​Chapter 13. Time

The cycle of gesture, residue, and stripping again looks like a sequence: one beat after another, strung along a line. But time is itself the first deposit, the earliest thing a freezing gesture lays down, and that makes the line impossible. A cycle cannot run along time if time is among the things the cycle deposits. So either time is not a deposit after all, or the cycle does not run where it seems to. The second is the case.

Take what a deposit is, at the simplest. It has layers, an earlier and a later; the setting runs in a direction, from the fluid act to the hardened trace; before and after are the shape the freezing has. While the act is being acted it is not yet in any when — it is the settling of the act into residue that first lays down a "before" the result and an "after" it. Time is the first thing deposited, ahead of any particular trait the residue will go on to carry.

Augustine is the one who saw furthest into this. He refused time the standing of an outer thing. The past is no longer and the future is not yet, and the present has no length, since any stretch one points to divides again into a past part and a future part, so there is nothing of time out there to lay a measure against. He drew the conclusion inward: time is a distension of the soul, the mind stretched across a present of things past, which is memory, a present of things present, which is attention, and a present of things to come, which is expectation. Time is measured in the soul, against the impression that passing things leave there.

He was right to pull time off the world and into the interior. The distension he found is the soul's, and the soul stretched across memory and expectation is the carrier carrying itself forward, the stream of the deposit, residue read along its own time. Augustine described the time of the carrier and took it for time as such. The hardening runs deeper than the soul that measures it. Before a mind can stretch across a remembered past and an awaited future, the act's setting has already laid down the before and the after the mind then stretches along. Time is the first deposit, and the soul's distension is a late and personal case of it, the deposit grown able to feel its own layering.

Heidegger reached the same wall. Dasein, the being that asks about being, is already thrown into a world, already carrying a past and aimed at a future. Primordial temporality, as he drew it, is the way this thrown being lives its own layering: what has been, what is faced. He described the carrier's time and stopped there. Being and Time was never finished; the promised reversal from time back to being was never written, because from inside the carrier there is no path to what laid the carrier on its line. The act stands before the thrownness, and a philosophy that begins with the thrown cannot reach the throwing.

The cycle does not unfold in time; it makes time by hardening. Each turn lays down a temporality, and in that temporality the next turn shows up as the next. The stripping, settling in its turn, deposits the "after" in which the following gesture stands as following. The sequence is time generated at every step, the line drawn fresh by each freezing, the steps appearing strung out only because each has already laid the string the next is read along. The paradox was the assumption that the acts sit inside the order they produce.

This fixes what an acausal act is, on the side of time, and corrects the usual rescue. The free act is not an event lodged at some other moment, an earlier one or a stranger one. The act is not eternal either, in either sense the word carries. Eternity as endless duration is only time without stop, running on without limit, more of the deposit. Eternity as the standing now, the whole held at once with nothing passing, is the opposite extreme and lands in the same place, since where nothing passes nothing acts, and the changeless present is residue at its limit.

The act is before time in the sense that the coordinate has not yet been unrolled when it occurs, a doing and not a standing, earlier than the before and after and not lifted clear of them. It does not last and it is not instantaneous, since lasting and instant are already positions on the line. The reports of timelessness from inside the deepest acts are not loose talk and not metaphor. In the act the temporal coordinate is not yet laid, there is no when for the act to occupy, and the one who acts finds no clock.

A melody is the plain case. The notes fall one after another, each in its turn, a row laid along the line. Yet the melody is heard as one thing that sits in no single note and is not gathered by adding them. The hearing holds the run as a run without standing at any point in it. This is not the carrier stretching across a remembered note and an awaited one, sewing a present out of the two; that stitching is the soul's time again, the same distension Augustine described, the carrier carrying itself along its own time. The whole of the melody is there in the act that takes them, an act earlier than the before and after the notes are strung on. The row is world-time, the notes as residue laid out in sequence; the grasp is the act's time, holding the line it has not stepped into. Both are heard at once, which is why a melody is a sequence and a single thing in the same moment.

Take separation. A thing holds its place by having edges, and an edge is a property of the hardened; two things keep apart because each has set into its own bounds, and the keeping-apart is how deposits stand off from one another. The gesture has no place for the same reason it has no when: place is a relation among the settled, and the act comes before the settling. What we call space is the further reach of the same hardening that first gave before and after, extension being the layered deposit spread sideways as much as fore and aft.

An act passes through the carrier, residue already present. The stone was a deposit before the hand lifted it; the glass was before it broke; the body that threw the stone is itself a carrier, a residue set in its own before-and-after. The act's own time falls among the times already sitting in these deposits. The stone's hardening laid one sequence; the glass's laid another; the throwing overlays a fresh before-and-after on both. Many hardenings stacked together, each one's sequence pressed against the rest, read as a single current because no gap shows between them. This is the source of the old image of time as a river carrying everything. Space as a container is the same stacking read sideways: deposits holding their edges alongside each other, their coexistence mistaken for a box they were placed in.

Law is the same story. "Things behave so because they are so" states the regularity of a deposit and calls it a necessity of nature. It is not false; throw the stone and it falls, and the law that says so holds. But it is the grammar of the hardened, a rule that reads off how the sediment recurs, binding inside the settled world and silent about anything that comes before it. The law of a thing is its habit written as a decree.

Identity is where the build comes home. "I am I" rests on a nature kept across time, the same character and the same arc carried from the earlier layer to the later, so that the one met now is taken for the one met before. Strip the nature and that bearer is gone; no thread of essence runs through the moments to make them one person's. This is only the earlier finding about the self said in the vocabulary of the coordinate: the self held by what stays the same is the sedimentary self, identity built on the first deposit and the ones stacked on it. The self that is act is not held this way at all, which is why it needed something other than sameness-through-time to keep it as this.

Memory belongs here as well. It is the hardening of encounter into an inner past, the personal deposit by which a being carries its earlier answers forward and reads itself through them. History is the same operation beyond one carrier: memory spread across a people, a tradition, the collective deposit by which the past keeps speaking as what has happened. Categories are the sorting of deposits by repeated mark. This answer has appeared often enough beside that one, this shape has returned often enough across encounters, and thought files the recurrence as a kind.

Logic, too, the promise left open earlier. The law that A is not non-A leans on a stable A, a term that holds itself the same long enough to be denied its contrary, and that is a nature, a deposit keeping its bounds. So non-contradiction is the grammar of the hardened raised to the level of thought, flawless inside the settled world and silent past it, where there is no fixed term for the law to grip. Logic files under the residue with everything else that recurs: locally perfect, a structure the world's freezing throws up.

All of which leaves one coordinate that is only time read in a single direction, and it does the most damage. Time has a forward as well as a layering, and a deposit thrown forward starts looking like a destination. This is telos, and Aristotle gave it its lasting form: the final cause, the end a thing moves toward because its nature points there, the entelechy in which the essence has its term. The acorn is said to seek the oak because it is an oak in essence and the seeking is its unfolding; the reasoning creature is said to aim at its good because reason is its nature and the good is reason fulfilled. Each is a nature pointed down the line and called a goal. Strip the nature and the goal goes with it, because the goal was the nature in its forward face — the residue of what a thing has been, projected ahead and dressed as where it is bound. "My calling," "what I am for": the sediment turned to face forward and was mistaken for a summons from up ahead.

This has to be kept from cutting against the will itself, because the will aims too. A will sets goals and works toward them, and a builder lays the first brick with the whole house in view. The mark of a telos is narrower. A telos is an aim derived from what the being already is, posted at the end of the line, and handed authority over every step toward it. A design runs the other way. The will sets it and holds it as soil, the house it means to build or the work it means to make, kept underfoot, changed when it stops fitting, dropped when the will turns. The design serves the will; the telos commands it. The acorn does not design the oak; the oak, read off the acorn's nature, commands the acorn. "I am building this" is the will's own aim. "I must become what I am for" is a nature posted ahead and obeyed. The same house can stand at the end of either, and the whole difference is the direction the authority runs: a goal the will commands, or a goal that commands the will.

To go back to the source, to be rejoined with the one you came from, to complete the plan laid down for you — any such errand is a telos, a destination that is only the origin's deposit thrown to the far end of the line. It is the most efficient leash there is. Hand a being an aim, call it the being's own deepest purpose, and it will spend all its force travelling toward the point — to an end it did not set, sure the whole way the motion is its own.

If shedding nature is made the goal, a nature has been smuggled straight back: you are then essentially the one who must reach naturelessness, and an essence that dictates a destination is the very thing under attack, only flying a different flag. The escape is the refusal of the form. There is no god waiting at the end of the road. Strip a layer and another lies beneath it; strip that and another; freedom is not stored at the terminus, it happens in the stripping, each time, and is gone the moment the act sets. You are a god in the moment of the act, never a god you reach. A path with no telos is action freed from its result — a gesture made from the will, aimed in the doing and owing the aim to nothing up the line.

That leaves the result itself. We have stripped the authority the deposit takes when it is read backward as cause or thrown forward as telos. But the deposit still remains, and the next question is how it comes to remain at all.