I have finally finished the issue of temporality. That’s all I have to say on the topic really. It is cold, so I am going to go find myself a jumper, and have some dinner. I was at work far too late this evening.
This is just a quick post as there is not a lot happening here. Some reading done on the train, and unfortunately only one block. The ones I am doing hand sewing at the moment are slightly bigger and more complicated so I am only getting one finished a night. I should probably try to spend one evening a week sewing on the machine, but there’s TV that needs watching 🙂
384 Three Colour Double Nine Patch
Still plodding away on the topic of temporality. It is not really inspiring me to any grand ideas at the moment, so I apologise for the general lack of philosophising of late. The next chapter which I reach in approximately 10 pages is on transcendence, I am not sure whether to be intrigued or to go cower in a corner.
I am starting to feel like I am running out of steam, but that could just be tiredness talking. I could barely keep my eyes open on the train on the way home. I think it is just that I have been trying to cut back on the sugar a little and am having some withdrawal symptoms, that and I think I have a cold again.
I did do some reading this morning. Still on the topic of reflection and whether it can be knowledge. Sartre’s take on it seems to be that it can, but it is a limited kind of knowledge. That it can only be about the for-itself/consciousness. However, he does think that it can be accurate knowledge of consciousness. The problem might be that consciousness is wrong i.e. we have a faulty memory, we see or hear wrong, we are interpreting other people’s behaviour wrongly. So a garbage in, garbage out scenario really.
I also have blocks.
I finally got over my mental block, and did some reading today. How much actually sunk in, I don’t know. Though just before I finished for the day it started talking about reflection again, and I found that a little easier going than the stuff about how a for-itself gets to be an in-itself in the past and a new for-itself takes its place.
The down side to the reading is that I didn’t get as much sewing done as I would have liked. Never mind. I will do some hand sewing this evening and hopefully that will knock over another couple of blocks.
Another Saturday, and I spent almost half of it untangling wool. In the end I ended up cutting out the knotty bit in the middle and tying the ends back together. I probably spent more time untangling than it will take me to knit the vest the wool is for. I could have saved myself a lot of time if I’d wound it up properly as soon as I got it. Lesson learnt, I guess.
Other than untangling, I have been very slack the last couple of days. I have been getting some sewing done, but no reading.
It’s probably just me being a little weird, but I find untangling wool somewhat hypnotic. I start untangling and before I know it half an hour has passed. I was almost late for work this morning.
The problem is with a kit I bought at the textile fair a few weeks back. It was for a very cute little baby vest and matching hat. I have a work friend about to have a baby and thought it would make an ideal baby shower present. It was one of those loosely woven skeins instead of a wound ball, and I only knitted about 4 rows before it was so badly tangled up I couldn’t knit anymore. So now I have to untangle it and wind it into a ball. I reckon I must have spent at least 2 hours so far just on untangling. Like I said yesterday, I get distracted.
No philosophising today. I am still on the topic of temporality. I am getting a little bored with it to be honest.
Block-wise I am doing okay. I have a little stash which I sewed ahead at the weekend, and I am getting two blocks a night finished hand sewing. I reckon I have done just over 400 blocks, but they are starting to get a lot harder so if I am going to get through another 590 blocks by the end of the year I am going to have to go faster.
The problem is I keep getting distracted, with things to knit, books to read, gardening to do etc. I end up trying to spread myself too thinly across too many things.
I will just keep plodding away at it I guess. Not much else I can do. I will get there eventually. Only another couple of days to the weekend and I can probably spend the whole of Sunday sewing.
The sub-chapter I am currently reading is called the ontology of temporality. Now according to dictionary.com an ontology is “An explicit formal specification of how to represent the objects, concepts and other entities that are assumed to exist in some area of interest and the relationships that hold among them”. At least that is the definition that seem to fit most with the way Sartre is using the term at the moment. So it is looking at the objects, concepts and entities associated with temporality or time. I don’t know why he didn’t just call it the nature of time. Sometimes I think he is making it more complicated just because he can.
I am currently struggling my way through the section of Being and Nothingness about temporality, hoping that not too many of the book’s future arguments rest on what is said here. At the moment there is far too much to disagree with, which throws into doubt any arguments that are based on it. Not that Sartre every really argues as such, in any structured logical way. Most of the time it just seems like a stream of consciousness, mildly interconnected.
Other bits I am wondering how it could fit into current understandings about space-time and relativity. Essentially I think Sartre is arguing that people create time through their being, that things don’t have pasts and futures they just have states. I don’t know how I feel about that. The idea about time coming from people might fit in quite well with relativity. However, if time is a dimension in the same way that space is, then surely an object has a progression through time even if it is not conscious of that progression? Sartre would probably reject the scientific interpretation of time because it tries to tie us down to actualities. He wants to the future to be about possibilities. Just because you can accurately predict what state a thing will be in at any particular point in time does that mean the thing doesn’t have a future? I think if you want to say that you have to radically change your interpretation of the word future.
Hopefully that makes some kind of sense. I woke up at 4 am this morning and couldn’t get back to sleep, so I am very sleep deprived.
Being, Nothingness and 1000 quilt blocks 