Ecolinguistics of temporality, grounded in the basic layers of human sense-making, challenges Newtonian absolute time model which dominates today’s folk psychology of time. Husserl’s famous phenomenology of the ‘extended now’ has done a...
moreEcolinguistics of temporality, grounded in the basic layers of human sense-making, challenges Newtonian absolute time model which dominates today’s folk psychology of time. Husserl’s famous phenomenology of the ‘extended now’ has done a lot to explain our experience of time, but it still deals with the perception of external events abstracted from their real-life context and is limited to passively observing subjects. Although a number of authors already explored action-based approaches to temporality, the discovery of the roots of the human sense of time in active and embodied involvement with the world has just started.
In this research we focus on basic concepts of present, past and future. We interpret these fundamental categories in terms of action-thoughts, understood as elementary units of activity as well as of actional thinking and imagination. Action-thoughts conceptualize the fundamental unity of thinking and activity postulated by the champions of action-based approach in psychology, from Vygotsky and Rubinstein to today’s enactivism. Action-thoughts both bring forth and represent actions and are also evoked in their covert rehearsal. The action-thought is an instrumentum studorium, which enables us to view from common perspective the phenomenology of the present as well as the enactment of past and future.
We argue that the temporal reality of an acting agent is sustained by the experiential flow of ‘absorbed activity’. An action being an indivisible unit of activity is thus also a unit of ‘actional’ time. A flow of time is thus constructed of and through actions. This experiential time is determined by the rhythm of activity, whereas ‘objective’ time measurements appear as external constraints (such as deadlines) and can even be viewed as foreign intrusions.
Both past and future are consciously and reflectively constructed in the plane of the lived present and make sense only in this plane. Past is re-presented by action-thoughts which abstract some part of our present and re-focus our attention on its experience. Future is also an action-thought, and it takes this abstraction even further to the new levels of reflection, so that it becomes yet a new modulation of our experience of the present. This experience changes the way we live and act and it modulates our cognitive living. If past builds up on attentional re-focalizations, future is constructed through focalizations of another kind, allowing for an increased sense of relevance and actuality. In fact, both past and future are merely abstractions from the present.
It is emphasized that the construction of temporal sequences is possible only in linguistic semiosis, and the triad ‘present-past-future’ is an instance of the ‘epistemological trap of language’: past and future are mental constructs that belong to the present just as any other act of thinking.
References
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