Mead thinks that each emerging moment changes the past. It’s difficult to see how it could be otherwise. This doesn’t mean that the directionality of the past is an illusion or reversible. Things done cannot be undone. But what those things are and mean changes as time moves along. The past, not just our view of it, changes over time. Start with Augustine. (more…) Read more

Abstract time is (Anthony Giddens says) “pure duration, as disconnected from the materiality of experience.” This comes to be seen as “real, ‘objective’ time” because “it is expressed in a universal and public mode.” This is helpful. (more…) Read more

“Abstract” time often has reference to durations of time, particularly in relation to economic activity. If I work a 40-hour week for a set wage, I get paid the same no matter what I do or don’t accomplish in that time. In the account books, there’s just the number of hours and the wage paid. The time is “abstracted” from my productivity as the sole standard of “how much I worked,” and then equated with another “abstract” standard of value... Read more

Mead says clock time and calendar time is time only “in a manner of speaking.” He also argues that clock and calendar time is not “absolute” but relative to one’s frame of reference. True that, as my kids say: “Monday” spells gloom within the framework of a certain organization of the working week, and more specifically within the framework of a certain job. But why should “relative” time be time only “in a manner of speaking”? Must something be “absolute”... Read more

George Herbert Mead focused his thought on temporality (especially in Philosophy of the Present ), and particularly on “time in” events and roles rather than time as a background of events. Time in the strictest sense is the moment of present emergence that reflects into the past and changes its meaning and projects toward the future. The abstract time of calendars and clocks is time “in a manner of speaking.” Is the time of clocks and calendars “abstract”? What might... Read more

Barbara Adam says that the time of clocks is “an idea in practice,” and elaborates: “as a material expression of a particular understanding of the natural world, in which time is conceptualised through motion without change, as a spatial quantity which is infinitely divisible into units, which can be numerically defined, and where parts interact within abstracted wholes, to a design of invariant repetition, accurate timing, sequencing and spacing.” Over time, as we regulate our lives by the clock, clock... Read more