Supplements to the Study of Time – serie

This work represents a guided tour to the interdisciplinary, integrated study of time. Through twenty-two connected essays, selected from the author's extensive writings, Time and Time Again advances new insights into understanding the nature of time seen through philosophy, the arts and letters, the sciences of matter, life, mind and society. Traditionally, attitudes to future, past, and present remained distinct for different cultures. But upon the globalizing earth, all cultural regions are now in instant by instant communication. There is a consequent turmoil about individual and collective identities and about value judgments, in all of which attitudes to time play crucial roles. The book explores this turmoil and, through its references, it also serves as a guide to the broadly spread literature about time.

This study deals with time and with music, and the link between the two is the suggestion that music is a modeling of the way we construct time. Time—the now, duration, succession and order of succession; the past, the future—is seen as a resource for managing systemic disequilibrium and as the evolutionary elaboration of the now. As organic dynamical systems humans maintain themselves by means of self-regulatory actions, nows, and these nows are proposed as feeding off a pre-temporal, interindividually accessed energy in nature, an ongoing cosmic proto-present. Speech is a way out of sensory immediacy and a way into a complex shared world where coordination and planning take place away from the distractions of the present as given by the senses. Music is presented as one of a group of behaviors comprising the arts and games that evolved in parallel with language to compensate for its abstractness. Language tends to the complexly abstract and music favors the complex, sensorially concrete: like speech, music operates on a synthetic plane, but provides synthetic occasions for sensory immediacy at a level of complexity to match that of language.