Feeling Time. Amit S. Yahav
wider cultural shift toward identifying duration with human endurance and, as such, increasingly focusing on varying qualities of temporal experience. The cultural shift in temporal attitudes during the eighteenth century has usually been understood as the story of the development of a mechanical technology for counting time that came to pervade public life and individual consciousness. Influential histories have focused on rationalization, promoting a notion of modern temporal consciousness as governed by chronometry and geared to support the efficiency and power of the social totality at the price of thinning, or even fully draining out, durational qualities from personal and collective experience.4 Programs of isolation and disciplinarity are, no doubt, key to eighteenth-century culture, as well as to modernity more generally. And yet eighteenth-century philosophy and literature have also undertaken extensive explorations of consciousness as a complex and nuanced interface of material, psychological, and social experience. Such investigations focus on the nexus of self and world, though not through frameworks of regimented schedules; and they underline a sociality different from, while also in complex relations with, the impersonal orders of commensurable exchange and print publicity. Feeling Time examines the vocabularies and logics used to explore temporal experience in such eighteenth-century discussions. It demonstrates that these yield accounts of duration that often attend to qualities no less than to quantities, intensities no less than extensities, and variations no less than regularities. It also finds that these eighteenth-century discussions identify felt duration as the crux of aesthetic pleasure and judgment, experiences described more as patterned durational activities than as static states.
In his analysis of “Duration and Its Simple Modes” in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke famously argues that we derive our primary sense of duration from the succession of ideas, thus aligning his examination of time with his examination of the way our minds generate ideas from sensation and generate succession from what he calls “accidental Connexion.”5 Locke’s account remained a constant touchstone for both academic and popular inquiries of time and of consciousness in England throughout the eighteenth century, with subsequent discussions elaborating on the sensible qualities of ideas and the compositional variations of succession. David Hartley, for example, develops Locke’s associationism and sensationism in painstaking analyses of how various timings and orders of sensations—rather than their contents—yield meaningfulness. He identifies two forms of association, “the synchronous, and the successive,” and argues that repetition of strings of sensation promotes memory and anticipation so that when a single sensation within the string is activated others in the string are also recollected.6 Hartley thus suggests that a moment of sensation can be dilated into numerous associations, yielding analyses of near synchrony or, alternatively, compressed succession. And though Hartley does not comment on time directly, such recourse to memory and anticipation, synchrony and succession, makes it clear that regardless of what time might be in and of itself, it constitutes for him a fundamental operation of the mind.
Such eighteenth-century associationist and sensationist approaches resonate with more recent temporal phenomenologies in their insistent coupling of duration and experience—the double proposition that our sense of time arises from the operations of the mind and that the operations of the mind are constitutively temporal. Twentieth-century phenomenologies loop back the exploration of durational experience onto the question of what time is. For Edmund Husserl, the temporality of intention—the pattern by which a sensory present relates to what immediately precedes it (retention in Husserl’s vocabulary) and follows it (protention)—promotes a notion of transcendental temporality—that time consciousness is the very structure that enables the differentiation of subject from object. For Martin Heidegger, Being’s simultaneous groundedness in futurity (what Heidegger calls falling), pastness (existence), and presentness (facticity) becomes the fundamental support for an ontological idealism—the argument that ordinary time (external flow) is a form of originary temporality (the fundamentally temporalized structure of experience). And for Henri Bergson, recognizing states of consciousness as heterogeneous conglomerations of succession, near succession, and synchrony entails the notion of pure duration that refuses analogies of space and time, extensities and intensities, quantities and qualities. But eighteenth-century discussions do not extrapolate transcendental or ontological claims about time from temporal experience. Newton distinguishes between absolute time—time in and of itself—and relative time—our sense of duration—and Locke and Hume follow Newton in presupposing a strict separation between the two; relative time can at best approximate absolute time, but never be identical to it.7 Moreover, Locke’s and Hume’s focus on what Newton calls relative time (though they use different terminology), involves a turn to what may best be described as habits: descriptions that refuse distinguishing minute levels of awareness—distinctions between pre-reflective and reflective consciousness. Yet without pressing explorations of durational experience back into a metaphysics, and while remaining at pragmatic levels of analysis, the eighteenth-century discussions I examine in Feeling Time offer rich analyses of felt duration, as well as of ethical and aesthetical implications of approaching time in this way. No less than Bergson’s or Husserl’s philosophies, many of the writings I examine consider how we perceive art as a salient analogy for how we feel time; no less than Bergson’s or Heidegger’s works, many of these discussions explore the temporal structures of authentic decision making and of care, and argue the case for these as durational experiences.8
My aim in this book, however, is not to recover a prehistory of twentieth-century phenomenology, but rather to consider eighteenth-century explorations of qualitative duration on their own terms and within the broad culture with which they are in conversation.9 I begin this study with Locke’s and Hume’s comments on time, attending to their focus on mental processes that yield accounts of durational feelings. But these philosophies serve as points of departure for tracking engagement with qualitative durational experience across various genres. I consider Joseph Addison’s and Denis Diderot’s comments on the pleasures of reading, Francis Hutcheson’s formulations of the moral sense, musicological and elocutionary treatises, Edmund Burke’s and Adam Smith’s aesthetic inquiries, and novels by Samuel Richardson, Laurence Sterne, and Ann Radcliffe. For all of these, temporality turns out to be key for psychoperceptual, ethical, and aesthetical explorations. Put together these discussions add up to what we might call a sensibility chronotope—shorthand for the temporal underpinnings of a culture that features a wide-ranging set of commitments to sensation, emotion, reflection, and sociability, and that develops alongside, though not in full agreement with, chronometric consciousness.
Sensibility, as many studies have shown, is an especially baggy and fluid category that conjoins feeling with thinking and judgment and is sometimes interchangeable with, and sometimes encompassing of, other terms such as sentiment, sentimentality, delicacy, and experience.10 What began in the seventeenth century with research of psycho-perceptual processes—Newton’s research of the vibratory constitution of nerve perception, Thomas Willis’s explorations of the animal spirits, and Locke’s analyses of the empirical origins of knowledge—came to be aligned in the eighteenth century with examinations of social relations and aesthetic preferences—Hutcheson’s elaborations of a moral sense and a sense of beauty, Hume’s and Smith’s discussions of sympathy, as well as more popular treatises on domesticity, polite persuasion, and appreciation of art and literature.11 Though not lending itself to the kinds of analyses that seek sharp focus and unequivocal differentiations, sensibility’s capaciousness seems to me—as it seemed to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers—to be an especially useful concept. For sensibility’s alignment of broad epistemological and moral concerns turned it into an encompassing worldview, a thoroughgoing culture that could house under the same title such varying manifestations as Richardson’s didacticism and Sterne’s irony, and whose precepts could extend beyond its orthodox proponents as well as beyond its heyday in the mid-eighteenth century.12 Moreover, as Jane Austen makes clear through her compelling characterization of a Marianne Dashwood, sensibility’s capaciousness enables it to stand for a wide spectrum of feelings—intuitive yet also reflective, strong yet also capable of composure, erroneous yet also thoroughly ethical, dynamic and varied yet also self-identical.13 And sensibility’s nuanced yet comprehensive approach to emotion well captures the range of feelings that Feeling Time discovers in eighteenth-century