The Problem of Time

Abstract

To specify what we mean by time, it is sufficient to define it as convergent and divergent movements which persist in a discontinuous succession and change in a continuity of heterogenous moments. This delimitation places time outside mere philosophical theories of time. The sociologist cannot participate in the arguments over the justification nor the abolition of time in favor of eternity which many philosophers from Parmenides and Plato to Hegel have been tempted to do. As a matter of fact, the theories of the “Living eternity” of Plotine, Saint Augustine, Schelling and Hegel, who reduce human time to divine time, only seem to present the most diffused formulas for the destruction of real time in eternity. Our descriptive definition of time also avoids taking a position on the subject of the primacy of ontological time or of “consciousness of time”. There was a long tradition of identifying time with the “consciousness of time”, and the “consciousness of time” with individual consciousness (Janet). Even philosophers who have revolutionized the interpretation of the “consciousness of time” by rendering it problematic, as Bergson and Husserl have done, have not been able to break away from idealistic subjectivism.