How Would Your Life Be Different If You Didn't Measure It In Years?
On Heidegger, Time, and Temporality
A year is a unit of time that makes sense for the sake of planning and convention and that is also tied to a pattern in the cosmos—the time it takes the earth to complete its cycle around the sun. But, as Heidegger claims, it’s also a distraction, existentially speaking, from the singularity and finitude of my own life. (If we knew when we were going to die, we would probably relate to the unit of a year very differently).
For Heidegger, an over-attachment to the clock or the calendar is not just a form of death-avoidance or repressed anxiety, but is a philosophical and contemplative error. The origins of time, he says, lies not in the relationship between the earth and the sun, but in the fundamental structure of temporality.
What does that mean? Temporality is expanded upon from his teacher, Husserl—it’s the idea that the past, present, and future aren’t points on a line, but like musical notes in a chord or like chords in a phrase. We hear music in the form of recollection and anticipation. What’s present before our ears includes what has already happened but remains as echo or memory and what has yet to happen but which we expect or want. You know that happy feeling you get when the chord resolves? That’s the sound of your expectation being met. Avant-garde composers take advantage
of it. Yes
this is
intentional.
By disrupting expectation and denying fulfillment they force you to think about the nature of listening rather than to simply get lost in the notes.
Reading is another good metaphor for temporality; it’s an act of gathering what you’ve read and reading on in expectation of something yet to come, whose outlines you project.
But when we measure our lives in the monolithic units of a dashboard, and tie our accomplishments to metrics we tend to forget all of this. Of course, there’s a utility to dashboards, graphs, talk of quarterly progress. But if you are what you measure and your measurements require you to abstract from your life and break it up into chunks of time, you may be missing something, too?
Is there a time for not being constrained by time? Is it a paradox to schedule time for serendipity? Granted, we have tasks to accomplish, and deadlines to meet. But what music do we not hear so long as we are running the sheet music through analytics rather than simply playing it?
Happy 2021,
Zohar
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