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COPYRIGHT 2001 Indiana University, Purdue University of Fort Wayne
We are mortal, our days are numbered. But our days are not to be numbered as we would number a growing pile of objects, as if each day is a discrete addendum to an already determined record. We experience our lives as more or less happy, more or less meaningful, as made up of more or less successful actions, and this "more or less" is just one indication that we experience our lives as involving an overall weave of time. (1) Days do not pile up; rather our lifetime as a whole unfolds new meanings in the succession of works and days. Time as we experience it is lived time, a term I use to capture the sense of time elucidated by existential phenomenologists in this century, most prominently Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a time in which--to roughly note features relevant to what follows--past, present, and future are not directions along an ordered continuum of discrete time-points, but interwoven aspects of an ecstatic structuring of experience, which structuring is integral with one's situated existence. (2) A sense of lived time belongs to the sense of one's life as a life well or badly lived. This is why questions about time continually arise as a matter of course in life and philosophy.(3)
Even before we raise explicit questions about time, the attempt to live life well throws us into encounters with it. This is especially true in the experience of problems with habit. One tries to live one's life well, one tries to head toward one's own future, yet one's life unfolds from habits that seemingly "run" one from one's past--past life implies itself in the fabric of the present and thus extrudes a shell around one's future. In the case of an unshakeable habit, an addiction, habit is no mere shell: it is a prison. The matter of this shell or prison, which flares into prominence in the attempt to live well, is time.
But habit is not merely a shell, prison, or problem, for the shell embeds actions that we no longer have to explicitly engage, thus granting a new situational background and correlative identity that supports ever more complex activity. One of the crucial insights of G. W. F. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit is that general backgrounds of this sort are vital to self-conscious action. Hegel argues that self-conscious life issues into the project of reason, but reason must configure itself as a practical activity, as a life of reason rather than as merely a theoretical endeavour, and the life of reason presupposes a living situation that cannot be constituted by any purely rational process. (4) Each shape of rational and thence spiritual activity presumes a background that is already there, a background that is not constituted by rationality or spirit at the present moment, but nonetheless possesses its own rationality or spirituality.
In what follows I study the backgrounds of different shapes of spirit as forms of habit. This illuminates senses of lived time proper to each shape of spirit, as well as illuminating habit and its temporality in general, thus leading to important conclusions about time in Hegel's Phenomenology. As Joseph Flay shows, time is crucial throughout the Phenomenology, since the first chapter, "Sense Certainty," embeds all knowing and doing in a temporal matrix. But as Flay also points out, Hegel does not say very much directly about time between the chapters on consciousness and the last chapter of the book, so Flay sets out to reconstruct what would be said about time in the intervening chapters, beginning from epistemological considerations. (5) By attending to habit and action, I give a reconstruction that instead focuses on the relation between living spiritual experience and time. This has the advantage of drawing Hegel into the discussion of lived time. More important, it shows how spiritual life sediments itself into time, or, to put it another way, how issues vital to various shapes of spiritual life can be intuitively encountered in the form of time. The very form of time can give us an intuitive encounter with the concept of spirit, and understanding this is key to interpreting Hegel's notoriously puzzling claims about time and its "annullment" in the chapter on absolute knowing.
Given that habit is crucial to my approach, I begin in section one with a discussion of habit and its role in Hegel's Phenomenology, taking up John Russon's and John McCumber's analyses of habit in Hegel and Joseph Flay's discussion of time. In section two, I draw on an account of addiction in David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest in order to illustrate Hegel's point that pure reason fails as a guide of human life. When it comes time to change actions against the weight of habit, something more than reason, a life of ritual that plunges us into an encounter with time, is needed. In section three, the point from Infinite Jest helps me elucidate the different senses of time that develop through the three main shapes of spirit that Hegel analyzes in chapter VI, namely the ethical order, culture, and morality. I return to Infinite Jest at the end of section three to elucidate the sense of time belonging to religion. In section four my study of the relation between spiritual life and senses of time lets me show what Hegel means when he calls time the "intuited concept" and "the concept itself that is there." This leads to an interpretation of his claim that in absolute knowing the time-form is annulled. I argue that lived time does not vanish in absolute knowing; rather the sense of lived time is shown to emerge from spirit's self-conceptual life--from its comprehension of its conceptual situation and history, rather than from a formal ordering of time.
I. From Hegel's Dialectic of Self-Consciousness to Habit as the Unself-Conscious Background of Action.
The dialectic of the Phenomenology can be described as operating in the tension between self-conscious claims about experience and experience itself. The dialectic develops through an analytical focus on the self-conscious side of this tension, but the focus on the self-conscious side leads precisely to a claim about experience, namely, about what is already requisite to experience itself if self-consciousness is ever to make its claims. This has two crucial implications. First, we should not be surprised if time seems to disappear from the foreground of discussion in the Phenomenology, since the book will focus on time only as it matters to the self-conscious claims being analyzed. Second, in being absent from the foreground, time has been absorbed into the background, and can be encountered in other ways, for example, in the form of habit and its temporality. These two points need a bit more explanation, which will also show how a study of shapes of habit in the Phenomenology can help reconstruct senses of time that are not explicitly discussed by it.
In the tension between self-consciousness and experience itself (to continue with the above description of the Phenomenology's dialectic, which description is geared to the concern of this paper rather than being comprehensive or definitive), experience initially appears as opposed to self-consciousness: the flux of sense-certainty is just given; self-consciousness has no hand in it; self-consciousness just makes claims about it; the given is not conscious. Hegel's dialectical analysis of conscious experience, however, shows that the given already appears as having the sort of universal structures proper to consciousness; that consciousness has a hand in synthesizing perceptual activity; that experience is driven by a force mirroring that of the understanding; and that in fact the sense of the given is inseparable from our living interests, from our serf-conscious desire. (6) Rather than saying the given has nothing to do with consciousness, it would be better to say that the given is "unself-conscious," since it emerges relative to our self-conscious activity.
Hegel's dialectic focuses on the forward movement that arises from pressures inherent in making self-conscious claims about experience. The philosopher makes a claim about what experience is, but what is given belies the claim, so the claim must be revised. To the philosopher self-consciously claiming that truth is what is sensuously given, time appears as an unself-consciously given series of nows. But Hegel shows that this flow of nows is in fact reflective of self-consciousness. What is given as an unself-conscious element of experience is in fact reflective of self-consciousness. So what plays the role of the unself-conscious is relative to our reflections. Hegel's Phenomenology primarily focuses on the reflective claims of self-conscious spiritual life, and relative to this, time often appears as an unmentioned, unself-conscious background; but Hegel's dialectic also shows that this unself-conscious background has already absorbed self-conscious elements. Time, when it recedes as a focus of self-conscious reflection, does not disappear; it is incorporated into the unself-conscious background against which self-consciousness figures its claims, so we can learn something about time by studying this background. (7)
In "Time in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit," Flay argues that Hegel's analysis of sense-certainty, perception, and understanding shows that, "Time is something we constitute in the sense that the knowledge relation is in part a function of the way in which we approach what-is, of the way in which we insert ourselves into the world with one or another intention in the form of desire. Time is something which arises in what are truly transactions between a knower and something known or knowable" (264). From the point of view I have been developing, this is the claim that time belongs to the unself-conscious background of experience in virtue of the way that self-conscious desire configures itself. Time is not a given; rather it, or more properly its sense, how we experience time, is an unself-conscious counterpart of the way we insert ourselves in the world.
Habit, if conceived in an expansive way, is a proper designation for the unself-conscious background of self-conscious experience. This concept and approach to habit is supported by John Russon's and John McCumber's studies of habit and its role in Hegel's philosophy.
In The Self and its Body in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, Russon presents a study of the Phenomenology that articulates its dialectical argument in terms of an interrelation of phusis, hexis and logos. In the context of his book, Russon's study of hexis (which he translates as "habit") suggests the following. To experience phusis is to experience a sphere that has its own drive prior to our participation in it, a sphere in itself opposed to consciousness. A hexis is experienced as something that verges toward appearing just as fixed, alien and opposed to consciousness as phusis. But it is intrinsic to hexis that we sometimes experience ourselves as being participant in it. When we are subject to our own habit, it almost seems like a force of nature, but in realizing that we participate in changing and acquiring our habit, habit appears as a force of our own nature. A hexis, in other words, is an unconscious background of experience, but, as Russon puts it, a hexis makes itself unconscious and inconspicuous; a hexis is not in itself unconscious (as is phusis), but has made itself be so. (8) When we experience that we have contributed to the making of hexis and can change it through self-conscious behaviour, we encounter a hexis as being partly participant in a self-conscious logos; the habit appears as an expression of self-conscious meaning (logos). In reflecting on one's habitual actions, one becomes ever more self-conscious of those actions as not merely stemming from a habit fixed like a force of nature, but as expressions of choices that one has made. A self-conscious meaning is exposed within one's habit, a meaning that was latent, but not apparent, in the process of habituation. Acquiring latent meaning in this way is quite important. We are taught to do the right thing before we are self-conscious of its rightness or capable of self-consciously arriving at our own conclusions about the right thing to do.
Habit is thus conceived as a mediating term with a specific functional role in Hegel's dialectic. Habit designates whatever functions as a requisite background that mediates between unconscious nature and self-conscious spiritual life. It is what I have been calling "unself-conscious." Here it is important to remember that "unself-conscious" is a relative term. Russon emphasizes that "habit" is a relative term, that "habit" becomes an ever more complex term of experience, and that the absorption of ever more complexity into habit is what enables ever more complex self-conscious activity. (9) Habit in this sense, and given its temporal character, would be the place to look for missing senses of time in the Phenomenology, granting here that time is "missing" because it has been absorbed into the unselfconscious background of experience rather than having vanished altogether. Habit in this sense is not to be confused with a particular faculty, but with a whole range of phenomena, since habit's essential determination is its functional role as a midway point between something purely natural and something purely conceptual, a role that enables the whole tension between self-consciousness and its other in the first place. Habit so conceived is broad in scope, and quite important to the development traced by the Phenomenology. For example, the representations and rituals of religion, the unself-conscious practices of everyday life, and so on, would count as forms of habit, and as crucial in enabling the development traced by the Phenomenology. (10)
McCumber's analysis likewise emphasizes that habit should be conceived as a midway point between the natural and the spiritual, given Hegel's direct remarks on habit in the Philosophy of Mind, and that this conception gives something akin to habit an expansive role in important transitions in Hegel's philosophy. Indeed, in the Philosophy of Mind, Hegel writes that "the form of habit applies to all kinds and grades of mental action" and that "habit on an ampler scale, and carried out in the strictly intellectual range, is recollection and memory." (11) McCumber's analysis shows how habit, in the first and more ordinary instance (for example, habituation to cold weather), is crucial for Hegel since it enables a sense of a "me" that persists precisely in having habits that institute generalized behaviors over and above immediate feelings. In being habituated, I am no longer wholly absorbed by the sensation of cold, I am a cold-dweller; I am no longer possessed by cold as a natural phenomenon, I have my own nature over against this natural phenomenon. (12) This is the sense in which habit operates as a shell, rooted in the past, that gives a sense of identity.
The sort of self-persisting, self-identifying "I" whose "own nature" is enabled by habit in this narrower sense is, I would argue, precisely what we find refined in the other grades of habit that Hegel mentions. For example, a self that recollects is a self whose "own nature" is such that it has the sophistication to interpret a historical "me" over against the storm of present psychological activity; its habitual interpretative activity distinguishes a present self from its past rather than being sunk in an eternal present. This sort of self would already have to have a basis for recollection, and that basis could not itself be recollected; it must have already been unself-conscious. In other words, recollection depends on habit, broadly conceived. It is this sort of self-conscious recollecting life (self-conscious because set over against its own self, its history, its claims, its reflections) that is the precise concern of the Phenomenology. Therefore habit as what enables such a life is also a concern of the Phenomenology, a point that McCumber secures in more detail in his article (and by a different route than the one I take...
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