Temporality is the name of that which holds the movement of life together, while simultaneously making of life a series of moments, of flowing presents and past retentions. The movement of temporality takes on central importance in the Phenomenology of Perception because it is our movement as existing subjects, condemned to meaning, or as it were, condemned to unfold temporally. In apprehension, what is apprehended is only apprehended in retrospection as part of the temporal flux, and that this reflection itself is in turn part of the flux. Time is a self-relation wherein the self seems to be reduced to a moment of non-being, or absence, taking place in relative fields of presence. We are, as it were, the absence, the kernel of non-being, which relates the passive and active poles, the space from which comes the upsurge of time. We live, as it were, in the midst of a temporal field, in a world, we do not constitute but take up and reckon with it in order to express, say, and act. We can’t not unfold in this manner, as our being is not simply a transparent given, but rather a temporal unfolding in a temporal field. Neither is time simply an eternal something which is complete alongside our being. Beneath the temporality of our acts, expressions, gestures, lies an intentionality which pushes them all along, an operant intentionality which comes before all of them and which they cannot do without. There is a time that we are existingly as living, or unfolding in the world, and there is a temporality, which serves as the background, from which our existence derives its significance. In the present, the living present, we have the moment wherein our being and our consciousness of being intersect and overlap in a spontaneous acquisition, which upon reflection, is appropriated in a historical field which I carry along as so many retentions of past acquisitions. Once acquired these acquisitions become part of the retentions which I protend into the horizon of the future; even further, they become part of the spontaneous self which apprehends in the moment of the living present. Time is the subject, the relation, the dialectic between being and having, the acquired and the possible.
It is perhaps here in the temporality chapter that the true significance of the Phenomenology of Perception is brought to the foreground. We live in fields of fields, of which temporality is simply the most basic, or perhaps the most originary. We historically have had the tendency to privilege the activities of thetic intentionality and disregard the level of ‘mere’ existence which lives beneath it. This example, of what Merleau-Ponty would call “high altitude” thinking, is precisely that which Merleau-Ponty is aiming at when he points at the pre-objective present which is the basis upon which thetic intentionality can function at all. It is therefore the case that this “high altitude” thinking seems to undermine its own claims to objective validity, when it fails to notice that it is erected upon a “pyramid of time” sexual energies, mistaken utterances and even possibly erroneous conclusions. In short, we reckon with all that is given explicitly and that which is not explicit, that which is simply operant in every effort to express, act, or engage with others and the world we share. What we project, in the first place, is the same thing we encounter again and again in every reflection, in every attempt to step back from the flux and arrest its flow if even for a moment, and that is a world which comes before me and yet which I effect with my own movement and the movements of others. The world is always given in advance as part of my unfolding which is the movement of time.
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