more speculative models like that presented in Allen's 'Towards a General Theory of Action and Time' (1984).8 In addition, Al-based computer science has made significant progress in the practical domain. Here, the goal is to enable computers to automatically identify, extract and interpret time information from expository texts in order to support secondary processes, such as decision making.' If computers can be trained to build adequate models of time lines from factual texts, can they not also be trained to help us identify how time is structured and 'works' in fiction? This possibility has fascinated practitioners of narrative theory as well as computer scientists for a decade at least. For example, Burg, Boyle and Lang (2000) attempted to unravel the notoriously complicated and paradoxical time construct in Faulkner's A Rose for Emily using constraint logic programmingDrucker and Nowvieskie (2003) conducted their Temporal Modelling Project with the aim to 'create a visual scheme and interactive tool set for the representation of temporal relations in humanities-based or 6

7

8

9

10

Genette, Gerard (1972). 'Discours du recit. Essai de methode,' in: G. Genette: Figures III. Pans: Semi, 65-282, transl: Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Ithaca: Cornell UP 1980. Poppel, Ernst (1978). 'Time Perception,' m: R. Held et al. (eds.): Handbook of Sensory Physiology. Vol. 8: Perception, ed. by R. Held et al. Berlin, Heidelberg, New York: Spnnger, 713-729. Also see: Poppel, Ernst (1997). 'A Hierarchical Model of Temporal Perception,' m: Trends in Cognitive Science 1: 56-61. Allen, James (1984). 'Towards a General Theory of Action and Time,' m: Artificial Intelligence 23: 123-154. See Ahn, D., Rantwyk, J., Rijke, M. de (2007). 'A cascaded machine learning approach to interpreting temporal expressions,' in: Proceedings of Human Language Technologies: The annual conference of the North American chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL-HLT 2007), ed. by C.L. Snider et. al., 420^127. Burg, J., Boyle, A., Lang, S. (2000). 'Using Constraint Logic Programming to Analyze the Chronology in A Rose for Emily; in: Computers and the Humanities 34: 377-392.

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qualitative research, with particular emphasis on the subjective experience of temporality';" Meister (2005) presented an approach in which manually tagged time information in literary texts is used to simulate the Temporality Effect, i.e. the reader's step-by-step construction of a comprehensive time-line for a fictional world.12 In contrast to these predominantly human intelligence based approaches, Mam's recent The Imagined Moment. Time, Narrative, and Computation (2010)" presents a state-of-the-art AI approach toward machine generation of time lines. Although the relevant time expressions in his initial corpus of documents are also manually identified and annotated, the scope of Mam's project extends further and aims at a combination of machine learning and corpus narratology. More on Mam's approach can be found in his chapter concluding this book. The current volume is one of a number of anthologies devoted to time that have been published during the last two decades." The motive to compile such an anthology normally is to open up a field for discussion before devoting oneself to it, critically or analytically, in a more defined way. As for the present book, this claim cannot be made. Rather, the anthology which you now hold in hand is the by-product of a research project that dealt with time construction primarily, if not exclusively, from the perspective of cognitive narratology and reception theory. Its aim was to explore an approach to narrative time construction that would open up new perspectives in the empirical analysis of individual texts as well as of text corpora. More particularly, our intention was to develop a model that would amount to more than just another partly descriptive, partly interpretive inventory of time-related phenomena in narratives, such as flashbacks, ellipses, recursion and iteration, acceleration or 'stretching' of time, all of which are generally conceived to be consequences of the transformation of the (logically) primary story into the secondary phenomenology of discourse. These effects of transformations of the what, the content of narratives with its 11

12

13

14

Drucker, J., Nowvieskie, B. (2003). 'The Temporal Modelling Project.' . Meister, Jan Christoph (2005). 'Tagging Time in Prolog: The Temporality Effect Project,' m: Literary and Linguistic Computing 20: 107-124 (Suppl.). Mam, Inderjeet (2010). The Imagined Moment. Time, Narrative, and Computation. Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P. Among these are: Mam, Inderjeet, Pustejovsky, James, Gaizauskas, Rob, eds. (2005). The Language of Time: A Reader. Oxford: Oxford UP; Butterfield, Jeremy, ed. (1999). The Arguments of Time. Oxford: Oxford UP; Zimmerli, Walter Ch., Sandbothe, Mike, eds. (1993). Klassiker der modernen Zeitphilosophie. Darmstadt: WBG1993.

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XIII

'hard-wired' immanent chronology, by the how of narrating, the manipulation of (among other) chronology by techniques of representation, have received particular attention in contemporary narratology, most prominently in Genette's structuralist taxonomy of chronological phenomena already mentioned above. Most structuralist theories in the vein of Genette's consider narratives as a product rather than a process. With regard to time, this focus on the outcome of narrative discourse makes it hard to grasp the intricate mechanisms of the genuinely narrative mode of time construction. Unlike the process of time construction by which we structure the realworld phenomena presented to us via sensory channels, narrative time construction is mainly symbol based and controlled. Moreover, it is a dynamic process: the mental activity of narrative based time construction has a temporal logic in itself that impacts on the time construct which we generate for a narrated world. The model of narrative time construction which we developed paid tribute to this double-layer process logic; furthermore, we also made an attempt at simulating the complex dynamic of a reader's time construction by computational methods.15 Meanwhile, some aspects of our approach have been superseded by Mam's more rigidly formalised approach. However, as he rightly observed, our project was in any case not 'aimed at evaluating state-of-the-art tools for automatically building timelines; rather, it involves the use of computers in developing substantial theoretical extensions to particular (mainly structuralist-inspired) approaches.'It is primarily with a view to this theoretical interest that the current anthology was labeled a 'by-product': for in the course of our investigations, we came to realise that two of the major discourses on time during the 20th century, that of philosophy of time and that of narrative theory, have for the most part been conducted in parallel, rather than in dialogue. This disciplinary insulation from one another is of course partly owed to a need for methodological focus and consistency in scientific thought. So-called 'literary theories' of philosophical issues are as fashionable as they are problematic, and literary theories of time, as already mentioned, form no exception here." Still, the desire for methodological stringency should not necessarily preclude philosophers and literary theorists from engaging in dialogue. Also, part of the lack thereof is probably owed to contingent factors and more trivial circumstance, and in particular to the inaccessibility of some important 20th" century German language contributions. These texts, of which some 15 16 17

Meister: Tagging Time (Fn 12). Mam: The Imagined Moment (Fn 13), 205. See Currie: Can There Be a Literary Philosophy of Time? (Fn 5), 43-63.

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clearly bear the signature of time philosophical thought in the phenomenological tradition of Husserl, remained obscured to the English speaking world for the mere reason that they were never translated. Against this background, the current anthology, which presents seven German language contributions in English translation for the first time, attempts to open up a new historical perspective.18 In addition, we hope that the compilation will also convince its readers that dialogue across disciplines is indeed fruitful. Time, we believe, is of a twofold interest to man: (a) as an existential and (b) as a representational phenomenon. Considered in this vein, our motto - McTaggart's dictum Time only belongs to the existent - should be read with and against the grain: If time, in the philosophical perspective, is indeed an exclusive attribute of the existent, then the attribution of time to any content of our consciousness will necessarily have an ontological consequence. Now, we obviously do respond to narratives and their contents as something that has temporality - and if McTaggart is right then this affective and cognitive response to narratives amounts to an implicit attribution of time which elevates not only factual, but also and in particular fictional representational contents to the status of the existent. In other words, the temporality effect and the reality effect go hand in hand. Philosophy of Time The first four articles presented in this book deal with time from a philosophical perspective, investigating it firstly in relation to time expressions in natural language, secondly as a category intricately related to our sense of self-awareness and identity, and thirdly as a life-world phenomenon which structures and influences the encounter of our human consciousness with the world. Hans Reichenbach's 'The Tenses of Verbs' (1947) proceeds from the observation that tenses of verbs determine time with reference to the time point of the speech act, differentiating accordingly between the point of speech, the point of the event, and the point of reference. He then demonstrates the specific usage of different tenses in different languages (with a focus on English) to express time relations and ar18

In order to serve this purpose, we have decided on a translation approach which attempts to preserve the original German document's argumentative and rhetonc style as far as tenable in order to honour its historicity. Admittedly, given the wellknown means of German grammar to support complex hypotactic structures, this decision is not unproblematic. In addition, one of the consequences of our approach to translation is to accept terminological inconsistency across contributions.

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rives at thirteen possible forms of ordering the three time points. Nine of these are termed fiindamental forms, noting at the same time that in English, for example, only six recognised grammatical tenses exist and that the tenses for which a language has no established forms are therefore expressed by paraphrase. Reichenbach draws the conclusion that 'logical categories were not clearly seen in the beginnings of language but were the results of long developments; we therefore should not be astonished if actual language does not always fit the schema which we try to construct in symbolic logic.'1' Such faculty of symbolic representation of time presupposes the faculty of its mental representation. The most fundamental implication of our human ability to represent time mentally is discussed in Peter Bien's 'Time Experience and Personhood' (1986).™ The concept of personhood, as Bien shows, is dependent on time consciousness, which, in turn, is founded upon self-awareness. Self-awareness and time consciousness enable us to experience the present against the background of an appropriated past, and in the light of a project for the future, thus creating a sense of identity. In a causal perspective, the appropriation of our past and the conceptualization of our future, as Bien shows, are necessary pre-conditions for the emergence of a sense of identity, and both are facilitated by an integration of past experiences and future projections into a coherent self-narrative: 'We expect from a person that his projects match the explanatory story that constitutes his present identity. I have to plan what I want to be in the future in the light of what I have become in the past.'21 Peter Jamch's 'Constituting Time through Action and Discourse' (1996)- investigates how we actively constitute time through symbolic as well as concrete acting, raising the question of primacy. His approach is to look at how we talk about time and temporality; his conclusion is that time consciousness is indeed a function of acting, which always comes first. In Jamch's view, time-statements are actually of a meta-linguistic order; they are 'merely a shorter, more elegant way of describing temporal statements' which in themselves remain subject to the 'methodical primacy of the ability to act over the constitution of a 19 20

21 22

Reichenbach, 11 in the current volume. Translated from the German original: Bien, Peter (1986). 'Zeiterfahrung und Personahtat,' m: H. Burger (ed.): Zeit, Natur und Mensch. Beitrage von Wissenschaftlern zum Thema "Zeit". Berlin: Berlin Verlag Arno Spitz, 261-281. Bien, 26 m the current volume. Translated from the German ongmal: Jamch, Peter (1996). 'Die Konstitution der Zeit durchHandeln und Reden,' in: Kodikas/ Code 19.1-2: 133-147.

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discourse which allows us to identify the uniqueness of incidents in their chronological sequence by using concepts.'" In 'Time, Tense, and Typology' (1996) Le Poidevin discusses a problem initially raised by McTaggart whose 1908 article 'The Unreality of Time' counts among the most influential contributions to modern time philosophy. McTaggart had introduced the distinction between what he termed the 'A-senes' of past, present, future, and the 'B-series' of before-after relations among facts. He then argued that a subjective and 'tensed' conception of time based on the A-senes description is logically inconsistent with an untensed and objective B-senes conception - and because of this logical paradox, as McTaggart concluded, time is logically non-real. In addition to this provocative thought, McTaggart also tried to prove that our human notion of time is in all likelihood based on the primacy of the A-senes over the B-senes, and that B-senes facts can be reduced to A-senes facts. This second idea of McTaggart's is the basis of the so-called 'tensed' theory of time. By conducting two thought expenments on 'disumfied time' and 'branching time', Le Poidevin demonstrates that while the former expenment does not put the 'tensed' theory of time into question, the latter expenment casts 'doubt on the doctrine that the B-senes is reducible to the A-senes. And if we can cast doubt on this doctrine, then we weaken the plausibility of the tensed theory of time.'- In other words: while the reality of 'tensed' time might be hard to prove, we cannot logically rule out the possibility for the existence of an objective, 'untensed' time. Nanative Theory of Time The articles in the second group consider time as it appears and functions in the context of literary narratives; in doing so, they attempt to elucidate how effects of time and temporality influence and are themselves shaped by narration. All of the five contnbutions contained in this section have been translated from the onginal German and are now available in English for the first time. Giinther Miiller's 1946 inaugural lecture The Significance of Time in Narrative Art* introduces the fundamental opposition of time of narration vs. narrated time (Erzahlzeit / erzahlte Zeit), a distinction 23 24 25

Jamch, 47 m the current volume. Le Poidevin, 65 in the current volume. Translated from the original German: Miiller, Gunther (1947). Die Bedeutung der Zeit in derErzahlkunst. Bonn: Umversitatsverlag.

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that has become a tenet of all later theories of narrative irrespective of methodological brand. Miiller proceeds from the observation that narration is always and necessarily a re-presentation of something that has passed and is absent. Also, no narration represents everything: selection cannot be avoided, for otherwise no narration could ever bridge the temporal gap between the representational content, which is located in the past, and the process of narration, which has its own temporality that extends from a point in time in our existential present. Therefore, narrated time is necessarily marked by contraction; moreover, the strength of this contraction vanes: 'All narrating is a narrating [..] of something that is not narration, but a process in life'; something that happens in the 'spatio-temporal world, even if it is an inner experience of the soul. If a narration contracts clock time such that the spatio-temporal condition is contracted away, then it makes an obvious choice with an interpreting effect' and which comes out of a signifying 'attitude to reality.'In 'The Timelessness of Poetry' (1955)," Kate Hamburger points to the essential a-temporality of representational content. Three observa26 27

Miiller, 69 in the current volume. Translated from the original German: Hamburger, Kate (1955). 'Die Zeitlosigkeit der Dichtung,' in: Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift fur Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 29: 413^126. Note that this article appeared immediately pnor to Hamburger's seminal Die Logik der Dichtung. Stuttgart: Klett ([1955] 21957), transl: The Logic of Literature. Bloommgton: Indiana UP. In the article (which is, pro forma, a reply to a polemic criticism by Herbert Seidler) Hamburger outlines her influential definition of fiction as a form of discourse practice that is based on a fundamentally different referential logic, and she does so by way of detailing the particularly 'illogical' use of tense and time in fictional literature. - A remark on a translation issue that exemplifies the difficulty to render adequate translations of German texts from the mid-1950s: Similar to its English counterpart the German term 'Dichtung' used in Hamburger's title refers to literature in general, i.e., to poetry in the wider sense, as well as to lync poetry specifically. However, while the author does occasionally use 'Dichtung' in the former, relatively neutral sense of literature at large, her argumentative focus is almost exclusively on epic poetry, and more particularly, on third person narratives as the only 'pure' form of fictional narration. Against the backdrop of our contemporary understanding of 'literature' as a genenc category for fictional as well as factual texts the clear-cut translation of 'Dichtung' as 'literature' (which the translators of Hamburger's book opted for) is thus somewhat a-histoncal in that it tends to downplay the aspects of referential autonomy and authorial control, in short, the specificity of literature qua poetry which were of key concern to Hamburger. Moreover, if applied consistently across the translation of the current article, the use of 'literature' in conjunction with genre adjectives would result in (if nothing else) stylistically dubious formulations such as 'lync/dramatic literature' for 'lynsche/dramatische Dichtung'.

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tions substantiate this claim: one, what is represented as a (fictional or factual) event must in logical terms necessarily be positioned outside of any empirical time line. Two, novels need not explicitly narrate time and if they fail to do so, then time is in fact simply not present as representational content. This potential for time neutrality is in significant contrast to our real-world experience, which is always embedded in and affected by time. Three, fiction may be presented using verbs - yet when used in fictional mode verbs loose their function to denote temporality, and their tense is reduced to an abstract grammatical feature: for example, the simple past used in a fictional narration is normally interpreted as referring to a fictional present. Hamburger's conclusion is that time, like space, turns into something ideal when encountered under the conditions of fictional mimesis - both are no longer forms of something that we experience to exist, but forms of something that we imagine. Our translation of Eberhard Lammert's 'The Time References of Narration'- presents a short excerpt from his book Bauformen des Erzahlens, one of the most important pre-structuralist systematic taxonomies of narrative forms in which the author paid particular attention to compositional features such as flashbacks, flash-forwards, iteration etc. This 1955 doctoral thesis, currently available in its 9th unaltered edition, is not only one of the most often republished books by a German Humanities scholar: it has also had an obvious influence on Genette's analysis and taxonomy of phenomena of 'order'. In the excerpt contained in this anthology, Lammert identifies succession as the most general compositional principle which narrative art initially shares with every linguistic utterance. However, in order to overcome the monotony of this base level sequentiahty, and in order to also highlight the aesthetic and semantic intentionality of artful representation as a defined whole the narrator has to apply the forming principle of omission. This unavoidable and necessary 'pausing, contraction and omitting on the part of the narrator not only accentuates specific phases in the sequence of events; it is precisely this activity which helps the entire narrated contents to emanate from the monotony of pure succession as something newly created:™ The thrust of de Toro's 'Time Structure in the Contemporary Novel' (1986) is indicated by its descriptive subtitle 'Suggestion of an En28

29

Translated from the original German: Lammert, Eberhard ([1955] 91990). 'Die Zeitbezilge des Erzahlens,' m: E. Lammert: Bauformen des Erzahlens. Stuttgart: Metzler, 19-24. Lammert, 106 in the current volume.

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hanced Model of Time Usage Analysis according to G. Genette'.30 By expanding Genette's terms ordre (translated into 'time arrangement' by de Toro), duree (duration) and frequence (frequency), the author suggests a more differentiated terminological apparatus that enables the analyst to describe the different forms of time usage. With the aid of this expanded taxonomy, de Toro demonstrates how time structure influences the constitution of meaning within a literary text (intra-textual function) as well as how aspects of time influence the reception of the reader (extra-textual function). Neither is time construction a mere exercise in building a mimetic representation, nor is time manipulation a mere exercise in creating aesthetic form - both have a significant semantic effect and hermeneutic consequence: 'The question of the function of time usage [...] is seen here as an instrument with an extra-textual and an intra-textual function, e.g. irony or perspectivation, and not just as a mere sequence of actions in time (there was . . . and then). From the intra textual point of view, we consider each type of time organization as important and as having far-reaching consequences to the interpretation of the text.'31 In 'Story-time and Fact-sequence-time' (1991), Harweg suggests to extend Miiller's traditional dichotomy of narrated time and time of narration into a four-level model that distinguishes between (a) factsequence-time, (b) narrated time, (c) discourse-time (the equivalent of Miiller's time of narration), and its logical counterpart in terms of the reception process, (d) observation-time. In his subsequent deliberations, Harweg focuses on the first two categories. With regard to the former, the author argues item fact-sequence-time constitutes an ontological as well as an epistemological sub-phenomenon in which the oppositions of material vs. formal and subjective vs. objective play a role. With regard to the second category, Harweg points out that authors of narrative texts do not narrate fact-sequence-time, but narrated time. The latter is distinguished from the former in the main by two criteria, namely selection and orientation. The emulation of fact-sequence-time in narrated time is termed longitudinal; the point-by-point co-presentation of parallel fact-sequences which results in spatial distribution is called latitudinal, and the partial co-presentation of such sequences 30

31

Translated from the original German: de Toro, Alfonso (1986). 'Versuch ernes erweiterten Modells filr die Analyse von Zeitstrukturen nach G. Genette,' m: A. de Toro: Die Zeitstruktur im Gegenwartsroman am Beispiel von G. Marcia Mdrquez' Cien anos de soledad, M. Vargas Llosas La casa verde und A. Robbe-Grillets La maison de rendez-vous. Tubingen: Gunter Narr, 26^17. In our translation we have amended the chapter title to reflect its contextualization in de Toro's book. de Toro, 110m the current volume.

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Foreword

that evokes a scalar gradation from concrete to abstract semantic relations among facts is termed altitudinal. Further variations can be achieved in the form of progredient and regredient arrangements among fact-sequence-time and narrated time. Towards Computational Models of Narrated Time The two concluding contributions appear for the first time here. Both focus on what might be considered the underlying - albeit not always explicit - assumption shared by all texts contained in this volume: time, in the form that we experience it, is not directly accessible to our perception, but a construct of the human mind. And if that is indeed the case, then narratives and the activity of generating as well as decoding narrative representations ought to be modeled as dynamic processes. This is where computers come into play. Meister's contribution 'The Temporality Effect. Towards a Process Model of Narrative Time Construction' tries to address a methodological lacuna mentioned earlier on, namely the hitherto insufficient attempts to relate cognitive and computational models of text-controlled time construction jointly and evenly to, on the one hand, philosophy of time and, on the other hand, to narrative theory. Whether the article and the decision to base such a model on McTaggart's and Husserl's time philosophy as well as on narcological categories is a step into the right direction, remains for the reader to judge. The concluding chapter of this anthology presents Mam's insightful 'The Flow of Time in Narrative. An Artificial Intelligence Perspective'. Time, as the author reminds us, does not appear alone in narrative; it is wound up with events, and involves relationships that hinge on modality and point-of-view. This accounts for a subjective notion of time, where the position of an event in time is dynamic and changes relative to the speaker. This notion must be reconciled with another, so-called objective notion of time where the events are ordered in a fixed, static fashion. Against this background, Mam introduces an AI perspective that integrates these concepts within a coherent framework. As he demonstrates, AI models based on narcological theory and findings from cognitive sciences are able to tell us what sorts of reasoning about time and events an intelligent agent can carry out. These findings, the author suggests, should be taken further in two ways: one, by conducting psychological experiments to learn more about how humans construct time representations; two, by scaling up the corpora in which time lines are identified. Mam considers his investigations 'only a first step [... ] in a much richer examination of time

Foreword

XXI

in narrative, within the framework of an empirical discipline of corpus narratology, where multimillion-word collections of narrative text are analysed using sophisticated Al-based timelining tools.'" Credits This anthology may have come into being as the side-product of a research project. However, it quickly outgrew the status of a stepchild, both in terms of the challenges which it presented, and in terms of the intellectual reward that it gave. The intellectual reward we hope to be able to share; as for the challenges one thing is clear: the editors would not have been able to meet them without the generous support that we enjoyed. We thank the German Research Council (DFG) for the financial grant awarded to the 'Temporality Effect' project of which this anthology forms an integral part, and we thank our institution, the University of Hamburg, for providing the material, personal and administrative infrastructure on which academic research work is dependent. A particularly big 'Thank you' is owed to the team of graduate students and assistants who helped with the editing of the manuscript: Lisa Griinhage, Lena Schiich and Rike Lohmann. We also thank our translators, Ingnd Launen and Alexander Starntt, for their remarkable effort. Finally, we would also like to express our gratitude to the colleagues whose intellectual support and engagement in our project was extremely motivating and helpful - the members of the Interdisciplinary Center for Narratology (ICN) at the University of Hamburg, and those of its precursor, the DFG 'Narratology Research Group' (FGN). Among these are two colleagues we would like to mention by name: Rolf Krause, a steadfast and critical ally in matters equally narrative, digital and humanist, and Giinter Dammann who, among other things, introduced us to narratology and who enabled the project as a whole. Both played a decisive role in discussing and selecting the articles and in conceptualizing the anthology which we have edited and which you now hold in your hands. Hamburg, December 2010

32

Mam, 235 in the current volume.

HANS REICHENBACH

The Tenses of Verbs A particularly important form of token-reflexive symbol is found in the tenses of verbs. The tenses determine time with reference to the time point of the act of speech, i.e., of the token uttered. A closer analysis reveals that the time indication given by the tenses is of a rather complex structure. Let us call the time point of the token the point of speech. Then the three indications, 'before the point of speech', 'simultaneous with the point of speech', and 'after the point of speech', furnish only three tenses; since the number of verb tenses is obviously greater, we need a more complex interpretation. From a sentence like 'Peter had gone' we see that the time order expressed in the tense does not concern one event, but two events, whose positions are determined with respect to the point of speech. We shall call these time points the point of the event and the point of reference. In the example the point of the event is the time when Peter went; the point of reference is a time between this point and the point of speech. In an individual sentence like the one given it is not clear which time point is used as the point of reference. This determination is rather given by the context of speech. In a story, for instance, the series of events recounted determines the point of reference which in this case is in the past, seen from the point of speech; some individual events lying outside this point are then referred, not directly to the point of speech, but to this point of reference determined by the story. The following example, taken from W. Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage, may make these time relations clear: But Philip ceased to think of her a moment after he had settled down in his carriage. He thought only of the future. He had written to Mrs. Otter, the massiere to whom Hayward had given him an introduction, and had in his pocket an invitation to tea on the following day. The series of events recounted here in the simple past determine the point of reference as lying before the point of speech. Some individual events, like the settling down in the carriage, the writing of the letter,

2

Hans Reichenbach

and the giving of the introduction, precede the point of reference and are therefore related in the past perfect. Another illustration for these time relations may be given by a historical narrative, a quotation from Macaulay: In 1678 the whole face of things had changed ... eighteen years of misgovernment had made the ... majority desirous to obtain security for their liberties at any risk. The fury of their returning loyalty had spent itself in its first outbreak. In a very few months they had hanged and half-hanged, quartered and emboweled, enough to satisfy them. The Roundhead party seemed to be not merely overcome, but too much broken and scattered ever to rally again. Then commenced the reflux of public opinion. The nation began to find out to what a man it had intrusted without conditions all its dearest interests, on what a man it had lavished all its fondest affection. The point of reference is here the year 1678. Events of this year are related in the simple past, such as the commencing of the reflux of public opinion, and the beginning of the discovery concerning the character of the king. The events preceding this time point are given in the past perfect, such as the change in the face of things, the outbreaks of cruelty, the nation's trust in the king. In some tenses, two of the three points are simultaneous. Thus, in the simple past, the point of the event and the point of reference are simultaneous, and both are before the point of speech; the use of the simple past in the above quotation shows this clearly. This distinguishes the simple past from the present perfect. In the statement 'I have seen Charles' the event is also before the point of speech, but it is referred to a point simultaneous with the point of speech; i.e., the points of speech and reference coincide. This meaning of the present perfect may be illustrated by the following quotation from Keats: Much have I traveled in the realms of gold, And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; Round many western islands have I been Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. Comparing this with the above quotations we notice that here obviously the past events are seen, not from a reference point situated also in the past, but from a point of reference which coincides with the point of speech. This is the reason that the words of Keats are not of a narrative type but affect us with the immediacy of a direct report to the reader. We see that we need three time points even for the distinction of tenses which, in a superficial consideration, seem to concern only two

The Tenses of Verbs

3

time points. The difficulties which grammar books have in explaining the meanings of the different tenses originate from the fact that they do not recognize the three-place structure of the time determination given in the tenses.1 We thus come to the following tables, in which the initials ' £ ' , 'R\ and '5" stand, respectively, for 'point of the event', 'point of reference', and 'point of speech', and in which the direction of time is represented as the direction of the line from left to right:

In some tenses, an additional indication is given concerning the time extension of the event. The English language uses the present participle to indicate that the event covers a certain stretch of time. We thus arrive at the following tables:

1

In J.O.H. Jespersen's excellent analysis of grammar (The Philosophy of Grammar. New York: Holt 1924) I find the three-point structure indicated for such tenses as the past perfect and the future perfect (256), but not applied to the interpretation of the other tenses. This explains the difficulties which even Jespersen has in distinguishing the present perfect from the simple past (269). He sees correctly the close connection between the present tense and the present perfect, recognizable in such sentences as 'now I have eaten enough'. But he gives a rather vague definition of the present perfect and calls it 'a retrospective variety of the present'.

4

Hans Reichenbach

The extended tenses are sometimes used to indicate, not duration of the event, but repetition. Thus we say 'women are wearing larger hats this year' and mean that this is true for a great many instances. Whereas English expresses the extended tense by the use of the present participle, other languages have developed special suffixes for this tense. Thus the Turkish language possesses a tense of this kind, called muzari, which indicates repetition or duration, with the emphasis on repetition, including past and future cases. This tense is represented by the diagram

An example of this tense is the Turkish word 'goriirum', translatable as 'I usually see'. The syllable 'gor' is the root meaning 'see', 'iir' is the suffix expressing the muzari, and the 'iim' is the suffix expressing the first person T. 2 The sentence 'I see' would be in Turkish 'goruyorum'; the only difference from the preceding example is given by the inflection 'iiyor' in the middle of the word, expressing the present tense. The Greek language uses the aorist to express repetition or customary occurrence in the present tense. The aorist, however, is originally a nonextended past tense, and has assumed the second usage by a shift of meaning; in the sense of the extended tense it is called gnomic aorist? German and French do not possess extended tenses, but express such meanings by special words, such as the equivalents of 'always', 'habitually', and so on. An exception is the French simple past. The French language possesses here two different tenses, the imparfait and the passe deflni. They differ in so far as the imparfait is an extended tense, whereas th& passe deflni is not. Thus we have

2 3

Turkish vowels with two dots are pronounced like the German vowels ' o' and 'ii'. This shift of meaning is explainable as follows: One typical case of the past is stated, and to the listener is left the inductive inference that under similar conditions the same will be repeated in the future. A similar shift of meaning is given in the English 'Faint heart never won fair lady'. Cf. W.W. Goodwin: Greek Grammar. Boston: Ginn 1930, 275.

The Tenses of Verbs

5

We find the same distinction in Greek, the Greek imperfect corresponding to the French imparfait, and the Greek aorist, in its original meaning as a past tense, corresponding to the French passe deflni. Languages which do not have a passe deflni sometimes use another tense in this meaning; thus Latin uses the present perfect in this sense (historical perfect). We may add here the remark that the adjective is of the same logical nature as the present participle of a verb. It indicates an extended tense. If we put the word 'hungry', for instance, in the place of the word 'seeing' in our tables of extended tenses, we obtain the same extended tenses. A slight difference in the usage is that adjectives are preferred if the duration of the event is long; therefore adjectives can often be interpreted as describing permanent properties of things. The transition to the extended tense, and from there to the permanent tense, is seen in the examples 'he produces', 'he is producing', 'he is productive'. When we wish to express, not repetition or duration, but validity at all times, we use the present tense. Thus we say 'two times two is four'. There the present tense expressed in the copula 'is' indicates that the time argument is used as a free variable; i.e., the sentence has the meaning 'two times two is four at any time'. This usage represents a second temporal function of the present tense. Actual language does not always keep to the schemas given in our tables. Thus the English language uses sometimes the simple past where our schema would demand the present perfect. The English present perfect is often used in the sense of the corresponding extended tense, with the additional qualification that the duration of the event reaches up to the point of speech. Thus we have here the schema

In the sense of this schema we say, for instance, T have known him for ten years'. If duration of the event is not meant, the English language then uses the simple past instead of the present perfect, as in T saw him ten years ago'. German and French would use the present perfect here. When several sentences are combined to form a compound sentence, the tenses of the various clauses are adjusted to one another by certain rules which the grammarians call the rules for the sequence of

6

Hans Reichenbach

tenses. We can interpret these rules as the principle that, although the events referred to in the clauses may occupy different time points, the reference point should be the same for all clauses - a principle which, we shall say, demands the permanence of the reference point. Thus, the tenses of the sentence, 'I had mailed the letter, when John came and told me the news', may be diagramed as follows: (1)

1st clause: Ei — Rl — S 2nd clause: R2, E2— S 3rd clause: R3, E3— S

Here the three reference points coincide. It would be incorrect to say, 'I had mailed the letter when John has come'; in such a combination the reference point would have been changed. As another example, consider the compound sentence, 'I have not decided which train I shall take'. That this sentence satisfies the rule of the permanence of the reference point is seen from the following diagram: (2)

1st clause: Ei — S, R, 2nd clause: S, R2 — E2

Here it would be incorrect to say: 'I did not decide which train I shall take.' When the reference point is in the past, but the event coincides with the point of speech, a tense R — S, E is required. In this sense, the form 'he would do' is used, which can be regarded as derived from the simple future 'he will do' by a back-shift of the two points R and E. We say, for instance, 'I did not know that you would be here'; this sentence represents the diagram: (3)

1st clause: R b E, — S 2nd clause: R2 — S, E2

The form 'I did not know that you were here' has a somewhat different meaning; it is used correctly only if the event of the man's being here extends to include the past time for which the T did not know' is stated, i.e., if the man was already here when I did not know it. Incidentally, in these sentences the forms 'would be' and 'were' do not have a modal function expressing irreality; i.e., they do not represent a conditional or a subjunctive, since the event referred to is not questioned. The nonmodal function is illustrated by the sentence 'I did not know

The Tenses of Verbs

7

that he was here', for which the form 'that he were here' appears incorrect. When a time determination is added, such as is given by words like 'now' or 'yesterday', or by a nonreflexive symbol like 'November 7, 1944', it is referred, not to the event, but to the reference point of the sentence. We say, 'I met him yesterday'; that the word 'yesterday' refers here to the event obtains only because the points of reference and of event coincide. When we say, 'I had met him yesterday'; what was yesterday is the reference point, and the meeting may have occurred the day before yesterday. We shall speak, therefore, of the positional use of the reference point; the reference point is used here as the carrier of the time position. Such usage, at least, is followed by the English language. Similarly, when time points are compared by means of words like 'when', 'before', or 'after', it is the reference points to which the comparison refers directly, not the events. Thus in the above example (1) the time points stated as identical by the word 'when' are the reference points of the three clauses, whereas the event of the first clause precedes that of the second and the third. Or consider the sentence, 'How unfortunate! Now that John tells me this I have mailed the letter'. The time stated here as identical with the time of John's telling the news is not the mailing of the letter but the reference point of the second clause, which is identical with the point of speech; and we have here the schema: (4)

1st clause: S, Rl5 Ei 2nd clause: E2 — S, R2

For this reason it would be incorrect to say, 'Now that John tells me this I mailed the letter'. If the time relation of the reference points compared is not identity, but time sequence, i.e., if one is said to be before the other, the rule of the permanence of the reference point can thus no longer be maintained. In 'he telephoned before he came' Rl is said to be before R2; but, at least, the tenses used have the same structure. It is different with the example, 'he was healthier when I saw him than he is now'. Here we have the structure: (5)

1st clause: R b E, — S 2nd clause: R2, E2— S 3rd clause: S, R3, E3

8

Hans Reichenbach

In such cases, the rule of the permanence of the reference point is replaced by the more general rule of the positional use of the reference point. The first rule, therefore, must be regarded as representing the special case where the time relation between the reference points compared is identity. Incidentally, the English usage of the simple past where other languages use the present perfect may be a result of the strict adherence to the principle of the positional use of the reference point. When we say, 'this is the man who drove the car', we use the simple past in the second clause because the positional principle would compel us to do so as soon as we add a time determination, as in 'this is the man who drove the car at the time of the accident'. The German uses here the present perfect, and the above sentence would be translated into 'dies ist der Mann, der den Wagen gefahren hat'. Though this appears more satisfactory than the English version, it leads to a disadvantage when a time determination is added. The German is then compelled to refer to the time determination, not to the reference point, but to the event, as in 'dies ist der Mann, der den Wagen zur Zeit des Ungliicksfalles gefahren hat'. In such cases, a language can satisfy either the principle of the permanence of the reference point or that of the positional use of the reference point, but not both. The use of the future tenses is sometimes combined with certain deviations from the original meaning of the tenses. In the sentence 'Now I shall go' the simple future has the meaning S,R — E; this follows from the principle of the positional use of the reference point. However, in the sentence T shall go tomorrow' the same principle compels us to interpret the future tense in the form S—R,E. The simple future, then, is capable of two interpretations, and since there is no prevalent usage of the one or the other we cannot regard one interpretation as the correct one.4 Further deviations occur in tense sequences. Consider the sentence: 'I shall take your photograph when you come'. The form 'when you will come' would be more correct; but we prefer to use here the present tense instead of the future. This usage may be interpreted as follows. First, the future tense is used in the first clause in the meaning S — R,E; second, in the second clause the point of speech is neglected. The neglect is possible because the word 'when' refers the reference point of the second clause clearly to a future event. A similar anomaly is found in the sentence, 'We shall hear the record when we have 4

The distinction between the French future forms je vais voir and je verrai may perhaps be regarded as representing the distinction between the order S, R — E and the order S — R, E.

The Tenses of Verbs

9

dined', where the present perfect is used instead of the future perfect 'when we shall have dined'.5 Turning to the general problem of the time order of the three points, we see from our tables that the possibilities of ordering the three time points are not exhausted. There are on the whole 13 possibilities, but the number of recognized grammatical tenses in English is only 6. If we wish to systematize the possible tenses we can proceed as follows. We choose the point of speech as the starting point; relative to it the point of reference can be in the past, at the same time, or in the future. This furnishes three possibilities. Next we consider the point of the event; it can be before, simultaneous with, or after the reference point. We thus arrive at 3 • 3 = 9 possible forms, which we call fundamental forms. Further differences of form result only when the position of the event relative to the point of speech is considered; this position, however, is usually irrelevant. Thus the form S — E — R can be distinguished from the form S, E — R; with respect to relations between S and R on the one hand and between R and E on the other hand, however, these two forms do not differ, and we therefore regard them as representing the same fundamental form. Consequently, we need not deal with all the 13 possible forms and may restrict ourselves to the 9 fundamental forms. For the 9 fundamental forms we suggest the following terminology. The position of R relative to S is indicated by the words 'past', 'present', and 'future'. The position of E relative to R is indicated by the words 'anterior', 'simple', and 'posterior', the word 'simple' being used for the coincidence of R and E. We thus arrive at the following names:

5

In some books on grammar we find the remark that the transition from direct to indirect discourse is accompanied by a shift of the tense from the present to the past. This shift, however, must not be regarded as a change in the meaning of the tense; it follows from the change in the point of speech. Thus T am cold' has a point of speech lying before that of T said that I was cold'.

10

Hans Reichenbach

Structure

New Name

Traditional Name

E—R— S E,R — S R — E—S -i

Anterior past Simple past

Past perfect Simple past

R — S,E L R—S—EJ

Posterior past

E — S, R S,R,E S,R — E S—E — R~}

Anterior past Simple present Posterior present

Present perfect Present Simple future

Anterior future

Future perfect

Simple future Posterior future

Simple future —

S,E — R £ — S — RJ S — R,E S—R—E

I

—

We see that more than one structure obtains only for the two retrogressive tenses, the posterior past and the anterior future, in which the direction S — R is opposite to the direction R — E. If we wish to distinguish among the individual structures we refer to them as the first, second, and third posterior past or anterior future. The tenses for which a language has no established forms are expressed by transcriptions. We say, for instance, 'I shall be going to see him' and thus express the posterior future S — R — E by speaking, not directly of the event E, but of the act of preparation for it; in this way we can at least express the time order for events which closely succeed the point of reference. Languages which have a future participle have direct forms for the posterior future. Thus the Latin 'abiturus ero' represents this tense, meaning verbally 'I shall be one of those who will leave'. For the posterior past R — E — S the form 'he would do' is used, for instance in 'I did not expect that he would win the race'. We met with this form in an above example where we interpreted it as the structure R — S,E; but this structure belongs to the same fundamental form as R — E — S and may therefore be denoted by the same name. Instead of the form 'he would do', which grammar does not officially recognize as a tense,6 transcriptions are frequently used. Thus we say, 'I did not expect that he was going to win the race', or, in formal writing, 'the king lavished his favor on the man who was to kill him'. In the 6

It is sometimes classified as a tense of the conditional mood, corresponding to the French conditional. In the examples considered above, however, it is not a conditional but a tense in the indicative mood.

The Tenses of Verbs

11

last example, the order R — E — S is expressed by the form 'was to kill', which conceives the event E, at the time R, as not yet realized, but as a destination. Incidentally, the historical origin of many tenses is to be found in similar transcriptions. Thus 'I shall go' meant originally 'I am obliged to go'; the future-tense meaning developed because what I am obliged to do will be done by me at a later time.7 The French future tense is of the same origin; thus the form 'je donnerai', meaning T shall give', is derived from 'je donnerai', which means T have to give'. This form of writing was actually used in Old French.8 The double function of 'have', as expressing possession and a past tense, is derived from the idea that what I possess is acquired in the past; thus 'I have seen' meant originally T possess now the results of seeing', and then was interpreted as a reference to a past event.9 The history of language shows that logical categories were not clearly seen in the beginnings of language but were the results of long developments; we therefore should not be astonished if actual language does not always fit the schema which we try to construct in symbolic logic. A mathematical language can be coordinated to actual language only in the sense of an approximation.

7

8

9

In Old English no future tense existed, and the present tense was used both for the expression of the present and the future. The word 'shall' was used only in the meaning of obligation. In Middle English the word 'shall' gradually assumed the function of expressing the future tense. Cf The New English Dictionary, Oxford 1914, Vol. VIII, Pt. 2, S-Sh, p. 609, col. 3. This mode of expressing the future tense was preceded by a similar development of the Latin language, originating in vulgar Latin. Thus instead of the form 'dabo', meaning the future tense T shall give', the form 'dare habeo' was used, which means T have to give'. Cf. Ferdinand Brunot: Precis de grammaire historique de la langue francaise. Paris: Masson 1899, 434. This is even more apparent when a two-place function is used. Thus T have finished my work' means originally T have my work finished', i.e., T possess my work as a finished one'. Cf. The New English Dictionary. Oxford 1901, Vol. V, Pt. I, H, p. 127, col. 1-2. The German still uses the original word order, as in Teh habe meine Arbeit beendet'.

PETER BIERI

Time Experience and Personhood We regard ourselves and other people as persons. The term person has many facets. There are many conditions of personhood that interact in a complicated way. One of these conditions is that a being has to have a certain relation to the time span during which it lives in order to be considered as a person. In the following, I will deal with this aspect of personhood. In the course of the analysis, the interrelation of personhood with other classical aspects will come to the fore. My reflections are divided into two parts. In the first part, I explore the question of the formal or general conditions for a being not only to factually live in time, but also to have a consciousness of the temporal dimensions of its existence. In the second part I attempt to develop the idea that persons are capable of creating a particular kind of identity by rendering a special kind of unity to their own lives stretched out over time. Formal Conditions for Time Consciousness What are actually the conditions for a being to have an entity, a consciousness of time? In order to answer this question, I will begin with a minimal model of a relation to time, and will then enrich this model step by step until we can recognise our full time consciousness in it. That means I will do something similar to what Strawson calls 'descriptive metaphysics'1: to make general conditions of our experience visible by reflecting on what would happen if these conditions were not met. Let us begin with the examination of objects. For persons are physical entities and, in this sense, objects, although the point of the term person is, that they are not just objects. Objects have a history; they are subjected to change. In order to describe their changes, it suffices to name the time structure that is given by the relation 'earlier than' or 'later than': the object has different attributes at a later point in time 1

P.F. Strawson: Individuals. London 1959; 'Analysis, Science, and Metaphysics,' in: R. Rorty (ed.): The Linguistic Turn. Chicago 1967, 312-320.

14

Peter Bieri

than at an earlier. In order to describe this simple and elementary relation of an object to time, we only need a continuum of time coordinates - tl, t2 - to whom we can allocate the description of state of the object. We do not need to speak of another, richer time structure, of past, present and future. When we speak of the history of an object, we want to indicate that it is one and the same object that has this history. In order to speak of the numerical identity of an object throughout time, we need two things: (1) we have to know its movement through space; (2) we have to be able to tell a causal story about the object; to specify to which causal influences the object has been exposed, and how it has changed because of this exposure. This assertion of the identity of an object goes together with a causal explanation of its change. Assertion of identity and explanatory history are counterparts, they go hand in hand. When I speak of causality here, I mean the relation between the causal dependence between events, and as these, I define the relation of the contra factual dependence. If A was the cause of B, then at least it can be presumed that if there was no A, then B would not have happened. This explication allows a liberal interpretation of the relation between causality and time: causal relations are also possible between simultaneous events, and in principle, even 'backwards causality' is possible (although I believe it is contra intuitive).2 We sometimes call traces what are actually the results of causal effects on an object. With that, we say that we are reminded by certain conditions of an object to earlier influences, or reminded that they represent certain earlier events. But then, we already speak of us, and we are not only objects. Traces on an object that is only an object do not carry any memory for the object and do not represent anything to the object. If we only look at the object itself and leave ourselves out of the game - so that there is nobody who can draw conclusions - we cannot even speak of traces, as this is a potentially epistemic term. They are simply conditions of an object that are the causal results of earlier effects. Consequently, objects do have a history. But they do not have a consciousness of this history. What do we have to add to an object in order for it to be able to generate such a consciousness? My first step is to provide an object - e.g., an organism - with representations of its environment. I use this term to define intentional consciousness. To represent means to be in an intentional condition: to relate to some2

Cf. J.L. Mackie: 'Causes and Conditions,' in: E. Sosa (ed.): Causation and Conditionals. Oxford 1975, 15-38; D. Lewis: 'Causation,' in: The Journal of Philosophy 70 (1973), 556-567.

Time Experience and Personhood

15

thing as something. Representations are representations of something. The ability to make representations is the ability to reference. I use the term of representation as a very wide, formal term: I leave open if all representation has to be conceptual representation, if all conceptual representation is proposition^ representation and if all prepositional representation presupposes a natural language. It is only decisive that we are dealing with intentional conditions whose description is intentional (non-extensional), because they are referentially opaque.' Familiar cases of intentional conditions - representations - are: to perceive, to think, to mean, to wish, to imagine etc. By equipping an object with the faculty of representation, did we automatically allocate to it a time consciousness? No. It is certain that the intentional conditions of an object are temporarily organised in the same way as its other conditions, namely by the relation 'earlier later'. Its representations form a temporal sequence. But this is only something that is factually the case. It is not yet something for the object. A sequence of representations is not yet a representation of a sequence. The order of the representation that we have up to now, is simply the order of its causal genesis. And this order alone does not yet allow for what time consciousness is: the representation of a temporal structure.4 In the next step, let us endow the object with the ability to allocate time indices to events represented by it. For example, let us assume that a computer equipped with sensors has intentional conditions and give it the ability to attach indices to the processes which it has registered. It then can print out, according to its 'inner clock': Atl, Bt2, Ct3, etc. With this, did we give the computer the ability to represent events as temporally organised events? The answer is, again, 'no'. It is true that the consciousness of such a being can be illustrated by a linear continuum that, to us, seen from outside, is a continuum of coordinators of time. But seen from inside, it is not yet a consciousness of a time structure. To us, this continuum is a temporal continuum, as to us, it is defined by the temporal relation 'earlier - later'. And in this, we recognise a specifically temporal logic to which, e.g., belongs the rule that if x precedes y, then y cannot precede x, and if x y and y precedes z, then x precedes z. To the computer, however, the continuum simply means an abstract relational structure constituted by a transitive, asymmetric relation. To the computer, the logic of this structure is not yet a tem3

4

On the intentional contexts, cf. W.V. Quine: Word and Object. Cambridge, Mass. 1960, §§ 30-32. Here and below, I owe very much to Jay F. Rosenberg's analyses in One World and Our Knowledge of It. Dordrecht 1980, 57-86.

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poral logic, even if we let it use the letter 't\ Accordingly, the same is true for a sequence of representations without indices: it is a de facto temporal order, that is to say, the order of its causal genesis. But it is not yet a consciousness of the world as existing in a temporal order. What is missing in this consciousness is the representation of time modes. To represent the world order as genuinely temporal means to represent it from a temporal perspective that is continuously dislocating itself, or from a temporal point of view that is continuously changing. It means to represent certain events as present or happening now, and others as past resp. in the future. And it means to have a consciousness and knowledge that events which are in the future from a certain point in time, are the present at a later point in time, and can be in the past at an even later point in time. But what do we have to supply to something that is equipped with the ability to represent, in order to enable it to have this temporal perspective? Obviously, it is not enough to simply hand over the vocabulary of time modes to our computer, without adding something else. It then could print out: Atl now I, Bt2 now I, etc. And we could understand these utterances as expressions of consciousness of the present time. But this is not true for the computer. In order to understand that the expression 'is now' is an expression of a time mode, one has to understand the contrast between 'is now', 'was' and 'will be'. And the computer lacks this understanding, so that 'now' is a mere word to it. What is it that is still missing in order to arrive at an understanding of time modes? What, for example, is missing in order to distinguish between present and past events? One is tempted to say that the computer will be able to achieve this as soon as we provide it with traces of earlier representations. Certain representations that belong to a being at a given point in time are causal consequences, are after effects of earlier representations, and these traces of the history of representations of a being - one could perhaps argue - constitute its consciousness of the past. They constitute its memories. In this way, the memory theorists of British empiricism concluded: there are active, living representations that constitute our consciousness of the presence, and there are faded representations that make, as traces of earlier representations, a reference to the past possible. This is the assumption that a being can read from the content of its representation - e.g., from its intensity - whether it is dealing with the representation of a present or of a past event. But this is an error: our computer, for example, will allocate the same time index to the content - the intentional object - of a perception, and to a representation that we can understand as memory if both representations appear at the same time. Differences in the rep-

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resented content alone do not yet constitute a temporal perspective as it characterises our consciousness of the time modes. What we have given to the computer are only traces of earlier representations and not yet real memories. The problem is that a being as described above is able to situate in a certain sense events of the world in time, but not itself. And exactly that ability is what we need for a consciousness of the time modes. In order to have a temporal perspective, i.e., a perspective from which an event appears as present at a certain point of time, and also can be seen as past from the next point in time, one has to represent oneself within permanently changing temporal relations to the events of the world. In other words, one has to have a form of self-awareness. What exactly does that mean? At first, it means that I can make a distinction between the history of the world - the sequence of its events - and the history of my representations of the world. Both histories proceed in one and the same time, and what I do by representing the difference between past, present, and future, is to bring my representation of the world into a temporal relation to the events of this world. Thus, to represent an event in the world as present (now), means to represent it simultaneously as one that I represent now, for example by perceiving it. To represent an event as past - to remember it - means to represent it as an event that occurred at the same time as one of my earlier representations, i.e., as an event that was formerly experienced by me as happening in the present. And to relate to a. future event - to expect it - means to relate to an event that will be at the same time as one of my later representations in time. Thus, in order to have a genuine time consciousness, a being has to be able to make a difference between the history of the world and the history of its encounter with the world. And the continuously changing perspective I have spoken about is nothing else but the continuous process to connect these two sequences of events in one representation of a single, consistent time.5 This analysis also explains the apparent paradox that one time mode can fall into the area of another. For example, we speak of past and future presence. If one remembers something, one does not only remember something that was, but something that was present, and if one expects something one does not only relate to something that will be, but to something that will be present. This can now be explained: a past event is one that was simultaneous with one of my earlier representations, and as concurrence with a representation is called presence, we are dealing with a past present. And the case of the future present is to be explained by analogy. The specific logic of the time modes is ex5

Cf. my Zeit und Zeiterfahrung. Frankfurt/M. 1972, 79-120.

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plained by the connection between the history of the world and the history of my representation. Time consciousness pre-supposes self-awareness. In order to not just organise the events in the world - like the computer - according to an abstract relation, but to represent the events as a story, I need the ability to represent my representation of the world themselves, my autobiography of representations. Consequently, I need representations of a second order, or, as it is called, metarepresentations. In the consciousness of the time modes, I do not just use my representations, I also mention them. And I quote them as temporally organised, that is as organised among themselves as well as organised in relation to what is represented in them - the world events. This is what Kant meant when he said that time is the form of the outward as well as the inward meaning.6 Metarepresentations are representations of representations, that is to say, they are representations whose intentional object is a representation itself. In a metarepresentation, I quote three aspects of my representations: (1) their temporal position relative to the events of the world, and relative to other representations; (2) their intentional object; (3) their mode: if we are dealing with a perception, an imagination or already with a memory. In this way, I can produce a continuum of interlaced memories, as described by Husserl in the case of retention.7 Now I can represent an earlier representation (remember) that is a memory in itself, in other words, a representation of an even earlier representation that, again, can be a memory whose intentional object is also quoted, etc. In our consciousness, this iteration factually breaks off at one point. But logically, there is no limit to the iteration of metarepresentations, as there is no limit to the iteration of metalanguages. When we provided traces of earlier representations to our computer, it seemed at first as if we had already endowed it with genuine memories. But then it transpired that it was only traces. We can now understand why that is so: memory is the term for a representation in which not only an earlier world event, but also an earlier representation of this event is being represented. And the computer - the way I described it - did not have this ability to quote itself. At this point, we have reached an intermediary result: as physical beings we are objects whose elementary relation to the world is characterised by the fact that we change with time and consequently, have a history. As persons, in addition, we are beings that have a conscious6 7

I. Kant: Critique of Pure Reason, B 49ff. E. Husserl: On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time. Dordrecht 1991, §§ 10-12.

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ness in the sense that we can represent our environment. This consciousness - according to its causal genesis - is in fact organised temporally. Furthermore, as persons, we have a consciousness of this order as a temporal order, as we can represent time modes and thus gain a temporal perspective. And we have this time consciousness because we have self-awareness: because we have metarepresentations and can quote our own history of representations by connecting it to the history of the world. This result has an important epistemological consequence. If in terms of our time consciousness we have to distinguish between the history of the world and the history of our representations, then we have to distinguish between the happening of an event, or the being of an object in this world, on one side, and their being represented on the other side. And this means no less than that in order to have a consciousness of time, we have to be epistemological realists. By definition, this realism includes the conviction that the being of an entity in the world is something different from its being represented by us: that its esse is not percipi, or, more general, repraesentari. And whoever is convinced of this, also believes in the following two assumptions which are fundamental to our common sense conception of the world: (1) there is a diachronic continuous existence of entities in this world even when they are not represented. (Note that this assumption does not hold for certain phenomena of the inner world, like, for example pain: pain that is not felt does not exist). (2) There can be a difference between the way we represent an entity, and the way the entity is. In other words, a realistic consciousness makes a distinction between appearance and reality. (A distinction that makes no sense with pain: pain is the way it feels). In order to represent time, we have to present the world as a realistic world. In other words: an idealistic consciousness (one that conceptualises all entities according to the logic of pain) cannot be a real consciousness of time. And as our consciousness is a true time consciousness, idealism is wrong. Persons are necessarily realists. To them, it is no option to be an idealist. To understand oneself as a person, and at the same time to claim that one is an idealist is an incoherent position. As realists, it is our epistemic goal to distinguish between appearance and reality. Firstly, this is true for the presence. Persons try to find out how objects they are confronted with really are. They attempt to make a difference between the perhaps deceptive aspects of their representation and the real attributes of the objects. They also try to do the same in their encounter with the past: we want to distinguish between the way the past really was and the way that we remember it - how it

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seems to have been. And here, one can discover a second connection between having a time consciousness and the way how we have to represent the world8: the attempt to distinguish between appearance and reality in the past can only be successful if we organise the world events according to causal dependencies, which I understand here, as I said before, simply as contra factual dependencies. In order to reconstruct the real course of the past and to disclose errors of memory, I have to be able to make use of causal inferences that tell me how the event sequences of the past have to have been. For let us assume I do not have causal inferences at my disposal. Then I have the belief foaL there could be a difference between the past events and my representations of them. But I cannot work with this difference. It is true that I have representations of present and past. But I can use none of these representations as an evidence for another. I have the impression that the past was so and so. But I cannot verify this impression. I want to make a distinction between appearance and reality of the past, but I cannot do so. I have a concept for which there is no set of rules to apply: I have an incoherent consciousness. However, if I have at my disposal the idea of causal dependencies between events, and thus of causal inferences, I can construct an objective time order within the past. For example, if I know the causal connection between fire and ashes, then I can know that in a certain past context the ashes cannot have existed before the fire, even if it may appear to me like that in my memory. And now I can establish an objective time order not only within the events in the world but also within my past representations. When I assume that my representations - perceptions - of fire and ashes depend causally on the existence of fire and ashes, then I can know that my representation of ashes cannot have anteceded the representation of fire, even if I might present it that way in my metarepresentations. In other words, if, and only if, I think of the realistic world as causally structured, and if I regard myself as causally implicated in this world, then I can reach my epistemic goal and distinguish between the real and the apparent image of the past. Then, and only then, I can distinguish between experienced and objective time. And, of course, this is nothing else than the argument of Kant's'Second Analogy'.9 At this point I can finally return to the topic of 'self-awareness'. I argued above that a genuine consciousness of time is only possible be8

9

For the following, cf. Jonathan Bennett: 'Analytical Transcendental Arguments,' in: P. Bieri, R.-P. Horstmann, L. Krttger (eds.): Transcendental Arguments and Science. Dordrecht 1979, 45-63. I. Kant: Critique of Pure Reason, B 233ff.

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cause we can situate ourselves in time, and I tentatively explained this idea by introducing the concept of metarepresentations. Yet selfawareness is not completely described by this. It is obvious that the representations that I quote are factually my own. However, this does not mean that I already have a description of myself as a being that has a history - a description of myself as a subject. I can only describe myself as something that is a history, that is to say, as a sequence of representations that are in a temporal relation to the events of the world. But when I quote representations, I do not only want to quote their existence or their appearance; I want to represent the fact that it was me who represented earlier. I want to represent the representations as my own. Examples for this form of a metarepresentation are 7 represent, that / represented', or 7 remember, that / perceived'. In both cases the assumption is that T relates to the same subject, and therefore, we speak of 'consciousness of self identity in time'. A question often raised in this regard throughout the history of the debate concerns the referential object of T : to what does this expression relate? From the outside - from the perspective of others - it is clear that we are dealing with a physical person that remains the same through time. But from the inside - from my own perspective - it may appear that I need not necessarily have to understand the consciousness of my identity as the consciousness of the identity of my physical person - as if I could abstract from my physical aspects or parenthesise them and see myself as merely a mental subject that remains the same overtime. But that is not possible. For we have seen that we want to distinguish between our representations of the past and the real past and we can only do that if we embed the history of our representations causally into the history of the world. Yet this we can only do, if, so to speak, we give the world a chance to come into causal contact with our representations - to cause them. And therefore, we have to represent ourselves as physical persons on which the world can have an impact. In other words, we can only have the concept of an objective past if we are able to represent our past as a past of physical persons. With this, I will close my piece of descriptive metaphysics of time consciousness. In these somewhat transcendental reflections I have tried to show that there are four closely connected conditions which must be met if a being factually living in time shall also have a consciousness of the temporal dimension of its existence: (1) in order to attain a temporal perspective on the world, it has to have metarepresentations at its disposal; (2) in order to achieve this, it is necessary that it represents the world as a realistic world; (3) in order to be able to dis-

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tinguish the objective time of this world from the experienced time, it has to represent the world as causally organised; (4) and in order to be able to do this, it has to understand its identity as an objective identity. These four conditions together constitute the very formal structure of the temporality of persons. Identity of the Person in Time However, there are other aspects of this temporality. Persons do not simply have a consciousness that they have a past, a present, and a future. They can also develop certain attitudes towards these temporal dimensions of their life. And it belongs to our concept of personality that they are supposed to develop certain attitudes. The concept of a person does not only have descriptive, but also normative aspects. With the idea of personhood, we connect certain normative expectations or ideals, and some of these ideals concern the relation of a person to its past, present, or future. Let us begin with the past of a person. Persons do not only have a past; it is, as we have seen, essential to persons that they can represent this past. And we have further seen that they necessarily represent it, when they represent it as past, as their own past. Next to this completely formal aspect of belonging, there is another aspect: we expect from persons that they also take possession of their past. It is not enough, this ideal says, that I simply state vis-a-vis my past that certain things happened to me. As a person, I should try to take them into possession and to understand them as parts of myself, so that they do not appear as alien to me. In other words, this ideal means that I should try to create a unity in my past life. This past life, though, does already have a unity that has materialised without me: the events in my story stand in relations of causal dependence to one another and therefore form a causal unity. The unity that is referred to in the concept of appropriation, however, is a unity that I have to produce in the first place. It derives from my need to understand the past. To the degree that I succeed in understanding my past, I unify it. I want to name this unity hermeneutic unity. In order to be able to understand my past I have to be prepared to remember it in a way that I can live through it again. In other words, it is a necessary condition for appropriation that I do not suppress my past in the sense that it is not accessible any more to my deliberate and directed memory. But this alone is not enough. Memories without interpretation are in a certain sense blind. They do not yet constitute comprehension. To create understanding means to see a remembered exper-

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ience in the context of earlier and later experiences in my history. And the relations that I create here are explanatory relations. Understanding is explaining. The creation of hermeneutic unity is an explanatory process that means an epistemic achievement. Appropriation of one's own past means to narrate an explanatory story about this past. What are the general characteristics of such a story?10 At first, we have here the postulation that memory on which a story is based is mostly correct, that is, true. If we had to assume that most memories of somebody are wrong, we would not only not speak of appropriation of the past, but would also hesitate to attribute memory to them at all. But correctness of memory is not enough. I can appropriate my memory only to the degree that I succeed in making sense of it. Doing this, I have three aspects of my story at hand: (1) the story of my intentional attitude: my history of actions; (2) the story of my needs, wishes, and emotions: my emotional history; (3) the story of my opinions, of my world of thoughts: my ideological history. Thus, to create a hermeneutic unity of my past means to merge these three stories into one single explanatory story. The formal structure of this story is: I have done certain things because I believed, wished, and felt certain things. My story of appropriation consists of intentional explanations of my past actions, in which intentional conditions like opinions, wishes, and emotions are quoted as antecedents. Intentional explanations construct the person they are dealing with as a rational being - as a being that acts in accordance with what it wishes, feels, and believes. Rationality is a parameter in the attribution of intentional conditions, and, in this sense, it is a condition for personhood. Accordingly, it is a construction principle of the story of my past that I can represent my story as the story of a rational character. Whatever I concede to myself, ex post, are imperfections like neglect, ignorance, lack of information, etc., but not blank irrationality. For if I saw myself as largely irrational, I would not be able to understand the actor of my past as a person. Thus, we rationalise our past. This is an undertaking that contains the danger of retrospective distortion, for, of course, we were not always rational. Rationality is also an ideal of personhood. But explanations of our past that are oriented at this ideal are our only chance to produce a hermeneutic unity. And perhaps some things that may appear irrational and bizarre in our past are so only at the surface. Psychoanalysis, for example, impresses us, among other things, because it allows 10

In the following, I apply Daniel C. Dennett's theory of intentional systems to memory. Cf D.C. Dennett: 'Intentional Systems and Conditions of Personhood', in: D.C.D.: Brainstorms. Hassock 1978, 3-22, 267-285.

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us, with the explanatory assumption of subconscious wishes, feelings, and opinions, to see ourselves as rational persons to a much higher degree than when we only stick to what is conscious to us (in the sense that we can report on its existence at any time). Consequently, the explanatory assumption of a subconscious can enlarge the chance to appropriate our past. When we try to produce, in the described way, a hermeneutic unity in our past life, then we create, as we say, an identity. I make who I am understandable to myself by describing who I have become, and by explaining to myself, why I became who I am. When I tell such a story, I operate selectively: firstly, in what I remember at all, and what I forget or suppress; secondly, in how I value and assess what I remember, i.e., what I see as being essential to me and not just accidental. In a story about how my presence derived from my past, I cut the past to size: I give a form to it or render it a profile. I distinguish certain events that happened to me, and certain experiences, as a key to other events, as turning points, etc. Retrospectively, I act as the dramaturge of my life. And by doing this, I mostly succumb to the lie of all classical dramaturgy: by overlooking or just not accepting that the course of my life was simply also determined by a multitude of coincidences, I give an unavoidability to my life that it did not have in reality. The criterion for a story of appropriation is explanatory coherence: the ability of a story to make all available data on my past understandable is decisive. But our experience is that there always seems to be several, similarly coherent stories. Therefore, we sometimes have the impression that we could choose among various stories - various possible identities. And sometimes we change our story. If we do that, we 'change our identity'; we 'lose' an old identity and 'win' a new one. This can, for example, happen during a long period of psychoanalysis. We then have the impression that we discover a new identity for ourselves and can re-write our past. That is the case when, for example, censorship is loosened and as a result new memories become available. Sometimes we may also have the impression as if we could invent or create a new identity for ourselves. In this case we do not mean a fictitious identity, but we speak of a new explanatory potential that is revealed by data that were known to us earlier but now appear in a new light. What we invent are new explanatory hypotheses about us that enlarge the coherence of our history of appropriation. When we successfully design a new hermeneutic unity of our past, which we believe to be more integrative than the former one, our identity will change. This is a continuous process, and this kind of change is essential to persons. In this process, the effort to come ever closer to

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an ideal of the personhood that appropriates the past as completely as possible is reflected. And it is important to see that the sequence of changing stories of appropriation is all we have as an answer to the question 'Who am I?'. There is no stable core in a person, no position outside these stories, from where I could ask: 'And who am I really independently from these stories?' Finally, I will mention a moral aspect of this idea that I am supposed to appropriate my past. I am held responsible for my past actions. To me, this only makes sense if I can accept my actions as my own. Insofar as I can remember my actions through metarepresentation, I represent them already as mine. Nevertheless, the readiness to take responsibility intuitively includes more: it only really makes sense to me if I can accept the responsibility for my actions under a description of myself to which these, my actions, apply. Therefore, a normative expectation to persons can be recognised in the effective rule that I have to take responsibility in every case - pathological cases aside: we expect from persons that they search for an identity that makes an integration of their past actions possible and allows them to stand by these actions. Let us regard now the relation that a person can have to their future. As we have seen, to have a consciousness about the future means to be able to relate to a future presence. If a being only has this purely formal ability, then it can happen that it simply lets its future happen to itself. If existence is this way, one simply stumbles passively into the future. But we as persons can do otherwise. To me, as a person, it is specific that I can be concerned and care for my future. By doing this, I am conscious firstly about what I do in fact do and what I can achieve, but secondly also about who I will be. These two aspects of my concern for my future can be called my project. Since a consciousness of the past without an explanatory story is blind, a consciousness of the future without projects is blind as well. To have a project means to conceptualise oneself as a certain person, as a person with a certain identity, into the future. By doing this, I take care that not only my future presence makes something out of me but that I also make something out of it. Within such a concept, I care about my future history of action from the perspective of my present wishes, emotions, and opinions. However, I myself cm also care about these wishes, emotions, and opinions: I can decide which of the wishes, expectations, hopes, etc. that factually exist in me I indeed want to appropriate and regard as mine in an emphatic sense.11 Doing that, I devel11

Cf. H. Frankfurt: 'Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,' in: The Journal of Philosophy 68 (1971), 5-20.

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op wishes or preferences on a second level. I wish to be somebody, who, in the future, will be guided by these-and-these wishes and preferences. In this way, as a person, I can take an attitude of reflective selfevaluation, and the result of my self-evaluation will be my project for the future. When I go into my future under the influence of such a project, I lead my life in the emphatic sense of this word. Part of it is that there is continuity between my projects and my appropriation of my past. We expect from a person that his projects match the explanatory story that constitutes his present identity. I have to plan what I want to be in the future in the light of what I have become in the past. For my projects are supposed to afford a realization of myself, the realization of a certain person who, because of a certain past, is the one that he is. When my projects do not match at all to what I have become, then I am in danger of breaking up as a person: I am giving away the chance of realizing an identity that embraces my past as well as my future. To develop a project means, in other words, to strive for the unity of the person that I am. This observation also has a moral component. The condition of the continuity of my projects with my past is supposed to secure that I do not accept obligations that I cannot possibly fulfill. This is an important point towards others as well as towards my own self. Others have to be able to rely on me, and I am not allowed to commit myself (e.g., through a promise) to something that I cannot honor. In that case, I would appear to myself as an incoherent person and in the end even lose the status of a person in my own perspective. What, finally, can be said about the relation of a person to its presence? To not experience the present blindly means to experience it in the context of an appropriated past and a project for the future. Both dimensions are necessary to make sense of my presence in reality. At the same time the consequence is that I can only turn certain sectors of the presence that I can potentially experience into my own presence. The first of these constraints derives from the story about my past and the self-image constructed by this story. I have become somebody who can only feel, wish, and do that-and-that in a present reality which, objectively seen, may harbour to others completely different opportunities to experience and act. This kind of constraint can result in the fact that I might miss a present reality that is a completely possible presence. I miss it because I, as one says, live 'too much in the past' in that I concede to the past an undue power over my present. Three aspects of this phenomenon can be distinguished: (1) I cling so much to one of my appropriation

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stories that I, as it were, freeze the identity that it suggests. In that case, my presence - the way and how I feel and think now - reproduces in a certain sense only past presences - the way and how I felt and thought in the past. In other words: I do not give the present reality the chance to change me and to correct me in my self-image. (2) The consciousness of the presence is covered, flooded by memories into which I sink and where I remain. This can, for example, happen with the death of a person who was very closely intertwined with our identity. We then substitute the past for the present and have the perception 'that life stands still'. (3) We suppress our past and separate it from us, so that it is no longer accessible to us in our memory. Under this condition it remains causally effective, and has its considerable causal effects especially because it is suppressed and defies appropriation and accomplishment. In such a case, one can say that we do not live enough in the past. But in the end, as Freud has taught us to see, it ends up being the same: our present is so much under the dictation of the past that real consciousness of the present is no longer possible. In the same way as I can miss my present because I live - in one of these ways - too much in the past, I can also miss it by living too much in the future and by having the perception that life can always only begin the day after tomorrow. In this case, I substitute the present with the future, so that the present never really counts. I am only interested in my future presence, how it appears in my projects and how I imagine it in my anticipatory imagination. My identity, projected into the future, quasi suffocates my present. And that carries a subtle danger: the future person that I wish to be is one that has grown into the future identity by allowing itself to be changed by the proceeding moments of presences. If I, however, as it were misappropriate or bracket my life in the meantime because of a fixation on the future present moments, then I will be the old (same) person when the future point in time arrives, i.e., has become present. And I will not be able to slip into the identity which was imagined for me in my project. One misses one's presence if one only lives the present moments as a past or future and never as a present presence. What does it mean to avoid this danger? I only know very vague descriptions of this ideal that we have here. One of them is that one should be open to the present reality and get involved with it. Then there is talk about the ability or the preparedness to let oneself be - temporarily - overwhelmed by the present and get lost in it. Another thought that we find in the philosophical tradition, mainly with Kierkegaard, is the idea that everything depends on living in the present moment: in a way, as if life would come to an end in the next moment. I, myself, believe that this is

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what it is all about in the end: in the same way, as consciousness of the past without explanatory story is blind, consciousness of the present is blind without implicit connection to an appropriation story and without a projection of my identity into the future. At the same time, these two dimensions that I need in order to embed also the present into a hermeneutic unity of my life harbor the danger that I miss my present presence. Therefore, we have to find a balance towards our presence between blindness and lost chances. This balance is an aspect of what we call equanimity: the security that I can, whatever happens to me, place these happenings into a hermeneutic unity of my life, and at the same time I can have the strength to not allow my life to be suffocated either by memory or by my worries about my future. We lose this balance again and again and have to search for it repeatedly. And if we regard this balance as an ideal of personhood this means that we lose the state of being a person again and again and have to regain it again and again. This is a basic fact of our conscious life.

PETER JANICH

Constituting Time through Action and Discourse 0. Introduction When it comes to the classical topic of time, it seems philosophers' clocks move differently. Insights brought forward in the last one hundred years in the context of the linguistic and pragmatic turn of philosophy are noticeably ignored: the demarcations of problems have become increasingly blurred, the answers less clear. But above all, it appears that which or whose problems should be solved by a philosophy of time is out of sight. However humble these solutions might be, and with whatever relative reservations they are suggested - the solutions brought forward have to at least claim transsubjective plausibility. In the following, some exemplary remarks intend to point out the sense in which contemporary philosophy seems to have lost its purpose, and lead to a second step in which an assumption about the root causes of this development is made: not only the linguistic distinctions of time itself but also the epistemological distinctions of how to describe, exemplify or explain time lack sufficient explication and reflection on the conditions of plausibility, and thus these very reflections and answers have lost their place in life. In the next chapter, a methodological reconstruction of our temporal distinctions in the framework of social action and discourse will be given. By doing this, a life-experience related (lebensweltliche) base for scientific and philosophical theories of time will be brought forward as well. This will finally lead to a conclusion concerning realistic and ontological concepts of time. The point of reference remains the question why we as human beings need 'time' in our actions and in our discourse - and accordingly seek to provide those linguistic creations which are also object to philosophical debate.

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1. Philosophy of Time without Orientation a Short Criticism of Language Far from any claim to give an overview of contemporary philosophy of time or even to just list the most important articles, some well known concepts, and such concepts which have been distinguished by frequent quoting, will be singled out as examples. This allows a remarkable diagnosis. When reading programmatic texts of the 'linguistic turn',1 the problem of time seems to be especially appropriate to discuss philosophical problems as problems of their linguistic phrasing. From the Pre-Socratics and Aristotle's concept of time to the then contemporary days of the Phenomenologists, philosophical tradition had yielded an abundance of texts, giving linguistic philosophy, with its purposes of language analysis and criticism of metaphysics, a lot to reflect on. Furthermore, it delivered an important example of a relativistic revision of classical philosophy and of the distinct theory of relativism that philosophers of the linguistic turn adhered to. Here, the substitution of epistemological theory and nature philosophy through scientific theory could be exemplified. Especially attractive was the inclusion of the time modes of past, presence and future into the language of physics within the world of Minkowski, and the apparent introduction of scientific, measured time into the individual time consciousness of an observer. This was to be seen in the framework of a relativistic theory of physics, which now had to be reconstructed syntactically and semantically by the philosophers of logical empiricism. Assertions of existence (Existenzaussagen) already played a prominent role in explanations within concepts of the linguistic turn - regardless if 'exist' concerned classical teleological arguments2 or basic problems of arithmetic,3 and if the word 'to exist' was denied the character of the predicator,4 or if the problem of existence was approached by a 1

2

3

4

See R. Rorty (ed): The Linguistic Turn. Recent Essays in Philosophical Method. Chicago, London 1967, see also the texts quoted in note 2 to 7. See e.g. W. Kneale: 'Is Existence a Predicate?', in: H. Feigl, W. Sellars (eds.): Readings in Philosophical Analysis. New York 1949, 29^13. See G. Frege: Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik. Eine logisch mathematische Untersuchung iiber den Begriff der Zahl. Breslau 1884, Introduction (trans.: The Foundations ofArithmetic. A logical-mathematical investigation into the concept of number 1884. New York 2007) and G. Frege: Begriffsschrift, eine der arithmetischen nachgebildete Formelsprache des reinen Denkens. Jena, Preface of Dec. 18, 1878 (trans.: 'Concept Script. A formal language of pure thought modelled upon that of arithmetics', in: J. van Heijenort (ed.): From Frege to Godel A source book in mathematical logic, 1879-1931. Cambridge, MA 1967. Like in the essay mentioned in note 2.

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theory of the markers of the subject position in sentences.5 It was within the tendency of philosophical thought of that time when, in 1908, McTaggart attempted to prove the unreality of time through an analysis of terminology of modal and ordinal time lines and their relationship.6 The literature discussing his article is almost limitless. Here is not the place to comment on this literature or the assumption of McTaggart himself. As far as the deficits of contemporary philosophy of time are concerned, the following diagnosis seems to be sufficient: there is not the least attempt at terminological explanation, let alone at defining temporal words or epistemological words utilised as central points of reference. The comprehensibility of, e.g., 'past', 'present', and 'future', of 'earlier than' and 'later than' are taken for granted in the same way as that of the noun 'time' itself. But also expressions like 'the true nature of time', 'unreal', 'realities which can be found in a time line', 'object of our belief respectively our imagination', and 'belief in the existence of a plurality of timelines' remain as unexplained as expressions like 'direct perception' or 'purely subjective'. It can be regarded as undisputed that the first, the temporal words, are known to us from everyday language, and that the latter, the epistemological ones, only appear in the form of completely undefined idioms which have come down from philosophy and science - rendering such words unusable for the purpose of a philosophical clarification without further explanations. It may be asked which standard and which hope for new insights is at the basis of such philosophical thought, if, on one side, a comparison of linguistic systems of discrimination is introduced (McTaggart's A- and B-line as modal and ordinal time lines), and on the other side, no mention of what constitutes the meaning and the use of these discriminations is made. Some assumptions of this much-quoted article are even presented below a generally accepted level of scientific analysis, i.e., without a distanced presentation of philosophical statements, in the form of personal confessions ('I believe that time is unreal'). This is a level on which non-realists and realists manifest their personal preferences. The question of the purpose of the research in the sense of a philosophical or scientific problem that can be transsubjectively communicated, and 5

6

See B. Russell: 'On Denoting', in: Mind 1905, from R.C. Marsh (ed): Logic and Knowledge, Essays 1901-1950. London 1956, 41-56. J.E. McTaggart: 'The Unreality of Time', in: Mind 17 (1908), 457^174. [Janich's erroneous reference to John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart in the plural has been corrected in our translation. Despite its unusual form, the name refers to one individual only. In the following, all references to McTaggart have therefore been transformed into the singular.]

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to which the claim of a transsubjectively comprehensible answer can be attached, neither exists explicitly, nor can such a purpose be recognised implicitly. This situation is different in the article by Bertrand Russell, 'On the Experience of Time', of 1915,7 which is the second of the texts discussed here. Also within the framework of the programmatic orientations of the linguistic turn, albeit with a noticeable relationship to Ernst Mach's Analysis of Perceptions, Russell pursues the question of the relation between the non-scientific experience of time and physical time. Sensation und memory and their pre-scientific roles in the constitution of time in experience are reconstructed in their concurrence. 'Definitions' are explicitly sought, e.g., in order to make sense of the meaning of discourse of 'one (momentary) total experience'. Also, the temporal relaters 'earlier' and 'later' resp. the adjectives for the three time modes are tentatively defined, although as 'purely verbal definitions' ('We say that A is earlier than B if A is succeeded by B') against the background of a realistic epistemological theory: 'There is no logical reason why the relations of earlier and later should not subsist in a world wholly devoid of consciousness.' There is a clearly recognizable concern in Russell's approach: to construct the physical out of the mental time, and it shows an awareness of the linguistic character of the theory of time. However, a certain idea concerning definitions becomes virulent in regard to the discriminations of time concepts without being made explicit: the explanation of instances of language usage according to their empirically controllable adequacy in concrete circumstances. Ultimately, it is 'perceptions' which provide the material that has to be organised into a theory of time in the sense of the early logical positivism - that is, limited to the means of logics and empiricism. In the absence of any terminological explanation, one can assume that in this case the mention of 'perceptions' points to Mach's heritage. About thirty years before Russell's essay, in 1886, William James had published his essay 'The Perception of Time',8 in which he explores the perception of time in accordance to experimental psychology since Wilhelm Wundt and interprets it along hypotheses concerning the temporal function of the brain in relevant processes of consciousness. James contests Kant's transcendental philosophy pointing out that 'the assumption' of time 'must be due to a permanently present cause. This 7 8

B.Russell: 'On the Experience of Time', in: The Monist 25 (1915), 212-223. W. James: 'The Perception of Time', in: Journal of Speculative Philosophy 20 (1886), 374^107.

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cause - probably the simultaneous presence of brain-processes of different phases - fluctuates.' As far as our considerations are concerned, we have to note again that all distinctions of time are given by James in an unexplained language that is assumed to be sufficiently evident, including the linguistic means used to present results of experimental psychology as well as of their epistemological interpretation. All distinctions are used naively. Similar to the two authors mentioned above, James looks for the problem of time in the area of reception, perception, the sensory, that is, in the realm of passivity. If one leaves out a completely different tradition of debate on the problem of time, namely the tradition of the older (E. Husserl) and newer (H. Schmitz) phenomenology and the special phenomenological concept of Heidegger's existential propositions on time - a tradition that would necessitate a totally different essay -, and if one concentrates on the mainstream of analytical-empirical concepts including their modern variations, then one should not be amazed that the deficits in terms of linguistic explanations, and of explanations of purpose and means provide a humus on which, a hundred years later, metaphysics and ontology are again thriving. Instead of partaking in the lessons of the linguistic, and later of the pragmatic turn of philosophy, and of striving to overcome its remaining weaknesses, modern studies strengthen the old errors and - unfortunately - lose the old merits. Just to mention, more recent examples of this development are - in chronological order - the books by P. Bieri (Zeit und Zeiterfahrung, 1972), W. Deppert (Zeit. Die Begrundung des Zeitbegriffs, seine notwendige Spaltung und der ganzheitliche Charakter seiner Teile, 1989) and K. Mainzer (Zeit. Von der Urzeit zur Computerzeit, 1995). In its subtitle, Bieri's book9 promises the 'exposition of a problem area'. It discusses 'the traditional problem of reality, objectivity and subjectivity of time in the context of contemporary theory of time' - as the blurb aptly asserts. Bieri's very detailed and, in detail, subtle analysis of the unreality argument of McTaggart comes to the conclusion that the consciousness of time should, with 'the greatest neutrality possible', be understood as the 'fact', 'that our conscious data present themselves as chronologically aligned'.l0 The explanation of this diagnosis amounts to the assumption that the 'phenomenon' of time perception resp. of our time consciousness can only be understood if we 9

10

P. Bieri: Zeit und Zeiterfahrung. Exposition eines Problembereichs. Frankfurt/M. 1972. P. Bieri, I.e., 182 [our translation].

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take it to refer to a real time that exists outside of consciousness whatever that is supposed to mean. In the course of his reasoning, Bieri adopts from his philosophical sources the deficits diagnosed above completely and without any modification: chronological distinctions are neither explained nor defined but assumed as self-evident. Whenever there is a reference to Physics, it is considered neither in terms of its empirical validity nor in terms of its semantic viability. The purpose of the study is not mentioned - if we presume that it is not the rehabilitation of the old metaphysics of time -, and is nothing more than a contribution to an actual debate in academic philosophy. It does not seem to be possible to establish whose problems are supposed to be solved with which means - no daring argument, as such a task is probably not the concern of the author. W. Deppert reaches a similar result, though from a different starting point and in a completely different way. Historically, he goes much further back and confronts aprioristic and empirical theories of time with the reconciliatory result that both have something to contribute to the understanding of time. He asserts that time does have an 'epistemological-logicaV and an 'ontological aspect'," and thus can only be understood holistically if both aspects are considered. The reason for the study is, as with almost all studies on the philosophy of time, the (seemingly) paradoxical nature of time12 - a topos dealt in since St. Augustine - as well as the competition of modern natural sciences with the philosophical tradition. But such a motif does not yet render a philosophical approach purposeful, and therefore does not provide a parameter enabling one to decide if the suggestions made are successful or not. If one does not intend to solve a problem, one cannot be criticised for not having solved one. The 'explicit purpose' of Deppert's work,13 to provide 'stimulation for a mutually beneficial cooperation between the various individual scientific disciplines and philosophy' - could probably also be reached by intelligently provoking but false theories. Therefore, it may be allowed to assume that the true - instead of the pretended - purpose of the author lies more in the rehabilitation of an emphatic discourse of the 'being', more precisely, of the 'being of the recognizable' and the 'being of the recognising',14 or in short, it lies in the revival of ontological metaphysics. 11

12 13 14

W. Deppert: Zeit. Die Begriindung des Zeitbegriffs, seine notwendige Spaltung und der ganzheitliche Charakter seiner Telle. Stuttgart 1989, e.g. 247f. [our translation]. W. Deppert, I.e., 12f., 250 [our translation]. W. Deppert, I.e., 233 [our translation]. W. Deppert, I.e., 240 [our translation].

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As far as chronological distinctions and epistemological instruments are concerned, largely the same can be said of Deppert's as of Bieri's book: everything is somehow given, and is assumed as sufficiently known and reliable. Thus, Deppert's epistemological attention to the topic of time complies with what R.J. Hankinson ironically states about epistemology under the title 'The Basic Questions of Philosophy-. 'The only thing that you really have to know about epistemology is that it does not contribute anything to knowledge.'15 Ultimately, Deppert's study is an attempt of reconciliation and appeasement in the dispute or the competition between philosophy and science - except that this dispute has ended long ago due to a largely legitimate lack of interest on behalf of the natural sciences, and due to conflict aversion and lack of ideas on philosophy's side.16 The most recent of the books on time mentioned here, K. Mainzer's text which was published in a paperback series bearing the title 'Knowledge',17 obviously assigns itself the task to give an overview on philosophical and scientific theories of time. This book gains a 'special profile' by the 'new perspective' that science and arts are 'mutually dependent on each other'.18 It does so by way of a sweeping survey from the Ancient World through classical and relativistic physics, to quantum physics and thermo dynamics to the scientific analysis of the phenomena of life - from Darwin's evolutionary biology to contemporary neurobiology including its models of mental processes - and finally in a short alibi-like appendix on historical philosophy and cultural studies, in which culture is strained - as would be said in the language of cooks - through the finely-woven sieve of scientific terminology. The culture of human achievements is not mentioned nor is its capacity not only to describe but also to actively organise life and culture itself (including science) by way of a tried-and-tested system of time distinctions. Here, too, it is a continuing effect of the analytical-empirical tradition that the issue of language in the philosophy of time was not taken seriously - against programmatic commitments. The purposes of an undertaking such as the philosophical clarification of problems of time have to be named explicitly beforehand in order to be able to later judge the means offered by the philosopher. Mainzer's book, too, suffers 15 16

17

18

R.J. Hankinson: Bluff your Way in Philosophy. Horsham 1985. Here: towards the specialised sciences. There is no claim that conflict avoidance exists towards competing philosophical theories. See note 23. K. Mainzer: Zeit. Von der Urzeit zur Computerzeit. Miinchen 1995 (series 'Wissen'). K. Mainzer, I.e., 7 [our translation].

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from the fact that no nameable, clearly defined purpose is being followed. Hovering above everything is what might have beruled for decades as Logical Empirism's slogan: 'The philosophical tradition has failed. The modern mathematical sciences are right, they are beautiful and good. Let us develop a new philosophy out of their analysis.' In no way should the merits of analytical-empirical philosophy be belittled. (By the way, traditional Hegelians, for example, would have no problem including the suggestions of the following chapters among their 'analytical philosophy'). Also, on the other hand, the defects of the philosophical tradition - which are multiplied by the defects of a historical-philological hermeneutics without orientation - should not be denied. But the way the 'problem of time' is treated in Mainzer's lucidly written overview gains the character of a new paradox, that of an un-philosophical philosophy. Not only does the purpose and means of a philosophy of time remain unmentioned but epistemological and scientific theoretical rationales, criticisms, refutations, reconstructions and judgments are avoided. With this, philosophy as purest doxography from a philosophical distance appears as the latest form of philosophy of time. Against this background it becomes an urgent task to attempt any new systematic suggestion in philosophy of time only after having revived the awareness for its problems, an awareness that demands more than yet another gush into the waters of existing theories of time. 2. The Differentiations of Time within the Lebenswelt When time becomes explicit as an issue, every competent speaker of an ordinary language already commands a multitude of distinctions of time. Whether one deals with the experience of time or the making of a calendar and the measuring of time, with philosophical, anthropological, scientific or cultural problems - everyone, any time, speaks about time as a matter of course and especially makes use of the noun 'time' ('Zeif) - which is, by the way, the case in all civilised languages where philosophical and scientific statements on time exist. The availability of the noun 'time' already hints to tacit and unreflected linguistic preconditions of every philosophy of time which makes use of this noun and discusses problems such as whether time exists, whether it is infinite or perhaps has its origin in the big bang, whether time is paradox or inconceivable, or whether in the end it can be reduced to our sense of time and our perception of time that is caused by procedures and rhythms in our organism. Prima facie, these and countless other questions owe their logical-grammatical expression to the fact that the noun 'time' is at hand.

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Substantives, in elementary German school grammar also called Dingworte (words of things), suggest in a misleading way that there is a thing, a substance, that is dealt with, and whose attributes can be defined. Substantives are a linguistic means of substantiation, quasi without a warning signal to the origin of this substantiation. A short reflection on the role of the word 'time' in the linguistic-logical sense when it appears as the subject of a declarative sentence, however, already serves to exclude some potential interpretations. In the first place, time cannot be a proper noun (in the logical sense), it does not stand for a natural or artificial object, be it a thing or an event. Examples of such proper nouns would be 'Eiffel Tower' and 'Vesuvius' for a natural resp. artificial thing, and 'the first world exhibition' resp. 'the first eruption of Vesuvius' are proper nouns for an artificial resp. a natural event. In this context, such proper nouns, if we reconstruct their appearance in instructions or statements logically, play the role of replacing indicator words. Indicators render every speech dependent on its situation of utterance. Proper nouns, on the other hand, make a discourse independent of situations of utterance. When the before mentioned proper nouns are available, you do not have to be able to refer to the Eiffel Tower or Vesuvius resp. the world exhibition or the volcanic eruption in the respective context of utterance, and thus do not have to limit yourself to the situation of the immediate presence of the objects referred to. If 'time' were a proper noun it should be possible to state in which contexts of utterance it substitutes which indicatory linguistic expressions, so that we may then formulate sentences of an instructing or asserting character that are invariant to situations of utterance. One only has to test the various options for ordinary language formulations to see that no combination with the word 'time' meets this condition. The same applies to a predicative character of time. Predicators have to be defined in an exemplary way with examples and counter examples before rendering them more precise in further terminological standardization. But it should be difficult to name examples and counter examples to which we are used to, or tend to assign or deny the predicator time. In short: 'time' is no predicator. It was Aristotle who realised with great clarity that 'time' can be used neither in a nominatory nor in a predicative mode. Therefore, he determined time to be something attached to motion. In a modern way, it can be said that we define time by reference to motions (and, as the examples that Aristotle gives suggest, more precisely: by referring to comparisons of motions).19 Taking up Aristotle's insight as a modern 19

For an interpretation of Aristotle's time doctrine, see P. Janich: Die Protophysik der

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way of representation, we can characterise and define the word 'time' as a term of reflection. According to this, to speak about time does not mean anything else but to use distinctions of time. Therefore, to use the noun 'time' means not to refer to an object of utterance as its contents but to classify the discourse itself, for example in order to distinguish the time distinctions from others (e.g., most commonly perhaps, spatial distinctions). The choice of the word 'term of reflection' (Reflektionsterminus)20 appears appropriate because with its aid, the linguistic means themselves are reflected, even when, in a misleading way, objective language seems to be spoken. Terms of reflection are defined in such a way that the noun 'time' is determined by the adjective Ltemporal\ which, in turn, is used to classify words (and with them, distinctions) as a meta-linguistic predicator. Lists of temporal words can easily be assembled for ordinary speech but also for the language of philosophy and science, like now, then, past, present, future, earlier, later, duration, point of time, eternity, second, and many more. All of these may be classified by way of the meta-linguistic predicate 'temporal'. Accordingly, to talk about 'time' means nothing more than to use such temporal words and, which amounts to the same, to form temporal sentences. Consequently, time is no new object that is indicated or appears by the use of a noun, but the use of the noun is only a more elegant way to express a meta-linguistic classification. If we ask, for example, whether time is an object of nature or of culture, it simply means to ask for the basis of the definition and validity of temporal statements. If, for example, somebody claims that time is one dimensional or focused, then these are no natural or artificial attributes of a given object time. Rather, what is at stake is the analysis of temporal statements with regard to the question whether they are characterised by a one dimensional structure or a direction. Therefore, statements about 'time as such' do not possess new criteria of validity exceeding those of the respective temporal statements of ordinary speech, of science and philosophy; they do not represent additional knowledge or additional understanding (e.g., of an 'ontology'). They are merely a shorter, more elegant way of describing temporal statements. Obviously, this definition of 'time' as a term of reflection is not motivated by anything more than the original concern of the fathers of the linguistic turn: language (here the substantival character of 'time') mis-

20

Zeit. Konstruktive Begriindung und Geschichte der Zeitmessung Frankfurt/M. 1980,246-258. See P. Janich: [Art.] 'Reflektionsterminus', in: J. MittelstraB (ed): Enzyklopiidie Philosophic und Wissenschaftstheorie. Stuttgart 1995, vol. 3, 528-529.

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leads with its suggestion of a reification or objectification. Therefore, we do not discuss philosophical problems here as if one had to accept the imposition of phrases and questions by a philosophical or other tradition, but they are deconstructed by language analysis: How could they have been phrased at all as a question or problem, and consequently, how did they come into existence? In the history of ideas, not every grammatically correct phrasing of a question or a problem forces the searcher committed to truth to look for an immediate solution or answer to his efforts. The grammatical possibility of pseudo problems and pseudo questions demands that we begin with a prior methodical step and confirm that we are not dealing with the latter. The characterization and definition of 'time' as a term of reflection involves the consideration of the access to temporal distinctions that are used and needed whenever time is mentioned - with whatever intention and in whatever context. With this, we have reached the challenge to 'methodically reconstruct those words which in studies on time are always taken as intelligible. Methodical reconstruction does not necessarily mean an explicit definition, which, on its part, is technically and methodically only possible in the context of sufficiently established language use of other words. Reconstruction does not mean that something new has to be invented, 'constructed', but that existing, time-honored speech is reconstructed in its use, in its intentions and achievements that establish this speech as functional. To proceed Lmethodically only means to avoid in the course of a definition such anticipations which are impossible to make during a course of action (e.g., the impossibility to eat a cake before it is baked), or to explicitly or implicitly allow assertions of sequentially that would lead to failure in action (e.g. the predication the painting and thereafter the carving of a wooden bloc will result in a painted statue). Methodical reconstruction of temporal distinctions has to specify the teachability and the learnability of temporal words in paradigmatic, conventionalised contexts of action in such a way that the process of definition is free of circular arguments, gaps and anticipations and leaps of reasoning. 3. Action and Discourse Even though we will not be dealing in the following with an empirical or empirical-constructive approach (e.g. in the sense of Piaget), it is heuristically helpful for a methodical reconstruction to ask how we achieve our first temporal distinctions as children in first language acquisition, or, more precisely, to identify the prototypical standard situ-

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ations in the context of which first temporal distinctions can be learned. It is self-evident that neither scientific nor philosophical theories of time will play a role in this, and that the discourse on time is neither taught nor learned through explicit definitions, and in most cases not even with terminological support. Mother tongue acquisition does not occur at a distance, like certain linguistically orientated philosophies prefer to have it - according to whom language serves primarily to describe the preexisting world but in and for the organization of everyday practical life, and that means: it is primarily prescriptive. In first language acquisition, discourse and action are still largely unseparated aspects of the adaption to a communal (as a rule familiar) praxis. Linguistic proficiency is trained together with proficiency of action, in connection with an order to do or not to do something, guided by positive or negative examples of actions and supported by sanctions like praise and blame. In a - now already methodologically-philosophically stylised - sequence, it is not the assertive but the appellative speech that marks the methodical beginning. (Here the methodical suggestion takes leave of a tacit general premise of the linguistic turn according to which philosophers are dealing mainly with logical analysis and reconstruction of assertive speech that describes the world. This error, which is based on an assumption concerning the purpose and means of scientific understanding of the world, also found its way into the linguistically oriented scientific theory of Logical Empiricism). When we are dealing with the acquisition of proficiency of action and discourse, we understand by 'action' the following terminological specifications which are supported by examples and counter examples well known to every normal speaker of [German]21 everyday language: - actions can be prompted in a meaningful way; - actions can be performed or not be performed; - actions can be successful or they can fail in that they will realise or miss their goal. As far as a methodical-constructive theory of action is concerned, I have to refer to the relevant literature.22 The distinction between action 21

22

Editorial note: In this instance, the article makes particular reference to the German language. However, as the argument as such is not language specific, we have bracketed the reference. See D. Hartmann: Naturwissenschaftliche Theorien. Wissenschaftstheoretische Grundlagen am Beispiel der Psychologic Mannheim, Leipzig, Wien, Zurich 1993; P. Janich: Grenzen der Naturwissenschaft. Miinchen 1992; P. Janich: 'Beobachtung

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and 'mere behavior' - that which 'happens' to us like other happenings that are no attitude, no movement of the own body (like, e.g., to be hit by a ball) - concerns an achievement which is principally indispensable for the training of a normal social competence in humans: it is the distinction between what is attributed to a human being and what is not. Praise and blame, and every other form of sanctions are always directed only to that which is the blame or the achievement of the educated, except with malicious or mentally deficient 'educators'. But it does not make sense to praise or blame what is not within the capacity of a human being. The point of this remark is that every normally minded and normally competent human being has, at least implicitly, a concept of action which makes a difference between what is in his/her command and what is not, and in which success and failure can be experienced. If we try to reconstruct how, embedded in communicative praxis, competences of action and discourse lead to first temporal words, then this step must be preceded, methodologically, by an acknowledgement that what can be lived, in reconstructing retrospect, cannot be described without temporal words. A prompt like 'Give me your ball' can only make sense when the person addressed is not already engaged in the act of giving the ball to the person requesting it. That means, every request aims, in a kind of extended presence of the communication, to something that lies in the future, as compared to the prompting. As prompting is also an action which, like all action, is focused on purposes and goals, it aims at something contra-factual, that is, toward a state of facts that will have to be established or maintained by the action prompted for. That means action itself has a temporal modal structure insofar as it happens in the present and is focused on the future. And whoever understands prompts and proves this by following them, converts a future oriented prompt into the present. In this elementary stage of reconstruction, the past only comes onto the stage much later. Only when, for example, the person that prompts cannot control compliance or non-compliance with his/her order but has to rely on a report, then there is a discourse on past actions or, when it comes to conditional action prompts, on past, conditional actions (D. Hartmann substantiated this aspect in terms of theory of action as a transition from prescriptive to predicative speech).23

23

und Handlung', in: Hans Poser (ed.): Erfahrung und Beobachtung. Erkenntnistheoretische und wissenschaftstheoretische Untersuchungen zur Erkenntnisbegriindung. Berlin 1992, 13-34; P. Janich: Erkennen ah Handeln. Von der konstruktiven Wissenschaftstheorie zur Erkenntnistheorie. Erlangen, Jena, 1993. See D. Hartmann: Konstruktive Fragelogik. Vom Elementarsatz zur Logik von Frage undAntwort. Mannheim, Wien, Zurich 1990, esp. 37, 38.

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The linguistic instruments described so far are still working without explicit temporal words of their own. However, in reports on complied or non-complied orders, the grammatical past tense might come into play, so that, implicitly, we have to learn the temporal distinction of the modalities linguistically in the form of temporal conjugation of verbs. First temporal words are incorporated explicitly into the context of prompts when these are in fact orders to perform chains of actions, and the order of the partial actions is relevant to the person issuing the prompt. You would say, e.g., do 'first' this and 'then' that, and if the person addressed does not first do that and then this, there will be negative sanctions. Or you request to do something when or as soon as a certain thing happens, and where appropriate initiate a dialogue of (positive or negative) sanctions that is subject to the conditions stated as a temporal order. Without question, the acquisition of first temporal distinctions does always happen in an actual communication process that refers to the communication situation and to joint action itself. It is the shared presence of shared action and discourse which secures the self-evident references of temporal indicators. At first, all temporal indicators are dependent on a situation as the deictic term 'now' exemplifies. Every prompt with the indicator 'now' is bound to an actual situation of utterance and makes this prompt's interpretability dependent on this reference. The same is true of the indicatory use ofLearlief and 'later' different from the predicative 'earlier than' resp. 'later than'. Methodically, therefore, the modes of time have to be learned primarily, normally in the grammatical forms of presence, future and past of the conjugation of verbs, later as adjectives 'present', 'future' and 'past', and even later as the respective substantives. A main extension of human discourse beyond what is available in the situation of utterance concerns what is absent in this situation. Proper names (in the logical sense) substitute deictic gestures and indicatory words, rendering modal as well as ordinal aspects linguistically comprehensible with regard to the time order. In a fictional text like a fairy tale or a detective story, we can, in this way, characterise the described agents with past sequences of events even in the context of their acting and talking. And we can learn to use the past perfect and the future correctly as it is provided most clearly in the Latin grammar as a verbal form, quasi as the time modes of a speaker who, on his part, is seen in the past or the future by a speaking observer. On the other hand, with two-place mutually converse predicators like 'earlier than' and later than' it is possible to express the order of events independent of the temporal positioning of the speaker with regard to these events. For the

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user of everyday language, this case also does not present any philosophical problems. We learn in actual performances of action, e.g. when opening a bottle and pouring out of it, the words earlier and later predicatively, and we can then in the future also apply them to new examples of sequences of actions and events in a predicative way. (Consequently, the immense philosophical literature that followed McTaggart's essay on A-sequences and B-sequences as the modal and ordinal time sequences, which was quoted above, is merely owed to a hurdle of reflection in analytical language philosophy: in the methodical reconstruction given here, the inability to map the two rows onto each other simply results from the fact that all utterances which refer to the situation of utterance itself constitute a methodically prior way of speaking compared to the predicative and ordinal mode in which one can speak about the order of events independent of the situation of utterance. Thus, the reason for the inability to map the rows mutually lies only in the strict logical disjunction of a discourse that is dependent and a discourse that is independent of its situation of utterance.) If linguistic instruments for the organization of our actions exist in modal and ordinal regard, we can introduce the discourse of duration as a methodical third. In this way, one and the same scheme of action can be actualised at different celerity, e.g. dramatically in the case of a race. But archaic distance indications like a day's journey, area indications in a farmer's day's work or speed indicators when navigating ships are also pre- and non-scientific examples for the fact that we judge our actions and experiences and, generally, movements according to the faster or the slower and thus, actions and events according to their (estimated) relative duration. As we live in a civilization that is dictated by clock time, speed and tempo of life, it may be difficult to imagine a way of life in which not even a roughly measured clock time played a dominating role in the daily routine. For example, the complaint of an Egyptian from the time of about 2,500 A.D. has been preserved in which he regrets the introduction of water clocks because now he has to eat whenever it is time and he is no longer allowed to eat when he is hungry.24 24

On the history of calculation of time (according to natural events) and me asuring of time (according to artificial events) see P. Janich: Die Protophysik der Zeit. Konstruktive Begrundung und Geschichte der Zeitmessung Frankfurt/M. 1980, 221-245. W. Deppert impressively proves which errors occur even in historiography of time measuring when the own linguistic means in respect of time have not been reconstructed methodologically. Deppert speaks on water clocks in their reception within history of science: "Whoever [...] takes our present concept of time for granted - a concept, however, that is not before our eyes in full clarity -

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In cultural history, calendrical time measures were established on the basis of natural processes like the daylight and the season, methodically preceding the use of clocks without the need of technical aides. These were then controlled by instruments like sun dials and astrolabes marking observed incidents in the 'rotation' of the sky. Much speaks for the assumption, however, that the sun dials that determined the time of day followed the use of water meters, that means, artificial procedures to measure time were introduced by a change in the use of sun dials (determination of the season by comparison of the highest solar altitude, that is at noon).25 Time measuring, in the strict sense of a comparison of the duration of events with the aid of artificially controlled incidents like the running of water out of a basin, later the retarded fall of a weight in a pendulum clock, developed entirely independently of the use of time measuring in the sciences and also of scientific aids for a technology of time measuring. Even the direction of rotation that we call 'clockwise' refers to the

25

cannot gain any inspiration from history because he will draw a distorted, ultimately incomprehensible image of history. Unfortunately, a large part of historical accounts on time measuring suffer from this flaw. Almost unanimously, these authors arrive at the conviction that the shadow- and water clocks mentioned here were only insufficient instruments for measuring time, for lack of sufficient technology and mathematics with archaic men [...]. Even Vercoutter is of the opinion, therefore, that the water clocks of Ancient Egypt did not have a constant outflow speed because the Egyptians did not have the necessary mathematics to calculate the respective Klepsydra-formula. And Peter Janich feels obliged to emphatically agree to this verdict. All these authors presume a concept of time that is bound to consistently proceeding events. But, as has been shown, there is nothing like that in myth', (I.e., 145 [our translation]). - Obviously, Deppert did not fully read the respective quotation in Janich. It says there: 'Here, Vercoutter seems to have overlooked that, methodically seen, it was not lack of mathematics that denied the Egyptian clock makers the solution of the problem. For, in order to be able to approach the problem mathematically in the first place, the dependency of the outflow speed to the liquid level has to be known. But only Torricelli (1646) made the statement that the outflow speed is proportional to the radix of the liquid level above the outflow opening. But it was already known to Heron of Alexandria that the outflow speed is so high as if the liquid has passed the complete height in free fall' (P. Janich: Die Protophysik der Zeit, 295-96). It should not only be critically remarked here that Deppert did obviously not read far enough in the text that he criticises. Up to criticism, above all, is the missing awareness for the problem in regard to his own linguistic means, when he does not even distinguish 'continuously proceeding events' from 'continuously repeatable events' and 'events with a constant speed'. Because of lack of conceptual clarity in his own language, Deppert is not able to comprehend and criticise the proto theory of time adequately. See P. Janich: "Was messen Uhren?', in: alma materphilippina 1982, 12-14.

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simulation of the course of the sun by the speed of the clock hand - that is in western culture and in the northern hemisphere, from east to west, and with double speed when it comes to 12-hour clock faces. Clocks for everyday use are nothing else but instruments that copy a natural event, which conveniently is the rotation of the earth, even in a modern, globalised technology. Only Kant dethroned the rotation of the earth as time norm with his indication of the slowdown of the earth rotation because of the tidal friction. Only after this argument, which proved the exemplary reference of time measuring to a natural event as being open to criticism, do the sciences have the epistemological problem of defining the motion of a clock in a way that it can be controlled and technically reproduced without going back to empirical insights which can only be found with the aid of clocks. But the sciences did not recognise this, neither in the classical nor in the relativistic physics. It is true that Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity rightly attacked the deficits in the definition of an absolute concept of time in classical mechanics, and it rightly demanded programmatically that physicists should not stick to 'metaphysical monsters' (Ernst Mach) but to the observable. But the enthusiasm of the physicists for the relativistic physics (and today, probably also the cult around the person of Einstein) cover up how strongly the relativization of simultaneity and time order to an observer include a naturalistic misunderstanding: again natural events are being chosen as events that measure time, and not events that man has artificially produced with the explicit purpose of generating universal reproducibility. With this, physics of special relativity, and, by the way, contemporary physics in general, also do not solve the problem that is decisive in physical but also in every other scientific research: the difference between useful and defective clocks. Defective clocks are also subject to so-called natural laws, and cosequently, the aspect of naturalness or the laws of nature cannot define which clock would be suitable (failure-free) in order to sample empirical data. Only human purposes and, in the sciences, explicit norms which define the purposes of the measuring of time, can achieve a distinction between malfunctioning and interference-free clocks. These insights were acquired and founded in the protophysics of time.26 Consequently, a philosophy of the time cannot simply adapt the language usage of physics resp. of the sciences, which is shaped by scientism and naturalism. Rather, physics, in its discourses on measured time, owes its semantics - against its naturalistic self-misunderstanding - to its technical fundament, more precisely, to a highly developed art of 26

See P. Janich: 'Hat Ernst Mach die Protophysik der Zeit kritisiert?', in: P. Janich (ed.): Protophysik heute, special issue of Philosophia Naturalis 1 (1985), 51-60.

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clock making which knows how to realise the purposes of time measurements for use in physics. With this we have explained, at least in an overview, how the linguistic instruments for temporal distinction of the three aspects of time, the modal, the ordinal and the durative, can be defined step by step and in a methodical order, explicitly and without circular argument or a gap in reasoning. At no point do we have to formulate or accept a hypothesis of the kind 'there is time outside human consciousness'. In fact, all discourse in terms of temporal distinctions is embedded in our actions which create the respective temporal structures, in our daily lives (Lebenswelt) as well as in the natural sciences which emanate from it. In short, we would not be able to speak about the ability to act (which is assumed as an acquired ability) if we were not able to always do this in temporal distinctions, and we could not do so if we were not able to act in a temporally structured way. Up to now, other aspects of time, e.g. psychological or cultural historical have not been mentioned. But these cannot be primarily constitutive for the reconstruction of time language because in order to describe them, you already have to make use of temporal distinctions of everyday language - as well as in experimental psychology as in all cultural theory. Furthermore, wherever psychologists perform their experiments, they even need availability of a scientific kind of time measurement. 4. Against the Seduction of Philosophers by St. Augustine With his famous figure of thought according to which we know what time is, as long as we are not asked to define it, but when asked find ourselves inable to give an answer, St. Augustine has become the principal witness of a frequently quoted yet equally absurd assumption: that 'time' cannot be conceptualised. Sure enough, this assumption is caused, on one side, by a lack of a clear specification of the reasons for clarification, and on the other side, by a missing set of instruments in logic, language philosophy and theory of action. Augustine cannot be blamed for not having it at his command but modern philosophers of time can be. They did not take into account the conclusions of the linguistic and the pragmatic turn of philosophy. To show this was one purpose of this study. Because of that, they have fallen victim to a seduction which can be identified as a doctrine based on ontology. To show this is a second purpose of the methodical reconstruction of our discourse on time.

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Whoever assumes, like Russell in his article quoted above, that something like a set of temporarily organised events 'exists', and that they can claim their own individuality and uniqueness by virtue of the time sequence, has, under a epistemological perspective, already lost his way while taking his first step. For the assumption of a unique, chronological sequence of events cannot be expressed other than by linguistic means. Yet by doing so, you invariably have to speak in transsubjectively comprehensible distinctions about the relative temporal position of one incident in comparison to another. That means, the discourse on time must already be available. And certainly it cannot become available if the return of the same (same incidents and same actions) is supposed to be created quasi by way of a comparison of events or actions at different times. (Frequently, this problem can be found in literature as the assumption: 'Basically there is no method to compare the courses of a clock which follow each other. For you cannot transport the later time distance back and put it against the earlier.'27 This assumption proves to be an error, as it looks for a definition in the domain of objects for something that lies, metaphorically speaking, in the domain of subjectivity, and that means, in human action. If the intention of the assumption of temporal non-comparability of incidents at different times were true, then we could not even, in the final analysis, identify our own actions as actualizations of action schemes and therefore, we could not act.) The methodical sequence of the creation of terms cannot begin with the 'uniqueness of every different event' and thus explain a 'repetition of same events' (and under these, same actions).28 Rather, as has been shown above, the simplest indicatory and predicative utterance about actions and incidents is already of such a nature that it cannot make do without the execution of repetitions of actions. But with this, the linguistic disposability of temporal distinctions in general is based on the axiomatic condition of the human ability to train actions as action schemes, as well as on the ability to actualise these schemes when needed. In other words, there is a methodical primacy of the ability to act over the constitution of a discourse which allows us to identify the uniqueness of incidents in their chronological sequence by using concepts - like e.g. in calendrical measurements. Methodically, time as the object of knowledge can only then come on the stage when sequences of actions are linguistically structured. 27 28

See e.g. K. Mainzer, I.e., 41 [our translation]. See P. Janich: 'Einmaligkeit und Wiederholbarkeit. Ein erkenntnistheoretischer Versuch iiber die Zeit', in: P. Rohs, J. Kuhlmann (eds.): Zeiterfahrung und Personality Frankfurt/M. 1992,247-263.

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Even an 'ontology' that speculates on the being of time before the recognition of time cannot avoid this condition. Temporary conditions of a modal, ordinal or durative kind are not only, to put it in Aristotelian terms, something connected to motion but, phrased in a modern way, something that is created purposefully by language and acting in the motion of action and differentiation itself: a construct. Whoever wants to claim something different would have to achieve the impossible, to speak about time without speaking about time.

ROBIN L E POIDEVIN

Time, Tense and Topology 1. Introduction The central question of this paper is how we should represent the relationship between past, present and future on the one hand, and the relations of temporal precedence and simultaneity on the other. In particular, should we think of the 'tenseless' relations between events, such as today's breakfast being before tomorrow's tea, as dependent upon, or determined by, 'tensed' facts about those events, such as today's breakfast being past and tomorrow's tea being future? I am going to explore this issue by considering two thought-experiments about time. These experiments are of a topological nature: that is, they concern what we might call the shape of time. Another, related, question concerns the legitimacy of using topological thought-experiments in this context. Both questions are prompted by a well known discussion of McTaggart's, in which he attempts to prove the unreality of time. I shall begin, then, with his treatment of the topic. 2. McTaggart on Time and Topology McTaggart drew attention to a distinction so commonplace that its significance had eluded earlier writers, but which has come to dominate discussions of time. As he put it, positions in time may be distinguished as past, present or future, or they may be distinguished by the fact that a given position is earlier than some positions and later than others. The A-series is the series of positions which runs from the distant past, through the near past, present, and near future, to the distant future. The B-series is the series which runs from earlier positions to later ones. The relations of earlier than, simultaneous with and later than may therefore be described as B-series relations. What is the relationship between the A-series and the B-series? Does the existence of one necessitate the existence of the other? Mc Taggart's answer is that there cannot be a B-series without an Aseries. That is, for there to be B-series relations between moments,

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those moments must also have A-series positions. The existence of a Bseries, in other words, is dependent on the existence of an A-series. We need not go into McTaggart's reasons for thinking this, as they do not directly impinge on the central issue of this paper, but we should note that it is a crucial premise of his argument for the unreality of time. For McTaggart goes on to argue that the notion of the A-series is incoherent, and that in consequence any attempt to defend the reality of time would require a conception of a B-series which is not dependent on the A-series. What is of more immediate concern, however, is how he deals with one objection to his contention that there cannot be a Bseries without an A-series. He considers the possibility of 'several real and independent time-series', i.e., series which each have an internal time-order, but whose moments bear no temporal relation to moments of other series. McTaggart's imaginary objector now puts this difficulty: every time-series would be real, while the distinctions of past, present and future would only have a meaning within each series, and would not, therefore, be taken as absolutely real. There would be, for example, many presents. Now, of course, many points of time can be present. In each timeseries many points are present, but they must be present successively. And the presents of the different time-series would not be successive, since they are not in the same time. And different presents, it would be said, cannot be real unless they are successive. So the different time-series, which are real, must be able to exist independently of the distinction between past, present and future.1 Here, then, is our first topological thought-experiment, which we may call the possibility of disunified time.1 In so far as we can represent this - and this will turn out to be a bone of contention Flgure l we may do so by drawing lines on paper (parallel so that they never meet), each line representing a different time-series (see Fig. 1). 1

2

J.E. McTaggart, The Nature of Existence (Cambridge UP, 1927), ch. 33, 'Time', repr. as 'The Unreality of Time' in: R. Le Poidevin and M. MacBeath (eds.), The Philosophy of Time (Oxford UP, 1993), 23-34, 30. A discussion of this and other non-standard topologies for time can be found in W.H. Newton-Smith, The Structure of Time (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980).

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How does this pose a problem for the A-series? As McTaggart represents it, the assumption on which the objection rests is that an A-series must be unique, in that reality can only contain one A-series. But there cannot be a unique A-series if time is disunified. In presenting the objection, McTaggart does not explain why anyone should suppose that the A-series is necessarily unique, and in dismissing the objection he simply denies the supposition (ibid.): No doubt in such a case, no present would be the present - it would only be the present of a certain aspect of the universe. But then no time would be the time - it would only be the time of a certain aspect of the universe. It would be a real time-series, but I do not see that the present would be less real than the time... if there were any reason to suppose that there were several distinct B-series, there would be no additional difficulty in supposing that there should be a distinct A-series for each B-series. McTaggart, then, is happy to allow that, if time were real, it could be disunified. Such a possibility would not, according to him, imply that we could conceive of a B-series independently of an A-series. Later writers have felt that McTaggart should not have been so tolerant of the idea of disunified time, and I shall examine their reasons in § 4 below. I want first to explore an implication of the thought-experiment which McTaggart does not consider, and that is that if we allow disunified time as a possibility, we have to give up the idea that the Bseries is reducible to, or determined by, the A-series. 3. Reductionist Programmes When, in The Nature of Existence, he first introduces the distinction between the two kinds of time-series, McTaggart does not talk (at least explicitly) of reducibility: he simply says that the existence of the Bseries depends on that of the A-series. Later in the book (p. 271), when he returns to the subject of time, he is more specific: The term P is earlier than the term Q if it is ever past while Q is present, or present while Q is future. The B-series, then, is to be analysed in terms of the A-series, and not vice versa. The question of the reducibility of one series to the other is central to the contemporary debate which McTaggart's discussion has generated. I shall now briefly outline this debate.

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According to the tensed theory of time, McTaggart's A-series is real. That is to say, there exists in reality a non-relational distinction between past, present and future. The term 'non-relational' conveys the idea that the A-series is not reducible to the B-series. Being present, for example, is not reducible to being simultaneous with some event. Further, A-series facts make true tensed statements such as 'The party is over'. In the modern jargon, the truth-conditions of tensed statements are themselves irreducibly tensed.3 Let us call this part of tensed theory the'existential thesis': Existential thesis: There are in reality A-series facts, and these facts make true tensed assertions or beliefs. In addition to this affirmation of an irreducible A-series, tensed theorists propose, with McTaggart, that the B-series is reducible to the Aseries. For example, the fact that i is present and the fact that j is present jointly determine the fact that i and; are simultaneous. By considering all the possible A-series facts which could determine simultaneity, we could give a reductive account as follows: x is simultaneous with y if and only if x is present and y is present, or x is n units past and y is n units past, or x is n units future and y is n units future. This is not the only reductive account available, as we can see by comparing the above with McTaggart's schema. I shall consider three possible analyses in this paper. But whatever the details of the reduction, tensed theory seeks to reduce B-series facts to A-series facts. This part of tensed theory I shall call the 'reductionist thesis': Reductionist thesis: B-series facts are wholly determined by A-series facts. We might note that the existential thesis and the reductionist thesis are logically independent of each other. The reductionist thesis need not be read as asserting the existence of A-series facts. We could read it as a conditional: if there are B-series facts, then they are determined by A3

For proponents of this view, see, e.g., A.N. Prior, Past, Present and Future (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), and 'The Notion of the Present', in: Studium Generate 23 (1970), 245-248; A. Loizou, The Reality of Time (Aldershot: Gower, 1986); J.R. Lucas, The Future (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989); Q Smith, Language and Time (Oxford UP, 1993).

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series facts. It may turn out that there are no A-series facts (perhaps, as McTaggart argued, the notion of such a fact involves a contradiction), in which case the reductionist thesis entails that there cannot be any Bseries facts either. So we could affirm the reductionist thesis and reject the existential thesis. This is McTaggart's own position. Conversely, one could affirm the existential thesis and reject the reductionist thesis. If this implies, however, that A-series and B-series facts exist independently of each other, or that there are in reality A-series facts but no B-series facts, this is not a very promising line to take. That there is some relationship between the A-series and the B-series can hardly be denied. And the reductionist thesis is a very plausible one. If we say, of three events, that e, is past, e2 present and e3 future, then we surely imply that d is earlier than e2 and both are earlier than e3. The two theses, then, make natural companions. Without the one, the other looks much less safe. Both theses are denied by the tenseless theory of time.4 According to this theory, A-series, or tensed, statements are true in virtue of B-series, or tenseless, facts. Here is atypical schema: Any token u of the type 'It is presently the case that/?' is true if and only if « is simultaneous with its being the case that/?. On this view, there is no non-relational distinction between past, present and future. Any such distinction must be relative to some event or position in time. As it is sometimes put, there are no tensed facts. The A-series does not exist in reality, but is merely a feature of our representation of reality. It is tempting to characterize the difference between the tensed and tenseless theories of time simply by saying that, for the tensed theorist, the B-series is reducible to the A-series, whereas for the tenseless theorist, the A-series is reducible to the B-series. But the theories are not mirror-images of each other. The reductionism of the tenseless theory is more complicated, involving as it does reference to representations of reality, and the view that the A-series is only a feature of those representations and not of reality itself. For the tenseless theorist, the Aseries only reflects our perspective on time. Tensed theorists, in contrast, are neither concerned to deny the reality of the B-series, nor make it a feature merely of our representation of reality. The notion of rep4

For proponents of this view, see, e.g., J.J.C. Smart, 'Time and Becoming', in: P. van Inwagen (ed.), Time and Cause (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1980); D.H. Mellor, Real Time (Cambridge UP, 1981); L.N. Oaklander, Temporal Relations and Temporal Becoming (Lanham: Univ. Press of America, 1984).

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resentation need not enter into the tensed theory at all. The B-series is a feature of reality for both sides of the debate. What they disagree about is its relation to the A-series. This asymmetry between the tensed and tenseless theories is reflected in the different strategies their proponents have traditionally adopted in defence and attack. For tensed theorists, the focus of the attack has been the tenseless reductionist programme. For tenseless theorists, the focus of the attack has nearly always been the existential thesis of tensed theory. In this paper, the spotlight is turned on the reductionist thesis. It is this thesis, I suggest, which makes the A-series harder to reconcile with the possibility of disunified time than McTaggart supposed. Let us say that, if there is in reality an A-series, then what it is to be present is to have the monadic property of presentness (and similarly for being past and future). Now what the hypothesis of disunified time shows, if it is coherent, is that an attempt to reduce simultaneity to the monadic properties of presentness, pastness and futurity will fail. To return again to the reductionist schema: x is simultaneous with y if and only if x is present and y is present, or x is n units past and y is n units past, or x is n units future and y is n units future. In disunified time, an instance of one of the disjuncts of the right hand side could obtain although the left hand side did not obtain (see Fig. 2). If being present is simply to have a monadic property, then it is coherent to suppose that in one time-series i is present, and in another timeseries j is present. But they are not simultaneous. Indeed they bear no i temporal relation to each other. We could, in order to get around this difficulty, insist that each instance of 'and' on the right hand side of the reductionist schema Figure 2 means 'and simultaneously, but then, of course, the reduction fails. There are two moves which the tensed theorist could make at this eductionist schema to make it co point. The first is to revise the insistent with disunified time. The second is to deny the possibility of disunified time. Let us look at the first of these possible moves. An alternative schema, suggested by McTaggart's analysis, would go as follows:

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x is simultaneous with y if and only if, whenever x is present, y is present. The temporal content of 'whenever' is made more explicit in the following formulation of the right hand side of the schema: (VO (x is present at t -»• y is present at t) If this is to be a genuine tensed analysis, the times quantified over must be positions in the A-series. For if they were positions in the B-series, 'present at f would not define a non-relational property; 'x is present at 4 p.m. on 1st April 1999' is no more tensed than 'x occurs at 4 p.m. on 1st April 1999'. The reduction of simultaneity in this alternative analysis does deal with the problem of disunified time, for the right hand side could not be satisfied by two events which belonged to different time-series. However, it is not an analysis which would be endorsed by all tensed theorists. It depends on the existence of compound, or iterated, tenses, such as 'present five minutes ago', and the acceptability of such iterated tenses has been called into question by Jonathan Lowe.5 He rejects such tenses as incoherent, and argues that it was the illegitimate introduction of iterated tenses which McTaggart relied on in his proof of the unreality of the A-series. I shall not discuss iterated tenses here, but simply note that they are controversial and that the controversy correspondingly infects the analysis of simultaneity above. A third analysis, which avoids the use of iterated tenses, goes as follows: x is simultaneous with y if and only if x is as many units of time past as j . The condition would be satisfied if both x and y were present, for then both would be zero units of time past. And if they were both future, they could still be the same negative number of units of time past. The analysis appears to be non-circular, because although it introduces tensed properties as relations, these are not obviously B-series relations. Again, the right hand side could not be satisfied by two events which belonged to different time-series. So here is an analysis which 5

E.J. Lowe, ' The Indexical Fallacy in McTaggart's Proof of the Unreality of Time', in: Mind 96 (1987), 534-538.

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appears to meet the requirements. But something has been lost, namely the simplicity and plausibility of the original tensed analysis. In addition, the worry remains that B-series relations have after all been smuggled into the right hand side. In any case, I shall argue that the second and third analyses face another topological problem, which I shall present in the final section. What of the second move, that of denying the possibility of disunified time? 4. Arguments from Tensed Theory to the Essential Unity of Time It will not do for the tensed theorist to deny the possibility of disunified time simply on the grounds that it conflicts with the reduction of the Bseries to monadic A-series properties. For precisely what the thoughtexperiment calls into question is the viability of such a reduction. What is needed is some independent reason for rejecting disunified time. To show that it conflicted with some other feature of the A-series would be an acceptable, non-question-begging, way of dismissing the problem. John Lucas suggests that the connection between tense and unity has to do with one's own perspective on time: it would be unintelligible for me to offer a frame of temporal reference within which I could not refer to the date at which I was then speaking. It is part of the concept of time that it is connected to us, whereas it is not abso lutely necessary ... that space should be connected to us.... The essential egocentricity of time is reflected in the ineliminability of tenses.6 There are two ideas in play here. The first is that when we use tensed terms such as 'now', 'yesterday', 'next week', we locate ourselves vis a vis the events we are talking about. That is, tensed terms reflect our temporal perspective. The second is that we can only talk about time in such tensed, and hence perspectival, terms. It follows that we cannot coherently talk of a time-series which is unrelated temporally to the one we are in, for we could not coherently say, of some event in that other time-series, that it was present. To describe it as such would imply that we had a location in that time-series, which ex hypothesi we do not. In Dummett's discussion of McTaggart, the same two ideas are in play, although no conclusion is drawn on the issue of time's unity. Of 6

J.R. Lucas, A Treatise on Time and Space (London: Methuen, 1973), 280.

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McTaggart's contention that the A-series involves a contradiction, Dummett writes: McTaggart is taking it for granted that reality is something of which there exists in principle a complete description. I can make drawings of a rock from various angles, but if I am asked to say what the real shape of the rock is, I can give a description of it as in three-dimensional space which is inde pendent of the angle from which it is looked at. The description of what is really there, as it really is, must be independent of any particular point of view. Now if time were real, then, since what is temporal cannot be completely described without the use of token-reflexive expressions, there would be no such thing as the complete description of reality.7 Where time is concerned, then, we can only describe it in perspectival terms, terms which reflect our own location. Now this seems to me not at all a happy way of putting things if one believes, as Lucas and Dummett appear to, that reality contains an A-series, and that the A-series is irreducible to a B-series. For to describe a term as perspectival, or dependent upon the observer's position, implies two things. One is that the term picks out a relation between our representation of reality and reality itself it does not pick out something which is independent of our representation of reality. The other is that, although the term may appropriately be used from one perspective, there are other equally legitimate perspectives from which the term would not be legitimate. These are certainly the implications of describing terms such as 'here' and 'on the left' as perspectival. The perspective from which something is appropriately described as 'here' or 'on the left' is just one of a number of perspectives. Such terms do not pick out intrinsic features of objects or the spaces which they inhabit, but rather spatial relations between the observer and the object or place in question. Moreover, these relations can be described in non-perspectival terms. Now if we cannot describe the temporal relations between the observer and the object or time in question except in tensed terms, then such terms cannot be perspectival in the way that spatial indexicals are perspectival. Defenders of the A-series should be particularly concerned, I think, to reject the suggestion that there are other equally legitimate perspectives from which, for example, your reading this paper is past. If time consists of a non-relational past, present and future, then there is only one legitimate perspective, namely, the present one. And if there is

7

M.A. Dummett, 'A Defence of McTaggart's Proof of the Unreality of Time', in: Truth and Other Enigmas (London: Duckworth, 1978), 356.

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only one legitimate perspective, then it is not, strictly speaking, a perspective at all. If 'here' does not provide the appropriate model of the perspectival for our present purposes, what does? Perhaps aesthetic judgements. 'Beauty is in the eye of the beholder' is an elegant way of saying that aesthetic qualities are irreducibly perspectival: they can only reflect a point of view. But what is only in the eye of the beholder is not there in the face of the beheld. The mind-dependence of aesthetic qualities robs them of objective reality. If this is the right model of the perspectival, then, as Adrian Moore has pointed out, to insist that time could only be described in perspectival terms is to imply that time is simply a feature of our representation of reality, and not a feature of reality itself8 Moore offers (p. 2) the following helpful characterization of a perspective, or point of view: 'When a representation of the world is from a particular point of view, then that point of view makes an indispensable contribution to its content'. Another way of putting Moore's point is that the point of view must be part of the truth-conditions for the representation. This is precisely what we want to say about space: Any token of 'It is the case that p here', tokened at place s, is true if and only if it is the case that/? at s. Now if this is our account of what it is to be a perspectival representation, that the context in which it occurs is part of its truth-conditions, then the natural account of the A-series is surely non-perspectival. That is, we might naturally offer the following kind of schema: Any token of 'It is presently that case that p' is true if and only it is presently the case that/?. Graham Priest offers precisely this characterization of tensed theory.9 On such a view the context of the token simply does not feature at all in the truth-conditions. The consequence of this is that whether or not a token of 'It is presently the case that p' is true is quite independent of when that token occurs. That is, the truth-value of such tokens is capable of changing over time. Priest is quite willing to accept such a consequence. For example, suppose on a dry and sunny Tuesday morning I say 'It's raining'. That token, when uttered, is false. But the clouds

8 9

A.W. Moore, 'Points of View', in: The Philosophical Quarterly 37 (1987), 1-20. G. Priest, 'Tense and Truth Conditions', in: Analysis 46 (1986), 162-166.

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gather and by four o'clock in the afternoon it is pouring down. At that time, my token is true.10 This account of the truth-conditions of tensed tokens is quite compatible with the possibility of disunified time. Let us suppose that there is a time-series which bears no temporal relation to the one in which we are, and that 'The F' uniquely picks out some event in that time-series. (Never mind how we could know that there was such an event. Those are the facts.) Then if we say The F is present, our statement is false in the context in which we utter it, viz., our position in this time-series, since the truth-conditions of the statement do not obtain in this time-series. But the truth-conditions of the statement could obtain in the other time-series (indeed, do obtain at some time in that series), and so our statement - that very token - could be true in the other time-series. Or, if the idea of a token having a truth-value at a time other than the one in which it is uttered is too odd, we could say that the proposition expressed by the token could have a different truthvalue at different times and at different time-series. But now suppose that 'The G' uniquely picks out some other event in that time-series which is not related to ours, and that it occurs after the F. Then if we say The F is earlier than the G, what we say is true even in the context in which we utter it. Provided, of course, that 'is earlier than' is tenseless. So statements of this kind, attributing B-series locations to events, can be true in contexts where no A-series statement about those events could be true. Hence, if disunified time is a possibility, the B-series cannot be reduced to the Aseries. Now someone will complain that 'is earlier than' is not genuinely tenseless, but to say this is to take up a position on the relation 1(1

This, apparently, was the mediaeval theory of propositions. Peter Geach tells us: For a scholastic, 'Socrates is sitting' is a complete proposition, enuntiabile, which is sometimes true, sometimes false; not an incomplete expression requiring a further phrase like "at time t" to make it into an assertion' (Critical Notice of Julius Weinberg's Nicolaus of Autrecourt, in: Mind 58 (1949), 238-245, quoted in Prior, Past, Present and Future, 15). The availability of such an account shows, I think, that I am not begging the question against the tensed theorist by assuming that there is a complete description of reality whose truth is not dependent on our perspective on that reality.

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between the A-series and the B-series, and so does not provided a nonquestion-begging objection to the topological thought-experiment. So far we have not found a convincing argument from the existence of an A-series to the impossibility of disunified time. But there is another consideration which we have so far overlooked, and that is the connection between tense and existence claims. Arthur Prior is one writer who insists on this connection, and he employs it (Post, Present and Future, p. 198-99) in casting doubt on McTaggart's thought-experiment: If, as I would contend, it is only by tensed statements that we can give the cash-value of assertions which purport to be about 'time', the question as to whether there are or could be unconnected time-series is a senseless one. We think we can give it a sense because it is as easy to draw unconnected lines and networks as it is to draw connected ones; but these diagrams cannot represent time, as they cannot be translated into the basic non-figurative temporal language. If we try so to translate them, we produce contradictions like 'There are things going on which neither are going on, nor will be going on, nor have been going on'. The crucial move is in the last sentence. The statement in inverted commas is self-contradictory if'There are' is significantly tensed. If, as Prior supposed (see especially 'The Notion of the Present'), reality is temporally restricted, so that the future is not part of reality at all, then to say that something is part of reality is to imply that it is not future (and perhaps also that it is not past either). To say that something is real is to locate it in the A-series, so the suggestion that reality contains a series which is not part of the (i.e., our) A-series is to contradict oneself. Here, it seems, is a quite legitimate objection to the possibility of disunified time, one which makes no presuppositions about the reducibility of the B-series to the A-series. 5. Branching Time To summarize the discussion so far: the suggestion that time might be disunified need not, it seems, disturb those who regard B-series facts, such as the simultaneity of two events, as reducible to A-series facts. Tensed theorists who are willing to countenance the possibility of disunified time can produce analyses of B-series facts in terms of the Aseries which are compatible with that possibility. And those tensed theorists who are not willing to countenance such a possibility can appeal to Prior's objection to the very coherence of talk about disunified time,

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that assertions of existence are tensed, and no true tensed assertion can be made of a temporal series other than the one in which the assertion is made. But now I want to present a second thought-experiment, similar to the first, but one in which these manoeuvres are ineffective. In this experiment, time is hypothesized to be branching. Let us consider, for example, a branching past (see Fig. 3). Here, two time-series, which were not related to each other temFigure 3 porally, joined up to form a single time-series. Of events in different branches, it is not true to say either that they are simultaneous, or that one is earlier than the other. Such events, however, will be earlier than some event in what we might call the post-fusion time-series. There is no direct inconsistency between the branching-past hypothesis and the use of tensed expressions to describe it. Indeed, such a topological structure can be characterized tense-logically. Let us consider the following theorem: [P„ (p) & P„ (q)]

-^Fn(p&q)

The theorem states that if it was the case n units ago that p and it was the case n units ago that q, then it was the case n units ago that/? and q. In branching time, however, the possibility in Fig. 4 arises. In this case, although p was the case n units ago and q was the case n units ago, it was never the case that (p & q), given that the conjunction P implies simultaneity. So the theorem fails. Branching time can (Now) therefore be characterized as a topology in which that particular tense-logical theorem fails n units (though the temporal implications of the conjunction make this tense-logical characterization only impurely tense-logical). We can Figure 4 also characterize branching time tense-logically by some rather strange propositions. For example: 'It was the case n units ago that/?, although there was a moment, m units

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ago (where m is greater than n), at which it was not going to be the case that/?'. It is important that we do not confuse branching time with branching possibility. We could think of the past (or, more plausibly, the future) as a series of possibilities branching out from the present actuality. But these possible pasts (or futures) all share a common time-series. One way of bringing out the difference between branching time and branching possibility is to say that nothing could occupy two time branches, but everything occupies any number of possible pasts or futures. In thinking what we might have done, we contemplate ourselves in some possible past, but that possibility is still located in the actual time-series. We think what we might have done during that summer of 1978, not in some summer which has no temporal relation to the remembered 1978." What this case illustrates is that the A-series positions at which p is the case and q is the case, respectively, do not determine the B-series relation between them. For although p's being the case and q's being the case are both n units past, they are not simultaneous. So neither our first suggested analysis, x is simultaneous with y if and only if x is present and y is present, or x is n units past and y is n units past, or x is n units future and y is n units future, nor our third suggested analysis, x is simultaneous with y if and only if x is as many units of time past as j , succeed in capturing the sufficient conditions for 'x is simultaneous w i t h / . For if branching time is a possibility, it is also possible that the right hand side of either of the biconditionals is satisfied when the left hand side is not. What of the second analysis? This went as follows:

11

I suspect that one of the reasons why Prior is more tolerant of branching time than of disunified time is that he conflates branching time with branching possibility. This is not to accuse him of confusion since for him time and possibility are intimately related: see Past, Present and Future, pp. 50-1. Lucas, who adopts a large part of Prior's conception of time, nevertheless makes the distinction clear: see The Future, p. 101.

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x is simultaneous with y if and only if (V0(x is present at t -»• y is present at f). The right hand side quantifies over all A-series positions - that is, the A-series positions events now occupy. In our branching-time example, there is only one A-series position in which p's being the case is present, namely n units ago. But at that A-series position, q's being the case is also present. So q and/? satisfy the right hand side of the biconditional, but not, of course, the left hand side. Something very similar to the second analysis, with one crucial difference, is suggested by Geach.12 His analysis (p. 98) is of temporal precedence, but we may adapt it for the case of simultaneity as follows: x is simultaneous with y if and only if it either is or was or will be the case that both x is present and y is present. The crucial difference between this and our second analysis is the introduction of the word 'both'. The right hand side of Geach's analysis would not be satisfied by our branching-time example. We cannot say truly that it was the case that both p is present and q is present. But, I would argue, the introduction of 'both' in an attempted reduction of the B-series to the A-series is illegitimate. Where 'both' has temporal implications, they are purely B-series implications: 'both/? and q' is equivalent to 'simultaneously/? and q\ So the first tensed strategy against disunified time, that of providing alternative analyses of simultaneity, fails against branching time. Further, the attempts to cast doubt on the coherence of disunified time do not appear to unseat the notion of branching time. For, in describing the branching past, we can locate ourselves temporally vis a vis those branches, and I can truly say that it was the case that there existed two time-series. So the fact (if it is one) that we cannot but adopt a perspective on time will not conflict with the possibility that the past contains disparate time-series. Further, when we say 'There existed two disparate time-series', what we say is clearly tensed, so branching time does not fall foul of Prior's objection to disunified time. It may be suggested (it has been, by Peter Simons) that all we have established is simply that the usual tensed analyses of B-series facts proceed on the (surely anodyne) assumption that time is linear. Recog12

P.T. Geach, Truth, Love and Immortality: an Introduction to McTaggart's Philosophy (London: Hutchinson, 1979).

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nizing this, the tensed theorist could make the reduction sensitive to different topologies. For linear time, the reduction goes like this, for disunified time, like that, and so on. Even if this were the right approach, however, we would still need to come up with an analysis compatible with branching time, and I am not at all clear that this can be done. I suspect strongly, in fact, that it cannot be done. But in any case, the truth-conditions of a statement like '/ is simultaneous withy' cannot be a purely contingent matter: statements have their truth-conditions as a matter of necessity. So topological sensitivity is no virtue in a tensed analysis of B-series facts. I shall end this discussion by considering an objection (which I owe to John Lucas) which is specifically aimed at branching time: that such a topology would open the door to causal anomalies. In particular, the objection goes, problems arise once we allow determinism into the picture. Let R and S be two disparate time-series that fuse at some point to form a single series T. Let t be a particular moment in T, and r and s particular moments in R and S respectively such that both r and s are n units earlier than t, for some n. Suppose that the universe in R and the universe in S are both deterministic: that is, the conjunction of the laws of nature together with the state of the universe at a particular time makes possible only one series of states at subsequent times. Suppose further that r makes it physically necessary that p will obtain n units later, and that s makes it physically necessary that ~p will obtain n units later. This seems to be a perfectly coherent possibility, for surely what obtains in R is entirely independent of what obtains in S. It follows from these assumptions that (p & ~p) obtains at t, which is, of course, a contradiction. What does this establish? That the thesis that time is branching, the thesis of determinism and some added assumptions form an inconsistent set. It does not show that the notion of branching time per se is incoherent. It is possible to tell an inconsistent story about branching time. But not all stories about branching time need be inconsistent. Perhaps worlds in which the past contains two or more branches are indeterministic worlds. Or perhaps determinism is not well defined for branching-time worlds.13 Alternatively, we could argue as follows: if the laws of nature are time-reversal invariant - i.e., if, for any process they permit, they also permit the reverse of that process - then determinism is symmetrical. That is, in a deterministic universe, the state of 13

Jeremy Butterfield, in 'Substantivalism and Determinism', International Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 2 (1987), 10-31, notes (17-18) the difficulties of defining determinism consistently with non-standard topological structures for space-time.

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the universe at a given time physically necessitates a unique series of states both subsequent to and prior to that time. In the case described above, what obtains in T, the post-fusion series, thus determines what obtains in the two branches. What obtains in R is therefore not independent of what obtains in S. It is perhaps true that talk of branching time invites the postulation of causal anomalies, rather as talk of time-travel invites the idea of travelling back in time to prevent one's own conception. But opening the door to paradox is not necessarily to entail paradox. We just have to be careful what we say about branching-time worlds, just as we have to be careful what we say about time-travel worlds. To conclude: I have tried to defend the idea of a branching past as a logically possible topology for time. Such an idea is not inconsistent with the notion of an A-series per se, nor with the related idea that existence assertions are irreducibly tensed. So it is not an unfair move to point to branching time as casting doubt on the doctrine that the B-series is reducible to the A-series. And if we can cast doubt on this doctrine, then we weaken the plausibility of the tensed theory of time.14

14

Earlier versions of this paper were read to the Philosophical Society at Oxford and the History and Philosophy of Science Seminar at Leeds. I am very grateful to those present, and especially to Richard Swinburne, John Lucas, Peter Simons, Jonathan Hodge, Geoffrey Cantor and Anna Maidens, for their comments. I am also grateful to anonymous referees for The Philosophical Quarterly for encouragement to clarify the argument at various points.

GUNTHERMULLER

The Significance of Time in Narrative Art1 Narrating is representing, a re-presenting of events which are not sensually perceivable to the listener. All poetry, all art, 'makes present' (vergegenwartigt), embodies (verkorpert). This characteristic must be considered in a wider context. The reality in which we live and which co-determines our lives is in no way exclusively objective, or only substance based and effective in its immediate and physical presence. Rather, it is shaped to a high degree by the impalpable (Ungreijbares), by the absent. Philosophical and scientific doctrines about the world as a system of invisible forces may be seen as mere theories, but very simple reflections show how strongly these forces rule our reality of life. To a large extent, we only know from hearsay about men and events who affect our actions in an uplifting or destructive way. Few knew the statesmen and generals personally and from an immediate presence whose decisions and actions decisively influenced the fate of millions. As for those great agents, they in turn were familiar with just a fraction of these millions whom they used, and the dead whose works of hundreds and thousands of years ago continue to shape our existence and our conditions are even more inaccessible to us. What is true for the historical agents is also true for artists and scientists, for inventors and merchants, for the great religious men and the great teachers of ethics. Contemplations such as these make us aware of invisible human forces and systems of power which, albeit absent and completely indirectly, touch and pervade us in a decisive way. There are many ways to represent what cannot be grasped with our senses, the absent, the non-substantial (Undingliche). One of these ways is that of art. Painting and sculpture represent incarnate characters to the eye; music brings movements in their internal cross-references before the ear. When it comes to poetry, the variety of genres is immediately apparent. Lyricism visualises the I or the we as they are affected by emotions, drama enacts the interplay of contradictions or tensions, and narration renders the course of events. In all of them, in different 1

This lecture anses from the draft of a morphological poetics in my Die Gestaltfrage in derLiteraturwissenschaft. Halle: Niemeyer 1944.

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ways, something that in itself is not immediately present turns into a sensually perceivable appearance, and, as such, more or less, infuses and affects our lives. In narration, the visualising effect (vergegenwdrtigende Wirkung) can easily be realised (if not as easily understood). For even about the closest friends or/and foes, the lover as well as the hater acquires a lot of knowledge, sometimes even most of it, through narrative accounts; and even when somebody communicates his insights, the ideas which he formed and the decisions which he made, he always narrates about himself. Not everyone will become aware of this to the extent that Goethe was, who often sent to his confidants a new piece of poetry in the format of a circular letter about events in his own life, which he did for example with his Elective Affinities (Wahlverwandtschaften). But this inevitably happens nevertheless. Once we have become conscious of the fact that our life space (Lebensraum) is to a high degree shaped by narration and consists of it, then we can easily lose the ground under our feet before, however, winning a new foothold, less solid perhaps but also closer to the truth. These simple observations tell us more about the basic principles of narrative art than if we attempted to derive the variants of the high art of poetry from so-called primitive narration. The primordial form of narration is not the temporally first one. The latter cannot be determined at all, and when asking such questions, one should keep in mind what Thomas Mann said, in his introduction to the novel Joseph and his Brothers {Joseph und seine Bruder), about the continuously receding backdrops of time. The primordial form of narration is a type just like the primordial, the archetypal plant (Urpflanze). Walzel2 and Petsch3 did not really succeed in making sense of their many fortunate and detailed observations concerning narrative art because they did not aim to identify a type in the Goethean sense. That is why they did not find a consistent comparative relation in their individual observations. On the other hand, the most distinguished contribution to the understanding of narrative art, the Theory of the Novel (Theorie des Romans) by Georg Lukacs,4 obstructs its own view on the poetic forms proper. For before the poetic forms as such can appear, 2

3 4

O. Walzel (1926). Das Wortkunstwerk Mittel seiner Erforschung. Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 125-259. R. Petsch (1942). Wesen und Form der Erzahlkunst. Halle: Niemeyer. G. Lukacs (1920). Theorie des Romans. Ein geschichtsphilosophischer Versuch uberdie grofien Formen derEpik. Berlin: Cassirer [English transl: The Theory of the Novel. A historical-philosophical essay on the forms of great epic literature. Cambridge: MIT P].

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and before they can allow the question for their structure, they are buried [in Lukacs' theory] under the historical-philosophical construction of ages of the epos that are coherent and meaningful, and of eras of the novel that belong to fragmented cultures lacking essential meaning and a totality of being. The classifications of the epos and diverse forms of the novel with their specific cultural-sociological conditions are tremendously subtle, but they refer rather to historical-philosophical relations than to morphological features, and, when it comes to individual considerations, predetermined yardsticks are used indiscriminately. In these observations, the poetic works of Balzac, Jacobsen, Flaubert, Goethe, and Tolstoy are dealt with more thoroughly than others, but their formative and creative achievements are only considered incidentally. Consequently, this approach studiously turns away from the simple fact that the epos as well as the novel does narrate something, and that therefore, here like there, a basically common relation to time does exist, even if it might be considerably modified in the various forms of narration. If one wants to identify the design principles (Gestaltgesetze) of narrative art, or dares to attempt a typology of its forms, one can neither compile unrelated details, nor can one deduct types of poetry from preconditions that are alien to poetry. Rather, one must start with observations that will form a series, observations of what in narrative art is comparable to the skeleton in vertebrate animals, namely narrating.5 Narrating visualises (vergegenwartigt); it represents something that has passed, makes present something that is absent. It renders the absent present without itself creating it. For all narrating is narrating about something, of something that is not in itself narrating. In narration it is transformed and yet still represented in such a way that the traits that have been changed will contribute to the concrete representation of the event that is in a certain sense real, but absent. Narrating does not give a self, but it gives a rendition. While the narration that is formed by the narrating process does of course exist as such it is something different from the narrated. Wallenstein's life, but also the life of Jean Vatican, is something quite apart from the narration of these lives as rendered by Alfred Doblin or Victor Hugo. The narration is a language body (Sprachleib) with its own process and rules of becoming 5

As methodologically important the following should be mentioned: R. Ingarden (1931). Das literarische Kunstwerk. Eine Untersuchung aus dem Grenzgebiet der Ontologie, Logik und Literaturwissenschaft. Halle: Niemeyer [Engl, transl: The Literary Work of Art. Evanston: Northwestern UP]; E. Staiger (1939). Die Zeit als Einbildungskraft des Dichters. Zurich: Niehans. For the history of genre theory cf I. Bekrens (1940). Die Lehre von der Einteilung der Dichtkunst. Halle: Niemeyer.

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(Werdevorgang und Werdegesetz) that are completely different from those inherent in the narrated event. And still, this difference is of such a nature that the language body is completely designed to make the narrated vivid, to realise it. The narrated, however, is a temporal process. In art, each genre has its own manifestation of time. Especially V. v. Weizsacker has given us insights into the difference between physical and biological time that could be made fruitful for the morphology of poetry.6 The poetic time, that is, the time that rules poetry, is more closely related to biological time, and that is not amazing, as 'art is another nature' according to Goethe's conviction. This is also true of narrative poetry, of the linguistic representation of events. But here, additionally, we have a close relation to physical time, to the time of the clock, for what is represented here is a time process in space. Even where emotional processes are described in their movements beyond time and space, a proportional relation to the 'outward', to the physical time, establishes itself, whether explicitly or not. This becomes clear, for example, in the sense that all this or so little happens within so few or so many minutes and hours. And this relation, this interacting of emotional, biological, and physical time not only really happens; it also constitutes the main force of every narration: its rhythm. Admittedly, many other factors are also effective here, for example the empathy or distanced observation of the narrator, the passion or aloofness of the narrated human beings, continuous or erratic development of the events, the alteration between the powers of guidance and accumulation {Fuhrkraft und Schwellkraft). Like all poetry and music, also pure lyric poetry moves within physical time when it is read or spoken. But whatever it renders present has no relation to this time, rather, it is removed from time. Considering Sappho's poems or Goethe's 'An den Mond' ('To the Moon'), Petrarca's sonnets, Holderlin's 'Patmos' hymn or Shelley's 'Ode to the West Wind', it is senseless to ask about the 'when'. Although the stanzas of those poems are not exchangeable, their organising principle is not time. They are bound in their sequence by other strings of processes, for example by the transition of one wave into the other, the emergence of an imagination, a thought, one out of the other. In pure drama, the sequence of time is indeed formative, but it serves essentially as the unavoidable form in which human contradictions that are not time-bound are expressed. By comparison, one may say that time in fact does belong to drama like it belongs to a game of chess. On the other hand, true narrative deals with the sequence of events as some6

V. v. Weizsacker (1942). Gestalt und Zeit. Halle: Niemeyer.

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thing temporal, it deals with with time as something that is filled with events and in turn eventuates them, with the temporality of life. Lukacs also recognised this in connection with a special type of the novel, the Sentimental Education (L'Education sentimentale), but he wanted to limit the observation to this type. However, in the narrative, the unstoppable flow of life-time, whose timeless experience can materialise in lyric; this flow itself is what is represented, in the Iliad as well as in the Aithiopika, in the Jerusalem Delivered (La Gerusalemme liberta), the Simplicissimus, the Elective Affinities (Wahlverwandt-schaften), in The Magic Skin (Le Peau de chagrin), in the Green Henry (Der Grune Heinrich), in Niels Lyhne, in the ^ e x - n o v e l s , in In Search of Lost Times (A la recherche du temps perdu), in Of Time and the River. It could almost be stated that the more time-bound life is, the purer the epic will be. From this point of view, the primordial form of epic is the 'and then', a formula that sharply illustrates the difference of epic poetry to lyric and drama. The 'and then', however, is not yet an answer, but it points to the essential questions of composition. Among these questions, that of narrative time will be examined more closely in the following as morphologically, it has an especially visible and comprehensible significance. Fielding, the founder of the coming-of-age novel, raised the question of narrative time and answered it with serene clarity. In Tom Jones, he elaborates: Though we have properly enough entitled this our work, a history, and not a life; nor an apology for a life, as is more in fashion; yet we intend in it rather to pursue the method of those writers who profess to disclose the revolutions of countries, than to imitate the painful and voluminous historian who, preserve the regularity of his series, thinks himself obliged to fill up as much paper with the details of months and years in which nothing remarkable happened, as he employs upon those notable eras when the greatest scenes have been transacted on the human stage. [...]. Now it is our purpose, in the ensuing pages, to persue a contrary method. When any extraordinary scene presents itself (as we trust will often be the case), we shall spare no pains nor paper to open it at large to our reader; but if whole years should pass without producing anything worthy his notice, we shall hasten on to matters of consequence, and leyve such periods of time totally unobserved. [...]. My reader is then not surprised if, in the course of this work, he shall find some chapters very short, and others altogether as long; some that contain

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GuntherMiiller only the time of a single day, and others that comprise years; in a word, if my history sometimes seem to stand still, and sometimes to fly.7

Consequently, in the headlines of his seven books, he states exactly the periods of time: Book II: [...] scenes of matrimonial felicity in different degrees of life; and various other transactions during the first two years after marriage between Captain Blifil and Miss Bridget Airworthy Book III: [...] from the time when Tommy Jones arrived at the age of fourteen, till he attained the age of nineteen. [...] Book IV: [...] the time of a year Book V: [...] a portion of time somewhat longer than half a year BookVI:[...] about three weeks Book VII: [...] three days Book VIII: [...] above two days Book IX: [...] twelve hours BookX:[...] about twelve hours BookXI:[...] about three days Book XII: [...] the same individual time with the former Book XIII: [...] twelve days Book XIV: [...] two days BookXV:[...] about two days Book XVI: [...] five days Book XVII: [...] three days Book XVIII: [...] about six days However, nothing is thereby said about the internal relation between the expanses of clock time, and the mode of defining time is rather ironic and seems to make some fun of the reader as well as of the author. Yet the humorous tone is characteristic of Fielding's work in general and does not at all weaken its deeply humane seriousness. The other theoretical introductory chapters to each of his books, too, have considerable weight, in spite of their humorous ease of expression. With references to the alternation of standstill and flow of narration, of disregard and detailed description they touch upon a basic form of all narration, the very primordial form that is closely related to the rhythmic flow of life time and experienced time. Research on narrative forms has paid little attention to this basic form - presumably because of the strong challenges which especially the epos, the novel and the novella pose in terms of their themes and 7

H. Fielding (2008). Tom Jones. Ed. by J. Bender & S. Stern. Oxford: Oxford UP, book II, chap. I, 67f.

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subject matter. This is not the place to attempt a compilation of all the relevant statements taken from the history of narrative theory. Let me emphasise one reference only. Thomas Mann, who, since The Magic Mountain {Der Zauberberg), is magnetically attracted by the problem of time, mentions this basic form of narrating several times in his Joseph-novel, using the expression 'gap' ('Aussparung'). It is true that the Joseph-novel provides a special case of structuring time, for while Joseph's short account of the Old Testament is strictly adhered to, the emergence of this course from hitherto silent domains is developed in breadth and width. However, as will be shown later, this is also just one special case of narrating in general, and Th. Mann's remarks concerning the specific character of the time of narration are obviously of an instructive and illuminating nature. In the beginning of the fourth main chapter of volume IV, it is explained: Der Lakonismus des bisher davon Uberlieferten [des Gesprachs zwischen dem Pharao und Joseph] geht bis zur ehrwiirdigen Unwahrscheinlichkeit. DaB nach Josephs Traumdeutung und seinem Ratschlag an den Konig, sich nach einem verstandigen und weisen Mann, einem Mann der Vorsorge umzusehen, Pharao ohne weiteres geantwortet habe: "Keiner ist so verstandig und weise wie du; dich will ich iiber ganz Agyptenland setzen!" und inn in wahrhaft enthusiastischer - man kann schon sagen: ziigelloser Weise mit Ehren und Wiirden uberschiittet habe, - das schien uns immer der Abkiirzung, Aussparung und Eintrocknung zu viel: wie ein ausgenommener, gesalzener und gewickelter Uberrest der Wahrheit erschien es uns, nicht wie ihreLebensgestalt; [...]. The laconic nature of the tradition up till now [i.e. of the conversation between Pharaoh and Joseph] almost makes it, however venerable, unconvincing. For instance upon Joseph's interpretation and his advice to the King to look about for a wise and knowledgeable and forethoughted man, Pharaoh straightway answers: "Nobody is so knowledgeable and wise as you. I will set you over all Egypt." And overwhelms him on the spot with the most extravagant honours and dignities. There is too much abridgement and cutting-away about this, it is too dry, it is a drawn and salted and embalded remnant of the truth, not truth's living lineaments.8 (In another passage, he explicitly speaks of 'mummified truth'.) Subsequently, the narrative gap is discussed: 8

Th. Mann (1990). Joseph der Ernahrer (Joseph und seme Bruder. Gesammelte Werke m dreizehn Banden). Frankfurt/M.: Fischer, 1478; (1944). Joseph the Provider {Joseph and his Brothers). New York: Knopf, 229f

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Wohlverstanden, wir haben nichts gegen die Aussparung. Sie ist wohltatig und notwendig, denn es ist auf die Dauer vollig unmoglich, das Leben zu erzahlen. Wohin sollte das fuhren? Es ffihrte ins Unendliche und ginge iiber Menschenkraft. Wer es sich in den Kopf setzte, wiirde nicht nur nie fertig, sondern erstickte schon in den Anfangen, umgarnt vom Wahnsinn derGenauigkeit. [...] Was ware aus uns geworden ohne Aussparung, als Jakob diente bei Laban, dem Teufel, sieben und dreizehn und ffinf, kurz: funfundzwanzig Jahre lang - von denen jedes winzigste Zeitelement ausgefullt war mit genauem, im Grande erzahlenswertem Leben? Und was sollte jetzt aus uns werden ohne jenes vernunftige Prinzip [der Aussparung], da wiser Schifflein, vom mafiig gehenden Strom der Erzahlung dahingetrieben, wieder einmal an den Rand eines Zeit-Katarakts bebt von sieben und sieben geweissagten Jahren? Of course, there is really nothing against the cutting-away in itself. It is useful and even necessary. In the long ran, it is quite impossible to narrate life just as it flows. What would it lead to? Into infinite. It would be beyond human powers. Whoever got such an idea fixed in his head would not only never finish, he would be suffocated at the outset. Entangled in a web of delusory exactitude, a madness of detail. [...] What would have become of us, for instance, when Jacob was serving with the devil Laban, seven and thirteen and five - in short, twenty-five years, of which every tiniest time element was full of a life-in-itself, quite worth telling? And what would become of us now without that reasonable principle [of cutting-away], when our little bark, driven by the measuredly moving stream of narration, hovers again on the brink of a time-cataract of seven and seven prophesied years?9 This all sheds some light from a slightly different point of view onto these same traits which we already observed. Only the expression that life once narrated itself may need an explanation in our context. Voiced by the great narrator, he transfers its representation on that which he has represented. In this case, it is an incident that was firstly narrated in the First book of Moses, that is, as an incident that happened outside the narration, in the time and life of the arch fathers. Every historical novel that uses historical sources displays such a doubling effect, and likewise every epos that, like the Iliad or the Nibelungen-sa&i, refers back to older poems that are closer to the time of the events. But in any case, to claim that the incidents given in the first narration are something that has happened in the temporal space of real life and have thus been narrated by life itself, can only be taken as a simile. Life does not narrate itself, life lives itself. Life does not leave anything out, but it is com9

Th. Mann (1990), I.e., 1479; (1944), I.e., 230f.

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plete down to the most delicate movement of each individual cell. Likewise, every incident that has not been distilled from historical sources but is created by the imagination is also designed as a complete interrelation of events. On the other side, Th. Mann's Joseph-novel itself also shows the significance of imagination in the historical novel. Therefore, in academic research, the expression that life narrates itself can only be used with strong reservations. Reservations, because the difference between narrating and narrated should not be concealed. This difference does exist, no matter if the events are historically confirmed or created by imagination. In every narration, events are represented not as narrated but as lived incidents of life living itself. Consequently, it is the difference between the narrated and the narrating that is decisive to the individual forms and the morphology of the art of narration. With its paradoxical oneness of separation and relation, this distinction is the root soil for a 'natural form' of poetry. One aspect of this polar unification is, as Th. Mann stresses, the impossibility to narrate life in the way it once happened. It is an important insight to point out that in reality every tiny element of time is and was filled with a detailed life that is basically worth being narrated. Even James Joyce and his school are not able to completely represent this saturation of every tiny element of time. Gaps cannot be avoided, even when complete accuracy is intended indiscriminately. With Thomas Mann, cutting-away obviously means a meaningful gap. I would like to suggest the term 'time contraction' ('Zeitrqffung'). For, in short, the narrator does not simply leave something out, he contracts the narrated time continuously, but to a different degree. Up to now, narrating has been repeatedly distinguished from the narrated. This includes the relation between the time of narration and narrated time. Now, this should be scrutinised more thoroughly. Grellmann in his encyclopedia entry, 'Roman' ('Novel'),10 also distinguishes between the narrator and the narrated. Yet, he only pays attention to the subjective appearance resp. his objectivity and the ideological conviction of the narrator and does not see what is basic to all narrating: namely, the intertwining of different courses of time. In order to narrate a story, the narrator needs a certain span of phys ical time. Its measurement by a clock is characteristic of the peculiarity of this time, for the clock allows a projection of time into space and thus a spatial measurement of time - for measurement of time proper does not exist. But when a star or the hand of a clock has covered this and that spatial distance, then time has run so and so 'long'. 10

H. Grellmann (1928/29). [Art.] 'Roman,' m: Reallexikon der deutschen Ltieraturgeschichte. Ed. by P. Merker & W. Stammler. Berlin: de Gruyter, vol. 3, 62-72.

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Therefore, there is no basic difference between counting the time of narration in minutes or in the number of printed pages of a certain work, and if a page norm existed, we would have a unit as useful as a normative clock. The measurable time of a narration should not be confused with the time that is needed for the creation of a narrative work to be completed. The time of creation may take many years, like the Iliad only received its present form, and thus its present time of narration, in the course of many centuries. And anyway, the time of creation of a narration is necessarily longer than the time of narration, meaning the time during which a work that has now been completed by the poet narrates its story - in cases in which an oral narration comes first and is then fixated in written form, like with Brentano's 'fairy tales' (Mdrchen), there are certain variations which we may neglect here. Also the fact that various readers read or recite the same story during a longer or shorter period of time belongs to a different time domain, to that of the interpreting presentation of the language body in a space of time. This space of time is caused by a marriage of the recipient with the gestalt of the work, and the individual ways of these recipients necessarily influences their own reading speed. But above all, it is important to note that the time of narrating has a different extension, continuity, and repeatability, that this time is of an essentially different kind than the narrated time. Let us first remain in the area of temporal extension. In parts, the time of narrating may be sometimes shorter, sometimes longer than the narrated time, but altogether, it is almost always shorter than the latter because of the inevitable gaps, the time contraction. In The Sorrows of Young Werther {Die Leiden des jungen Werthers) and in Elective Affinities (Wahlverwandtschaften), the narrated time stretches roughly over one and a half year, in Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre) roughly over ten years, in the classical baroque novel Argenis (Histoire de Foliarque et d'Argenis) from a summer to the following autumn, the time in Sentimental Education {^Education sentimentale) covers twenty-seven years, in the Buddenbrooks fortytwo years, in the Iliad almost two weeks, in The Egoist by Meredith one week. The time of narrating, however, can be counted in hours in all of them. And even when, in works of the school of Joyce, the time of narrating and the narrated time are almost identical, one cannot ignore the fact that contractions and gaps have been created even here. As said before, it is virtually impossible to narrate a life span completely and exhaustibly because, otherwise, the movement of every individual cell, every muscle, every metabolic system had to be narrated. Here, the inscrutability of life manifests itself quietly and impressively, and the ob-

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server is pointed to the difference of the two mutually related time concepts in a narration as well as to the different measurements of time contraction possible in this constellation. At the same time, it provides an illustration for the paradoxical saying that all creative forming is an omitting. Very generally, we can distinguish between three main sorts of narrative time contractions. One is the simple skipping of time spans. That can be done explicitly ('several years after', in Kleist's Bettelweib von Locarno) or without special reference and can apply to hours as well as to years. This way of time contraction can be especially well observed in the structure of Jiirg Jenatsch. Again and again, larger periods of time are cut out, whereas the narrated phases are broadly represented. Secondly, there is the contraction of time in large steps or main achievements in the way of 'vem, vidi, vici'. This emerges very abruptly in the The Brothers Karamazov, of which the first book narrates almost thirty years in strongly simplified main lines, while the following books develop three days, in the way, that the time of narrating and narrated time are for long periods as largely congruent as they are in Joyce's Ulysses, although, here and there, the style of representation is completely different - in Dostoyevsky's work, it is the consequence of the extensive part that dialogues play in the narration. In a third variant, the individual movements and incidents are contracted into the general traits of a transitional conditionally - here, one could speak of iterative and durative traits, in analogy to the terms for verbal forms of action, for example, when we read: 'Now, he rode out daily' or 'For weeks he could not free himself from the idea'. To a large extent, Stifter's Witiko is considerably shaped by a low degree of contraction of iterative and durative actions. It is obvious that one or the other way of time contraction has a formative effect on the rhythm and the structure, and consequently on the gestalt of the work as a whole. But to avoid misunderstandings, one has to keep in mind that in each work, there are numerous, not to say countless, contractions and that these do not necessarily have to be of the same kind. Decisive are not just the most numerous kinds of time contractions in a work, but the ones that leave the strongest mark, or, to be more precise, what is most important is the relation between the frequency and the impact of the various time contractions in a work. Emphasised periods of time that are portrayed as especially meaningful in a work of poetry are generally less contracted, although, for example, the two murders in the Jew 's Beech {Die Judenbuche) are not explicitly narrated, they are in fact omitted in the narrated time.

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Another difference adds to this. There are narrations in which the individual progressions are very clearly defined in order of their place in a certain period of time. It is narrated how many days or hours have passed between this and that event; hour, day, and year of an event are explicitly given. Thus, the narrated time is fixed in a quasi calendncal way. The narrative works of Herzog Anton Ulnch of Brunswick have this tendency, but also Goethe's; Bel ami, Buddenbrooks, and the Forsyte Chronicles are strikingly exact in a calendncal way. On the other side, there are narrations that narrate almost nothing about a relation to clock time. Not only the Hellenistic novels with a good part of their followers belong into this category, but also many fairy tales, and among the works of high art such works as Henry of Ofterdingen (Heinrich von Ofterdingen) by Novalis. In the same way, in the Artus epics, it would be difficult to limit the individual events to a certain time of the day. Now, there are countless transitions between the two border cases of clock-time accuracy and clock-time independence, and even in one work, generally, the level of accuracy is not consistently the same. For example, with E.T.A. Hoffmann or Meyrink, the change between clock-time independent periods and those that do have exact clock time is caused by the narrated. However, when one realises how exact in calendncal terms time is determined in Werther, for example, one will be cautious to make conclusions offhand about attitudes toward life that are denved from the kind of time of nanating, and to interpret calendncal accuracy as an expression of a view of life that is determined by physics. Without a doubt, only so much can be said, namely that here and there, a different expenence of time by the poet is influential, that connected to it is a different relation of life to the spatio-temporal world, and that, in fact, a different mode of creation, a different type of form, a different basic law of becoming will be related to it. How to judge this individually can only be decided case by case. This is confirmed by the following observation. All nanating is a nanating of something that is not nanation, but a process in life; this process occurs in the spatio-temporal world, even if it is an inner experience of the soul. If a nanation contracts clock time such that the spatio-temporal condition is contracted away, then it makes an obvious choice with an interpreting effect and as the result of a sense-giving attitude towards reality. This is no less the case when the clock time is in fact not contracted away, but narrated precisely. But not only these special contractions add significance, every contraction does so. To skip a sequence of events, that means, to contract it away, to make it denser or more expansive, actually means to give significance to it or to remove it from some point of view. What Achilles

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does in detail while he angrily stays away from the fight, what Parsifal does in detail while he angrily keeps away from God - in Homer, in Wolfram, it has been contracted away. But, from a different point of view, this may be especially worthwhile to narrate. The months spent painfully by Wilhelm Meister after the loss of Marianne, the months spent storming through during the war by Eduard in Elective Affinities (Die Wahlverwandtschaften) could very well be narrated in elaborated detail instead of durative-iterative contraction or in short reflections, if there was not a rule of value and consequently, an interpretative intention that led to just this contraction of the narrated time. With this, an important phenomenon comes into sight, that not just the explicitly evaluating opinion turns the narration into an interpretation. Rather, it is a basic structural law of narrative art that already one of its elementary forming processes, the representation of time periods in a tension between time of narrating and narrated time, has an interpreting effect. Remarks by Goethe are helpful to grasp this more clearly. He says in his 'Introduction to the German Gil Bias' (Geleitwort zum Deutschen Gil Bias) that the novel as an ethical phenomenon of art is rightly expected to have an 'inner consequence, which, even if we are led through so many labyrinths, appears again and closes everything as a whole in itself [our translation]. This is in accordance with the interpretation of catharsis in Goethe's 'Afterthought to Aristotle's Poetics' CNachlese zu Aristoteles' PoetiV), in which the famous controversial quotation is translated: 'Tragedy is the mimesis of a significant and completed action, which [... ] after a period of sympathy and fear, closes its business with the balance of such passions' [our translation]. The 'Geleitwortzum Deutschen Gil Bias' continues: 'But human life, faithfully recorded, never presents itself as a whole; after the most wonderful beginnings, bold progresses follow, then accident interferes, man recovers, he begins, perhaps on a higher level, his old play, which was agreeable to him, then he either disappears early or disappears slowly without every knot that was tied having been untied' [our translation]. Here, an important point of view, although in no way the only one, is given under which a contraction of incidents, and that means contraction of narrated time, may happen. When dealing with Diderot's essay on painting (?Versuch tiber die Maleref), signification as a reason for contraction is even more obvious, and whatever was observed on the relation between life time and narrated time, gains clearer contours here. There, Goethe says: 'Nature seemingly acts on behalf of itself, the artist acts as a human being on behalf of other human beings. In life, we only barely select the desirable, the enjoyable. Whatever the artist offers to man, should all be

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comprehensible and comfortable to the senses, all be enjoyable satisfying, all be inspiring, educating and elevating to the spirit; and consequently, the artist, grateful to nature that also created him, gives a second nature back to it, but an experienced nature, a reflected nature, a nature perfected in a human sense' [our translation]. Shortly before, Goethe writes: 'Nature organises a living, indifferent being, the artist a dead, but a meaningful being, nature a real being, the artist an apparent being. The beholder himself has to add, significance, emotion, reflections, affect, and effect on the mind to the works of nature. In the work of art, he will and has to find all this already present' [our translation]. In regard to the narrated time, the following can be concluded: the poet narrates a sequence of events which has happened independently of the act of narration, outside the narration. He re-presents it, but not exactly in the way as it is in itself, but poorer in one regard, richer in the other. What Goethe says about nature is also true of narrated events: these events are nature, they are perceived or represented as nature by the poet as well as by the listener outside in nature, and consequently, they initially appear to the observer as 'indifferent', as inarticulate processes, even alien to meaning. To make this clearer by an example: at first, the incidents represented in the Aeneid, in Fortunatus, in The Red and the Black (Le rouge et le noir) or the ever newly narrated Joseph-story take place in front of the eyes of the poet, and there, they are indifferent events in nature. They happen like the lightbeams emitted by the sun, the bonding and separation of chemical elements. The Hymn 'On the Devine' ('Das Gottliche') announces: 'For the realm of nature is unfeeling' [our translation]. A diversity offerees of nature act together so that events may happen and proceed. Human emotions, reflections and movements of the will also belong to these forces of nature. But these differ from each other, in the first place, only by the degree of their contribution toward the emergence of the sequence of events, not by their rank, although man comments emotionally, intentionally and reflecting on the course of nature to which he belongs, and tries to influence it in an escalating or defensive way. These incidents themselves say as little about a transcendental meaning, about significance, as the direction of the Gulf Stream, the advancement or retreat of a glacier, the stormy movements around an atomic nucleus, the cleavages of a fertilised egg cell. They are incidents like any other incidents of the sublime unfeeling, unthinking, unwilling nature, even if they can be perceived with the human eyes of the body or the mind. If they have a time, it is the time of the metronome, applying a technical measure with an agreed measuring unit to them.

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This is what Goethe's grim sentence - nature organises a living, indifferent being - means. And this, above everything else, turns this reality into the adequate elemental material for artistic creation, for representation in poetic narrating. For it is the narrator who adds articulation, value and degradation to the 'indifferent being'. It is he who develops out of the senseless sequence of events 'significance, emotion, thought, effect, impression on the mind'. He makes them 'nurturing, educating and elevating to the mind', and by giving significance to a symbolic case of life, he awards human meaning to the world; to wit: his meaning, the meaning that he believes in, the meaning he has experienced, achieved, and suffered. The basic structure of meaningful articulation, however, results from the explicit narrating of those time sequences, which are important to the creation of meaning, and from the cutting-away of those, which are unimportant to this purpose, through time contraction. Under the forming hands of the poet, the relentlessly silent natural process turns into a moved and moving narration about the deeper human meaning of human life, even where despair about meaninglessness is articulated in the work, for then the longing for meaning and significance is the humane that continues to exist. Even where renunciation of meaningful interpretation is the result, something is awarded to the natural event, namely, the character of senselessness, which is no less alien to the natural event as such than the character of the significant and the meaningful. The narrator may only rarely be conscious of these interrelations. In most cases, he might form the narrated event with judgmental empathy. But that he is unable to avoid these morphological conditions, is an inescapable rule, like metamorphosis in organic natures. But the poet creates his work, which creates human meaning, through forming, and the structuring of the narrated by time contraction is one of the leading forces of creation. Time contraction articulates. It leaves out, more or less, those of the meaningless events that are unimportant or incidental in the meaningful context of the given work. It intensifies and relaxes the time periods, releases from calendar time or subjects to it. It can represent the beat of the biological pulse, the swing of the physical pendulum, the curve of the spiritual wave, together or individually, as the decisive force. It can contract time with respect to the most personal, the least personal, or those incidents beyond the personal; it can show, all in all, only one, or in multi-voiced exchange, many kinds offerees or incidents as effective. It can relate the narrated, the natural event, as closely as possible to its original course, but it can also anticipate what comes later and catch

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up with what was earlier by virtue of the polar relation of the time of narrating and narrated time. It can give a voice only to the event but also to the sympathy of the narrator, to his empathy and his reflection, to his distant statements, his confidence, his distress, his humor. All this and much more that could not be specified here, gives human meaning, human significance to the natural event which is alien to meaning. It co-builds the creative construction of the narration in a decisive way, the shape of its sound and the beat of its pulse. This, however, is the formation-reformation of all poetry. It corresponds to the formation-reformation of organic natures, up to the metamorphosical growth from the mono cellular to the multi cellular entity. The language body (Sprachleib) of poetry is shaped by the movement of the emergence (Werdebewegung) of narrating. Like every other language, the language body of poetry not only articulates itself but it also speaks about something else which it causes to appear by its representation. Regardless how important theoretical statements and the reported individual events may be in a narration, it is the language of the complete movement of emergence, of the sounds, the sequence of images, shaped from all inventory and forces of the work, it is this language that makes poetry become poetry. Knowledge and action have their own languages. The language of art, of poetry, of narration, is form, is gestalt. Time, as has been shown, has a basic significance to the formation of narrative art. It is the one formative force that allows a comparison between all narrative works with respect to this decisive trait of the common form and thus makes the identification of morphological lines and groups possible. This, however, is the indispensable condition in order to arrive at a typology of narrative art to which we ought to aspire. Finally, an unintended result of these observations has to be touched. Art belongs to the signifying forces of human life that creates meaning, and at the same time belongs to those entities, which are created by a natural force, when the appropriate conditions arrive, without being asked for and without a purpose, like plant and animal. It supports the shaping and the liberation of the sense of being, of the experience of the world. It carries us away, as is said in Schubert's song, into a better world - a higher, deeper, wider world, so to speak, a world that is more humane because it is meaningful. Through this, it is able to strongly, sometimes decisively, influence the lived human life. But it is not able to change the unfeeling world that is alien to meaning, to abolish or to alter its cycles of physical or biological nature that are indifferent towards human interpretation. Rather, within the enormous and incomprehensible edifice of nature, it acts like a natural force in itself. As

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a world with its own meaningful, significant way, it rotates in its own orbit according to its own rules, which are analog but not identical to the growth-oriented world of life and only touches the physical-chemical-biological world insofar, as mind and spirit of man is connected to it. It can radiate its vitalizing meamngfulness to the mind and spirit of man, and, from there, also influence bio-chemical events to a certain degree. It is true, this still harbors enough dangers, but the grand nature does not know fear, and as an apparition of nature with its own rules, art plays its part in the diversified fabric of the human domain to achieve the sublimation of life.

KATE HAMBURGER

The Timelessness of Poetry* 1. I was asked by the editors to comment on Herbert Seidler's polemics against my theory of the epic preterit.1 Kindly allow me to do this as follows. Instead of dealing with all of Seidler's individual attacks, which derive from a point of view that is, as one might say, more motivated by an 'emotional stylistic' than by a view deriving from the logics of discourse, I only would like to discuss and elucidate, if possible, some principal problems. For the rest, I would like to refer to the book that I hope soon to present: Die Logik der Dichtung {The Logic of Literature). Furthermore, may I consider the object of my - by necessity polemic response as a general one, by dwelling on some of the views and problems mentioned in the discussion, but without quoting the individual works. What is at stake is one point, the problem of time which has impinged upon the theory of fiction, and which has, from the beginning - already with Lessing, already with Goethe and Schiller -, invited an erroneous approach that misinterprets the 'mode of being' ('Seinsweise') of fiction. As I was made to understand, it can only be elucidated and corrected by stringent logical proofs. Namely, by a method that was, up to now, hardly practiced, or was not practiced at all: the comparison of the function of discourse that generates fiction, to nonfictional discourse. The sources of errors from which obviously, directly or indirectly, confusion slipped into the current debate on the problematic of time with regard to poetry, have their origin in Lessing's theory of Laocoon on one hand, and in Goethe's and Schiller's view of epic and dramatic poetry on the other hand. The source of errors in the theory of Laocoon is Lessing's assumption that poetry is an art of time. He bases this as*

1

Editorial note: Footnotes 1 and 3 were added by the editors. We have decided to translate the title's German term 'Dichtung' as 'poetry' rather than 'literature' for reasons detailed in our foreword, footnote 27. H. Seidler (1955). 'Dichtensche Welt und epische Zeitgestaltung', in: Deutsche VierteljahrsschriftfurLiteraturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 29: 39CM13.

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sumption on the view that it is an art of speech and that the action of discourse, by necessity, takes place within time. For this reason, he argues, the poet (he refers to the epic poet) can only 'represent' ('abbilderf) such phenomena of reality that take place in time, namely events or actions. And if the poet wants to describe objects, he can only do so by conversing them into actions. When Homer wanted to describe the Shield of Achill, he could only succeed by showing how Hephaestus produced it, thus dissolving it into the actions of Hephaestus.2 Already this example shows how this, Lessing's theory, leads to completely wrong interpretations, not only of the illustrative art of Homer but of epic means of representation in general. It is true that Homer disintegrates the images of the Shield, like the conflict between the two cities, into action, event, moving life, but he does not disintegrate them into the manual actions of Hephaestus. Indeed, the indication, which is repeated again and again, that Hephaestus produced and created does mean the contrary, namely, the indication that we are dealing with images here, something that may be easily forgotten due to the lively descriptions. But Lessing's theory has been kept in mind and, in modified form, has become effective again as the discrimination between time of narration (Erzahlzeit) and narrated time (erzahlte Zeit). But how does that work? Firstly, the problem will be considered with a simple Homeric example. Agamemnon, woken up from the dream that was sent by Zeus, raises, dresses, and rushes towards the ships: Jetzo erwacht vom Schlaf, noch umtont von der gottlichen Stimme, Setzte sich aufrecht hin, und zog das weiche Gewand an, Sauber und neugewirkt, und warf den Mantel dariiber; Unter die glanzenden FiiB' auch band er sich stattliche Sohlen; Hangte sodann um die Schulter das Schwert voll silberner Buckeln; 2

'Homer namhch malet das Schild mcht als ein fertiges, vollendetes, sondern als ein werdendes Schild. Er hat also auch hier sich des gepnesenen Kunstgnffes bedient, das Coexistierende seines Vorwurfs in em Consecutives der Handlung zu verwandeln und dadurch aus der langweiligen Malerei ernes Korpers das lebendige Gemalde emer Handlung zu machen. Wir sehen mcht das Schild, sondern den gottlichen Meister, wie er das Schild verfertiget' (Laokoon, XVIII) - 'Homer, that is to say, pamts the Shield not as a finished and complete thing, but as a thmg in process. Here once more he has availed himself of the famous artifice, turning to the co-existing of his design mto a consecutive, and thereby making of the tedious pamtmg of a physical object the living picture of an action. We see not the Shield, but the divme artificer at work upon it' (Laocoon, XVIII).

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Nahm auch den Konigsstab, den er erbeten, ewiger Dauer, Wandelte dann zu den Schiffen der erzumschienten Achaier. He woke from sleep, the god's voice Eddying around him. He sat upright, Pulled on a silky shirt, threw on a cloak, Laced a pair of sandals on his shinning feet, And hung from his shoulder a silver-worked sword. And he held his imperishable, ancestral staff As he walked through the ships of the bronze-kilted Greeks. This incident is described in verses Iliad II, 41-47. It takes a measurable amount of time to read these verses or listen to the recitation. But does the incident described happen within a certain time? Is it described as a progression of time? If the incidents are depicted in more detail, if the clothes, the movements of Agamemnon are specified, then the poet would have needed to make more verses, and the reader would have needed more time to read them. But the incident described would not present itself as a longer incident in time. The time of narration would be longer but this time of narration, which is needed for the poetic production of the incident, and appears again in the auditory or reading reception of the description, is as little associated with the incident described as the time that I spend regarding a painting is associated with the painting itself. A time of narration to which the narrated events can be related does not exist. I can measure the time that the reading of the verses requires but I am not able to measure the time that Agamemnon needs to wake up, to dress, and to rush to the ships. I know nothing about this time, a fictitious time, because it is not specified and therefore, does not 'exist'. But even if it was indicated by some time specification, this representational indication would have nothing to do with the real time, which is, for example, represented by the extension of the verses. Here, a further point has to be considered. I concede that Lessing was right when he claimed that a real act and that includes a discursive act, 'articulated sounds in time' ('artikulierte Tone in der Zeif; Laocoon, XVI) - does take place within time. In the same way, every real object is, by being in space, also located in time, according to the theory of relativity. But relevant to the theory of poetry is the idealistic doctrine of Kant, which is still valid, co-existing with the theory of relativity. Kant teaches that time and space are both categories of perception in which we experience the spatio-temporal world. This doctrine should not be disregarded in the theory of fiction precisely as it has no validity in poetry. What Hegel ex-

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pressed in his Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art (Vorlesungen fiber die Asthetik) applies to it, to its 'mode of being' ('Seinsweise'): 'Thinking, however, results in thoughts alone; it evaporates the form of reality into the form of the pure concept, and even if it grasps and apprehends real things in their particular sphere into the element of the universal and ideal wherein alone thinking is at home with itself ('Das Denken aber hat nur Gedanken zu seinem Resultat; es verfluchtigt die Form der Realitdt zur Form des reinen Begriffs, und wenn es die wirklichen Binge in ihrer wesentlichen Besonderheit und ihrem wirklichen Dasein fafit und erkennt, so erhebt es dennoch auch dies Besondere in das allgemeine ideelle Element, in welchem allein das Denken bei sich selber isf).3 This quotation of Hegel is not only valid for the poetic but also for the non-poetic, the 'prosaic' reflective-imaginative and thus conceptual-linguistic representation of reality. But with special epistemological persuasiveness it can now be applied to the epic and dramatic, i.e., to the fictional or mimetic genre. While reality is the 'material' of this genre, it 'evaporates' into the mode of being 'mimesis', in other words, a reproductive appearance, but an appearance that does not present itself, like in fine art, in representational form (albeit in different materials), but in the form of perception, concept, idea. Here, the forms of representative reality are not valid, neither in time nor in space. And if Seidler, as the basis of his proof, says that 'the construction of the fictional world concurs with the construction of reality' (393), because it is 'in an essential reference to reality' (393), it would be difficult for him as well as for anybody to go for a walk in a garden that is described in a novel. In the same way, he might hardly have the impression that a real garden is by virtue of language - 'it is based in language that real and fictional world are ever subjected to the same rules of construction' (395 [our translation]) - a garden 'that has been constructed by men'. Here the transcendental-phenomenological epistemological theory is envisioned. But it has been overlooked that only reality, the material world proper, exposes itself in the form of appearance, of phenomena, to this subjectively limited perception. This is not the case with an invented reality, no matter to which extent it is shaped and invented according to the pattern of reality. The conditions of the perception of reality are not its conditions; the forms of assertions of reality are not the forms of reality proper. And Kant's doctrine of time as inner form of intuition (Anschauung) cannot be applied to the events narrated in a novel, in the same way, as the doctrine of space as outer intuition cannot be applied to the space that is described in a novel. For space and 3

G.W.F. Hegel (1975). Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art. Oxford: Clarendon P, 976, resp. Vorlesungen iiber die Asthetik III (Werke 15). Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 244.

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time are forms of experience of the existing, but not of the imaginary. A train accident happening in reality takes, with everything that comes with it, a certain time. The newspaper report on it 'contracts' this time by conceptual time specifications of all kind: at five o'clock, after twenty minutes, after that, etc. When reading this report, we cannot experience the time during which the accident happened as we cannot experience the real accident itself, but we only conceptually take cognizance of the accident, that it happened and took so and so long. The contracting of time, that is, the specifications that denominate time conceptually, are not only given in fiction but in every report on reality. As well in the newspaper report as perhaps in the narrative of a novel, the train accident is displaced from any time experience because it is displaced from any progress of time. However, during the last decades the interest of literary theory has shifted towards the construction (Gestaltung) of time in a novel, and thus on the problem of time in general. This interest was motivated by novehstic poetry itself in which time and the experience of time became topical, with Proust, Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Mann, etc. By their treatment of time, these poets made a partly epistemological, partly constructive 'transcendental' turn, the turn from 'naive' presentation of events to a 'critical' reflection of the mode of the conditions of their sequence. This turn is of course associated with the profound exploration of psychological-existential depths that characterises modern narrative and dramatic art. These poets attempted to construct time itself, to narrate it, like space is poetically constructed and narrated, either in a more reflexive way (like Thomas Mann's chapters 'Ewigkeitssuppe' ('Soup-Everlasting') and 'Strandspaziergange' ('By the Ocean of Time') in The Magic Mountain and similar philosophies of time that are applied to the larger periods of time in the Joseph-novel), or by strongly stressed hints to the course of time in which the narrated events 'happen', or rather, are imagined as happening. In these works, the time unit of a day became especially popular, most famous in Joyce's Ulysses, or in Virginia Woolf s Mrs. Dalloway. Here, time is made recognizable, narrated like the space. But, time cannot be as easily constructed as space, and it cannot, ultimately, even when extended into larger spaces of time, be presented differently as in every other historical account, and as in natural changes in life that are, of course, produced by time. Here, we can see one of the causes of the fact that a small unit of time like a day was preferably chosen for the poetic construction of time. By this, the infiniteness of the inner world which is not time-bound could be constructed most strikingly as a contrast to the limitedness of the outer existence (this is one of the levels of sigmfica-

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tion of Ulysses, and also of Mrs. Dalloway). But here, it is important to see what this construction of time means to the narrative technique. Because, this exactly can be an argument against the absolute value, the 'cultic' value that literary analysis has occasionally given to the problem of time and the construction of time. The novel can narrate time but it does not have to. This can be well demonstrated by a comparison to the construction of space in painting. Painting can construct space with the aid of perspective. But in no way does it construct space all the time. A portrait, a still life does not construct space. The novel can construct time as the works named above do. But this is the exception. Generally, a novel narrates events, situations, human beings with their reflections and problems without recollecting that 'in reality' events, life do happen within time. In Mrs. Dalloway, when every hour the chime of Big Ben resounds, this means that time is being narrated, that the course of time is intended to remain conscious. If in a novel, there is a recurrence to the prehistory of a character, then this is another, albeit less distinct way of constructing time. In indications like: the next day, one year later, the time had come, etc., the construction of time is even less distinct, even less dramatic, but given with the narrative course of events. Therefore, in such cases, overemphasis of the 'structure of time' may lead to similar misinterpretations, similar confusion of the relevant with the irrelevant, as Lessing's interpretation of Homer's illustrative style of narration does. If time is not topical, not constructed, not narrated, then it 'is' not in a work of poetry. It is not there nevertheless, like in reality - in the same way as space is not in a painting that does not construct space - even when we can 'forget' about it there, that is, we are not prepared to experience it there. For in reality, time is the 'inner form' of the course of life, and when we forget about it, perhaps because we are preoccupied with something else, then we can remember it again at any time. We can become aware of its course by looking at the clock, or at the beginning darkness, or at the change of seasons. But if in our quote of Agamemnon, the time Agamemnon needs to dress himself and rush to the ships, is not indicated by some indicator - even if it is the 'rose fingry Eos' - I would not be able to remember that some time has to pass with such an action. If time is not indicated by a term or image, then it is not in the narration. For in poetry, only what is narrated is existent. Only then narrated time exists, when it is explicitly narrated, like painted space only exists when it is painted. What is true for the short quotation from Homer is true for the most extensive narration of life or events. If in such a narration, time has not been included as a constructed and constructive factor by the poet, the interpreter is not allowed to use this factor for his interpretation, be it, that he stresses

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conceptual time indicators that are following the course of time or be it that he interprets a imagined time into the novel from his side.4 The possible - construction of time does not distinguish the novel from other constructed materials of reality, and therefore, should not be interpreted as a special underlying 'transcendental condition' of the narrated courses of life, just because, in reality, time (and space) do exist. By the way, it was this problem that led Fielding in his Tom Jones to understand the peculiarity of fictional writing, and from there, he incorporated his 'new' novel theory into this novel. 2.

The second correlation of fictional genres with natural meanings of time and tense that provides a source of errors in the analysis of time in poetry, goes back mainly to Goethe, less so to Schiller. It is basically connected to the first one: that narrative poetry presents action as past and therefore in the preterit tense. Seidler's attack is directed against my indication of this source of error. He accuses me of having 'burdened the creation of a fictitious world on one single form of verb' (390 [our translation]) and, at another place, expresses it in the way that was supposed to make 'the preterit present the fiction'. As a matter of fact, I cannot be accused of having written such a senseless formulation, but I said - and showed from the grammatical 'attitude' of fictional narration - that the preterit loses the original function it had in the statement of reality, in 'historical narration', to denote something that has passed. But setting aside this misunderstanding of Seidler, notice when he conducts his own stylistic interpretation about the space of the past, etc. in the narration, he himself does not use anything else but just this single verb form. And why should he not? In the sentence, in the oral and written communication, it is the finite verb that expresses something of the 'mode of being' ('Seinsweise') of people and things: about their being or non-being, their not-yet-being, and their no-longer4

For example, there are many time indicators in Fontane's novels - 'At ten o'clock, the night tram left from the Station FnedrichstraBe. Even before mne o'clock, one was there m full travelling equipment [...] In the morning, just after five, the tram arrived in Schmiedeberg, from there it was just one small hour to Adamsdorf [...]' Those dates have nothing to do with structure or meaning but have their source m Fontane's casual, realistic, style of narration that does not distinguish between essential and non-essential information. The time mdicators should only be used, on one level with other mdifferent indicators, as a symptom for the non committed gossipy chattiness of this style. With observations of this kind, characteristics of the bourgeois-naturalistic style of the epoch can be made accessible.

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being, that is, their place and time, and therefore their place in reality. And consequently, it is the preterit that expresses, in a statement in reality, that, for example, a man does not live any more. If I read or learn from a statement in reality: 'The merchant N. was a rich and generous man', then I know that now, when I come to know this, he does not live any more. If I read this sentence in a novel, then I am not informed that he was a rich and generous man when he was still alive, but that he is such a man. And if this sentence in a novel is written in present tense, I am made to know exactly the same: Not that he still lives right now as this rich and generous man, but that he lived - and behold! The imperfect tense was or lived does not have any meaning any more for whatever I learn from this sentence in the novel. I am not oriented towards the temporal, the preterit meaning of this verb, but towards the meaning-content signified by it, and I am not realizing the present tense form of a historical present tense either. The preterit loses its function and meaning of 'past'. But saying this, I did not indicate that 'the preterit presents the fiction'. In fact, fiction is presented in a different way, it is created, albeit with the aid of verbs, yet not with their temporal form, but with their meanings. I will show how this works with an example especially suited to demonstrate that emotional stylistics is not sufficient to understand the highly intricate functions used by language when it does not make statements on reality but wants to construct a poetic fictional reality - functions which are subconscious to the poet in as much as the grammatical forms in which he expresses himself are subconscious to the ordinary speaker and writer. The frame narrative of Keller's Zurich Novellas (Zuricher Novellen) begins with the following sentence: Gegen das Ende der achtzehnhundert zwanziger Jahre, als die Stadt Zurich mit weitlaufigen Festwerken umgeben war, erhob sich an einem hellen Sommermorgen mitten in derselben ein junger Mensch von seinem Lager, der von den Dienstboten des Hauses bereits Herr Jacques genannt und von den Hausfreunden einstweilen geihrzt wurde, da er fur das Du sich als zu groB und fur das Sie sich noch als zu unbetrachtlich darstellte. Towards the end of the eighteen hundred twenty years, when the city of Zurich was surrounded by extended fortifications, in the centre of the same, on a bright summer morning, a young man rose from his bed, who was already called Mr. Jacques by the servants of the house and addressed with 'Ihr' [2nd person pi.] by the friends of the house, as he appeared to be too big for the 'Du' [2nd person sing.] and still too insignificant for the 'Sie' [3rd. person pi.; our translation].

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Like no other, this text seems to confirm explicitly that a plot of a novel is imagined as having passed and is therefore told in preterit tense. When does it happen? At the end of the twentieth year of the nineteenth century. But let us continue to ask: what happened then? A young man rose from his bed. If we ask the reverse question: when did the young man rise from his bed?, then we have to reply: towards the end of the eighteen hundred and twenty years, on a bright summer morning. Giving these answers, we realise that they are inadequate. The question: when did this happen? somehow does not match the verb in relation to which we ask this temporal question. We do not use verbs like to rise (from a bed, a chair etc.), to go, to sit, to have a restless night (for he had had a restless night, as is said immediately after this), when making statements about points in time that reach far back in time and are indefinite. I can say: Yesterday, or one week ago, Peter rode his bike to town, but I usually do not say: Ten years ago or at the beginning of this century, he rode his bike to town, or even: He rose from a chair. In a statement of fact (Wirklichkeitsaussage), I use such situation verbs (Situationsverben) in imperfect only in relation to points of time which have passed not long ago. Why? Because these verbs signify a situation that is concrete and can still be remembered and overlooked by me, the person who makes the statement here and now. A sentence like the one by Keller cannot appear in a statement of fact (Wirklichkeitsaussage). Here, a statement that links a young man rising from his bed to the information that the city of Zurich - where this happened at the end of the eighteen hundred twenty years - is surrounded by extended fortifications, would be impossible. When we read this text without knowing the context it is taken from, we still know immediately that this is not a reality statement. The first verb that we come across, he rose from his bed, teaches us that we are dealing with a fictional narrative. At the same time, this verb does even more. It eliminates the time marker in its function as marker of the past tense. It does so although it is given in imperfect, that is, according to a strict grammar, it indicates an action in the past, even in a given time. But what does the situation verb really do? It does the opposite: it makes time and space present, it leads to a (fictitious) situation here and now in that our young man did not rise but does rise. And in spite of the imperfect and in spite of the definite time statement, I really cannot ask when the young man rose from his bed. I am not supposed to learn that he rose from his bed at a given time on a day of the 19* century but that he rose. And as it is this factum that matters, the preterit form becomes insignificant and disappears, it becomes de-emphasised and can be substituted by a present tense as well,

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which likewise would not be emphasised.5 But what happens to the precise statement of time which was already far in the past of the poet Keller? It loses its function as a historical statement of the past; it merely sets the stage for the coming narration which we have entered, the image of the city of Zurich that was still surrounded by fortifications at this time. The situation verb eliminates the indication of the past that both time marker and preterit form have in a reality statement, and it creates a fictitious present, which immediately constitutes itself more intense and clearer in all further moments of the narration. Let us read on: Herrn Jacques' Morgengemiit war nicht so lachend wie der Himmel, derm er hatte eine unruhige Nacht zugebracht, voll schwieriger Gedanken und Zweifeliiber seine Person. The morning mind of Mr. Jacques was not as laughing as the sky, as he had spent a restless night, full of difficult thoughts and doubts of his own person [our translation].

The reader experiences in the same way as the poet who wrote this, only that Mr. Jacques' morning mind is not laughing - in the fictitious moment of being of this fictitious character. Therefore, the decisive element that creates fiction in this text is the situation verb, which already has the power to eliminate the indication of the past tense in tenses and time markers. Situation verbs are always tools of fictionahzation but they are not decisive for the character of epic fiction, as they also appear in statements of fact, as for example, in eyewitness accounts (which have only really taken shape in their precise and typical form in modern radio reports, like those covering sport events, state funerals, coronations, but also in travel accounts in which an eyewitness reports on events in the moment when they are happening, a modern form of the Mauerschau or teichoscopy in drama). The decisive criteria for nar5

However it may be argued that, when reading a historical work, I am likewise expecting not the temporal, but the significant meamng of the verbs. When reading in Ranke's work Die groflen Machte {The Great Powers): 'In this moment (1740) of an obviously true danger to the German fatherland, Fredenc II appeared, Prussia rose' [our translation], then the appearance of Fredenc II, the rise of Prussia, would be decisive. Nevertheless, in my reading expenence, I have the knowledge, what the verbs express did happen, and accordingly has happened at a certain time, not only the rise of Frederic but also that he rose at that time. Elsewhere, I will discuss in detail the decisive meaning of the context, to which we have to turn for the elucidation of the language system in such cases when the use of words itself does not enlighten the place of a written work, or even of a sentence.

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rative fiction, however, are the verbs of inner processes, as I have shown in detail in my article on the epic preterit. To say it even more clearly now, the preterit tense form is the substrate in which the narrative can proceed because it is not possible to narrate without a certain definite verb form. Again, a comparative look at paintings can be revealing. A painting cannot be painted into the air; it has to have a base: a wall or a screen. But wall and screen as a base lose their original material. Not that it dissolves, but in the way that it has no material value for the painting, for the work of art. The screen is a screen outside the painting, once it is a painting it does no longer have any meaning as a screen. This is the way the preterit tense acts in fiction: outside of fiction, it is real preterit tense and establishes a relation to the past. In fiction, it is the colorless substrate of the referential contents of the verbs which alone is meaningful. Therefore, it can be treated, grammatically and linguistically, in a way that otherwise would not be possible: in connection with deictic pronouns, etc., as can be read in my essay.6 There, I attribute the aesthetic significance of the 6

a) Here, I would like to respond to another one of Seidler's arguments which, for some reason, possibly has been taken up in other circumstances. He criticises my proof that only in fiction, but not in a statement of fact, deictic time adverbs can appear in connection with the imperfect. Against my quotation of a sentence from a novel, 'Heute abend wollte der Komg Flote spielen' ('This evening, the king wanted to play the flute'), he put the example: 'Man kann in einer Gesellschaft sagen: eigentlich wollte ich (bzw. er) morgen spielen, aber ich tue es doch mcht (bzw. er ist erkrankt)' ('You can say at a party: originally, I [resp. he] wanted to play tomorrow, but I do not do it [resp. he has fallen sick] (Fn 37)' [our translation]. Here, the modal auxiliary verb want (wollen) is misleading. Indeed, among the auxiliary verbs, only want and in one of its meamngs also the verb shall (sollen), can apparently appear in a statement of fact in its pretent tense form in connection with a deictic future tense verb. For this verb, as such, is directed towards an action that will be conducted in the future and can be substituted by the expression: to have the intention to do, etc. Its pretent tense has the meaning of a pre-existing intention which could not or cannot be realised. So the meaning of Seidler's sentence is: I say today, now, at the party, where I am presently, that yesterday, I (still) had the intention to play tomorrow - tomorrow from the point of my today, the day after tomorrow from the point of my yesterday - but already today I know that I will not do it. This means that, from my present, I look back into my past of yesterday as well as forward into my future of tomorrow, and I can only make the grammatical connection wanted tomorrow {wollte morgen) because of the special meaning of the verb. Any other modal verb will resist this connection in a statement of fact. I cannot say: tomorrow I could or had to play. But in the novel, the sentence on Fredenc's flute play can be: tomorrow he had to or he could play, and had to or could have the same present tense meamng as wanted to. For in this case wanted to does not mean that somebody knowing something about the

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epic preterit tense (especially compared to the historical present tense), and its function generally, to the character effectuality that is attached to it. I believe that the concept of substrate that is explained above, is one step further on the way of its semantic elucidation, even more, it is the final significant elucidation that solves the problem in a satisfactory way. With this, the moment effectuality has not been turned invalid but merges into the concept of the substrate. Consequently, the situation is as follows: the fictional narrative is not fictional because the preterit tense loses its temporal function, but the preterit tense loses its function because the narrative is fictional, meaning that it creates fictitious characters with means that historical narration cannot make use of, like verbs of inner processes, free indirect discourse, monologue, or dialogue. As far as I can see, the mundane fact that dramatic poetry creates fictitious characters has not been included into the definitions of epic and dramatic poetry. But it is only king states that yesterday, or at any other past point in time, the king had the mtention to play. Rather, this wanted to signifies the fictional momentary inner situation of the kmg's will, not a past experienced from his side, but his fictitious present, from where'this coming evening' is imagined. b) Following this argument, I would like to clear a further misunderstanding of which, apparently, my own argument is not innocent. Seidler argues that my proofs of the absence of the I-Origo of a narrator in a novel cannot be correct, as I myself had shown that this is not true for the desenption of milieus in a novel. Now I founded my proof, for the purpose of showing the genesis of a fictional narration, on the entrance of Stifters Hochwald, where, actually, the account of the milieu does not yet belong to the novel as such (something that I will show in more detail in my forthcoming book). The present tense in which it is narrated is no histoncal present tense, but marks a kind of historical eye witness report that only passes over into fictional narration with the preterit tense. However, with common introductory descriptions of milieu in pretent tense, like for example at the beginning of Jiirg Jenatsch, the situation is different. Here, the concept of context is important, a concept that I had not yet introduced in the essay on the preterit tense. A mere description of milieu in which the characters of the novel do not yet appear does not or does not need to contain those structural elements that identify them as a novel's description. But if I know, for example from the title, that I have just started to read a novel and no travel account, I already experience an introductory milieu desenption as the setting of a novel and relate to the fictitious characters whose appearance I can surely expect because I read a novel. In this case, the imperfect of this description immediately loses its function as a marker of the past, and the impression that is given by the first sentence of Jiirg Jenatsch: 'The midday sun shone over the bare peak that was surrounded by rock heads, of the Mierpass in Biinden county' ('Die Mittagssonne stand iiber der kahlen, von Felshauptern umragten Hohe des Julierpasses im Lande Biinden') is that of the temporal present of the expected plot of a novel.

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this fact that informs us about the linguistic and representational rules of this, the fictional genre. This fact clarifies that fictional narration is something categorically different from historical narration which is an account of reality. But wherein lies the structural root cause of this categorical difference? It lies in the fact that the contents of epic poetry (which as a genre restricts us to lead our proof by reference to the narrative) will only exist because they are narrated, whereas the contents as the object of a statement of fact (Wirklichkeitsaussage) exist whether or not they are narrated.7 A narrated fiction is not the object of the statement of a 'narrator' or an 'I-narrator', but it is a junction of the process of narration which in itself is not a 'person', but just a generative function. When, in our Keller-text, it is said: 'Mr. Jacques' morning mind was not as laughing as the sky' ('Herrn Jacques' Morgengemut war nicht so lachend wie der HimmeV), it does not mean that somewhere a Mr. Jacques exists and somebody relates this about him, but this character is generated by the words chosen as somebody with a bad mood in the morning. Narration is the function that generates fiction like the colored brush of the painter generates the painting. It is the mimetic function that as the narrative function can be reduced to zero: at this point, the dramatic form emerges where the narrative function is partly substituted by the scenic representation, or from the poetic point of view by the dialogical system. It serves to elucidate and give contour to the poetic genres if we reserve the concept of the 'narrator' for the author of a narrative work of poetry, but does not personify the narration itself to become a narrator. The terms narrator, dramatist, lyricist, identify the kind of art that is performed by these artists, in the same way as the terms painter and sculptor identify the kind of their art. This is not a mere play with terminology but, in the case of epic and lyrical poetry, leads to insights into the logic and thus to the phenomenology of the poetic genres. When today particularly effort is taken to avoid the identification of the 'lyrical I' with the poet, then there is less reason for such qualms then in the case of calling the narration the narrator.8 7

8

A more detailed analysis of this statement that will also dissolve the seemingly paradoxon of unreal contents of a statement of fact, I will elaborate in the future. In my article that is discussed here (which was already written in 1952 ['Das epische Praetentum', m: Deutsche VierteljahrsschriftfurLiteraturwissenschaftund Geistesgeschichte 27, 1953, 329-57]), this was not stressed with full terminological clearness. The term 'non-fictitious factor' {nichtfiktiver Faktor) that I used there at one point and which was criticised by Wolfgang Kayser (in his article 'Die Anfange des modernen Romans rm 18. Jahrhundert und seme heutige Krise', m: Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift fiir Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 28, 1954, 417^16), is admittedly not adequate and could lead to misunderstandings, as

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The difference also proves to be important to the phenomenology of the I-narration. Concerning the I-narration, Seidler accuses me with special vehemence of daring to say that this concept avoids the intrinsic task of the epic poet to create humans. I am ready to withdraw the expression 'avoid' (ausweichen) in this sentence (which appears only as a parenthetic relative clause in my work), but not the fact itself. To prove that this is not incorrect I can refer to a great principal witness, to Aristotle, who reprimanded whenever an epic poet 'himself spoke'. Because then, as he remarks shrewdly, he is not an 'imitator' (/ui/uriTrig; Poetics 1460). Although it is not correct to translate the 'avxov ... Set ... Aeyeiv' of this quote with 'to speak in first person (= I)', as it sometimes happens, but by implicitly making the same difference as was stressed above between the 'epic' that is the narrator, and the 'mimetic' narration, this also becomes a hint to the special form of the I-narration. Indeed, it is no autochthonous epic form. It is not 'mimesis' but a - in which way ever - fictitious statement of fact, where we have to stress that fabricated is not the same as fictitious. And if you look deeper into the structures of poetry, the sense of an I-narration is not the creation of a fictitious world but a self-representation of the I-narrator himself, whatever amount of world and man he may integrate into the realm of his self-account. The logic of poetry, which has, to those who care about poetry, a stricter regularity than may be visible on first sight, tells us something about its aesthetic phenomenology. It is part of the logic of thinking itself, just as poetry is part of the general system of language, in which this logic manifests itself in the form of grammar. The laws that rule language when it generates poetry can only be discovered when it has been, in careful observation of its characteristics, distinguished from those of the general language system. Then, however, it shows that fictional poetry is separated from the general system of expression by an insurmountable boundary whereas lyrical poetry has its place inside it, albeit in the most delicate way. It may be true when Seidler claims that the 'unity of poetry is torn apart' with this. But where is it written that poetry has to be a unity? it creates the impression as if the 'narrator' was identified with the author. Already at that time, the argument was that narration itself is a factor that does not belong to the fictitious world proper, but at that time, I had not discovered the functional constitution of this factor that cannot be named a 'fictitious' one - as again, Kayser would like to do - for the exact reason that itself generates the fiction. In the book I referred to, I try to give a more detailed analysis of the character of the narrative function.

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There is certainly one unity to which it belongs with all its genres and varieties: it is the unity of art itself which embraces poetry like all the other arts. It is separated from the mode of being of reality (Seinsweise der Wirklichkeit) by the fact that what it creates not only exists but also signifies, meaning that it has the existence of a symbol and with this necessarily also of an idea. In the system of art, however, poetry takes a special, even a precarious place. Because it is the very art that exists through a 'material' that is not only the material of art, of the poetic expression and creation of reality, but also of the extra-poetic, the 'prosaic'. And with his sharp eye, Hegel saw and said of poetry that it is 'the special art in which art begins to dissolve itself and merges with the prose of scientific thinking'. This insight already contains that a logic of poetry exists because there is a logic of thought.

EBERHARD LAMMERT

The Time References of Narration The most general compositional principle which narrative art initially shares with every linguistic enunciation is the concept of succession in which it can be presented and received only. Therefore, the gradual process of 'becoming' characterises language's work of art (Sprachkunstwerk) as a whole, as well as its specific, individual forms in a much more essential way than it effects the whole and the parts of an artwork of painting.1 At least since Lessing, but ultimately since Aristotle, the principle of 'succession in time' {Laocoon, XVIII, 65; 'Zeitfolge\ Laokoon, XVIII, 371) has been acknowledged as a fundamental prerequisite of poetic enunciation. This principle of language-based presentation had led Lessing to the far-reaching conclusion that the poet also had to arrange the subject matter of his poetry successively; indeed, that merely those objects were worthy of poetry that could be illustrated in a temporal sequence. Such objects, Lessing further concludes, 'are generally termed actions. Consequently, actions form the proper subject matter of poetry' [our translation; cf Laocoon, XVI, 55].2 In his 'First Critical Forest', Herder sharply criticised this view and rightly accused Lessing of an inappropriate generalisation. Of course, he also confirms: 'The successive nature of the process is and remains the crux of the matter' [Herder 2006: 148] ('Das Nacheinander werden (der Dichtung) ist und bleibt der Knoten'; [Herder 1878:] 148). However, it would not necessarily follow from the first principle of succession in language that temporal succession had to be the inherent pnn1

2

Editorial note: The numbering of footnotes differs from that in the original. Also note that the bibliography at the end of this translation was generated from the comprehensive bibliography contained in Lammert's book and augmented where necessary. - Based on this premise, Medicus [1930] has already drawn considerable conclusions in regard to the problem of form in his ' Vergleichende Geschichte der Kunste' ('Comparative history of the arts') (see esp. 194ff, 203, 213), whereas Walzel [1923] levels these distinctions in different ways. Editorial note: Lammert does not quote directly from Lessing's chapter XVI but from the annex (= Laokoon, Anhang III, 434) which is not included in the English translation.

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ciple of poetry's content matter. According to Herder, Lessing's conclusions would cause a terrible 'bloodbath' among 'poets both ancient and modern' (155). - Undoubtedly, Herder partly overplayed Lessing's fruitful insights with his combative polemics but he also pointed out the weak link in Lessing's chain of reasoning. In doing so, as will be shown below, Herder actually harnessed Lessing's theory as one that pertains to narrative art (Erzahlkunst). Herder argues that Lessing made his observations by using the example of Homer and, based on the realization that Homer represents 'nothing but progressive actions' - rightly so, Herder already considers this an exaggeration - 'immediately subjoining the main proposition: Poetry represents nothing but progressive actions' (152). Here, Herder makes an important distinction first: Homer composes his poem as a narrative: 'It happened! There was!' In Homer, then, everything can be action and must rush to action. This is the direction in which the energy of his Muse strives; wondrous, heart stirring events are his world; he has it in his power to utter the words of divine creation:'There was!'(151) However, Herder positions Pindar side by side with Homer as the creator of 'large lyrical paintings', and Pindar's word of creation: "I sing!' (151). Thus, narrative work of art has its energy source in a world of events (Begebenheiten), which art creates and organises into an action line (Handlung). The lyric poetry's point of convergence, by contrast, lies in the soul of the poet and may, indeed must orientate its enunciations toward an emotional condition, without being bound to the succession of real processes. It may tell of condition, current spirit and timeless thoughts: it simply has to sing. Lyric poetry is bound to the first principle like any other enunciation but not any longer to the second! Herder already goes as far as questioning the absolute necessity of progressing in time - and he nearly would also have turned his criticism to the 'basic concepts' ('Grundbegriffe') of the epic and the lyrical, which everywhere - and even with Homer - shape literature jointly by succeeding one another. Anyhow, urging us to let each kind of poetry retain its own principle of blending, he states that as far as the epic poet Homer and his epos is concerned, 'the essence of his poem' lies in its forceful (!) progression; the successions 'are the body of the epic action' (150).

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Here, one can feel the basic affinity that exists despite of all separation between the 'basic concepts' and the 'main genres', in this case, between 'epic' [adject, form] and 'epic poetry'. An epos in general must possess the basic epic strength of the progression of events in order not to miss its genre. In addition, it may also feature - and it actually requires this for its artistic forming - lyrical or discursive traits, even for relatively long periods. The discourse may, as Herder also emphasised, expand into the spatial dimension and shape it in the illustrative fashion of 'painting'. However, the scaffolding (Gerust) of the narrative work has to be the progressing, indeed the energetically progressing action that is characterised by a striving force! In one story or the other, the description of milieu, the creation of human character sketches, the presentation of ideas and, finally, the educational purpose may overshadow the mere sequence of events and thus render it meaningful in the first place. But we are, in case we want to deal with the preconditions and typical features of all narratives, referred back to the events taking place in time which E.M. Forster called their atavistic armature. For this reason, the established formula 'there was' ('es ward'), which Herder calls the narrator's word of creation, characterises the peculiarity of poetry more precisely than the formula 'once upon a time' ('es war einmaV), which before and after Petsch has been considered as the origin of the epic account. The formula 'once upon a time' does not yet express any intention of eventfulness; consequently, it can therefore only be thought of as the primal schema of narrative exposition, as the entrance gate to the fictitious world that is only narratively shaped when the static 'it was' evolves into an 'it became' or 'it happened'. Following Giinther Miiller, 'the primordial form of epic is the "and then", a formula that sharply illuminates the difference of epic to lyric and drama' (in this volume p. 71). There was... and then... - if one adds the two together, one has the ideal outline of the narrated, the pattern of unreeling events triggered by the impetus of a first incident. So our first conclusion is: it is the poet's task to transform his ideas and opinions as well as his visions of space and characters into temporal processes, into events, or at least to embed them within these if he wants to make them narratable (erzdhlbar). In Herders terms this meant for the epos that every part 'must rush toward the action'; put into the language of the narrator Jean Paul it reads: 'The entire inner chain or the chain of reasoning must disguise itself as the flower chain of time' [our translation]. And Jean Paul assumes: 'This is the most

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difficult task' ('Dies ist das Schwerste'; Jean Paul, § 68, 176, resp. 230). We have deliberately chosen the findings of Lessing and Herder as the basis of our deliberations because especially Herder receives far too little attention for his fundamental achievements in the science of literature, unlike his contribution in literary history which has characterised German philology to this date. The basic conditions of narrating were already outlined in Herder's criticism [of Lessing], and, as far as Homer is concerned, their consequences for the narrative presentation of the world had already been realised. However, the insight that a piece of art constituted by language and characterised by defined movements as well as examinable contours is not the result of a chance correspondence of the two categories of time, but rather the result of their continuously changing tension did not cross Herder's mind yet, although he had already accepted Shaftesbury's concept of 'forming forms' and derived his understanding of the forming powers (Bildekrafte, energeia) of language from it. The tension between the simulated real events and their narrative mastery is initially based on the tension between empirical and language-based reality, i.e. intentional reality per se.3 Language cannot imitate objects and processes but it only may indicate and bring them to mind to the extent that is necessitated by the relevant purpose of the message. But by indicating, the speaker presents the whole issue from his perspective. With his selection from the unlimited ensemble, which is available to him in real or fictitious form, he constructs a limited whole, according to the principle that all forming, and especially the forming by human hand, is an omission.4 If these principles of indication and selection are obligatory in every kind of linguistic representation of the world then they must also be equally identifiable in all phenomena of narrative art. This provides us with a point of departure from which we can swiftly overcome the very old debate on theories of mimesis, from which even Lessing could not escape yet. For the double nature of the narrated process and the process of narration, better than any other phenomenon of narrating, al3

4

The indicative mode in the language based work of art is intentional because it points to a trans-literary entity! About intentionahty in detail: Ingarden Das literarische Kunshverk {The Literary Artwork) - Stenzel 'Philosophic der Sprache' ('Philosophy of language'), esp. 35ff. - Recently, Hamburger [1953] accentuates the distinction between real and literary reality with her thorough analysis of the fictional character of narrative works. About 'indication' Flemmmg [1925], 9f About 'selection' Lugowski [1932], 185; more in particular Milller [1944] and in this volume, 67-84.

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lows us to grasp the principle of indication and selection positively. Therefore, the comparison of narrated time (erzahlter Zeit) and time of narration (Erzahlzeit)5 in terms of observation and evaluation, even if it is just one among many other means, is initially the safest way to describe the relation between narrated reality and linguistic representation. Here, the general principles of indication and selection in terms of contraction (Raffing) and omission (Aussparung) manifest themselves so clearly that in many instances they even do not evade exact meas5

Using the terms 'ideal time' (action time) and 'real time' (time of speech), Heusler [1902] already conducted research on 'the dialogue in the older German narrating poetry' in 1902, and at the same time, Zielmski [1901] analysed the problem of 'Homeric succession' by examining the tension between the course of events and the presentation of events. Older than these scholarly approaches, and even older than the analyses of Herder and Lessing, are the remarks about the specific difficulty of time in narrative art by the authors themselves, e.g. by Fielding, Sterne, and then Jean Paul. These remarks are interwoven reflectively into their works Tom Jones, Tristram Shandy and Titan. As far as we can see, Hut [1923: 10] is the first one who contrasts the terms 'time of narration' QErzahlzeif) and 'time of plot' QHandlungszeif) but who disregards their specific tension by concentrating on the unity of time in drama. - In an epoch that is characterised by a sensitiveness to time, time relations in narrative texts have become one of the most important aspects of interpretation in the works of Muir [1928/1949] and E.M. Forster [1927/1947] as well as in a number of special research papers mostly based on Jean Pomllon's Temps et roman [1946] in which he analyses the philosophical premises of time phenomena. Important in terms of criticism: Gaetan Picon [1947]. - With regard to the theory of drama, 'time' has always been in the focus of interest. An overview can be found in Junghans' work Zeit im Drama [1931] in which he takes the terms 'expansion of time' CZeiterstreckung') and 'management of time' ('Zeitbewaltigung') as a basis. But in the course of his work, he increasingly misjudges his literary subject in favour of philosophical and psychological theorems despite the excellent individual considerations. - The structure of Petsch's chapters about time in Wesen und Form derErzahlkunst [1934/1942] and Wesen und Form des Dramas [1945] is obviously influenced by this book. Indeed, the tension between time expansion of 'the process of narration' ('Erzahlvorgang') and the 'narrated event' Qerzahlten Vorgang') has caught Petsch's attention before ([1930:] 266, see [1934/1942:] 163), but he also turns to the 'experience of time' (chrony -

—•time summary

• leap summa "iterative-durati

*• step summar

• def explicit '*• ind • implicit * hypothetical n DII and on story level T

n story level -

• time usage "ellipsis

c presentation/time congrv.

>chrony • frequency o r

tory level -

characters

• plot k space/time

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\ concretization of time (10 Nov 2010). Perception events systematically correspond to the so-called 'discourse events' defined in Meister, Jan Chnstoph (2003). Computing Action. A Narratological Approach. Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 4 5 ^ 8 . In general these events concern the transformation of the knowledge status of a consciousness observing the Active world. Discourse events are thus, on the one hand, delimited from the fundamental 'object events' (= transformations to the state of objects in the Active world), but, on the other hand, are positioned systematically below the 'outrageous events', which are always identifiable first in the interpretative ascnption of relevance, in the sense of an emphatic event concept.

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tion of the phenomenon of time, in reference to its constituents, we are also, on the other hand, orienting ourselves methodologically on the phenomenological approach of his adversary Husserl, following whom we can leave aside the question of the ontic status of the perceived objects and the characteristics assigned to them. Against this background the 'temporality' of narrative texts must thus be viewed, on the one hand, from the perspective of a Active event time, and, on the other, from that of the factual dependency on time of literary information processing. This dualism of event time and discourse time does not just express, in a specific way, the capacity for reflexive phrasing fundamentally anchored in language in the sense of 'speaking-about-speaking', of which narrative texts in the autothematic mode (can) make facultative use. This dualism is rather, insofar as it refers to 'time', an unavoidable and irrefutable one, which is always already a given. Whether the author, the narrator or some other Active narrative figure wants to bring it up or not: by narrating, they are already speaking to us in, and therefore about, 'temporality' - theirs as well as ours. In a narratological perspective this necessitates a threefold investigation: -

-

One, how at all - that is, with which principal conditions and prerequisites - is it possible to achieve an idea of the temporal order in a Active world through the reading of narrative texts? Two, how do we achieve a consciousness of the temporality of that mediative process itself, by virtue of which our pictorial representation of this Active world and its internal temporal order emerge? Three, to what extent does the temporality of the mediative process - independent of whether it comes to our consciousness or not - have a retroactive effect on our delineation of the Active world's chronology?

'Temporality', in terms of the Active world's always already 'doubled' being-in-timeness and the reception process (re^constructing it, thus attains an ontic dignity and primacy over the category of space. While a narrative text is given us materially 'in space' (e.g. in the form of a book), our conception of the spatial dimension of its 'world' often remains very abstract. Narrated space need not have a common border with our own real, existential experience of space. By contrast, the fact that the very process of reading, (re-)construction and interpretation necessarily takes place in real time, substantially determines our delineation of a Active chronological ordering of that Active world both

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formally and as regards content. This interdependency, particularly the dynamic feedback effects between phenomena of the discourse-temporal and object-temporal ordering, and their textual guidance, must receive special attention in a narratological model of the temporality phenomenon. A decisive failing of previous approaches, which (in one way or another) all fall under the methodological paradigm of the 'time of narration / narrated time' (Erzahlzeit I erzahlte Zeit) distinction, is the ontologising premise, often unreflectedly concomitant with this distinction, of a distinct temporality of Active worlds. In contrast, our perhaps most fundamental thesis is that there can be no separate 'Active' time in this sense - since, seen from the logic of how they are constituted, all stretches of time form an epistemological continuum. As a narratological undertaking, our model claims relevance for a very narrowly defined subject area: that of fictional prose.18 This is also a genre that is decisively shaped by engagement with the themes of 'time' and 'temporality', on the levels of both form and content. 'Time' and 'temporality' are, beyond this, epochal themes of philosophy. In light of this combination of content-formal and general intellectual-historical dignity, it is tempting for the literary theorist, in particular, to work from the basis of time-philosophical assumptions from textual theory and analysis, and to 'overshoot' to a general interpretation or even to a philosophising individual thesis. The perhaps best-known example of this is provided by Ricoeur (already mentioned above), with his emphatic evaluation of narrating literature as the privileged medium of human experience of time.- I will not be able to do justice to those kinds of philosophical ambitions here; too great also would be the risk of submitting another contribution to the dilettante 'Literary Philosophy of Time', as criticised by Gregory Currie.- The method of my 18

19

20

The concept of narrativity itself is of course anything other than unproblematic; see Sternberg, Meir (2001). 'How Narrativity Makes a Difference,' in: Narrative 9.2: 115-122. We will therefore formulate the following working concept: We will treat as 'narrative' that section of prose texts whose content level is constituted dominantly by linguistically represented 'object events' in the sense of the definition by Meister (2003). On the criticism of Ricoeur, see Chamberlain, Jane (1998). 'Thinking Time: Ricoeur's Husserl in Time and Narrative; m: Minerva - An Internet Journal of Philosophy 2 (see footnote 11). Currie, Gregory (1999). 'Can There Be a Literary Philosophy of Time?' m: J. Butterfield (ed): The Arguments of Time. Oxford: Oxford UP, 43-63. Curne's criticism is aimed particularly at the attempts of Ricoeur and Bakhtin to model a specifically literary form of time-experience. Currie argues, in opposition to them, that there can be no special literary (or otherwise representational) form of timeexperience, but only one: the real one.

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approach is rather largely that of an inductive-descriptive process, attempting to grasp the constituting logic of the 'temporality effect' stepby-step and 'bottom up'. However, I will try to sketch at the outset of our considerations the time-philosophical starting point that will determine the direction of our narratological approach. We will start with Augustine and thus with the classic of the philosophy of time. Thereafter, Husserl's philosophy of time and his conception of the 'time window' will be examined. The third section is dedicated to McTaggart in whose fundamental differentiation of two distinct time series we will again encounter the (not only) Augustiman division of objective time and subjective time experience. McTaggart's approach offers a possibility that has hitherto been, as I believe, insufficiently taken into consideration, namely to place the distinction, widespread in the theory of narrative, between discourse time and Active narrative time onto a more solid philosophical basis. In the fourth section, I will examine two examples from the reception of McTaggart - Le Poidevin's attempt to depict McTaggart's model in Possible Worlds semantics, and Bien's constructive interpretation of the model (which is nonetheless philosophically and not narratologically motivated). The fifth section shows how McTaggart's model can be mapped onto narrative texts and their processing; the following discusses what I term 'temporal operators' as the main devices by which narratives control our designing of temporal constructs. What will remain hidden in the following is the existentialist debate on time that is particularly bound up with the name Heidegger. This is not to deny the eminent significance of Heidegger's deliberations on the fundamental role of time as an existential horizon for human beings. It is simply that the themes broached there are outwith the remit of primarily text-empincally oriented narratology. .

The Augustiman Paradigm

In his Confessiones Augustine formulated a simple question: 'What is time?'- The problem turned out to be profound, and so is its discussion by Augustine. Heidegger, for example, counted the Confessiones 21

Saint Augustine (2008). The Confessions. Translated with an Introduction and Notes by Henry Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford UP (= Oxford World's Classics). See also the translation by A. Outler, Augustine: Confessions. (11.11.201029.11.01) or: The Confessions of Augustine. An Electronic Editon. Text and Commentary by James J. O'Donnell (11.11.2010).

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alongside the contributions of Aristotle and Kant - as one of the 'the three groundbreaking reflections on the nature of time' in Western philosophy.- However, in the debate on the philosophy of time, it is not the Confessions in their entirety that are examined, but rather the theses formulated, in the 11th book, on the relativity of human perception of time and the unreality of time. The autobiographical-theological context of these meditations is seldom taken into account in this field.23 From the perspective of the theologically interested Augustine commentators, on the other hand, the abrupt shift from autobiographical tale to speculative exposition, at the end of the 9* book, has been seen as problematic. This apparent change of genre made problematic the self-contained interpretation of the Confessiones as a didactic, autobiographical and confessional text." Both selective approaches (i.e. the philosophically motivated blending out of the autobiographical element, and the theologically motivated blending out of the speculative part of the text), however, do not, as Fischer (2000) has shown, do justice to the thoroughly sequential to22

23

24

Heidegger, Martin: 'Des hi. Augustmus Betrachtung ilber die Zeit. Confessiones lib XI', quoted by Fischer (2000: XI). Fischer, for his part, quotes from a hitherto unpublished copy of a lecture of Heidegger's in the Abbey of St Martin, Beuron, 26.10.1930, which will appear in volume 80 of Heidegger's complete works; cf Fischer, Norbert (2000). 'Einleitung,' in: Aurelius Augustinus: Was ist Zeit? Hamburg: Meiner, XI-LXIV). It is particularly his precedence in view of existentialist philosophy of time that is often emphasised; so for example in Brann, Eva T.H. (1999). 'Augustine As Phenomenologist: A Time Diagram,' m: Hopkins, B.C. (ed.). Phenomenology: Japanese and American Perspectives. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Also in Herrmann, Fnednch-Wilhelm von (1993). 'Augustinus und die phanomenologische Frage nach der Zeit,' m: Philosophisches Jahrbuch 100: 96-113. Compare O'Donnell's critical meta-commentary: 'The last three books of the Confessions are the pnncipal obstacle to the work's reputation for greatness in the literary, as well as the psychological or theological, order. One scholar recounted no less than nineteen different theories that had been devised to explain their presence and their relation to the rest of the work, then proceeded to add his own.' In: O'Donnell, James O. (2001) >http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/jod/twayne/aug5.html> (11.11.2010) . O'Donnell is here referring to Grotz, Klaus (1970). Die Einheit der 'Confessiones'. Tubingen: Diss. U of Tubingen. - On this question see also the section 'Zur Diskussion urn das hteransche Genus der Confessiones' in Fischer's (2000: XXVff; Fn 22) introduction to the edition of the Confessiones XI. Fischer refers, inter aha, to the example of the Wilhelm Bornemann edition, which simply omitted books 10-12. See: Augustins Bekenntnisse. In neuer Ubers. und mit einer EM. dargeboten von W. Bornemann. Gotha 1888. (=Bibhothek theologischer Klassiker 12).

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tality of the Confessions." The apparent gap in the transition from the ninth to the tenth and especially to the eleventh books of the Confessions makes the fundamental complexity of the themes of 'time' and 'temporality' exemplanly clear, and show that Augustine had already anticipated the basic idea of the Kantian argument: that of the unavoidable subjectivity of the empirical concept of time, which can be dispelled only through a transcendental or theological explanation of time. What Augustine reconstructs and relates in the first nine books of the Confessions is not, after all, only the disinterestedly observed case of someone else's biography, whose myriad individual moments and individual events are ultimately smelted to a solid chain by the conscientiousness and skill of the biographer. It is rather a case of his own life, which is relating itself and thereby encounters the paradox of always having to imagine itself standing outside that temporal concatenation in order to be able to make it all possible to describe it own entanglement in an ordered temporality. The tenth and eleventh books demonstrate with the transition from the level of representation to that of reflection, that this is a case of an, in the profoundest sense, 'time-conscious' autobiography that has become aware of its own apona. In these circumstances, it can no longer exhaust itself in objectivising the linkage of events represented as memory into the linearity of before - after. Rather, Augustine understands every point in the imaginary chain he 25

See Fischer (2000; cf Fn 22). Fischer's general interpretation, developed from the perspective of the eleventh chapter, sees in the autobiographical narration of Books 1-9 a practical realisation of Augustine's own fixedness in time, in Book 10 a reflexive abstraction from the autobiography to problems of memory, which is elucidated more thoroughly in Book 11 in terms of the problems of human understanding of time and our own existential fixedness in time. In the central 11 * book, Fischer sees three approaches to the clarification of the concept of time: an attempted empirical inference failed for Augustine with the realisation that this would lead to an unacceptable objectivising of time; the realisation that time is as a distentio animi an effect of the 'actions of the spirit, in which the past, present and future are realized' (ibid., p. LV) did provide, for Augustine, a plausible explanation, but would also indicate the aporetic consequences of the temporal 'stretching' of the spirit. So Augustine came to the conviction that going beyond the immanent distentio animi is possible only through transcendence and unification with God. - Paul J. Archambault (1984. 'Augustine, Time and Autobiography as Language,' m: Augustinian Studies 15: 7-13) proposes the thesis that Augustine 'establishes a theoretical basis for autobiographical narrative by showing, through his excellent analysis of memory, that life is not serial but that it can be entirely recalled in a single instant.' With that, the weighting is turned on its heads; the Augustinian meditation on time would then be serving the autobiography.

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has created also as one which obeys the dynamics of positioning in a second continuum - that of past-present-future. However, this recognition leads to a dilemma. Our acts of cognition are necessarily present and take place in the 'now'; on other hand, we claim to be able to 'remember' or even 'anticipate' ourselves: that is, to cogmtively process something that clearly no longer has empirical existence at the time of its thematisation. Cognition and perception thus come into conflict: if time is unavoidable, as perception claims, then there is nothing that can simultaneously be and not be; if, on the other hand, something can both be and not be, as cognition demonstrates, then time has become invalid as an organising principle. Augustine's well-known solution consisted in concluding that all time-determinations are unavoidably relative, and in formulating his thesis of a 'threefold present' - a present which is not just selective, i.e. which does not reduce itself to a given now-standpoint. Even the 'now' is more than just one single indexical point in time; rather, it is constituted from a stretch of time formed of several such points, whose entirety makes up the present. Embedded in this now-present, however, are also mental representations, called up by memory or anticipated by imagination, of - relative to the 'now' point in time - recent or prospective stretches of time, which we believe 'objectively' to be situated in the past or the future. So, both a remembered 'present of the past' and an imagined 'present of the future' are immanent components of the present we experience. The principal relativity, deduced in this way, of all objectivising time-determinations, which should be imagined as 'transcended' in a static, threefold present of the consciousness, aims for Augustine at a theological point: in the fleeting moments in which we engage reflectively with the fact of time's unreality, we experience the best possible analogy to the principally time-transcendent nature of the divine consciousness. Of course, this imagined timetranscendence, at all comprehensible only via intense abstract reflection, delivers only a caricature of actual divine extra-temporality. In this, Augustine does not merely argue, but rather demonstrates with his Confessions that it is not the objectivising-histonographical aspect of his autobiographical consciousness, but the aspect that reflexively questions its own prerequisites that will be unavoidably confronted with the quintessence of the theological or philosophical problem of determinism. For him, the profound phenomenological and conceptual complexity of 'time' and 'temporality' thus rests on the fact that every form of time determination necessarily contains a reflexive component and refers back to the perceiving subject and his own fixedness in time. Quite aside from the significance which this realisation has

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both theologically and philosophically, it is also fundamental to the rather humbler narratological investigation of the constituting logic of narratively evoked temporality effects.- The second Augustinian realisation also fundamental to our context is: the perception of 'time' in terms of temporal extension cannot be reduced to the perception of distinct points in time from which a stretch of time is formed - because this concept would call the identity of the perceiving subject into question. If we think of our own self as remaining itself over time, we clearly require the ability to synthetically observe distinct points in time as a stretch or a time frame. This raises the question of by what means and processes we perform precisely this temporal synthesis during the reception of narrative texts, and to what extent it is dependent upon empirically verifiable textual components. 2. Husserl's Phenomenological Approach: The 'Time Window' The two problems raised by Augustine - firstly: how can we explain time-determinations that retro-act upon the perceiving subject despite being undertaken by the self?; secondly: what establishes our capacity for the synthetic observation of distinct points in time as more comprehensive stretches of time or 'time frames' - are taken up in Husserl's philosophy of time. Husserl takes on the thesis, originating from Brentano (and indirectly from Kant), that the temporal determinations undertaken by us express nothing about the objective characteristics of the objects of perception. Objective time and subjective time-consciousness must be fundamentally divided, and Husserl, in keeping with his phenomenological approach, deals primarily with the 'suspension of objective time'" Thus, time does not interest him from the perspective of the 26

27

In contrast to the interpretation sketched here, see O'Donnell's exposition, which raises the subjectivity of time-expenence and sees this as contrasted by Augustine with the extra-temporal existence of God: 'Time is inherent in the created intellect, a category for describing the apparent transience and rmpermanence of reality. Time is not even a created thing, for it is a creation of created things. Intelligent created beings see the world around themselves in a framework of their own invention, which they call time. This characteristic distinguishes their expenence from that of their creator. God as creator sees all things simultaneously in a single vision, perceiving process and change but, freed of experiencing those things in temporal succession, he does not expenence time. The creator lives outside created things and therefore, a fortiori, outside time. Time cannot be, Augustine concludes, without created being' (O'Donnell 2001; cf Fn 24). This is already the title of the first paragraphs in the introduction to the 'Lectures

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perception of the characteristics, external to consciousness (in Husserl's sense, 'transcendent'), of objective items but rather from that of their consciousness-internal sensation; in other words, as a so-called 'piece of phenomenological data'. Three main tasks present themselves for a phenomenological investigation: firstly, 'to describe the given naive and scientific consciousness of time according to its sense (time is taken by us to be what? temporal relations present themselves as what? and what sorts of relationships are meaningfully intended in the sense belonging to the representation of time, to this intuition of time?)';- secondly, the description of this consciousness's content, whereby sensory (empirical) and interpretative (cognitive) contents have to be distinguished; thirdly, however, the the exhibition of the particular cases in which 'adequate intuition of time' is perhaps given; the exhibition of that which is quasi-temporal (duration, succession, and the like), which is not interpreted transcendently and 'objectively' as reaching out beyond itself and which asserts nothing with regard to an 'objective time.' On the contrary, the quasi-temporal is interpreted immanently, that is, taken simply and just as it is, and makes up the proper material that, as content of apprehension, underlies the interpretation that constitutes objective time.29

In light of the over-arching aims of Husserl's argument, the most explosive part is contained in what is modestly referred to as the third subtask. An individual 'adequate intuition of time' expresses nothing reliable about objective time - our sensation of the simultaneity of two phenomena, for example, may appear to us to be a substantive phenomenon, but does not stand up to an, in the physical sense, 'objective' investigation. Nonetheless, there is a route that leads from time phenomena as experienced to time as an inter-subjective construct:

28 29

on the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time' in the winter semester 1904/05 in Gottingen. See Husserl, Edmund (1991). On the Phenomenology of Internal Time (1893-1917). Translated by John Barnett Brough. Dordrecht: Kluwer (= Collected Works. 4); hereafter referred to as Husserl, PhCiT..- On the notorious editorial history of the original lecture manuscript worked on by Martin Heidegger and Edith Stern, which was first published in 1928 in the JahrbuchfurPhilosophie und phanomenologische Forschung (Vol. 9), see alongside the translator's introduction to vol. 10 of the Husserliana also Wiehl, Reiner, ed. (1981). Geschichte der Philosophie in Text und Darstellung Vol. 8: 20Jahrhundert. Stuttgart: Reclam, 89f Husserl P/iCiT, 194.

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The 'sensed' temporal data are not merely sensed; they are 'charged' with characteristic modes of apprehension, and to these in turn belong certain claims and entitlements: to measure against one another the times and temporal relations that appear on the basis of the sensed data, to bring them into this or that objective order, and to distinguish various apparent and actual orders. What becomes constituted here as objectively valid being is finally the one infinite objective time in which all things and events - bodies and their physical qualities, psyches and their psychic states - have their definite temporal positions, which we can determine by means of a chronometer.30 However, truly objective time as a 'transcendent' structure entering consciousness directly via experience (i.e., independent of all perception and sensation) is something that lies beyond the horizon of phenomenological knowledge. That is why Husserl does not undertake the deduction of immanent consciousness of time from the a priori of objective time, but instead: 'We seek to bring the a priori of time to clarity by exploring the consciousness of time, by bringing its essential constitution to light, and by exhibiting the apprehension-contents and act-characters that pertain - perhaps specifically - to time and to which the a priori temporal laws essentially belong.'31 Husserl's subject is thus 'time' neither as an a priori form, nor as an objective content - it is time as an immanent construct of consciousness. But how do we create time as a construct on the basis of our sensations? With this question, Husserl again picks up Brentano's approach. Brentano had recognised that the sensation of duration and succession is not necessarily created through the objectively given continuity and sequentiality of the stimuli, but rather via associations generated in the consciousness itself, or, as Husserl comments: The fact that the stimulus endures still does not mean that the sensation is sensed as enduring; it means only that the sensation also endures. The duration of sensation and sensation of duration are two very different things. And this is equally true of succession. The succession of sensations and the sensation of succession are not the same.32

30 31

32

Ibid., 7. Ibid., 10. By these 'temporal laws', Husserl means the features of the unlinearily directedness of the time arrow and the unambiguous determination of individual points in time within a continuum.

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Husserl develops this train of thought largely on the example of the connection between notes and melody. A melody is something we perceive as a temporally ordered sequence of distinct notes, of which each has a certain duration. This means for our consciousness that, firstly, we do not only register the note currently being heard, but can also retain the preceding ones, and, secondly, that with each new note, all preceding and remembered notes experience a continuing modification they move further and further into the past. Up to now, however, this explains only how we are able to integrate the individual notes in their succession into a melody; what remains unexplained is how we sense the duration of individual notes and how we can then reproduce this duration in our consciousness by integrating the notes into the complex sensation of a melody. The problem intensifies if we do not take as our starting point the perception of a melody that consists of different notes, but investigate the perception of a constantly changing (i.e. temporally and qualitatively regular) object. Its perception, too, does, after all, take place in a physiologically determined way, through a sequence of individual acts of perception. The differences inherent in the perceptions, however, remain without any recognisable qualitative profile and do not establish any possibility of creating a representation of duration on the basis of regularly clocked acts of perception. And the problem becomes even more distinct if we consider the ongoing perception of an unchanging object - the sequence of apparently identical acts of perception does not in any way justify a temporality of the perceived as a phenomenon of temporal extension. Until now, we have been considering a pure succession of perceptions, but not the perception of succession, to say nothing of duration. Our consciousness is, at best, that of a constant sequence of momentary perceptions of an object, something which Husserl calls 'original consciousness of time'. But how do we achieve a corresponding 'reproductive consciousness of time'33, which remembers not only the past object but simultaneously also the entire complex of recent perceptions in which this object was originally embedded? Husserl solves this problem by introducing a fundamental distinction. On the one hand are continuously modified temporal determinations, which are assigned to phenomena not in an objective-qualitative, but rather a modal and therefore subjective-relational sense (now, past, future). On the other hand, there are areas of consciousness in which phenomena become objectivised according to the mode of their appearance in the intentional, retentional and protentional consciousness. At the start of the perception process, the note is registered intentionally 33

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as a so-called 'note-now'. Already the perception of the present must thus be imagined not as being of a single point but as the registering of an extended time window, in which the objects directly bordering the point are kept present in the mode of the 'primary memory'": thus it encompasses also the 'just-past' and the 'directly-imminent'. It is only on the border of the window that the perception's modal-temporal determination is transformed to a true 'past'. Here, the perception becomes the object of the retentional consciousness, which no longer performs a simply 'primary' memory function, but a 'reproduction of the past'.35 In this retention is contained not only the past perception but also the fact of its modal designation as past. Moreover: not only this one, but also the perception assigned to the now, both appear in a new, conscious temporal modification. In retention, all preceding instances of retention are stored in the sense of a retention of retentions.- So, retention is not the mere imagination and storing of the contents of a now-perception that is directly in the past - it is always also the perception of the past as being past, the pre-past and its being pre-past. For Husserl, perception itself encompasses all three areas: intention, retention, pretention. It is neither restricted to a Active mathematical point on a time line, nor does it adhere to the idea of a reality consisting of a singular now-point. For Husserl, these are sheer fictions and lead to absurdities. In phenomenology we do not have to do with objective time but with the data of adequate perception. This requires us to consider perceptions, with their appearing now, past, and future, as given. Reduced, they yield the evident now, past, and future,

IV

In place of an objectivising theory of time, which presumes the abstraction of the one-dimensional now and therefore a linear conception of time as a sequence of such points, Husserl proposes a phenomenological conception characterised by a quasi-spatial concept of time. In that, he starts from what he considers the evident fact that our perceptions are not limited to a single point in time, but always encompass a socalled 'time window' - a piece of evidence that for Husserl also counts as an essential indicator of the 'givenness' of the self that Kant had cat34 35 36

37

Ibid., 170. Ibid., 171. Here, as in the following, we are leaving to one side the entire complex of the protentional consciousness postulated by Husserl, the functions of which can be thought of as analogous with those of retention. Husserl PhCiT, 174; emphases in the original.

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egoncally and irrevocably divided into an empirical and a transcendental ego.38 That is the actual point of Husserl's theory of time: in that the retentional consciousness does not only keep the 'image' of a past note present in the memory, but also makes conscious the fact and the measure of its pastness, it reflexively creates a consciousness of duration. Furthermore, with this act it simultaneously constitutes itself as retentional consciousness; it thus constitutes itself and justifies the immanent conception of time. Using the example of time, consciousness's ability to give evidence of itself is proved. - It is only with reference to this wider context that the emphasis with which Husserl sums up can be understood: [...] obviously it must be claimed as something absolutely given itself that a retention, in which what is just past in its unity with the now and the always new now comes to absolute itself-giveness, already inheres in the perception. If we scan the flowing tree, the tree becomes given in a temporal form. And if we hear a bit of melody, we do not hear, merely single tones, even less moments of single tones or mathematical tone-nows, matching the now-points that could be abstracted in thought. We rather hear enduring tones - specifically, tones combining into a tone-formation; and we grasp this whole tone-formation as a formation that is steadily building up and as that which is heard. And in the unitary regard continuously directed towards it, we grasp the unity of the total perceptual appearance of this tone-formation as something absolutely given itself. And if the whole tone-phase is finished, retention still apprehends the just-having-been of the total phase that has there elapsed; and it still apprehends the total perceptual appearance in the manner of an appearance that has just been and that no longer contains moments of actually present perception. The evidence here concerns the just-having-been by means of which a relation of the object to the flowing now is co-given; and the object cannot be detached from this now. All of this is found in phenomenological reduction under its continual suspension of present or past natural reality.39 What perspectives does Husserl's philosophy of time - which can here be only portrayed in abbreviation - open up for our narcological investigation? At least two aspects seem worth considering. Husserl's approach delivers a philosophical basis for the plausibility of an (in a wider sense) 'constructive' modelling of narratively evoked temporal effects, whose emphasis is not on a planar reconstruction of an assumedly 'objective' temporal structure of the ordo naturalis and the 38

39

This interpretation of Husserl's philosophy of time, in the sense of a critical reading of Kant, follows the theses of Chamberlain (1998; cf. Fn 11). Husserl PhCiT, 355; emphases in the original.

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concomitant ontologising stratification of distinct 'times', but rather on the dynamics of the constituting process itself. Essential in this context is particularly the indication that merely temporally segmenting acts of perception does not in itself necessarily imply the perception of temporality. Transferred to the subject area of a narrated world: the representation of a temporal order in the Active world does not arise necessarily from the trivial fact that each word denotes another object or another representation and that ever new quasi-perceptions of the mental images evoked by these words are performed successively. If Husserl is right, temporality is constructed by our consciousness only under the presumption of a non-linear change of the content of perception - i.e., there where we experience acceleration, expansion and compression. Moreover, we can experience temporality only when true retention (or protention) is present, where it is not a case of the primary representation of an object, but where we, remembering, generate a representation of the perception of an object. Remembering in the sense of 'representing an object in our fantasy [...] is having an apparition in the present that possesses the character of representation.'- We also have to add how a narrative text, particularly with regard to time, can awake that consciousness of the representational character of the images evoked by it - already one suspects that, in view of this, the conventionalised use of tenses also plays a role, as does the explicit designation of Active objects and events by means of time-determinations: both establish the distance between the perceived, which is a Active entity, and the perceiving real consciousness of the reader, without which a consciousness of its representational character cannot emerge. Following Husserl we therefore have to understand temporality and also narratively coded temporality - as a phenomenon of difference in two ways. The first aspect of this quality of difference is of a qualitative nature: neither a sequence of unchanging nor of constantly changing perceptions enables us to become conscious of temporality; this can be done only through a succession of quantitatively and qualitatively discrete individual perceptions - experiencing time rests on the dynamics becoming conscious, not on mere sequentially.41 The second 40 41

Ibid., 165. This sense is also that taken by Meir Sternberg, who wants to trace the concept of 'narrativity' itself back to the temporal dynamics that result from the dichotomy histoire/recit - i.e. the transformation of the natural temporality of the represented happenings through the teleological (poetical-affectively, communication-strategically or situational determined) temporality of the representation happenings. If one follows this thought further, then isochronal narratives would be neither 'narrative' nor would they possess any 'temporality'. On this, see Sternberg, Meir

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aspect of this quality of difference is an ontic one: a consciousness of temporality can emerge only where we have a consciousness of the represented character of past perceptions, which are represented in memory. It is in this doubled sense that we will have to model narrative 'temporality itself as a form of representational consciousness'42 in the context of our narratological research. 3. McTaggarts A/B/C-senes Theory Considered in a narratological perspective, the philosophical approaches to time and time perception which I have discussed so far may serve to highlight individual aspects of our experience and conceptualisation of time through narratives. But neither of them offers a comprehensive model that could be fully mapped onto the phenomenon of narratively induced temporality constructs. Ironically enough, the philosophical model that will take us further in this regard is the one which denies the reality of time: that of McTaggart. Beside Heidegger, McTaggart has exercised the greatest effect on the debate in the 20th century. Yet aside from their common theme, the difference between Heidegger and McTaggart could hardly be larger: McTaggart's argument is logical-analytical and not existentialist;43 the development of

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(1992). 'Telling in Time (II): Chronology, Teleology, Narrativity,' in: Poetics Today 13.3: 515ff. Also Sternberg (2001; cf. Fn 18). HusserlP/iCiT, 164. This designation refers pnmanly to the method not the subject of his philosophy. In this regard, McTaggart, as a Hegel specialist, is rightly classified by Jerome B. Schneewmd under the rubric of a 'metaphysician'. See Schneewmd, Jerome B. (1967). 'McTaggart, John McTaggart Ellis,' in: Encyclopedia ofPhilosophy, vol. 5. London/NewYork: Macmillan, 229-231. - A companson of the essay discussed below with McTaggart's earlier Hegel commentary shows the impulse for the development of unreality thesis originated from the Hegel exegesis. In his Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic (1896), McTaggart explicates in the 5* chapter ('The Relation of the Dialectic to Time') the contrary theses of finite and infinite time; both are criticised as contradictory. In section 146, his conclusion anticipates his later argument: 'Since either hypothesis as to the extension of time leads us into equal difficulties, our course should surely be, not to accept either, but to reject both. Time must, we are told, be either finite or infinite. But there is a third alternative. There may be something wrong in our conception of time, or rather, to speak more precisely, there may be something which renders it unfit, in metaphysics, for the ultimate explanation of the umverse, however suited it may be to the finite thought of every-day life. If we ask whether time, as a fact, is fimte or infinite, we find hopeless difficulties in the way of either answer. Yet, if we take time as an ultimate reality, there seems no other alternative. Our only resource is to

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his thought, moreover, requires no monograph, but was presented in an essay of less than twenty pages.- Nevertheless, his controversial thesis that time is 'unreal' because its logical deduction leads into an insolvable paradox has kept time philosophers busy for almost one hundred years. McTaggart's argument is as follows:45 temporal positions and events- can be ordered in two ways, in the linear succession of an 'earlier - later' stretch of time, or also in the sequence of 'past-presentfuture'. The first organising principle McTaggart calls the B-senes; the second provides a so-called A-senes. Events are also organised in a third, non-temporal way - namely in the varied forms of non-temporal sequence, for example by the organising principle of the alphabet. This extra-temporal sequence he calls the C-senes. McTaggart presumes that 'time' is necessarily determined through the concept of transition and that the direction in which it runs is unambiguous. From the first premise follows that 'time' exists only under the condition that the event, first imagined in a time-neutral C-senes, can be assigned changing A-senes predicates. For this time-determination, the B-senes predicates do not come into consideration, for two reasons: firstly, because they themselves would have to have been arranged on the basis of a temporal order; that is, they assume what they would have to prove. Secondly, because the B-predicates of events cannot change at all - since what has once been 'earlier' than something else will always remain so, or else the concept of linear temporal order would be called into question. But what is the situation regarding the possibility of finding a basis for temporal ordering within the C-senes? This undertaking fails at the second premise: non-temporal organising principles, such as the alphabet, do indeed determine a sequence, but no direction (I can spell from Z to A just as well as from A to Z). Onginal and also changing temper -

44 45

46

conclude that time is not an ultimate reality.' - Quoted from the electronic edition, (12.11.2010). Original edition: A Commentary on Hegel's Logic. New York: Russell & Russell 1964. McTaggart, J. Ellis (1908). "The Unreality of Time,' in: Mind 17: 457^174. Here we are largely taking on the portrayal in Schneewind 1967 (cf Fn 43) but are supplementing it with the exposition of the C-senes. A usable but for short summary is provided by Savitt, Steven: 'Being and Becoming in Modern Physics,' in: E.N. Zalta (ed.). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2008 Edition), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2008/entries/spacetime-bebecome/ (12.11.2010). McTaggart talks about events in the narrower sense of 'transformations'.

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al determinations of events given in a time-neutral C-senes can thus only exist by virtue of the A-senes: 'time' is therefore an effect of the mapping of an 'earlier - later' A-sequence onto the elements of the Csenes.47 Without an A-senes, there is no time. But the assumption of an A-senes leads - according to McTaggart - to an infinite regress: 1. To be able to be a valid element of the A-series, an 'event' must have all A-features; it must be able to have the predicates 'past', 'present' and'future'assigned to it. 2. This assignment of predicates clearly cannot occur at one and the same point in time, since this would be contradictory. 3. The obvious solution seems to lie in the assumption that these irreconcilable predicates can be assigned to the element at different points in time. 4. Then, however, each of these three points in time, insofar as these, after all, must take place in one and the same temporal continuum, would have to be defined, in turn, in a second A-series. With that, the requirement made of the assignment event is exactly that which has been applied to the 'event' under point 1 - and so begins the infinite regress. With that, McTaggart conceives of time as 'unreal' - it is a logically self-contradictory construct of our consciousness, which cannot cones pond to anything in objective reality, which is non-contradictonly organised. For him, this does not, however, mean that the discussion of time is meaningless, since it would be nonsensical to deny that we have a subjective perception of time. He conceives of this perception as centred on the concept (shaped by E.R. Clay) that William James- labelled the 'specious present' and took as the starting point of his cognitive-psychological explication of the functioning of human perception of time: the 'time window' whose extension varies individually, in which the individual perceptions encompassed by it appear to us to be 47

48

McTaggart (1908: 460): 'Changes must happen to the events of such a nature that the occurrence of these changes does not hinder the events from being events, and the same events, both before and after the change [...] Take any event - the death of Queen Anne, for example - , [ . . . ] At the last moment of time - if time has a last moment - the event in question will still be a death of an English Queen. And in every respect but one it is equally devoid of change. But in one respect it does change. It began by being a future event. It became every moment an event in the nearer future. At last it was present. Then it became past, and will always remain so, though every moment it becomes further and further past.' James, William (1886). 'The Perception of Time,' m: Journal of Speculative Philosophy 20: 374^107, repr. James, Wiliam (1899). The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1. New York: Holt, 605-642.

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subjectively 'simultaneous', and which we use as the subjective anchor for future-oriented anticipations and past-oriented memories. McTaggart sums up correspondingly: Our conclusion, then, is that neither time as a whole, nor the A series and B series, really exist. But this leaves it possible that the C series does really exist. The A series was rejected for its inconsistency. And its rejection involved the rejection of the B series. But we have found no such contradiction in the C series, [...]. It is, therefore, possible that the realities which we perceive as events in time-series do really form a non-temporal series. It is also possible, so far as we have yet gone, that they do not form such a series, and that they are in reality no more a series than they are temporal. But I think [...] that the former view, according to which they really do form a C series, is the more probable. Should it be true, it will follow that in our perception of these realities as events in time, there will be some truth as well as some error. Through the deceptive form of time, we shall grasp some of their true relations.49 4. A-lB-senes, Possible Worlds and the Formal Conditions of Time Consciousness McTaggart's reasoning took up and juxtaposed not only the core arguments of the theological (Augustine) and the epistemological-transcendental (Kant) considerations - it also anticipated- the fundamental argument on which Husserl's phenomenological approach was based: Human perception of time is centred on the - objectively counterfactual, but existentially necessary - experience of a distinct 'now', aptly termed the 'specious present' by E. Robert Kelly already in 1882: The present [...] is really a part of the past - a recent past - delusively given as being a time that intervenes between the past and the future. Let it be named the specious present, and let the past, that is given as being the past, be known as the obvious past.51 The concept was later elaborated upon by, among other, William James and CD. Broad. The present has no clear delineation; it is a fleeting 49 50

51

McTaggart 1908: 473 (cf. Fn 44). It is a case of anticipation despite its appeanng after 1904 (Husserl's lecture in Gottmgen) insofar as McTaggart's basic idea was already developed in his 1896 Hegel commentary (cf.Fn 43). Anonymous (= E. Robert Kelly 1882). The Alternative: A Study in Psychology. London: Macmillan; quoted after: James 1899: 609 (cf. Fn48).

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phenomenon. This realisation underlies Augustine's idea of a 'threefold present' as much as it informs Husserl's reasoning: in a philosophical perspective our perception of the present cannot be understood as the perception of something located at a defined point in time, but only as something appearing in an elongated 'time window' (Husserl), and which moves continuously through this field, already possessing in it a direct before and after. Similarly to Augustine and Husserl, McTaggart also clearly presumes in his conception of time as such - that is, as an effect that he tries to describe by connecting the A-/B-/C-senes - that our experience of time is to be thought of in dependence upon so-called 'indexical' representations within our consciousness. Indexical in this sense: both remembering and anticipating also indicate the position of the perceiving or judging intellect; again a thought that we have already encountered in Augustine and then in developed form in Husserl (protention, retention)." Despite these parallels in regard to the phenomenological conceptualisation of 'time', the emphasis of McTaggart's argument naturally lies on the attempt to trace the problem or the correlation between objective time and subjective experience of time back to its metaphysical basis. With McTaggart's thesis of the 'unreality' of time, the question of the reality of time, already raised by Augustine, receives a negative ruling. But McTaggart's conclusion sounds more radical than was intended. As a Hegelian he does not, for example, take on the position represented by Kant, that time is no more than a 'transcendental schema'.53 And it must also be remembered that McTaggart was very 52

On the concept of indexical representation, see Mohr, Georg (2000). 'Indexahsche Representation von Zeit und die Simultaneity von innerer und auBerer Erfahrung,' in: C. Kupke (ed.). Zeit und Zeitlichkeit. Wiirzburg, 119-137. - Mohr examines in particular the use of the time indicator 'now'. His conclusion: the indexical reference is 'characterised by a specific referential two-dimensionality (121), which corresponds to a 'double-perspectived consciousness' of the speaker. The twodimensionality emerges as a result of the necessary 'restriction of the subjectcentred perspective' of the subject saying 'now', with which the mearnng 'at the point in time of my present statement' is expressed. With that, the world is positioned as an intersubjective frame of reference in which something happens at the point in time of the statement, and which is the object of the statement. Thus, in the 'now' overlap the 'series of speech events' and the 'series of events that become the object of speech' (129); the consequence if the 'simultaneity of the indicated event with the event of indications' (129) - own translations.

53

McTaggart (1908: 474) contrasts Kant and Hegel as follows: 'If this view is adopted, the result will so far resemble those reached by Hegel rather than those of Kant. For Hegel regarded the order of time-series as a reflexion, though a distorted in the real nature of the timeless reality, while Kant does not seem to have

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conscious of having refuted, with his demonstration, the 'reality' of a specific concept of time - namely the concept based on the premises of one-dimensionality, uni-lmeanty and reality, i.e. objectivity. For him, other conceptions are thoroughly possible, among them a time that, though 'merely' phenomenologically given, is nested within itself." His conclusion is thus essentially Solomonic: time may be unreal from a metaphysical perspective - however, it still promotes a recognition in us, because, despite its erroneousness, it also unintentionally gives us an insight into the world's true organising principle - represented by the C-senes. With that, McTaggart's approach offers a privileged point of contact for narratological investigations, for which (at least in the subject area 'fictional literature') the question of the 'reality' of the objects and relations in the narrated world is nonsensical anyway. If, as McTaggart claims, 'time' is unreal, but finds its meaning in that we use it as a kind of explorative construct - where, if not in its application to something that is already by definition 'unreal', could the genesis and the function of 'time as a construct', from the perspective of an A-/B-/C-senes, be better understood? Precisely this question has been investigated by Le Poidevin.55 He examines the special case of the interpretation of the temporal structure of fictional events, as it arises in dependence on an assessment of the truth value of fictional propositions within the limits of Possible Worlds semantics. Le Poidevin ultimately reaches the analogue conclusion of McTaggart's: the temporal 'nature of narrative', too, is fundamentally called into question by our intuitive conception of 'time as transition' in terms of the A-senes. In his line of reasoning, Le Poidevin reformulates the McTaggart model in propositional-semantic terms. Following this approach two types of statements about 'time' can be distinguished: a) indexical ones, i.e. those that refer back to the subject of the statement as a point of reference. These are statements about the A-series; b) non-indexical ones, i.e. those that perform a relational determining of position in the earlier - later continuum, which happens either through the application of an absolute chronological marking of events, or also

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contemplated the possibility that anything in the nature of the noumenon should correspond to the time order which appears in the phenomenon.' Ibid.: 'And how are we to deal with the appearance? If we reduce time and change to appearance, must it not be to an appearance which changes and which is in time, and is not in time, then shown to be real after all?' Le Poidevin, Robin (1988). 'Time and Truth in Fiction,' m: The British Journal of Aesthetics 28: 248-258.

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inferentially, e.g. that over which the temporal interpretation of causal relations is inferred. These are statements about the B-series. With McTaggart, we have to assume that the position of an event in 'time' is to be essentially determined via the A-senes. We must be able to trace B-senes statements back to A-senes 'facts' or A-senes 'statements', from which they become semantically deducible as elements in the mass of logically valid inferences- But - and this is the decisive question - which way leads in the opposite direction, from B-senes statements about the events in a fictional world back to the A-senes statements and where - i.e. on which observing subject - would these A-senes statements be anchored? This problem, too, had already been addressed in principle by McTaggart himself (on the example of Don Quixote); he did, however, see it as a nonsensical question, since he was less interested in the logical problems of truth-neutral A-senes statements than in those of A-senes 'facts'. But if we consider the fictional text in itself as an empirical Asenes, as Le Poidevin suggests, the series of 'mental events' in the reader's consciousness can now be taken into consideration. We then focus on the succession of the imaginations elicited by the text, which are generated one after the other and which thus, seen objectively, do constitute a real B-senes, but which, evaluated subjectively, form instead an empincal A-senes. However, that merely tells us something about the temporality of the cognition process and not about the Active events and their temporal structure as such. Alongside this orthodox argument, there is, however, a second which is formulated not in ontological terms, but semantically and reflects the problem not in regard of the status of the 'facts' (Active vs. real) but that of the 'statements' (fictional vs. factual). Indeed, in this perspective we are no longer talking about afictive world, but about zfictional one; a world whose charactenstic lies not in what it is, but in how it is being refened to, namely by way of fictional (rather than factual, i.e. referential) statements.57A fictional world in the sense of possible worlds semantics (according to which all statements about that world lie within the scope of the modal operator of fictionality) absolutely does allow the possibility of ordering the individual events in the form of its 'own', disjunctive, fictional B-senes. Yes, one can even theoretically imagine that this kind of 'possible world' also 'has' its own, disjunctive (i.e. not identical with our real one), factual A-senes. However, what one is unable to imagine is how, under this presumption of 'doubled' A-/B-time series, statements 56 57

Cf. ibid., 249. On the distinction^-ve /fictional cf. Fn 2.

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could be made in the real time series about the ordering of the fictional one: [...] if the adventures of Don Quixote take place in a possible world, then that world will have its own B-series, not connected temporally to us. Similarly, there can be disjoint A-series: each world may have its own past, present, and future, unconnected to ours. The difficulty arises if we try to combine the idea that A-series statements are semantically independent of B-series ones with the possibility of making A-series statements about fictional events. If we treat 'In the world of fiction fit is true that [...]' as a sentential operator locating the referents of the terms which follow it in a possible world [...], then temporal expressions such as 'before' as in 'It is true in f that (p before q)' will not locate the events referred to in the actual world. However, the trick will not work for A-series terms. That is, placing 'p is past' within the scope of the sentential operator will lead to an incoherent statement. This is because we cannot make sense of an A-series temporally unconnected with ours which is not relativised to some event, e.g., 'p is past relative to q'. In other words any A-series statements which are genuinely semantically independent of B-series statements will be about our A-series.58 Put more simply: every concrete (not made within a fiction) statement about the location of an event in a Active continuum of past-present-future (= a Active A-senes) is unavoidably a statement about our own position in our real time - unless we were to refer this statement back to a starting point in the Active B-senes, which would lead to an infinite regress. The special case of the constitution of time in a fictionally narrated possible world seems equally aporetic, if not even more problematic than the 'time' perception in the real world discussed by McTaggart. To corroborate his argument, Le Poidevin discusses three conceivable objections: 1. 'Narrative statements are largely A-series statements in the past tense; one can undertake the required relational determination on the basis of grammatical designations.' - This type of foundation Le Poidevin dismisses as purely 'surface tensing', which loses its effect if we imagine ourselves into the world of the story. 2. 'But is it not the case that precisely this 'imagining' ourselves into a fictional-immanent time defines the necessary subjective-temporal reference point for Active A-series statements?' - No: because our 'imagining' is conceived in terms external to the Active world. There are no 58

Le Poidevin 1988: 251; emphases in the original (cf. Fn 55).

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textual statements that immanently refer to this imagination and thus make it into a (fictionally claimed) part of the fictional world itself: '... what narrative would allow us to infer that 'It is true in f that I (the reader) exist?'59 3. 'In fiction itself, B-series specifications are made (explicit date specifications or contexts that lead inferentially to them). These refer to real, historical dates and events, which allow a connection to our real world to be established.' - Le Poidevin's reply: since historically counter-factual statements are also made in fiction, one has to - in order to avoid contradictions - assume that they do not really refer to our B-series, but to a third'parallel world'.60 None of the three 'common sense' objections has so far been able to conclusively show how one could find a reliable fiction-immanent reference point for A-senes statements about B-senes facts, which would not in turn be somehow dependent upon the placing of a reference point in the real A-senes of our own 'time'. However, there does appear to be one more possibility: We assume that every fictional report is fundamentally to be imagined as having been expressed by an immanent narrator. With that, the anchor point of the A-senes statements, which our premises imply are absolutely necessary for building up a temporal structure, is placed firmly inside the fictional world: 'The suggestion is to interpret all fiction [...] as being (explicitly or implicitly) told from the first-person perspective and that perspective determines the position of events in the fictional A-senes.'61 59

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Ibid., 252. - Le Poidevin makes it too easy for himself here. These kinds of socalled 'metaleptic' statements are fairly common, particularly in late 18* / early 19th century Romantic and 20th century postmodern literary narratives. On the narratological concept as such see Pier, John: 'Metalepsis,' in: P. Hilhn et al. (eds.). the living handbook of narratology. Hamburg: Hamburg University Press.