Consciousness and Change

(1) This direct encounter with the immediate past is sui generis, and it is an ‘original’ element of experience. Thus, it is not as if the perception of material objects appears first in animal experience, and the perception of phenomenal objects across time comes next. And that is to say, not that all perceptions are simultaneously directed to present and past, but that those perceptions whose object is at each moment situated purely in the present, such as the visual perception of a tree or house, are nonetheless for the experiencer sited in a temporal framework which incorporates a past of which he is concretely aware in a way that closely matches the perception of movement. A man staring fixedly at a chair is as directly aware of the perceptual object of a few seconds ago as is the perceiver of a movement across time. The individuation of the perception of any instant requires that it be so.

Indeed one might at first suppose that, since the function of perception is to inform us of phenomena in a changing world, all perception must be of change across time. However, this is no more true than the reverse supposition. Each of these extremes is an abstraction from reality. Perceptual worlds populated exclusively by change across time, or exclusively by unchanging objects, are scarcely imaginable: so to say pure manic Heracliteanism, or depressive Parmenideanism!

Consider the latter: a sort of graveyard of immobilized entities, all frozen in their tracks. And in fact such a scene would be a world, not in reality of changelessness, but of persistence and change in which the change is presented to consciousness in the mode of the hour hand. It is conceivable that all visual perception took this form, though since intentional bodily action depends internally on proprioception, and physical action is fundamental to the animal condition, rather less than conceivable that absolutely all perception might be of an ‘hour-hand world’. Meanwhile the Heraclitean alternative presents even greater problems for the imagination, bearing in mind that change is always relative to an unchanging ‘ground’. But the point to be emphasized here is, that we can experience one type of object (unchanging desert, the ‘fixed stars’) only if we can experience the other (earthquake, a rocket-path). In a word, they are

‘equi-original’.

(2) And yet considered from the point of view of experience, the symmetry vanishes. In the very nature of things there is a sort of natural bias towards the perception of change. Even in the situation of total lack of change in the objects of perception, change continues—within. (It is a direct manifestation of the life of the subject, as indeed is experience itself: they exemplify the ‘ticking over’ that is in a general sense essential to life.) However frozen the perceptible world may in fact be, the ‘internal clock’ of consciousness ticks on, and all that can stop it is oblivion. Heracliteanism is true of the domain of experience.

In the light of this fact it seems to me that the perception of the shape of movement might with some justice be proposed as a fitting image for consciousness. While the perceptibility of change in one's environment is a necessity merely qua contrast with the perceptibility of stasis, in the case of the phenomenon of experience the necessity for awareness of continuous occurrence across time is internal to the phenomenon itself—a necessity which is encountered equally as directly in intentional action as here. One could put the matter this way: that consciousness is possible only if it is akin all the time to the perception of shape across time. In this image we import the direct encounter with temporal change, the sheer awareness of the passage of time, that we know to be essential to consciousness. The proper image for experiential consciousness is, seeing the gesture across time, or reading the luminous ticker-tape sentence, and it is not seeing the hour hand of the clock, or the immobile Pyramids. More exactly, it is seeing the gesture across time in seeing the hand that moves, or seeing the hand that moves in seeing the gesture across time. Consciousness at any instant encompasses more than the instant.

(3) This ‘co-presence’ of times is a constitutive property. It is this which the image of the visible gesture emphasizes: it drives home the message that, despite being divisible into ‘now’-parts, the nature of experience is temporally in extenso from the temporal standpoint of that ‘now’. It is almost as if at each instant one saw more than the instant, as if one were equipped with a sort of prism facing in both temporal directions, whereby one simultaneously witnessed both

‘elsewhere’ and ‘here’ in time, given miraculously in their appropriate temporal locations. This

misleading image has the virtue of situating the decisive property non-relationally within the experience itself. That property is best captured by reaffirming the claim that the essential description of any experience of the moment contains an irreducible reference to the immediate past/future of the experience, given from the temporal vantage-point of

‘now’. The experience of the instant is never given, and cannot as such be given, merely as ‘now’.

Close up the past, wall off the future, and you cover over the present too. For there is simply no such thing as ‘the solipsistic fruits of the instant’. Just as I cannot see motion at any instant unless I now see what I also witnessed elsewhere in time, namely the movement-phenomenon that reaches up to this very instant; just as I cannot be going anywhere unless I am coming from somewhere, or coming from somewhere if I am going nowhere, indeed can be doing nothing in the absence of either!; so it is right across the spectrum of experience. The experience is in its very constitution embedded at a determinate point in a concretely given temporal continuity, and not just known to be sited in some determinate way. While dream experience has odd temporal characteristics (as will emerge in Chapter 2), the sheer narratability of the dream demonstrates that the property of temporal ‘co-presence’ is not peculiar merely to experience in the conscious. It is true of experience as such.

(4) Time is the form, not as such of the psychological, and not merely of the experience: it is rather to be characterized as the form of any properly developed mental psychological phenomenon. Thus, time cannot be the form as such of the psychological, since two qualitatively indistinguishable pains might simultaneously exist in one's two thumbs, thanks to the proprioceptive perception of the body, and ultimately to the long-term body image. Therefore space, or more exactly the experienced space of the body, must be the form of the psychological primitive, sensation. But time cannot just be the form uniquely of experience either, since we individuate mental states generally across time. For example, one cannot from t1 to t2 hold two enduring distinct beliefs directed to the same proposition, any more than one can from t1 to t2 support two active thinking experiences with identical content.

Then time with determinations appropriate to the temporal mapping of experienced process must be the specific form of experiential consciousness. It is not just that we individuate experiences, and most significantly internally indistinguishable experiences, by positioning them on the ultimate differentiating one-dimensional co-ordinate system—time. In addition, an experiencing subject is one who experiences the passage of time. Experiences not just are, and are not just known to be, they are experienced as ‘simultaneous with’ or ‘just after’ or ‘a continuation in time of’

or ‘leading towards’ particular existent experiences; and this is a universal structural characteristic specifically of the realm of experience. A conscious animal inhabits time just as concretely as it does space. To awaken is to discover oneself in both.

The supposition that all movement might have been as the hour-hand's and invisible, indeed that absolutely all perception might have been as if of a sort of Parmenidean graveyard of immutability, such theoretical possibilities must not deflect us from the central point. Namely, that experience itself cannot be of this kind. Even the unchanging perception of a fixed immobilized world conceals a processive continuity, that of the perceiving itself, which is occurrently renewed in each instant, defining itself through that change as it proceeds. And this is how it is with experience as such. That is why I say that the proper image for conscious experience is, not the seeing of the hour-hand, nor of a close at hand tracer bullet, nor even of the very large visibly-moving minute hand: it is the sight of a swallow in flight, or of a meteor crossing the night sky.