Paul Ricoeur: Time and Narrative.
Volume 3.
PART IV: NARRATED TIME
SECTION 1: THE APORETICS OF TEMPORALITY
3. Temporality, Historicality, Within-Time-Ness(時間內狀態): Heidegger and the "Ordinary" Concept of Time
THE ORDINARY CONCEPT OF TIME
Heidegger places his polemic against the ordinary concept of time under the heading of "leveling off,(敉平)" never to be confused with the discussion of the "source," even if this leveling off is induced by forgetting the source. This polemic constitutes a critical point, much more dangerous than Heidegger might have thought, preoccupied as he was during this period with another polemic over the human sciences. In this way, he can claim, without qualms, not to distinguish the scientific concept of universal time from the ordinary concept of time that he is criticizing.
His argumentation directed against ordinary time makes no concessions. Its ambition is no less than a genesis without remainder of the concept of time as it is employed in all the sciences starting from fundamental temporality(時間性). This genesis is a genesis progressing by leveling off, taking its point of departure in within-time-ness, but one whose far-off origin lies in the failure to recognize the tie between temporality and Being-towards-death. Starting from within-time-ness has the obvious advantage of making the ordinary concept of time first appear in greatest proximity to the last decipherable figure of phenomenological time(現象學現在). But, more importantly, it has the advantage of organizing the ordinary concept of time around the pivotal notion whose kinship with the principal characteristic of within-time-ness is still apparent. This pivotal notion is the point-like "now." As a consequence, ordinary time can be characterized as a series of point-like "nows," whose intervals are measured by our clocks. Like the hand moving across the face of the clock, time runs from one now to another. Defined in this way, time deserves to be called "now-time." "The world-time which is 'sighted' in this manner in the use of clocks, we call the 'now-time' [Jetzt-Zeit]" (p. 474).
The genesis of the point-like "now" is clear. It is merely a disguise of the making-present that awaits and withholds, that is, the third ecstasis of temporality, which preoccupation brought to the fore. In this disguise, the instrument of measurement, which is one of the things ready-to-hand upon which we fix our circumspection, has eclipsed the process of making-present that had made measurement desirable.
Starting from here, the three major features of within-time-ness are subjected to an identical leveling off. Datability(可定期性) no longer precedes the assigning of dates but rather follows it; the lapse of time, which itself arises from the stretching out characteristic of historicality(歷史性), no longer precedes the measurable interval but rather is governed by it; and, above all else, the character of making-public, founded in the "being-with" relating mortals to one another, gives wily to the allegedly irreducible characteristic of time, its universality. Time is held to be public because it is declared to be universal. In short, time is defined as a system of dates only because dating takes place on the basis of an origin that is an indistinguishable "now." It is defined as a series of intervals. Universal time, in the end, is only the sequence (Folge) of these point-like "nows" (Jetztfolge).
Other features of the ordinary concept of time only appear, however, if we retrace the genesis of a contemporary failure to recognize the most original temporality. As we know, phenomenology must be hermeneutic because what is closest to us is also what is most covered over. The features we are going to look at all have in common the fact that they serve as symptoms, in the sense that they allow us to glimpse an origin at the same time that they attest to the failure to recognize this origin. Consider the infinity of time. It is because we have erased from our thoughts originary finiteness, imprinted on time to come by Being-towards-death, that we hold time to be infinite. In this sense, infinity is but a fallen state of the finiteness of the future attested to by anticipatory resoluteness. Infinity is non-mortality; but what does not die is the "they." Thanks to this immortality of the "they," our thrownness among things present-at-hand and ready-to-hand is perverted by the idea that our life span is only a fragment of this time.
One indication that this is how things are is that we say of time that it "flies." Is this not because we fly from ourselves, in the face of death, because the state of loss in which we sink, when we no longer perceive the relation between thrownness, fallenness, and preoccupation, makes time appear as a flight and makes us say that it passes away (vergeht)? Otherwise, why would we notice the fleeing of time rather than its blossoming forth? Is this not something like a return of the repressed, by which our fleeing in the face of death is disguised as the fleeing of time? And why do we say that we cannot stop time? Is this not because our fleeing in the face of death makes us want to suspend the course of time, by an understandable perversion of our anticipation in its least authentic form? "Dasein knows fugitive time in terms of its 'fugitive' knowledge about its death" (p. 478).
And why do we consider time to be irreversible? Here again leveling off does not prevent some aspect of the originary from showing through. Would not a neutral stream of "nows" be able to be reversed? "The impossibility of this reversal has its basis in the way public time originates in temporality, the temporalizing of which is primarily futural and 'goes' to its end ecstatically (綻出)in such a way that it 'is' already towards its end" (p. 478). Heidegger by no means denies that this ordinary representation is valid in its own right, to the very extent that it proceeds by leveling off the temporality of a thrown and fallen Dasein(此在). This representation belongs, in its own way, to the everyday mode of Dasein and to the understanding that is appropriate to it. The only thing unacceptable is the claim that this representation be held to be the true concept of time. We can retrace the process of interpretation and of misunderstanding that leads from temporality to this ordinary concept. The opposite route, however, cannot be traveled.
My doubts begin precisely at this point. If, as I believe, human temporality cannot be constituted on the basis of a concept of time considered as a series of "nows," is not the opposite path, from temporality and Dasein to cosmic time, in accordance with the preceding discussion, just as impracticable? In the preceding analysis, one hypothesis was excluded from the outset by Heidegger: that the process held to be a phenomenon of the leveling off of temporality was also, and simultaneously, the separating out of an autonomous concept of time - cosmic time - that hermeneutic phenomenology never completely follows through on and with which it never manages to come to terms.
If Heidegger excludes this hypothesis from the beginning, it is because he never tries to vie with contemporary science in its own debate over time, and because he takes it for granted that science has nothing original to say that has not been tacitly borrowed from metaphysics, from Plato to Hegel. The role assigned to Aristotle in the genesis of the ordinary concept of time (p. 473) bears witness to this. Aristotle is supposed to be the first one guilty of this leveling off, confirmed by the entire subsequent history of the problem of time, through the definition given in Physics IV, 11, 218b29-219a, which we examined above. His assertion that the instant determines time is said to have begun the series of definitions of time as a sequence of "nows," in the sense of indistinguishable instants.
Even given the - highly debatable — hypothesis that the entire metaphysics of time might be contained in nuce in the Aristotelian conception of it, the lesson we have drawn from our reading of the famous passage in Aristotle's Physics is that there is no conceivable transition - either in one direction or the other — between indistinguishable, anonymous instants and the lived-through present. Aristotle's strength lies precisely in the fact that he describes the instant as any instant whatsoever. And the instant is anonymous precisely in that it precedes from an arbitrary break in the continuity of local motion, and more generally of change, and indicates the occurrence (lacking the quality of the present) in each movement of the imperfect act constituted by the act of power. Movement (change) belongs, as we have seen, to the principles of physics, which do not include in their definition a reference to a soul that discriminates and counts. What is essential, therefore, is, first, that time have "something to do with movement," without ever measuring up to the constitutive principles of nature; next, that the continuity of time "accompanies" that of movement and of magnitude, without ever freeing itself entirely from them. The result is that, if the noetic operation of discrimination by which the mind distinguishes two "nows" is sufficient to distinguish time from movement, this operation is grafted onto the sheer unfolding of movement whose numerable character precedes the distinctions relative to time. The logical and ontological anteriority that Aristotle assigns to movement in relation to time seems to me to be incompatible with any attempt at derivation through the leveling off of so-called ordinary time, starting from the time of concern. Having something to do with movement and something to do with Care seem to me to constitute two irreconcilable determinations in principle. "World-historicizing" merely hides the gap between the present and the instant. I fail to understand either how or why the historicality of the things of our concern should free itself from that of our Care, unless the world-pole of our Being-in-the-world developed a time that was itself the polar opposite of the time of our Care, and unless the rivalry between these two perspectives on time, the one rooted in the worldhood of the world, the other in the there of our way of Being-in-the-world, gave rise to the ultimate aporia(進退兩難之境) of the question of time for thinking. This equal legitimacy of ordinary time and phenomenological time at the heart of their confrontation is confirmed with particular emphasis if, instead of just confining ourselves to what philosophers have said about time — following Aristotle or not - we lend an ear to what the scientists and epistemologists most attentive to modern developments in the theory of time have to say. The very expression "ordinary time" then appears ridiculous compared to the scope of problems posed to science by the orientation, continuity, and measurability of time. In light of this increasingly more technical work, I am led to wonder whether a single scientific concept can be opposed to the phenomenological analyses, which are themselves multiple, received from Augustine, Husserl, and Heidegger.
If, first of all, following Stephen Toulmin and June Goodfield, we limit ourselves to classifying sciences according to the order of the discovery of the "historical" dimension of the natural world, we find that it is not only a progressive extension of the scale of time beyond the barrier of six thousand years, assigned by a petrified Judeo-Christian tradition, that the natural sciences have imposed on our consideration, but also an increasing differentiation of the temporal properties characteristic of each of the regions of nature open to an ever more stratified natural history. This feature — the extension of the scale of time from six thousand to six billion years — is certainly not to be neglected if we consider the unbelievable resistance that had to be overcome for it to be recognized. If breaking this barrier of time was the source of so much consternation, this was because it brought to light a disproportion, easily translated in terms of incommensurability, between human time and the time of nature. At first, it was the discovery of organic fossils in the final decades of the seventeenth century that, in opposition to a static conception of the earth's crust, imposed a dynamic conception of geological change, whose chronology dramatically pushed back the barrier of time. With the acknowledgment of such geological changes and the explanation of their temporal sequence, "the earth acquires a history." On the basis of material traces, fossils, strata, faults, it became possible to infer the succession of the "epochs of nature," to borrow the title used by Buffon. The science of stratification, invented at the beginning of the nineteenth century, decisively transformed geology into a "historical" science, on the basis of inferences made from the witness of things. This "historical" revolution, in turn, opened the way, through the intermediary of paleontology, for a similar transformation in zoology, crowned in 1859 by Darwin's great work Origin of Species. We can only dimly imagine the enormous mass of received ideas that was to be dislodged by the simple hypothesis of an evolution of species, to say nothing of the degree of probability of the theory as such, whether we consider the mode of acquisition, or of transmission, or of accumulation of specific variations. What is important for our discussion is that, with Darwin, "life acquires a genealogy." For the Darwinian or neo-Darwinian biologist, time is indistinguishable from the very process of descent, marked by the occurence of favorable variations and sealed by natural selection. The whole of modern genetics is inscribed within the major assumption of a history of life. This idea of a natural history was further to be enriched by the discoveries of thermodynamics, and, above all, by the discovery of subatomic processes - in particular, quantum processes — on the other end of the great chain of beings. To the extent that these phenomena are in turn responsible for the formation of heavenly bodies, we can speak of "stellar evolution" to account for the life cycle assigned to individual stars and galaxies. A genuine temporal dimension was thereby introduced into astronomy, one that authorizes us to speak of the age of the universe counted in light-years.
However this first feature - the breaking of the temporal barrier accepted for thousands of years and the fabulous extension of the scale of time — must not mask a second feature, one of even greater philosophical significance, namely, the diversification in the meanings attached to the term "time" in the regions of nature we have just referred to and in the sciences that correspond to them. This phenomenon is masked by the previous one to the extent that the notion of a scale of time introduces an abstract factor of commensurability that takes into account only the comparative chronology of the processes considered. The fact that this alignment along a single scale of time is ultimately misleading is attested to by the following paradox. The length of time of a human life, compared to the range of cosmic time-spans, appears insignificant, whereas it is the very place from which every question of significance arises. This paradox suffices to call into question the presumed homogeneity of time-spans projected along a single notion of a natural "history" (whence our constant use of quotation marks in this context). Everything occurs as if, through a phenomenon of mutual contamination, the notion of history had been extrapolated from the human sphere to the natural sphere, while, in return, the notion of change, specified on the zoological level by that of evolution, had included human history within its perimeter of meaning. Yet, before any ontological argument, we have an epistemological reason for refusing this reciprocal overlapping of the notions of change (or evolution) and history.
This criterion is the one we expressed in Part II of this study, namely, the narrative criterion, itself patterned on that of praxis, every narrative being ultimately a mimesis of action. On this point, I unreservedly ascribe to Colling-wood's thesis drawing a line between the notions of change and evolution on the one hand, and history on the other. In this respect, the notion of the "testimony" of human beings concerning events of the past and the "testimony" of the vestiges of the geological past does not go beyond the mode of proof; that is, the use of inferences in the form of retrodiction. Misuse begins as soon as the notion of "testimony" is severed from the narrative context that supports it as documentary proof in service of the explanatory comprehension of a course of action. It is finally the concepts of action and narrative that cannot be transferred from the human sphere to the sphere of nature. This epistemological hiatus is, in turn, but the symptom of a discontinuity on the level that interests us here, that of the time of the phenomena considered. Just as it seemed impossible to generate the time of nature on the basis of phenomenological time, so too it now seems impossible to proceed in the opposite direction and to include phenomenological time in the time of nature, whether it is a question of quantum time, thermodynamic time, the time of galactic transformations, or that of the evolution of species. Without deciding anything about the plurality of temporalities appropriate to the variety of epistemological regions considered, a single distinction — an altogether negative one — is sufficient, that between a time without a present and a time with a present. Regardless of the positive aspects included in the notion of a time without a present, one discontinuity is of the utmost importance to our discussion of phenomenological time, the very one that Heidegger tried to overcome by gathering together under the heading of "ordinary time" all the temporal varieties previously aligned under the neutral concept of the scale of time. Whatever the interferences between the time with a present and the time without a present, they presuppose the fundamental distinction between an anonymous instant and a present defined by the instance of discourse that designates this present reflexively. This fundamental distinction between the anonymous instant and the self-referential present entails that between the pair before/after and the pair past/future, the latter designating the before/after relation as it is marked by the instance of the present.
The outcome of this discussion is that the autonomy of time with respect to movement (to employ a vocabulary that is Kantian as well as Aristotelian) constitutes the ultimate aporia for the phenomenology of time — an aporia that only the hermeneutical conversion of phenomenology could reveal in its radicality. For it is when the phenomenology of time reaches those aspects of temporality that are most deeply hidden, even though they are closest to us, that it discovers its external limit. For someone who is attracted wholly to the polemic that Heidegger has undertaken, by designating ordinary time the universal time of astronomy, the physical sciences, biology, and, finally, the human sciences, and by attributing the genesis of this alleged ordinary time to the leveling off of the aspects of phenomenological time, for this sort of reader Being and Time appears to end in failure — the failure of the genesis of the ordinary concept of time. This is not, however, how I should like to conclude. This "failure," in my opinion, is what brings the aporetic character of temporality to its peak. It sums up the failure of all our thinking about time, and first and foremost that of phenomenology and of science. But this failure is not without value, as the rest of this work will attempt to show. And even before it refuels our own meditation, it reveals something of its fruitfulness insofar as it serves to uncover what I will call the work of the aporia active within the existential analysis itself.
I will group my remarks on this work of the aporia around four poles.
1. It is first of all the "ordinary" concept of time that, from the outset, exerts a sort of attraction-repulsion on the whole existential analysis, forcing it to unfold, to distend itself, to stretch itself out until it corresponds, by an ever-increasing approximation, to its other which it cannot generate. In this sense, as it were, the external aporia that develops in the concept of time, due to the disparity among perspectives on time, is what provokes, at the very heart of the existential analysis, the greatest effort at internal diversification, to which we owe the distinction between temporality, historicality, and within-time-ness. Without being the origin of this diversification, the scientific concept acts as a sort of catalyst for it. The admirable analyses of historicality and within-time-ness then appear as an almost desperate effort to enrich the temporality of Care, centered first on Being-for-death, with ever more worldly features, so as to offer an approximate equivalence of sequential time within the limits of existential interpretation.
2. In addition to the constraint exerted from outside by the ordinary concept of time on the existential analysis, we can speak of a mutual overlapping between one mode of discourse and the other. This borderline exchange takes on the extreme forms of contamination and conflict, with the whole parade of intellectual and emotional nuances that can be produced by these interferences of meaning. Contamination has more particularly to do with the overlappings on the level of within-time-ness. These phenomena of contamination are what served to legitimate the idea that the border was crossed as a result of leveling off alone. We anticipated this problem when we discussed the relations between the three major phenomena of datability, lapse of time, publicness, and the three conceptual features of actual dating, the measurement of intervals by fixed units of duration, and simultaneity, which serves as a criterion for all co-historicality. In all these cases, we may speak of an overlapping of the existential and the empirical. Between thrownness and fallenness, which constitute our fundamental passivity with regard to time, and the contemplation of the stars, whose sovereign revolution is not subject to our mastery, a complicity is established, one so close that the two approaches become indiscernible to feeling. This is attested to by the expressions "world-time" and "Being-in-time," which compound the strength of both discourses on time.
In return, the effect of conflict, stemming from the interference between our two modes of thinking, can be more easily distinguished at the other end of the scale of temporality; it is the conflict between the finitude of mortal time and the infinity of cosmic time. In truth, it was to this aspect that ancient wisdom was most attentive. Elegies on the human condition, ranging in their modulations from lamentation to resignation, have never ceased to sing of the contrast between the time that remains and we who are merely passing. It is only the "they" that never dies? If we hold time to be infinite, is this only because we are concealing our own finitude from ourselves? And if we say that time flies, is this simply because we are fleeing the idea of our Being-towards-the-end? Is it not also because we observe in the course of things a passage that flees us, in the sense that it escapes our hold, to the point of being unaware, as it were, even of our resolution to pay no attention to the fact that we have to die? Would we speak of the shortness of life, if it did not stand out against the immensity of time? This contrast is the most eloquent form that can be taken by the twofold movement of detachment whereby the time of Care, on the one hand, tears itself away from the fascination with the carefree time of the world and, on the other hand, astronomical and calendar time frees itself from the goad of immediate concern and even from the thought of death. Forgetting the relation between the ready-to-hand and concern, and forgetting death, we contemplate the sky and we construct calendars and clocks. And suddenly, on the face of one of them, the words memento mori stand out in mournful letters. One forgetfulness erases another. And the anguish of death returns once more, goaded on by the eternal silence of infinite spaces. We can thus swing from one feeling to the other: from the consolation that we may experience in discovering a kinship between the feeling of Being-thrown-into-the-world and the spectacle of the heavens where time shows itself, to the desolation that unceasingly reemerges from the contrast between the fragility of life and the power of time, which is more destructive than anything else.
3. In turn, the difference between these two extreme forms of a borderline exchange between the two perspectives on time makes us attentive to the polarities, the tensions, even the breaks inside the domain explored by hermeneutic phenomenology. If the derivation of the ordinary concept of time by means of leveling off appeared problematical, the derivation by means of their source, which ties together the three figures of temporality, also deserves to be questioned. We have not failed to emphasize, at the transition from one stage to the next, the complexity of this relation to the "source," which is not confined to a gradual loss of authenticity. By their supplement of meaning, historicality and within-time-ness add what was lacking in the meaning of fundamental temporality for it to be fully primordial and for it to attain its wholeness, its Ganzheit. If each level arises from the preceding one by reason of an interpretation that is at the same time a misinterpretation, a forgetting of the "source," it is because this "source" consists not in a reduction but in a production of meaning. The world-time through which hermeneutic phenomenology approaches astronomical and physical science is revealed by a final surplus of meaning. The conceptual style of this creative source leads to a certain number of consequences that accentuate the aporetical character of the part dealing with temporality in Being and Time.
First consequence: when the accent is placed on the two end-points in this increase in meaning, Being-towards-death and world-time, we discover a polar opposition, paradoxically concealed throughout the hermeneutical process directed against all concealment: mortal time on the one side, cosmic time on the other. This faultline, which runs through the entire analysis, in no way constitutes a refutation of it; it merely makes the analysis less sure of itself, more problematic - in a word, more aporetic.
Second consequence: if, from one temporal figure to the next, there is both a loss of authenticity and an increase in primordiality, could not the order in which these three figures are examined be reversed? In fact, within-time-ness is continually presupposed by historicality. Without the notions of datability, lapse of time, and public manifestation, historicality could not be said to unfold between a beginning and an end, to stretch along in this in-between, and to become the co-historizing of a common destiny. The calendar and the clock bear witness to this. And if we follow historicality back to primordial temporality, how could the public character of the historizing fail to precede in its own manner the most radical temporality, inasmuch as its interpretation itself comes out of language, which has always preceded the forms of Being-towards-death reputed to be untransferrable? Even more radically, does not the Ausser-sich of originary temporality indicate the recoil-effect of the structures of world-time on those of originary temporality through the intermediary of the stretching-along characteristic of historicality?
Final consequence: if we are attentive to the discontinuities that mark the process of the genesis of meaning throughout the section on time in Being and Time, we may ask whether hermeneutic phenomenology does not give rise to a deep-rooted dispersion of the figures of temporality. By adding to the break, on the level of epistemology, between phenomenological time on the one hand and astronomical, physical, and biological time on the other, the split between mortal time, historical time, and cosmic time attests in an unexpected way to the plural, or rather pluralizing, vocation of this hermeneutic phenomenology. Heidegger himself paves the way for this interrogation when he states that the three degrees of temporalization are equiprimordial, expressly taking up again an expression he had earlier applied to the three ecstases(綻出) of time. But if they are equiprimordial, the future does not necessarily have the priority that the existential analysis of Care confers on it. The future, the past, and the present each has a turn to predominate when we pass from one level to another. In this sense, the debate between Augustine, who starts from the present, and Heidegger, who starts from the future, loses much of its sharpness. What is more, the variety of functions assumed by our experience of the present warns us against the arbitrary restrictions of a too one-sided concept of the present. Despite the one-way filiation that Heidegger proposes, moving from the future toward the past and toward the present, and also despite the apparently univocal descending order governing the source of the least authentic figures of temporality, the process of temporalization appears at the end of the section on time to be more radically differentiated than it seemed to be at the start of the analysis. For it is in fact the differentiation of the three figures of temporalization - temporality, historicality, and within-time-ness - that displays and makes more explicit the secret differentiation by virtue of which the future, the past, and the present can be called the ecstases(綻出) of time.
4. The attention paid to the aporias that are at work in the section on temporality in Being and Time warrants our casting one last look at the place of historicality in the hermeneutic phenomenology of time.
The position of the chapter on historicality between the chapter on fundamental temporality and the one on within-time-ness is the most obvious indication of a mediating function that far surpasses the convenience of a didactic exposition. The range of this mediating function is equal to that of the field of aporias opened up by the hermeneutic phenomenology of time. By following the order of the questions raised above, we may first ask ourselves whether history is not itself constructed on the fracture line between phenomenological time and astronomical, physical, and biological time— in short, whether history is not itself a fracture zone. But if, as we have also suggested, the over-lappings of meaning compensate for this epistemological break, is not history the place where the overlappings due to the contamination and the conflict between the two orders of thinking are most clearly manifested? On the one hand, the exchanges due to contamination appeared to us to predominate on the level of within-time-ness between the phenomena of datability, lapse of time, and publicness as they are brought out by the existential analysis, and the astronomical considerations that governed the construction of calendars and clocks. This contamination cannot help but affect history to the extent that it gathers together the characteristics of historicality and those of within-time-ness. On the hand, exchanges due to conflict appeared to us to predominate on the level of primordial temporality, as soon as Being-towards-death is cruelly contrasted with the time that envelops us. Here again, history is indirectly involved to the extent that, in it, the memory of the dead clashes with the investigation of institutions, structures, and transformations that are stronger than death.
However, the median position of the historical between temporality and within-time-ness is more directly a problem when we pass from the borderline conflicts between phenomenology and cosmology to the discordances within phenomenological hermeneutics itself. What are we to say, finally, about the position of historical time, set between mortal time and cosmological time? It is in fact when the continuity of the existential analysis is questioned that historicality becomes the critical point of the entire undertaking. The greater the distance between the compass points marking the two poles of temporalization, the more the place and role of historicality become problematical. The more we inquire into the differentiation that disperses, not just the three major figures of temporalization, but the three ecstases of time, the more the site of historicality becomes problematical. From this perplexity springs a hypothesis: if within-time-ness is the point of contact between our passivity and the order of things, then might historicality not be the bridge that is erected within the phenomenological field itself between Being-towards-death and world-time? It will be the task of the chapters that follow to clarify this mediating function by taking up once more the three-cornered conversation among historiography, narratology, and phenomenology.
At the end of these three confrontations I would like to draw two conclusions. The first one has been anticipated a number of times; the second may have remained unperceived.
Let us first say that, if the phenomenology of time can become one privileged interlocutor in the three-way conversation we are about to undertake among phenomenology, historiography, and literary narratology, this is a result not just of its discoveries but also of the aporias it gives rise to, which increase in proportion to its advances.
Let us next say that in opposing Aristotle to Augustine, Kant to Husserl, and everything scholarship ties to the "ordinary" concept of time to Heidegger, we have undertaken a process that is no longer that of phenomenology, the process the reader may have expected to find here, but rather a process that is one of reflective, speculative throught as a whole in its search for a coherent answer to the question: what is time? If, in stating an aporia, we emphasized the phenomenology of time, what emerges at the end of this chapter is a broader and more balanced insight — namely, that we cannot think about cosmological time (the instant) without surreptitiously appealing to phenomenological time and vice versa. If the statement of this aporia outruns phenomenology, this aporia thereby has the great merit of resituating phenomenology within the great current of reflective and speculative thought. This is why I did not title this first section of this volume "The Aporias of the Phenomenology of Time," but rather "The Aporetics of Temporality."
「從虛構敍事的歷史化 (historicization) 和歷史敍事的虛構化之間的親密交替源生出我們所謂的人的時間，亦即敍事的時間。」