Some striking passages from Chapter 2: Temporality
of
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, tr. Donald Landes, Routledge, 2012 (1945).
477
We say that time passes or flows by. We speak of the course of time. The water that I see rolling by was made ready a few days ago in the mountains, with the melting of the glacier; it is now in front of me and makes its way towards the sea into which it will finally discharge itself. If time is similar to a river, it flows from the past towards the present and the future. The present is the consequence of the past, and the future of the present. But this often repeated metaphor is in reality extremely confused. For, looking at the things themselves, the melting of the snows and what results from this are not successive events, or rather the very notion of event has no place in the objective world. When I say that the day before yesterday the glacier produced the water which is passing at this moment, I am tacitly assuming the existence of a witness tied to a certain spot in the world, and I am comparing his successive views: he was there when the snows melted and followed the water down, or else, from the edge of the river and having waited two days, he sees the pieces of wood that he threw into the water at its source. The ‘events’ are shapes cut out by a finite observer from the spatio- temporal totality of the objective world. But on the other hand, if I consider the world itself, there is simply one indivisible and changeless being in it. Change presupposes a certain position which I take up and from which I see things in procession before me: there are no events without someone to whom they happen and whose finite perspective is the basis of their individuality.
479
If we separate the objective world from the finite perspectives which open upon it, and posit it in itself, we find everywhere in it only so many instances of ‘now’.
481
Correspondingly, therefore, the subject must not be himself situated in [time], in order to be able to be present in intention to the past as to the future. Let us no longer say that time is a ‘datum of consciousness’; let us be more precise and say that consciousness deploys or constitutes time.492
Time exists for me only because I am situated in it, that is, because I become aware of myself as already committed to it, because the whole of being is not given to me incarnate, and finally because one sector of being is so close to me that it does not even make up a picture before me—I cannot see it, just as I cannot see my face.