Blink of an Eye: Material Nature Captured in the Momentary Now a Radical 1St Person Perspective

Blink of an Eye: Material Nature Captured in the Momentary Now A radical 1st person perspective To Ula Dwight Holbrook Blink of an Eye: Material Nature Captured in the Momentary Now A radical 1st person perspective Also by Dwight Holbrook: The Wickham Claim: Being an Inquiry into the Attainder of Parker Wickham, the factual account of a legally contested Revolutionary War confiscation in 1779. The book brought about a legal claim credited with blocking the development of Robins Island in the Peconic Bay of Long Island. ABSTRACT. Holbrook, Dwight. Blink of an Eye: Material Nature Captured in the Momentary Now. A radical 1st person perspective. Faculty of English. Adam Mickiewicz University. Poznań 2018. Pp. 215. ISBN 978-83-944926-3-2. Text in English. Blurring the border between science and the humanities, this book scrutinizes the relation between material nature and ourselves, doing so by means of a 1st person approach to time. It takes as primordial starting point the now’s immediacy – that is, the experiential immediacy of one’s awakenness to, and contact with, the world and our surroundings, a moment- ness of time that matches and aligns with the immediate presentness of the world we’re in touch with and lucidly aware of. The primordiality of such alignment of time is brought out by the fact that without it there could be no communication, no con-temporaneous society, no knowledge, all of which hinge on this synchronicity of immediate time. Such a perspective entails the overturning of the all but universal bedrock presumption of sequential time, the before and after of extended time. Instead of the transient present resting precariously on the foundational notion of an ordered, sequential time that provides for causal sequence, for chronologies, and for a past “in” the past and a future “in” the future, in the schema advanced in this book it is the past and future that perch precariously on the present – the immediate present being not the present effect of a cause but the present beginning that other notions of time are predicated on. In other words, the notion of time – as this book proposes it – is turned upside down. One might compare such a proposal to that of attempting a detour around the ob- servational bias of searching for keys where the street light is shining, that locality being in this case 3rd person and data-compatible description – the measurable, the countable, the sequential. It is enough here to hint at the detour’s vindication by citing a previewer’s comment on an article in which I addressed the subject of immediate time: “This paper tackles what I’d say is the most important question in consciousness studies; namely, what is the nature of experienced temporality.” (Journal of Consciousness Studies, in- house previewer of “The Nowness of Conscious Experience,” Sept. 19, 2017). KEY WORDS: experiential immediacy, external present time, first-person perspective, lucidity, the now, objectively present moment, present-to-past, relational time, self/other temporal alignment, temporal constraint Dwight Holbrook, Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, al. Niepodległości 4, 61-874 Poznań, Poland; email: [email protected] Published by The Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań © Copyright 2017, 2018 by Dwight Holbrook United States registration number TXu-2-084-238 (2018), TXu002053708 (2017) Cover design: Agnieszka Frydrychewicz, based on an image provided by Andrew and Eric Corra. Formatting and typesetting: Pracownia Wydawnicza WA UAM ISBN 978-83-944926-3-2 Acknowledgements A radical 1st person perspective entails a number of serious problems – some would say insuperable problems – in that it attempts, perhaps imprudently, to go beyond the hard-enough task of seeking a way around the chasm between what we know first-hand, our concrete and experiential contact with the world, and on the other hand the knowledge obtained by inferring and abstracting from the immediate to the non-immediate, the non-immediate being commonly considered a better gauge of the “objective view of that same world”, to borrow the words of Thomas Nagel.1 The endeavor of this present book is, in essence, to apply that “objective” label to an aspect of time this book gives special attention to, namely the immediacy of now time, the immediacy of experiential contact that comes by being awake to the world now. In this undertaking I give special mention and thanks to Harald Atmanspacher, The Mind and Matter Society, and its journal, for the range and depth of his and the Society’s innovative directions in probing questions of time and related issues. More specifically pertaining to the subject matter of this book, I owe deep appreciation to Georg Franck for pointing out a number of significant hurdles I face by my elevating now time over numbered and clock time. His comments were directed at my article “Is Present Time a Precondition for the Existence of the Material and Public World?” (Social Epistemology, 2015) that addressed themes taken up in this present work. Also to be thanked is Jesse Butler, my sparring partner in an exchange published online in Social Epistemol- ogy Review and Reply Collective, subsequent to the publication of the article mentioned above. And most recently, I wish to thank Franz Jansen for his detailed critique of a preliminary section of this book, and Professor Roman Kopytko of this university and Professor Subhash Kak of Oklahoma State University for their helpful and commendatory comments. As well, thanks are due to the director of the English Department at Adam Mickiewicz University, Professor Katarzyna Dziubalska, as well as to mgr Michał Jankowski, for arranging the university’s publication of this book, and to the former director, 1 Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 3. Professor Jacek Fisiak, for his help in other ways. Lastly, I owe the Corras – Andrew, Eric, and James – an expression of gratitude for the layout of the cover page and Kelben Holbrook and Wames Carra for additional assistance. Titles of other earlier articles I have written on time’s 1st person perspective hint at some of the initial groundwork and direction of this present work, titles like “Does Time Move? Dogen and the Art of Understanding the Moment” (Kluwer Academic, 2002), “The ‘Back- ground’ Category” (Mind and Matter, 2010), and a version of chapter 10, “Do We Die?” (Ways to Religion Conference, Wroclaw, 2015), and as well a version of the final chapter of this book presented at the transdisciplinary workshop “Generalities and Particulars: A Fruitful Tension”, organized by the Society for Mind-Matter Research and held at the Zen Center Johanneshof, Herrischried, in May 2017, and most recently my paper “In Defense of One Now” presented at the Mind and Matter symposium preliminary to the Toward a Science of Consciousness Conference in Tucson, Arizona, in April, 2018. “Is there anything more certain than the knowledge we have that we are present?”2 Craig Bourne, A Future for Presentism, 18. “[T]he present is not part of time. Of course ordinarily in the schools, colleges and the universities you have been told and taught and your dictionaries go on saying again and again that time has three tenses: past, present, and future. That is absolutely wrong – wrong according to those who know. Past and future are in time, but the present is not in time; the present belongs to eternity. Past and future belong to this – the world of the relative, change. Between the two penetrates the beyond, the transcendental, and that is the present. NOW is part of eternity.” Attributed to Osho, cited in Jonathan Bricklin, The Illusion of Will, Self, and Time: William James’s Reluctant Guide to Enlightenment, 155. “Again, the ‘now’ which seems to bound the past and future – does it always remain one and the same or is it always other and other? It is hard to say.” Aristotle, Physics 4: (9)10. 2 More specifically targeted to the momentary now, a slightly modified version in our rendering would read: “Is there anything more certain than the knowing we have of the present we are awake to? All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic, digital, or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems without permission in writing from the author, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review. Table of contents Chapter 1. Introduction: What If There Were Such a Thing as Present Time? ................ 13 Part 1 The Now in Nature Chapter 2. Material Nature Here and Now ....................................................................... 33 1. The here and now as a 1st person perspective .................................... 41 2. Perceiver – perceiving – object of perception ................................... 45 3. The boundary question anew ........................................................... 49 Chapter 3. Material Nature-as-other ................................................................................. 55 1. In defense of material nature-as-other .............................................. 57 2. Otherness as a precondition .............................................................. 59 3. Otherness in via negativa terms ........................................................ 62 4. Otherness and the here-and-now ..................................................... 64 5. Material Nature as both other and here-and-now ........................... 65 Chapter 4. The Now

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