Journey Through the Vowels of Human Time

Abstract

An uninterrupted flow of thoughts (images, memories, analyses, desires, etc.)—content of human time in discontinuity/continuity. The discontinuous is suspended and thus becomes continuous when it emerges voluntarily: this is effort or duration; since in human time it is necessary to be and not just to exist, unlike non-human time: a stone exists, but it is not, any more than plants and animals, which seek only to reproduce, even if they are internally adapted by various modifications. But they are not the mainspring, unlike humans, who manifest this through gestures that are both mechanical (breathing, tingling, rubbing, crossing and uncrossing of limbs, touching of the face at each external and internal interaction) and, at the same time, through selected gestures assembled into attitudes (movements that are, however, ritualised according to the action and the place where they occur) at a given social-historical moment.

Human Time thus seems to be a Flow, either voluntarily organised into effort and/or duration, or involuntarily into subdued passion which nevertheless manifests itself through internal gestures (to the point of gurgling, coughing, breathing more or less loudly) or external gestures (yawning, tiredness, boredom, excitement, interest, moving in a geometry of perception). The whole thing can be tumultuous; the imaginary, this very movement of floating thoughts, comes up against the symbolism of internal and, above all, external conventions; it thus consists of creating and not just acclimatising, because human persistence also wants to refine and not just be powerful, and this within three limits: motivational finality or eschatology, goal-mean or teleology, result or “form” or eschatology; but the “waters change” defy, indulge in, for example, sophistry (or negative refinement), this dispersion aimed for itself.

The aim here is to reflect on these impressions/expressions of the human Time Flow; that of a Self-given from its three angles (Conative Subject: that of differential preferences, Political Actor: creator of relationships, Social Agent specialising in a particular skill) and which, at any given moment, can/wants to juggle between persistence alone (the game of the Same within the Identical, the Same, the Similar) and refinement through change (the innovative game of the Other within the Multiple, the Diverse), according to the chosen development factor (refinement, persistence, dispersion, dissolution), in a position of reinforcement or reduction within each action undertaken by one of these three aspects of the Self.