Perdurant Time

Abstract

Sustainability is a matter of time. For years, scientists have been warning us that our time is up, if we do not “bend the curve” of greenhouse gas emissions. Thinking about future generations calls into question our inherited relationship with nature and the time-scale shift to the Anthropocene. Arguably this trend began with the Industrial Revolution around 1750 and has reached catastrophic levels with the increase of tropical cyclones, wildfires, flash flooding, and heatwaves. The question on most people’s mind is, do we have time to change? Change may occur over eons, such as geological events with the appearance or disappearance of significant life-forms. It may be momentary, such as a flash of insight where our perception of the world changes. Or, indeed, change can happen retroactively - as physicists conceptualize - time can be diffracted, changing the past. This suggests three ontological structures of time. Time is atemporal where things endure and preserve their identity through change. Time is subjective. Or entities have different temporal parts wherein entities unfold through time, referred to as perdurants. Our time is a time of a geological shift. Many geologists agree that we are moving from the Pleistocene to the Anthropocene, with the Doomsday Clock ticking ever closer to 12:00 midnight, deeply affecting the mood of the current generation. The battle cry for sustainability, already a contested word, has been appropriated by petroleum companies and big tech with promises of moving towards 50% lower carbon emissions by 2050. But when we read the fine print in their disclaimers, we find the language of “speculation,” “projection,” “forward looking,” and “risk,” rendering the term meaningless. This paper aims to extend the term sustainability to include all three ontologies of time. I will do this by (I) looking at Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant’s transcendental aesthetic in Section 3 of Heidegger’s 1929 monograph Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, where he overcomes subjective time and the ontology of endurance that accompanies it. (II) Heidegger interchanges between endurance and perdurance in, “The Principle of Identity” (1957) and “The Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics” (1956) navigating a knife-edge between identity and difference. (III) I will conclude by suggesting, when thought in terms of perdurance, sustainability can bend the curve in our current trajectory towards ecological destruction, by reimagining a better world.