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Temporalization of the Body Within Phenomenology and the Metaphysics of Manifestation

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In this paper, I would like to discuss some problems concerning the question of manifestation of time, its Erscheinung, or its coming-to-be-experienced. Since Aristotle, philosophers have found themselves in paradoxical questioning about the nature of time. Indeed, a major obstacle found its clearest expression in Augustine’s famous dictum: “If you ask me what time is, then I do not know anything about it any more.” So, one would say with him that the whole task is to translate the experience of time into discourse, even if it has been set out as “simply” descriptive. Curiously enough, philosophers seem to have not been at ease with Aristotle’s rather straightforward decision to link time with movement. Why should they not be content with an explanation like this: time happens and we experience it as happening whenever something is moving, changing its place, pace and its own state? Perhaps this refusal is due to an almost mysterious subtlety about the experienced time. I cannot engage here in arguments against Aristotle’s “kinetic” account of time. Rather, in this paper I will shortly discuss and counter-balance some theoretical perspectives which reveal their anti-Aristotelian strain at least implicitly insofar as they hold to the view of the irreducibility and prority of time. But, struggling to delimit the descriptive region, as phenomenologists often do, one seems to get an extra ephemerality of time so that time’s ontological and “epistemological” priority turns out to be just the other side of its ungraspability and random schematic analyzability.