Human Time

Our era, more than any other, has thought and written about time as a condition of human life. Twentieth-century thought has taken temporality seriously, perhaps for the first time in history. Not only has philosophy centered on this theme, from Dilthey and Bergson to the present day, passing through Ortega and Heidegger, not only is the title of the latter’s most important book Sein und Zeit, but the other intellectual disciplines have explored temporality in all directions: in society—theory of generations—in psychology, in literature, in art. In my own work I have had to devote many pages, from different perspectives, to the problem of time and temporality, pages which I am not going to repeat here; I shall limit myself to recalling them to the degree indispensable for comprehension of what I must now say.

We are dealing—let us not forget—with an anthropological perspective, but we must be well aware that this anthropology is metaphysical. This means, as we have said repeatedly, a biographical perspective; not the perspective of human life as radical reality, not that of analytical theory, but that which pertains to the empirical structure of that life. And so we must try to see how temporality functions, in a precise way, as one of the ingredients of this life; that is, of the empirical but structural form in which it actually takes place, and which we call “man.”

Human life is temporal and successive. The definition of eternity given by Boethius is literally presented as a negative cast of human temporality: interminabilis vitae tota simul et perfecta possessio, “the simultaneous and perfect possession of everlasting life.” Human life is not everlasting, but has begun and will end—most important of all, will end, whatever its ulterior fate. Furthermore, its possession is not simultaneous, but specifically successive—it is possessed bit by bit—and it is not perfect, but highly imperfect and precarious: unstable in the present instant, pale and impoverished in memory of the past, uncertain and vague in anticipation of the future. Life presents itself in any case as affected by temporal finitude: its formula is that of “our days are numbered.” Stretching from birth to death, we might say that the radical form of “installation” in life is precisely time; time is that in which I “am,” properly speaking, and the temporal mode of being—as we saw in general elsewhere—is “to keep on being”: expressed more succinctly, “to endure.”Birth is the absolute past. While all the contents of my previous life have been present at some time, birth was never present: it was never present to me, I did not “attend” it. The past is recalled in memory and the future is anticipated in the imaginary project; but, in a more immediate way, life is both “retention” and “protention.” The “instant” is not a point without duration, but a temporal surrounding when we are dealing with human life and not with cosmic time. Past and future are present in a decision, in a human doing. What is done is done “because of something and for some purpose,” and it is that presence—no matter how “abbreviated” it may be—of motivation and aim, which introduces temporal distension, duration, into every instant of my life. This means that, strictly speaking, life does not consist of instants, but moments. This is the form of the intrinsic temporality of human life.That temporal and successive quality is expressed, in a way that cannot be improved upon, by saying that human life happens. Language uses different and ultimately metaphorical expressions to describe what “goes on.” The most frequent of these—which unconsciously emphasize the chance dimension of life, a point which we shall have to discuss—allude to “falling”: incident, incidence, accident, and so on. The particular shading of “hazard” is explicit in the Greek τυνχάνειν (tynkhánein), from the same root as τύχη (tykhé), luck or fortune. The idea of “arriving” or “coming” is very close to συμβαίνειν, (symbaínein), hence συμβεβηκός, (symbebekós) “accident,” occur (oc-currere), and the French arriver. In the English word happen we again find the idea of luck, fortune, or chance; in the Spanish word acaecer (“to fall out”), the idea of falling reappears. The word acontecer (happen) in Spanish is deeper and more interesting: it is derived from contigere, a Vulgar Latin form of the Classical contingere (that is, con-tangere); it is “what touches,” that is, the luck which falls to someone; it is not mere casualidad (coincidence), derived from casus or fall, but the “lot” or portion (méros, mórion); in short, it is what corresponds to μοῐρα (moîra), and in this sense the word acontecer is semantically related to destino, “destiny” or “fate.” (We find something similar in the German Ereignis and the reflexive verb sich ereignen, in which the root eigen, “own,” shows through: in acontecer, one makes something one’s own, what happens belongs to one or touches one.) And this etymologicnl connection shows us that man’s temporality and contingency are unexpectedly linked.What happens happens to us; that is, it takes place, it “touches” us (contingit, attingit, from which the Spanish verb atañer, to touch or affect). Therefore, what happens “remains”; it gradually constitutes the content of life, its “resources,” its “riches,” its ousía, and in this sense is the substance of life. The future, for its part, is a reality which does not yet exist, and therefore is not possessed, but with which we have to make our life. Hence we live “on credit,” reckoning with the future which is possessed by anticipating it in the form of belief. As it passes, time “brings me into realization” and, in a certain sense, “thingifies” me. I mean that the past “I,” as it “continues to be,” once that it “has been,” ceases to be I and becomes circumstance: the “I” which I was is something that I encounter, with which I have to count, which conditions me, which opens up certain possibilities to me and closes off others. (I can speak English because I learned it before, because an “I” who is now past learned it; I cannot speak Russian because no past “I” of mine learned it, or because I forgot it, and so on.) That is, time affects me, like the other ingredients of my circumstance. The executive I, the true I in its pronominal function—not the substantive one, not “the I”—the function in which I say “I,” is present, is pure presentness and momentness, but its reality consists in projecting itself vectorially toward the future. I am not future, but present and actual and acting, and therefore future-oriented.On the other hand, if we attempt to understand in a concrete, non-abstract way, not in the sense of pure measurement, the meaning of the finitude of life, of the limited time of its duration, we must regard it dramatically. Human life does not “last” a longer or shorter time, like a building or a utensil, not even like an organism, but has a “plot.” In the phrase ars longa, vita brevis, the brevity of life depends on the longevity of art. Life is short because it is not long enough for the art which must be learned and executed; that is, for one’s projects. Human time is not a mere quantity, but is always the time there is not enough of—or too much of. When there is too much time, that tremendous situation we call boredom occurs, and then we say that we have to “kill time.” There is not enough when the “plot” of our life needs more time than is available. Man frequently complains that he “has no time for anything,” but then he usually discovers that he “has nothing for time,” and his life takes on the form of tedium. This means that time is not mere passage or flow, that it does not limit itself to “passing,” but has structure; and this structure is not that of simple duration or quantification, but the structure imposed by the projective reality of life. Once more we encounter the dual structure which we find everywhere when we analyze human life: installation and vectors. Man is “in” time, the substance of his life. But to live temporally is to aim vectorially in different directions, near or far. There is no such thing as an “indefinite” vector, and this will lead us to the ultimate questions posed by human life when it is considered as totality, and when, in consequence, its configuration becomes problematical.

All this is characteristic of human life in general, of biographical life as it reveals itself to the analysis of its necessary, and therefore universal, structure. But if we now go on to the higher concreteness of its empirical structure, we find some aspects which affect its temporality. Worldhood, corporeality, the actual sensorial system, the interaction of biographical life and its biological substratum, real social forms, the rhythm of history—all this conditions the true reality of human time. We must consider it briefly within this anthropological perspective.

Time appears as articulated; it is not a continuum, a permanent and homogenous flow. From the point of view of human “doing,” we have already seen that the elective and decisive quality of human life, founded on motivation and projection, imposes the structure of the moments of which life is composed. The moment is not a chronological unit—it makes no sense to ask “how long” a moment lasts—but it is a vital one, that is, a biographical unit. Man lives moment after moment—and these moments are not instantaneous—and the linkage between them establishes the articulated continuity of the biographical trajectory. But the world as it actually is imposes another empirical articulation which is superimposed on the previous one: that of day and night, with light and darkness, which correspond to the periods of wakefulness and sleep, and these are dependent on human corporeality. (But, it might be objected, are there not other more elemental and primary articulations, such as the beating of the heart or the rhythm of breathing? Do not these impose the most characteristic structure of human temporality? No; for heartbeats, inhalation and exhalation, are primarily somatic and not biographical. Normally I do not notice them, they do not have biographical relevance for me save in exceptional cases; they are abstract units, what we might call “submultiples” of vital time.)The cyclical quality of biological and terrestrial life, insofar as it conditions biography, is the primary mode of quantification of time; the “tale” of the numbered days allows them to be counted. Imagine a man who never slept, in a world that was always the same, where light was perpetual: he would have a completely different experience of life with respect to time and its finitude. On a larger scale, the rhythm of the seasons projects a new and higher structure on temporality, which reinforces the “plotlike” quality of life. To the passage of the days is added the recurrence of the seasons, and with it the “passage of the years,” which is what is counted, strictly speaking, what makes us feel at a certain level in our vital trajectory. Daily life, by its repetition, creates an illusion of eternity: that which we do “each” day makes us feel as if we could do it “every” day; that is, forever. At the same time, variation and innovation impress the “plotlike” quality of life upon us. And from this arise all the concrete forms of sensation in relation to time: expectation, waiting, hope, despair (which becomes the experience of “this can’t go on”), hopelessness (expressed in the melancholy experience of “things can go on like this indefinitely”).Naturally, the chief characteristic of time as a form of empirical structure is age. In the first place, life has a “normal” duration (which has nothing to do with “mean” duration, for that can be altered by infant mortality, accidental death, and so on). It is not the time one is going to live, but the time one counts on; in consequence, the time which makes us feel at a certain “altitude” in life. This is of an order of magnitude which in practice is constant, but by no means unchangeable: between the Romantic period and today, in a period of 150 years, the normal life of Western man has been extended by a good fifty per cent, and the end is not yet in sight. Age, on the other hand, besides being an accumulation of reality—what we call “experience,” and that is why we distinguish between the time that “passes” and the age that we “are”—presents itself as a qualification of human possibilities, inextricably linked with biological powers. According to his age, man feels himself to be in each respect—in each vectorial orientation—in a situation which could be expressed in these terms: “not yet,” “now,” and “no longer.” These expressions never affect the whole of life, but only each of its dimensions, and the “not yet” in respect to something coincides with the “now” in respect to something else, and so on.

The child, whose reality is intrinsically immature, who is not yet...we shall see what...nevertheless is with unusual fullness. He has a certain very obvious “substantivity,” which on the other hand, in a form not easy to determine, persists throughout his biography: we keep on being, to an unsuspected degree, the child that we have been. But we have seen elsewhere that the child is not yet the person he is going to be. This explains the anxiety felt by parents about their children as they grow and mature: literally, they do not know who that child is going to be. This is only known—or it begins to be known—when the sexuate condition achieves the maturity of sexual development: at puberty. This is why the young person never feels quite identified with the child he has been, with that child whom people tell him about and whom he perhaps remembers: it is not obvious that “he” is that child. Hence he must “revalidate” his loves, his friendships, his devotions, his childish beliefs, and largely reject them, at least temporarily; that is why I say that he has to revalidate them. The crisis of belief—religious belief, for example—in a young person is not primarily due to the expansion of his mental horizon, to contact with books or teachers who teach hip things that are different from those he has received, but above all to the fact that the young person is a different person from the child who began to believe; and he must begin again, must revise and accept out of his own self what he cannot receive passively from the child he bears within, but whom he has left behind. This is the anthropological basis that gives meaning to the sacrament of confirmation, which is stripped of its human significance when it is administered before the age of puberty, before the “who” is established in the first fullness of adulthood.

The young person is defined by his minimum of reality and his maximum of real possibilities—those of the child are abstract, are not yet “his” possibilities. This is why youth consists very largely in the absorption of reality and the exploration of its possibilities—the traditional Lehrjahre and Wanderjahre, years of apprenticeship and travel. The child, and even the youth, considers the “grownup,” the adult, as a stable and already formed reality, but when he reaches adulthood he discovers his instability, and, in consequence, the need to keep on inventing. As for the old man, independently of what his physical state of decline may be—that is, if we consider old age as a temporal level, as a form of age—in principle he represents a positive form: the maximum richness of reality, and possibilities which are reduced but in fact broadened by the accumulation of experience of life. The old man’s powers are certainly less than those of the youth or the mature adult, but their significance is much greater to the degree in which his biographical life is a great deal more ample—at least, as long as physical decline does not impose a narrowing stemming from biological factors but with personal repercussions. The important thing about old age, however, is something different: “one can’t go beyond old age,” which means, if we look at things from inside life, that it is the last age, that there is no further age. But this means that the old man has to persevere in his vital phase, and this transforms the “plotlike” meaning of his life. Hence, the meaning of old age depends entirely on how one confronts death, on what this means for each old person. Don Juan’s famous exclamation, “What a long credit you give me!” is a strictly juvenile attitude, which the young man cannot really escape. Old age, on the other hand, is the season of realization and fulfillment, that situation where life is installed in a form which is either “definitive”—unlike all the others—or results in death. And since death is a question mark, the life of the old person is determined by it and by the meaning which, in each case and at every moment, he gives it. This brings us to another problem, one we will have to deal with in its proper place.

Of course, all this is linked to the concrete form—not individual, but collective, historico-social—in which human life takes place. For example, at the present day longevity is encountering a number of social patterns which did not foresee it—retirement, statistical tabulations of age, difficulty of “starting over,” and so on. The scale of the generations depends on the role of ages, and is affected by alterations in the biographical structure; historical knowledge conditions possession of the past and the possibilities of invention. I have spoken at length of all these subjects—from Reason and Life to Generations: A Historical Method and The Social Structure, in a different form in “Experience of Life,” and most specifically in my “books about countries,” The Spaniards, Julián Marías on the United States, Our Andalusia, and so on—and I need not repeat what I have said before and what does not belong in this book. Just now I am interested in the anthropological aspect of what I have studied elsewhere from the viewpoint of analytical theory, social structure, or the ultimate concreteness of the historical forms of life.

Life is circumstantial invention. It is not creation, for life never exists “out of nothing,” but is a making of oneself together with things: it is not, however, mere “realization,” for it consists in the previous invention of possibilities as such. This quality of quasi-creation has a temporal correspondence which affects man as the image of God, imago Dei. In Genesis, in contrast to the instantaneous fiat of the creation of things, γενηθήτω, (genethéto in the version of the Septuagint), a very different expression is used when the creation of man is being described: faciamus hominem ad imaginem et similitudinem nostram, ποιήσομεν ἄνθρωπον κατ' εἰκόνα ἡμετέραν καὶ καθ' ὁμοίωσιν (poiésomen ánthropon kat’ eikóna hemetéran kai kath’ homoíosin), “let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” Leaving aside the suspicion of some theologians that the plural contains a reference to the Trinity—one that is more interesting than it seems, even in an anthropological perspective, for we have already observed that the notion of person is connected with the concept of “living-with,” and not in vain did Unamuno say: “An isolated person would cease to be one; whom, indeed, would he love?”—“Let us make” rather than “let him be made” seems to indicate a continuity, an undertaking; perhaps the best translation of faciamus would be “we are going to make.” And if we ask ourselves in what man’s resemblance to God consists, what allows us to think of man as an image of God, we would have to find it in his indefiniteness, the finite version of infinity. Man is essentially imperfect, that is, unfinished, uncompleted, always a thing-to-be-done and as yet undone. Different from God, who is infinite and eternal, but the opposite of things. Things are in time, but man is making himself from the stuff of time; and since the real man, in his empirical structure, is in a certain sense also a thing—the articulation of a who and a what—his temporality is conditioned by all the structures we have just been examining, not forgetting the sexuate condition, which introduces two forms of biographical human time. Nicholas of Cusa said that man is Deus occasionatus. We might say that in his created but creative temporality, the absolute innovation which has to make itself successively in the form of happening, we find the anthropological meaning of his nature as the image of God.

Julián Marías

METAPHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY:

The Empirical Structure of Human Life