Telling time

According to Einstein’s renowned declaration, for those who believe in physics – or, more precisely, in its capability to offer a “scientific” representation of the world – the distinction between present, past and future is just “an illusion, though obstinate”. If we consider an effective analogy by Mauro Dorato, we can state that those who agree with the famous German scientist will recognize in the present, past and future a relationship very similar to that between “here” and “somewhere else” – in other words, the present is just a located moment and has no privileged status. In other conceptual universes, some of which are explored by philosophy, or imagined by art, as well as in other scientific disciplines like biology, the need for a strong distinction between “what has happened”, “what will happen” and “what is happening” seems to be unavoidable. At the macroscopic level of living beings there does not seem to be a way out of the “eternal present”, which cannot be escaped even by the desire of some well-developed mammals to understand reality or such an apparently primary experience as the “passing of time”. Even the “timeless” description of reality offered by physics is immersed in time and changes with it. This paradox seems to contain the core of the irreducibility between two cultural constructions which we will be calling “the time of the soul” and “the time of the world”, after Ricoeur. The main thesis of this essay is that there are two fundamentally different ways of facing the mystery of time, which have a precise relationship with the mentioned contrast between the subjective and the objective conception of time – mental, qualitative and experienced in the first case; physical, quantitative and measurable in the second. Considering Ricoeur’s research on time and stories, we can conclude that this dichotomy may give rise to another similarly radical difference between the two opposite options of inquiring and telling about the time. The first task has traditionally been dealt with by science and philosophy, the latter by art, in particular through the narrative imagination and the opportunity to create a story. To reach “objective” and verifiable knowledge, science and philosophy had to pay the price of denying, though not completely, time as experienced by people. Art, on the other hand, has been able to put into practice the opportunities offered by the unreality of the time told, thus offering a provisional solution – poetic rather than theoretical – to the aporias raised by the clash between the time which is “made of moments” and the time that “passes”.

If you would like to edit a resource, please email us to submit your request.