'Every event or incident had lasted only for a brief duration of time...'

21 July 1994 | Time, Diary & Memory

#memoriesfromdiaries 💛

‘Time’ plays a pivotal role in our everyday routines, ain’t it?

Added, we as human beings find it quite easy to remember and recollect events through a sequential ordering in time, ain’t we?

By sequential ordering, I mean, an event that comes before, or an event that comes after another event!  

Let’s call it the temporal sequence!

More on temporal sequencing, after this long time ago’s diary entry is done! 😍

So here goes the diary entry for the day –

Morning [in Temporal Sequencing]

5.25 am – Waking up & Jogging, Gym

5.55 am – Coffee

6.30 am – Study time

7 am – Routine cleaning of the Cubicle, stacking up the books in a neat fashion, and off to school.

II & III hrs – Botany Class & Lab

Afternoon [in Temporal Sequencing]

PT Class (Substitute for Math)

Botany Class

PT Class (Substitute for Math)

Evening [in Temporal Sequencing]

Swimming

[A burning sensation in the eyes because of excessive chlorine in the Pool]

5.35 pm – Ring up my Chithi

6.30 – Study time

7.30  - Dinner

8.15 to 10 pm – Study time

10 pm – Go to bed

A temporal sequence then refers to the order in which events unfold in time.

Through this particular day’s diary entry, let’s learn a few interesting ideas connected with ‘temporal sequencing’ in connect with the concept of Time!

Well, each of the events that I had jotted down on today’s diary entry, (27 years ago), has had a ‘temporality’ a ‘temporal structuring’ and a ‘temporal sequencing’ to it, ain’t it?

In other words, every event or incident had lasted only for a short time or for a brief duration of time.

As such, what was ‘being represented’ possesses a certain fundamental temporal quality on them!

To Kant,

This notion of temporality is fundamental to perception!

Says he, in his Critique of Pure Reason –

I perceive that appearances follow one another, that is, that there is a state of things at one time the opposite of which was in the preceding time.

Thus I am really connecting two perceptions in time.

Now connection is not the work of mere sense and intuition, but is here the product of a synthetic capacity of the imagination, which determines inner sense with regard to temporal relation.

But imagination can combine the two states in question in two ways, so that either the one or the other precedes in time; for time cannot be perceived in itself, nor can what precedes and what follows in objects be as it were empirically determined in relation to it.

Hence to Kant, there is a temporal structuring, and a subsequent temporal sequencing to perception.

Which means to say that, all percepts (or objects of perception) are represented in a temporal sequencing (as in the case of this diary entry), as –

Percepts that are about to happen, percepts happening right now, and percepts having already occurred in a sequenced succession.

To Kant, again, this ‘flow of experience’ is effected only by the ‘faculty of imagination’!

Adorno, who adores Kant, also waxes eloquent on this question of transitoriness and ephemerality, and its relevance to human subjectivity and experience.

To Adorno’s mentor Walter Benjamin, again, what is ephemeral is the real!

Let’s continue to talk Time…!