Harman on time

http://doctorzamalek2.wordpress.com/2010/07/31/first-look-at-being-and-time/

It's about his first encounter with Heidegger. But it also talks about time. There's a golden line:

The intellectual reflex of our time is still to say: “static and essential = bad; changing and becoming = good.”

It reminds me of a half finished thought I posted on Bryant's post on construction. I wrote that the prejudice is to think "object = static."

Graham jumps further in to the core of the problem: this stasis is thought pejoratively.

It made me realize that ironically it's the process view that reifies time into an external container. The trumpery of "you would be a fool to think objects as static" masks an underlying prejudice that is not well worked out.

The prejudice is the default mode in which "everything flows." Now he mentions it I hear the ticking of a clock inside this meme. It's so easy to hold it in an age of ubiquitous time measuring devices.

Ironically then the process view codes for thinking time as a succession of instants. Which is why I find Harman's reworking of occasionalism so refreshing.

"Of course you would be a fool to think that things are static" is trumpery, and that it might mask a deeply held prejudice about time as an external container, just ticking away regardless.

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