Timeline

While a line continues as a popular image of Time, it has been falling into general disrepute among Philosophers for more than a century. Most notably, Bergson criticizes it as an hypostasization of something that is intrinsically dynamic; Husserl shows how every moment is a convergence of lines; and Heidegger reveals the Present as a knotting of Past and Future that constitutes the basis of lived experience. While these, in varying ways, portray Time as a seamless flow, Sartre notes, as has been recently discussed here, disruptions in the flux. Still, he does not go so far as to describe what any careful consideration of lived experience exhibits--the prevalence of discontinuities, starting with that between the formation of an intention and the execution of it. Yet, as is found in memory, experience becomes homogenized by its location in a temporal sequence. So, a simplified image of the discontinuity of experience is a series of isolated points, which can become conjoined, with Time as the connector. Hence, the line can still be instructive as an illustration of Time in a modified respect--not itself as representing Time, but as a combination of points and connectives, with the latter symbolizing the specific Temporal component of experience.