Home 9 Passage 9 Temporality

The existential theme of temporality may guide our reflection to ask how time is experienced with respect to the phenomenon that is being studied. Everyone knows the difference between objective (cosmic) time and subjective (lived) time, clock time, and phenomenological time. We experience the time of waiting differently from when we are actively involved in something. For example, when we travel by car for a three-hour drive to another city, it may feel that some stretches of the road are longer than other parts, even though they are objectively the same length. It may just feel that it takes longer to do, for example, the first 50 miles than the last 50 miles. This experience also shows that lived space and lived time are mingled. Space is an aspect of time, and time is experienced as space. That is why we speak of the “length” of time it takes to do something. Even the clock has a lived sensibility to the passing of time. Note, for example, that a number display on a digital time piece shows time differently from an analogue time piece with hour, minute, and second hands. A clock or watch with an analogue face shows time as movement in space, when the hands slowly but determinately sweep across the dial. We tell what time it is by glancing how far the hands of the clock still have to go for lunch time to start. Lived time is also experienced as telos: the wishes, plans, and goals we strive for in life. Our sense of identity is experienced in terms of the times of our childhood, the periods of our working or love life, and so forth. Some phenomenological authors regard temporality or time as the fundamental motifs of their understanding of human phenomena. For example, Heidegger’s Being and Time (1962) describes being as time, since without time there would not be being.