Time, Embodiment and the Self

This essay brings together two themes - time, or "temporality", and the nature of the self. Discussing each separately, and then pulling them together, it concludes that the conception of time is germane to the standpoint of the observer and is grounded in our prereflective engagement in the world.

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Beginning with a sustained argument against the tenseless theory of time and against McTaggart's A series/B series distinction, the author of this essay goes on to provide a non-paradoxical, tensed, phenomenologically-based account of the "going on" or "taking place" of events in time that escapes the paradoxes endemic to "passage" as understood via the A series/B series distinction. The author then turns his attention to the other main aim of the essay, which is to seek an understanding of time adequate to those more "embodied" conceptions of the self that place character, and with it the "constitutive attachments" or "ground projects" of individual life circumstance, at the centre of the self. This involves a "redrawing" or the self informed by a wider conception of the will than the one we have inherited via Descartes and Kant, by an account of ground projects, and by the theory of the tripartite psyche in Plato's "Republic". It also involves extending the account of time developed in the second chapter in a way that draws on the notion of "ecstatic temporality" that originates with Heidegger.