I recently had a paper published in a journal called Human Arenas. The paper is called "The early modern attack on teleology and the politics of contemporary psychology: Intellectual roots of current dilemmas." Feel free to contact me if you'd like to read it.
I have several other academic papers I am working on but frankly grow weary of the deep stylistic constraints. I want to write something else these days, poetry, more relaxed whatever. Below is 'Section 1' of a new project on time, experience, artifacts, ancestors, and institutions. It has already started to get weirder than I anticipated. I have two other projected sections where I will get deeper into questions first around ancestors and artifacts, and second around institutions and our modern concept of 'history'. The main idea I'm exploring is this: the modern experience of time is highly chaotic, out of step with natural rhythms, vexed by distress and 'pathology' (which are particular distortions of time). This chaotic experience of time has some connection to the role of artifacts in our individual and collective lives. Earlier and smaller human communities would have had a very different relationship with artifacts and the way they patterned time, preserved tradition and connection. Rather than artifacts, in this more proper sense, we deal with commodities. Artifacts imply a temporal containment and order. Commodities imply processes too complex to derive from the commodity alone. Thus the commodity assumes a mysterious quality and our relationship to it is alienated. An artifact, more properly, implies its process, makes its origins and purposes known. A commodity implies opaquely, it does not announce its origins. Thus I am inquiring into the experience of time as a way to pursue these questions about artifacts, ancestors, institutions, and history.
Here is part 1:
Patterning Time: Individuals, Ancestors, and History, or On the Movement from the Implying of Artifacts to the Implying of Institutions
Time is perhaps the constitutive aspect of experience. Its ubiquity means that it is easy to not notice it, and incredibly difficult to think clearly about it.
Here I am concerned with what it means to ‘pattern’ time: to give it rhythm, to regulate its passage, to make change less violent, more manageable. There are many ways to think about how to pattern time, and here I will explore several ‘scales’ or ‘levels’ on which time can be patterned: as individuals, as communities, and comprehensively. Individual time will be discussed in terms of music, breathing, and ‘mental health’. The patterning of communal time will hinge on the meaning of ancestors, artifacts, and rituals. The comprehensive patterning of time will concern the notion of history, and the desire to perceive order in the total unfolding of events.
To speak about time is to speak about movement and change. To speak about patterning time is to speak about orderly movement and change, as opposed to disorderly or chaotic movement and change.
These reflections strike me as more urgent as I go further into my time, or as I age. As I’ve aged I’ve become aware of the great violence that afflicted my ancestors, the chaotic and painful movements and changes suffered by those before me. I have been fortunate to approach their pain through a particularly deep psychedelic experience during the summer of 2021. It was my own pain that made me wonder about the pain of those that came before. As I’ve studied my own pain I’ve found their pain to be implied, and as I’ve studied them I’ve found my own pain to be implied. I live further what they lived; I am implied in their living.
I wish to heal, to ease the violence of the flow of time, for myself and for others.
I will, hopefully, trace a line from the patterning of time on an individual scale as it leads to more communal and historical perspectives. I regard this as a preliminary exercise into a larger project that will involve doing much historical work, such as going through the memoirs and books left by my own ancestors. The ultimate philosophical upshot concerns the way in which local artifacts, known in ancestral and traditional situations, become unmoored from their implying; they cease to become intimately known in places, and instead become commodities.
Patterning Individual Time: Meaning, Music, Breathing, ‘Mental Health’
Society is real, but it is still made up of individuals. Thus in order to understand the workings of this thing called society, and how society patterns time, we need to understand how individuals experience time, patterned and otherwise.
Individual experience can be understood in terms of the quality of how time passes. This follows from the fact that consciousness, experience, and time are nearly synonymous terms. To be conscious is to be aware of time, to be able to track change. To have ‘experience’ is to be engaged in an ongoing flow of occurings and happenings; things that happened, things that are happening, things that will happen. Thus Bergson’s Time and Free Will, Heidegger’s Being and Time, and Gendlin’s A Process Model all treat time, or process, as essential and constitutive aspects of time. I have seen Rob Parker, a psychologist who studied with Gendlin, say ‘we are time…’
Many of our most important experiences involve a certain pattern of time. The psychologist Guy Claxton, for example, discusses the way in which a human voice is only intelligible at certain tempos or rhythms. If you play a tape too fast a voice becomes screechy and unintelligible; the same tape slowed down would reveal a voice too deep and garbled to be comprehensible. Human speech is intelligible within precise temporal parameters; it is a particular rhythm, tempo, and cadence, and we cannot understand it unless these temporal conditions are met.
Social and interpersonal situations similarly are governed by a specific cadence, rhythm, or pattern of time. When greeting another person, for example, there is an acceptable rhythm to the exchange of “Hey, how are you?” “Pretty good, how about you?”. Too much of a delay and one may seem disengaged, uninterested, or not listening. Too quick of a response and one is interrupting, talking over, or overbearing. This is true both in the short-term and long-term. An interaction in a retail environment has a specific rhythm. A long-term relationship—with a partner, friend, or parent—has a different set of rhythms and landmarks. Thus we celebrate birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays, all ways of patterning time.
The quality of an experience—whether it is good or bad, better or worse—can also be understood in terms of the quality of time. A painful or unpleasant experience, for example, may feel temporally stretched out, long, exaggerated. We might say that a meeting or date dragged on, and note how 30 minutes felt like 2 hours. Similarly, it is commonplace to note how time moves quickly in pleasurable activity or good company. ‘Time flies…’ we say.
The notion of patterning time is especially relevant in the discussion of ‘mental health’ or human well-being. Indeed, part of my desire in writing about this topic is a larger project of developing non-pathological language for discussing human well-being or goodness. I don’t want to talk about ‘mental health’, as I believe the concept smuggles in a variety of untenable philosophical positions (i.e. that human distress is an issue of ‘pathology’). Pathologizing —diagnosis, medicalization, so on—is an important practical and theoretical issue in my life as a psychotherapist.
It is possible to discuss traditionally ‘pathological’ issues in terms of the experience or rhythm of time. Depression, for example, could be understood as often involving a slowed, thickened sense of time; the future may feel closed, the present inescapable, and the past overwhelming. The experience of ‘mania’, by contrast, could be understood as a radical opening of the future where anything becomes possible, thoughts race, time flies by and leaves no trace in memory. Or severe schizophrenia may involve complete disruption of lived time, leaving people with large stretches of time unremembered and unaccounted for. All of these experiences, moreover, are intensifications of tendencies present in all experience.
The claim thus arises: Any given human experience, perhaps experience in general, can be understood as unique temporal patterns or rhythms. Everything seems to be some kind of becoming; every being originates, develops, and perishes in time. To speak of experience in terms of time offers a significant challenge to the language of ‘mental health’. To speak of ‘mental health’ is to imply a medical understanding of distress. To medicalize distress is to confine the questions largely to the physical body (i.e. physicians). To medicalize is thus to focus on structure and thereby space as opposed to time. Medical professionals of course are interested in patient history, and there is plenty of work done on integrative medicine. But the basic framework of medicine—and especially psychiatry and some psychotherapy—is essentially physical and therefore spatial.
To take seriously the relationship between experience and time is thus ultimately a challenge to any sort of physicalist ontology. For if the pattern of time is truly integral to (identical with) experience, then there are processes at play that are otherwise than physical. Or, put differently, the relationship between experience and time shows that consciousness or life is genuinely causal in the world and not simply epiphenomenal of physical process.
The relationship between experience, time, and causality will now be made evident through an inquiry into artifacts. Artifacts, objects made or used by intelligent agents for purposes, will provide crucial information about the causal role of consciousness and its peculiar relationship to time. For the existence of artifacts presents us with evidence of a peculiar process whereby a living being regulates its relationship with time through the active appropriation of its environment. To understand artifacts, then, is to understand the possibility of a being that patterns time for itself, regulates its own experience. Because such an experience is fundamentally temporal it must be understood and explained temporally. If such a phenomenon exists and can be understood, then, fundamentally temporal processes must exist, excluding any possible reductive physicalist metaphysics.
In addition to these therapeutic and philosophical issues, there is also a personal-political dimension. My hope is that this inquiry will shed light on the particular forms of suffering that have afflicted me as well as my immediate and extended family members. I have often found life painful, and I remember finding it painful from a very young age. As I’ve aged, learned, and become a therapist I’ve learned a lot about trauma and intergenerational trauma. I believe that the pain I have experienced in my life is not just my own, but comes also in part from the suffering going back at least four generations. These, sadly, are the only generations I am aware of. But in those four generations there are a variety of displacements, emigrations, wars, illnesses, abuses, and troubles. Most, perhaps all, of what I know of them is thanks to the artifacts they left behind: the pictures and stories, the books and writings. Through those artifacts I have been able to pattern my experience of time, and bring some calm to what has often felt like chaos. Thus in asking after the relationship between time and well-being I am raising the question of ancestors, of generations, of graceful transitions in life and death..
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