Stretching Our Intentions Through Time, Research Time, 26/10/2017

Here’s an interesting argument that I found in The Human Condition. It’s another example of how Hannah Arendt’s thinking blends ontological and ethical matters in ways that work.

She describes a foundational aspect of our experience of time – how we develop our most visceral conceptions and feelings for the time beyond the present. This goes beyond just remembering and imagining. Both of those are acts carried out in the present.

Remembering refers to the past and imagining can refer to the future, but these acts don’t connect our intentions and worldly activity beyond the present. These acts remain in the present – they don’t extend our action beyond the moment.

So we aren’t really experiencing the past and the future, only calling possibilities and memories before our thoughts. We can experience the past and the future, but it takes a much more intense act than speculation.

When I was partying in my early 20s, I had a
friend who, at the height of his drunkenness,
would scream, "I can see through time!"

Experiencing time beyond the hazy boundaries of the moment is a matter of physical reach there, spreading ourselves four-dimensionally.

Forgiveness and promising. These are the acts by which we physically reach into the past and future – essentially moral and social acts.

Forgiveness is to free someone from the consequences of a past act. It erases that old action from your relationship with that person. An action whose direct intention reaches into the past and changes it.

It may just be in the context of this one relationship between a few people, but it’s still changing the past – nullifying an event, deadening its consequences.

Promising is, parallel to forgiveness, the act of changing the future. Now, the future doesn’t yet exist – it literally hasn’t happened yet* – so you aren’t changing some pre-existing future.

* Please do not bring general relativity or any of the implied conceptions of time – block time, timeless time – into this conversation. I’m just talking about the human experience of time in the flow of our movement.

No, you're changing what would be into what can be. A promise is a reach into the future to create it – an act of manipulating existence into a particular shape. Our intentions in our promises push our actions forward in time as the promise becomes a goal, an attractor for our action.

These actions are possible only through social relationships – building bonds of trust, reliability, and obligation. Communities are constituted here.

But the constitution of communities and friendships are bound up with the extension of our experience beyond the present moment and into a smeared duration of practical awareness. Building our social bonds requires stretching our intentionality into the past the future – extending our presence from the present into a long stretch of time.

Self-conscious creatures become social through stretching their intentionality along entirely new vectors. Promising and forgiving makes us four-dimensional creatures. These acts make us more than timely – becoming temporal.

When Machines Have Intentions, Men Become Machines, Research Time, 21/08/2013

The more Jean-Paul Sartre I read, the more I appreciate his prescience. As I read more of his exploration of scarcity and its material articulations, I find ideas that would become momentous in major philosophies in subsequent decades casually thrown around as Sartre makes his points and moves on. This time, it’s a curious idea about the actions of inanimate objects and systems of bodies.

He discusses what he considers a curious way of speaking that he says only became prevalent after Karl Marx, but which has become ubiquitous and ordinary by now. In his first illustrative example of this, Sartre describes how the workday in industrializing Europe expanded beyond daylight to reach fifteen to sixteen hours. This is because gas-powered lighting was invented, and these lights enabled workers to stay in the factories past sundown. 

Sartre’s critique is in the active word given to a lamp. Lamps don’t enable anything because they don’t think or move. At the moment, Sartre critiques this way of thinking for attributing intentionality and the ability to act to a set of inanimate bodies. The lamps had no malice toward the workers who were cajoled into brutally longer workdays after their advent. They weren’t capable of thought and planning, therefore incapable of action as traditionally conceived.

I’ve read this idea in analytic moral philosophy as well, in regard to problems that come up in environmentalist philosophy. In describing ecosystems, it’s often required to discuss how a river or some other feature of a landscape affects surrounding bodies. And sometimes, a philosopher who will appear saying that inanimate objects can’t act. They’re entirely passive because they define action using a common sense definition: if a body can’t think or plan what it does, then it can’t be said to truly act. This is the reasoning behind the classifications of killing in our judicial system. The degree of severity of the punishment you face for killing someone varies according to your planning and foresight. 

Of course, just because one conception of action works in one venue (such as judicial morality) doesn’t mean that same conception will work in another venue (such as understanding ecological relationships). And ecological relationships don’t only occur in natural systems like river valleys and deserts, but in factories, towns, and farms. Economic systems are ecosystems too.

As far as I’m concerned, this is the greatest conceptual transformation that the twenty-first century and ecological philosophy has brought us: the ability to understand nonhumans and even the nonliving as actors in the world. That way, we can better conceive of how the messes we’ve gotten ourselves into through the unintentional activity of humanity and other bodies operate. People who still think according to this radical separation of humanity and nonhumans are hobbled in their ability to understand the material relationships and dynamics that actually constitute our world.

People are also machines, and machines can be understood as different kinds of people. What Sartre discussed, Gilles Deleuze and I embraced. 

And Kraftwerk seem to have lived it.