Edge-Based Clausal Syntax: A Study of (Mostly) English Object Structure [ペーパーバック]

Everyone, I should think, has experienced the sensation that time flies when you're having fun, right? Yet, we know, too, that if we really stop to think about it rationally, time cannot really speed up or slow down, can it? In this sense, time seems to be bifurcated between an objective, quantitative time (as understood by Kant's "faculty psychology") and a subjective, qualitative time (as understood by Bergson and Hurssel's "duration"). In his brilliant new text The Time of Our Lives, UC Santa Cruz Philosophy Professor David Couzens Hoy sets out to reconcile these two poles by deemphasizing the former and privileging the latter; that is, his task is not to excavate objective time - Rexroth's "so many clicks to a century" - but rather, to "unmask" the conditions that allow for the "phenomenology of human temporality," or quite literally, "the time of our lives."

Not an easy task! Yet, Hoy pulls it off with erudition and keen insight, while maintaining a high-level of accessibility - indeed, a rare combination for philosophy professors.

Logistically, The Time of Our Lives is Part I of a planned two-volume set on "the history of consciousness." Yet, Hoy's decision to write the volume on "time-consciousness" before "mind-consciousness" is no accident; as he writes in the Preface (and flying, perhaps, in the face of analytical theories of time): "(A) thoroughly pragmatic or hermeneutical philosophy will have to give up the project of explaining which is more primordial, mind or time, and which is derived." This seemingly simple yet iconoclastic statement openly admits to a strong (and, in my opinion, POSITIVE) influence of Continental Philosophy, which may well raise the hair on the necks of more conventional thinkers...but wow, it sure makes for a wild, heady ride!

Personally, I put the cart before the horse and started with his Postscript on Method, where he intriguingly distinguishes between Hume's "vindicatory genealogy" (which cuts through psychological phenomenon to reach an existing core or standard) and Nietzsche's "unmasking genealogy" (which seeks to interrogate how morals come about in general). Although Hoy's method of inquiry throughout the book resembles Nietzsche and Foucault's "unmasking genealogy," he admits that, in the end, his project is more vindicatory than unmasking: "What this study attempts to exonerate, in any case, is the self-understanding of the genealogical method itself. Genealogy would not and should not resist such attempts to vindicate its usefulness, cogency, and coherence - in sum, its rationality."

As I said before, heady stuff!

This book is, in a word, FUN. In Ch. 4, for example, Hoy reconciles poststructural tactics for decentering the modern subject with the possibility of political action by comparing and contrasting Deleuze and Derrida with Zizek and their respective takes on what Hoy calls "Bartleby Politics." That said, I also think readers should have at least a superficial knowledge of Poststructural and Critical Theory (namely Foucault and Derrida), Phenomenology, and Hermeneutics. Still, I strongly recommend The Time of Our Lives to anyone remotely interested in philosophy or time - the text is that good.

The first reader review here of this book, along with a review on the 2009 Notre Dame Philosophy Review site, do a first-rate job of describing what I have found in this book. So for a summary of the content, use those resources. I can then feel free here to opine on what that content means for me.

I have read the book once completely, but it deserves repeated study and will be a reference book for me. By focusing on the topic of time and temporality, it integrates a comprehensive and balanced analysis of the continental philosophy and phenomenology I am interested in. We need both a convincing political philosophy and a relevant philosophy of religion that are coherent.

Instead we have critical theory's affirmation of Enlightenment values for political philosophy (Habermas) opposed to a genealogical critique of political institutions with serious doubts that our inherited values are worthwhile (Foucault). We have a choice between Habermas' reworking of the Enlightenment promises of rationality and progress and Foucault's adamant objections to that.

In addition, we have ontologies such as Heidegger's advocating for "enowning's" deference to the withdrawal of Being itself opposed by Derrida's postmodern (Hoy names it "poststructuralist") replacement of ontology by an original and elaborate literary theory of texts called deconstruction. Yes, all of that is put in perspective in Hoy's book.

It is the second, the discussion of ontology that interests me, because it has potential for philosophy of religion. Hoy commits to philosophical standards, but in the process he raises what are for me theological issues. They revolve around the significance of the dynamic of identity and difference. He surveys those issues as thoroughly as I have found in any one place. Insofar as Christian theology depends on an explication of Being to understand revelation, any critique of such an understanding of Being (as from Heidegger challenged by Derrida) raises primordial questions.

Beyond this book, we can find perspective in Michael Eldred's non-theological reading of Parmenides that suggests a relation of mind and temporality (Hoy's prevailing topic) as inspired by Heidegger (see Eldred's web site). Such a view challenges the Christian apologetics that interpret Heidegger as merely supplementing the ol' time religion. So far as I am aware, with few exceptions (Acts of Religion), defenders of religious orthodoxy are doing their utmost to persuade us that there's nothing new to see here (The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion).

I am convinced that, if Hoy's philosophical method of genealogy is pushed to its inevitable implications, the methodology can also illuminate theology. As my interest is in theology more than philosophy, I search for revelation rather than knowledge--not revelation once and for all but as an ever-available source. No, I have not found it--yet. Heidegger's work promises the possibility of such revelation in his theory of the evidence of the absence of a presence that must be somewhere even if it is not t/here, Da. It is an ontology of what has been forgotten since Heraclitus.

That is now stirring up one of the most fertile and productive outpourings of philosophy of religion in its history. Religion and theology have long been skittish about individual inspiration, with its association for heresy through the ages. So not a lot has yet been done by theology with what is available from the authors whom Hoy refers to. (Should you be aware of resources, please let me know.) Yet with the growth of religious studies programs at the graduate school level, the scholarship we need has begun to appear. Foundations are not easily shaken out of their stupor, but a few eyes have begun to open. Their philosophical teachings can be found in Hoy's book on time-consciousness. I look forward to his promised second volume on self-consciousness.