801 - 2

[R Srivatsan]

801 - 2.  Here Hegel tackles the Kantian notion of time.

Kant's notion of time:  For Kant, time is a priori the form of internal intuition, the form of external intuition being space.  Time cannot be experienced, since it is the medium of experience. Time as the internality of the subject comes first and is the basis of all experience.  (See CPR excerpt sent in my previous email.) Now, through this division of time into the primary form of internal experience and space as the primary form of external experience the world is divided into the subjective and the objective.  The outer is represented in the inner through space and time.  The phenomenon is the perception of the noumenon through the senses .

Hegel's project as we recall is to erase this division between the subjective and the objective.

"Time is the concept itself that is [simply] there" (My insertion and emphasis, p 317).  In other words, time is the concept which is apprehended as simple being at this stage.  Because of this, time is seen as empty intuition (as Kant sees it).  And as long as the concept has not grasped (comprehended) itself conceptually, "it has not annulled time" (317).  What does this annulling time mean?   Hegel continues:

"Time is the outer intuited pure Self which is not grasped by the Self, the merely intuited concept; when this concept grasps itself it sublates its time-form, comprehends this intuiting, and is a comprehended and comprehending intuiting." (317)

 For Hegel, time is the empty being of the concept: it is the opaque form in which the concept appears to the naive self consciousness.  Now, if the concept of the concept expresses itself in self-consciousness, i.e., if the final form of the concept is self aware of itself as concept, this opaque form that is time is nothing but the opaque form of subjectivity itself.  Thus, when the concept grasps itself as concept, this empty, opaque time form is sublated, and it comprehends its intuition and also what this comprehension means. 

To elucidate, consciousness, as long as it is not aware of itself (is not self-conscious), sees time as the empty form of internal intuition. But to put it perhaps better (for us) than Hegel puts it, Kant's philosophical concept of time  sees itself as the empty internal form of intuition because Kant's notion of the subject is that of a pure, substantial (spiritually unarticulated) being.  Because this notion of time is apparently primary, the subject or ego is primary too (in the sense of chrono-logically first).  At a first pass, let me suggest that in contrast to Kant's primacy of the subject, for Hegel, the subject (the inner) comes in correlative development with the world (the outer), and is not primary:  it is the selflike outcome of amoebic fission of a substantive world which finds a focal point of consciousness/self-consciousness.  And because the concept of the subject is driven into more and more complexity by means of its comprehension of each stage through the negative force of experience proving its errors, time is annulled as an empty form. I.e., its structure as the shell of experience is erased and we see that what remains is the concept in its development:  we no longer see the concept as an unchanging being, but as articulated in terms of its own growth and structure.

Time is thus the abstraction of what the concept is -- it appears due to the improper comprehension of what the concept (as self-concept, as telos of spirit, as absolute knowing) is.   Time disappears as does space (as constitutive a priori forms) because the subject object divide disappears and there is no inner outer boundary in absolute knowing (which is knowing of both the individual I and the We as expressed in the I -- a manifestation of the one in the other). 

Srivats

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R Srivatsan
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There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning – devotion to individuals, to groups or to causes, social, political, intellectual or creative work … in old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves. One’s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation, compassion. - Simone de Beauvoir 

[R Srivatsan]

PS:  What Foucault does in his "Organization of Geneses" section of Discipline and Punish (sent as an attachment a couple of days ago) is show how the historical concept of time is changed through discipline.  His charge against Marx in this context is that Marx limited his major investigations to the explorations of value and surplus value, and saw time merely as a) a passive clock measure of time spent in labour for the manufacture of a commodity; and b) an empirical battle over the length of the working-day over the extent of surplus value leached from the labourer.  What Foucault points out is that during the same period, the idea of investing each moment of time with discipline, training, docilizatory training, the idea of time as an element of capital, as an active instrument for the development of the working body and thought, and of the evolution of society through investment is perfected.  The concept of time is enriched through this investment of value in it.  And this happens in the 18th century.  

I am not sure if this is an argument "against" Hegel, but it relates in two ways.  One, it is a detailed articulation of how the experience of time in the context of a disciplinary tide is consolidated into an existential moment of subjectivity.  In other words, it illustrates in the domain of practice, how the idea of time as an empty vessel to be invested with training and labour to develop subjectivity comes into being through the drive of the capitalist concept that transforms the working body as a material subjectivity into a docile being.  Two, in doing so, it pulls against Hegel's somewhat cerebral account of time, drawing the concept into the actuality of history.  With Hegel, for Foucault, time is secondary to experience -- subject comes into existence due to its practical engagement/resistance/confrontation with the object.

Srivats