Presence and time
We each have extremely varied experiences of time, depending on our general modality of presence in time, and our specific intentionalities at certain moments. What is presence? What is time? And how an intimate comprehension of their articulation can allow to invest them better of our free will?
Presence is an intentional being
Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) explored the question of being in time, from the point of view of existence, in Being and Time (1927). What is existence? Where are we? In oneself? In the world? Before, after, or during? Heidegger’s thought inspired the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Not to put aside a polemical subject, we know that Heidegger was a member of the Nazi party from 1933 to 1944, and yet his thought inspired early resistance fighters, even during the war. Some perceived his lectures during the war as supporting fascism, while others, on the contrary, received them as an opening to the space of a free thought, indispensable to fight totalitarianism from within. This debate is not the subject of this article, but it is worthwhile, because it is complex and deep, just like the debates that must be had about the support or opposition to “Covid doxa” thought in the period 2020-2022. Hannah Arendt, for example, recognized today for her extremely useful analysis of Nazism (even though she was rejected at the time because her thinking was not in line with the doxa of the time), always supported Heidegger.
Let’s return to the subject: being, in Heidegger’s sense, is not intentional, it’s the essence of our existence. Let me qualify this by adding the notion of presence. I postulate that presence is an intentional being. What is at stake is always “the being in the world”, or “the being to oneself”, but imbued with an intentionality linked to free will, which is properly human. And it’s also the capacity of transformation of oneself and of the world, which is today very concrete, because enlightened by neurosciences (non-existent at the time of Heidegger): thinking transforms physiology and thus engages a power to act whose effects are more and more tangible and measurable.
Time is a function of movement
I postulate an intrinsic link between presence and time, in reference to Einstein’s proposed intrinsic link between motion (or space) and time. Einstein’s proposal in his theory of relativity is verified in concrete experience. Time is not an external flow, which would impose itself in the same way to all, time expands according to the movement of the subject. For example, for GPS satellites: they are moving at a different speed than ours on the surface of the earth, so the time of their clocks does not run at the same pace as ours. Without taking into account this distortion of time by the speed of movement, our GPS would give positioning errors of several kilometers.
Experiences of presence in time
We have all experienced extremely variable sensations of time unfolding, depending on the situation, the context, our inner state, our physical and relational capacities, etc. I suggest you relate to those moments when you felt like you were doing a lot in a day, as opposed to those moments when you felt like you were accomplishing nothing. Or those moments of intense contemplation that fed your imagination forever while you seemed inactive, as opposed to those periods of frantic activity in which time seemed to fly by without consistency.
History of time
The feeling of a synchronous unfolding of time for all human beings came with the invention of the train and its national timetable in England in the 19th century. Before this step linked to the industrial revolution, we knew that time was really disparate: in our village, far from the other villages, we were only “connected” to the collective time linked to the space of co-presence and the audible bells, much more restricted geographically than today. We were only in the same time of our distant neighbors. If a person arrived from another village, he would “synchronize” to our local clock, marrying our time. And the time of his displacement was still a third space, with its own temporal logic.
Even today, when we arrive in certain places, we can have the impression that they are “from another time” than ours, in their architecture, the habits of the inhabitants, the rhythms of life and interests. This sensation of being immersed in “another time” can be that of a past time and sometimes even a future time. Why do we sometimes feel so confused about the nature of time?
Time, because of its global synchronism in a locality that has become worldwide, gives us, more than yesterday, the impression that it would be “objective”. The awareness of its diversity, its variability and our power over it is therefore difficult to perceive.
“Our time”
What is the feeling of “our time” if we disconnect from the world clock? Let’s take the example of a moment of intense presence during a long evening with friends: the space of the evening is a beacon, giving us freedom to use time in this temporal space that is imprecise in terms of timetables. Let’s imagine that there are no telephones or clocks in the living room where friends are so present with each other. What is this time? How does it unfold? It is intrinsically linked to the way we are present. It can be very dull if we are not there, or on the contrary very fluid, full of folds and folds, and rich with a thousand emotions, ideas, links, which will stay with us for the rest of our lives if we are fully present to ourselves and to others.
The quality of presence folds time
We can make the remark that this sensation of time relative to the intensity of one’s own presence is eminently subjective and has nothing to do with the “real unfolding” of time.
Why are flies so difficult to catch? Their heart beats at a much higher speed than ours, so their time is not the same as ours. In our difficulty to follow them, we experience the co-presence of two very different times. What seems very fast to us is their normal rhythm, and our normal rhythm must seem extremely slow to them, which is why they always anticipate our movements. To succeed in catching the fly, the only solution is to work on synchronizing ourselves to its time, i.e. to accelerate our speed of action, our heart rate, etc.
If we take the example of the time of rehearsals for a show as opposed to the time of the performance, we realize that our presence in the two situations is based on completely different modalities. Our rhythm of attention and action is almost the opposite: it is because we will have repeated the same gesture slowly and repeatedly that we will be able to carry it out at high speed during the performance. Thus, in relation to the gesture, the time that surrounds it is extremely variable according to the intention of presence of the person who carries it out.
And furthermore, the times experienced by actors, stage acessoirists, stage managers, spectators (those who are passionate, those who are bored, or those who are disturbed by their neighbors), firefighters, security guards, passers-by around the theater, those who are with friends at the café, and people reading, watching television, alone or with family, all have enormous differences in their natures.
Our quality of presence in time makes it “bend” in important proportions, it contracts or dilates it. We have a great capacity to create our time, in a chosen way, in relation to an intention that is ours and is a matter of our free will.
Freedom from time
The German philosopher and sociologist Hartmut Rosa works carefully on the notions of speed and resonance. For him, resonance defines our relationship to the world. In his book Rendre le monde indisponible (2020), he develops the idea that immediate access to the world via digital technology takes us away from our presence to ourselves and to this same world. This is the paradox of over-availability through technical mastery, which for him leads to an under-availability of being.
...the attempt to give things a guaranteed availability takes away their resonant quality
Hartmut Rosa, Making the World Unavailable, Paris, La découverte, 2020.
To agree with Hartmut Rosa in practical terms, I believe that we need to free ourselves from time, in both senses of the word:
- Free ourselves from the belief that time would be imposed on us as an external and objective continuum. To become aware that time as we represent it is a social yoke. We are capable of creating our time.
- To do this, we must choose and create disconnected time-spaces (like the evening with friends mentioned above), that is to say, these moments that we reserve for ourselves, within which we will have the freedom to deploy our own time.
The quality of our presence is thus a choice, which entails “becoming free”. This presence decided by us bends time, it transforms its unfolding and rhythm, which synchronizes all the more with ourselves to make us enter into resonance, as our time becomes desynchronized from collective time. Thus we have the capacity to bend time not to our will, but to our intention to be, that is to say to our chosen presence.
Presence as the fundamental grounding of our being in the world
Presence constitutes this fundamental grounding that connects us to ourselves and to the world, this quality of attention that transforms lived experience into inhabited consciousness. To be present is to resist the centrifugal forces that disperse us - the imminence that projects us into urgency, the denial that cuts us off from reality, the social injunctions that distance us from our interiority. Presence is neither withdrawal into oneself nor fusion with the exterior, but this creative tension between inner grounding and openness to the world. It is cultivated through paradoxical adaptation that requires sometimes absenting oneself to better find oneself again, through the complex geography of our inner states that vary according to contexts, through resonance with the waves that pass through us. Faced with drama that fractures, submission that empties existence, old age that isolates, presence becomes resistance and reconstruction. It is what allows us to transform the unexpected into opportunity, to maintain our integrity in turmoil, to create connection where solitude reigns. Cultivating one’s presence ultimately means offering oneself the present of the present moment, the source of all authentic transformation.
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