Ted Toadvine: 00:07

Every moment of time is unique and singular. It can't be reduced to a homogeneous interchangeable unit.

David Morris: 00:16

The way we encounter time keeps on opening us up to something prior to us.

Benjamin Décarie-Daigneault: 00:21

This idea of how encounters with matter can be enriched by what we come to know about matter.

Ted Toadvine: 00:31

Hi, I'm Ted Totevin, professor of philosophy at Penn State University and Nancy Tuana, director of the Rock Ethics Institute. And I'm delighted to have the chance to speak with everyone today about my new book, The Memory of the Deep Time, Animality, and Eschatology. And I'm here with two colleagues who I believe will engage us in a super interesting conversation, and I'll just like to ask them to introduce themselves. David, maybe you'd like to go first.

David Morris: 01:00

Hi. I'm, David Morris. I'm a professor of philosophy at Concordia University in Montreal to the north of TED and, I'm very interested in having this discussion today because of the remarkable content of this book which is going to be interesting to so many people. Benjamin.

Benjamin Décarie-Daigneault: 01:16

Yes. Hi. I'm Benjamin de Carillon. I'm a graduate student here at Penn State University with working with TED. I'm super excited about this book, which I've been reading many times now because of the themes that are there are precisely what I've been interested in in the past few years now.

Benjamin Décarie-Daigneault: 01:34

So deep time, animality, and also in the future, those are very dear topics for me. So, yes.

David Morris: 01:42

Ted, I was wondering if I could start off because Burjima has just said that he's happy to have been reading this book. I feel like I've been pre reading it because I've heard some of the papers delivered in initial form at various meetings that we've been at together, but one thing that struck me in reading them all together, first of all, it's quite an interesting book because it brings together phenomenology with critics of phenomenology, with engagement with the sciences in a manner that I think at the heart of it really does draw on this philosophy that you and I work on, Merleau Ponty. But it's also a striking book because I find so much of you in it. Their descriptions of you sitting on the beach and touching the pebbles and holding the ammonite and so on. And it's, you know, a book that I think would be interesting of course to philosophers, to phenomenologists but to people who are thinking about the role of science within the world today, the role of the environment to people in environmental humanities, to people in the sciences.

David Morris: 02:33

And I thought it might be interesting for them and for me just to hear a little bit about how you came to write this book and the way it really comes from you journeying around in the world. It feels like you're there in nature and you're having insights. So that's a striking way of writing.

Ted Toadvine: 02:48

Yes. Well, thank you, David. I'm happy to say a few things about this. You know, I opened the book with an account of just, sitting on the the beach in Lyme Regis on the on the coast of England and, hunting for fossils in the pebbles. The strange experience for me of realizing that the gravel around me was filled not only with fossils that I was finding, but also with bits of human detritus that themselves spanned a wide temporal range.

Ted Toadvine: 03:15

And I became very, very curious about what it means for us, for our perceptions to move back and forth across different scales of time, and I've been particularly interested in what it's like for us to experience something as ancient in a way that explodes our capacity to really conceptualize it or even imagine it. And so the very problem of deep time has perplexed me as a philosopher. And I haven't felt that the philosophical tradition, especially, the European traditions of philosophy, haven't given me much to work with to understand deep time or our experience of it. You might say that for European philosophers, they tended to follow in the footsteps of Immanuel Kant in approaching time always through subjectivity. For example, someone might claim that the world apart from subjectivity, apart from consciousness, doesn't actually have any temporal passage.

Ted Toadvine: 04:15

What exists is just what exists at each instantaneous moment. If you think of the world that way, then it's only through the actions of subjectivity, through the actions of consciousness, that what has passed gets represented as memory and what's to come gets anticipated as future. You know, of course, in our everyday lives, we think of the world as having its own time, whether we're thinking of that time or not, and that's certainly the basis for our scientific accounts of time. You know, we can think about the time of dinosaurs, the geological history of the Earth, or the Big Bang that initiated the expansion of the universe. One response is to say that these scientific ways of thinking about time, we might call that naturalized time or the time of the world apart from subjectivity, that this is simply derivative to from time as we experience it, from our memories and anticipations.

Ted Toadvine: 05:12

It might be a useful representation of time, but in the end, it's just an abstraction. It's a construction that has value for us, but doesn't actually tell us anything about the world on its own terms. But there's something really unsatisfying about that way of thinking about time. It raises some profound quandaries. What is the relationship between time as we experience it unfolding over the course of a day or a year or a lifetime and scientific accounts of time when we're thinking about the big bang or we're thinking about geological spans in terms of millions or billions of years.

Ted Toadvine: 05:49

Do we even mean the same thing by time in these two different accounts? And how does our experience of time develop into or give way to the scientific way of describing time? Which one is more fundamental? Is it the scientific account of time, or is it time as we sort of feel it passing? That might sound like a really nice philosophical problem for philosophers to sit around and discuss in their spare time, but I also think that there are increasingly real practical and political stakes in how we relate to what we now call deep time.

Ted Toadvine: 06:25

And this expression, deep time, at first was taken up, as a way of naming geological scales of time, the billions of years that shaped the formation of the planet Earth. But we can also think of deep time as having nested scales, cosmic time, geological time, evolutionary time, and so on, and that these scales of time intersect in complex ways. Furthermore, we've become aware of the immense durations of the past at these different scales. And at the same time, we're increasingly concerned about the immense scales of time in the future. And this has practical implications when we think about things like how we will we dispose of nuclear waste that could continue to be really dangerous for hundreds of thousands or perhaps millions of years, or the question of whether humanity is in danger of going extinct at some point in the future.

Ted Toadvine: 07:18

In short, a lot of people are asking real questions today about what we should be doing to plan or manage the future in ways that will avoid risks like environmental collapse or human extinction. Questions like this have brought home the challenge of trying to connect our everyday experience of time, you know, counted in days or years or generations with deep scales of time that are counted in millions or billions or even longer scales of time. Some ways that this challenge has been posed recently, I think, for example, the work of Dipesh Chakrabarty talking about the Anthropocene, he says, you know, there there's a problem of two calendars or two scales of time, human history on the one hand and planetary scales of time on the other. And our problem is how to bridge those scales of time, how to connect them. But in in my view, we're starting in the wrong place.

Ted Toadvine: 08:09

We're talking about bridging human time to deep time. I think we need to start from a better appreciation of the complex ways that our temporal experience is already immersed in and entangled with innumerable intersecting durations of time at all scales. So, you know, consider the fact that we are ourselves material beings that consist entirely of elements of air, water, and bones. You know, we're 99% oxygen, carbon, hydrogen or nitrogen. We are ourselves material elemental beings, but we're also living organic beings who have evolved from and alongside other forms of life.

Ted Toadvine: 08:51

And of course, we are historical beings who inherit languages, landscapes, cultures, life worlds whose origins stretch back beyond our memory, but also beyond any recorded human history. My aim in the book is to draw particularly on the traditions of phenomenology, to unpack this richness of our embodied temporal experience. And when we do, it becomes clear that the divide between human time and deep time is a false divide, and that our relationship with time is far messier, but also far richer than we usually recognize. It's not for me a matter of reducing time to our subjective awareness of time, but nor is it it about treating the time of the world or the time of nature as something outside of us apart from us. Instead, the time of the world is something that we participate in precisely because we are ourselves fully entangled with it across innumerable dimensions.

Ted Toadvine: 09:47

There's a certain line that I like from the French philosopher Michel Serres in his book The Incandescent. He writes, in so far as I am memory, I participate in things. In so far as they are things, they have memory. I think that's really a profound meditation on what it means to think of ourselves as memories, elemental memories, organic memories, as well as cultural memories, and to think about the world around us also as itself, memories that are accumulating and unfolding at different durations, different scales, in complex intersecting ways. So the first part of my book offers a phenomenological foundation for thinking about deep time.

Ted Toadvine: 10:31

In the second book, I take this up specifically at the scale of our organic lives as a site of evolutionary memory. And I do this in conversation with the role that animality has played in continental philosophy and in critical animal studies. In this part of the book, I respond, for example, to Heidegger's claim that animals are poor in world by considering the world of the bee and the ways that a bee's world both invite and refuse us to in a kind of going along. And I also defend Jacques Derrida's rejection of biologistic continuism, that's his phrase, that would eliminate all differences between humans and non human animals. But I do this not to endorse any kind of specialness for human beings, any human exceptionalism, but instead to respect a creative differentiation that characterizes the evolutionary process.

Ted Toadvine: 11:23

And these themes come together for me in the second part of the book in my proposal to replace biodiversity with what I call bio diacritics. This brings together the understanding of corporeal memory that I've been describing with the structure of diacritical difference that we find in language. I would say on the one hand that it's pretty clear that we are the accumulated memory, at least at the genetic level, of all of our ancestors stretching all the way back to the last universal common ancestor of life, some three and a half billion years ago. But that that linear way of thinking about this memory or this unfolding of time immediately needs to be complicated because at each moment of that diachronic unfolding, we could take a synchronic view of the relationships between living things at that moment. And so every one of our ancestors, every one of my ancestors going all the way back through the history of life existed in relationship to a myriad of other living and nonliving things that made its existence and its survival and its reproduction possible.

Ted Toadvine: 12:31

Those things that it eats, those things that provide its habitat, the things that it competes with, the things that it has symbiotic relationships with, its pathogens, its microbial associations, and so on, all of these relations, and even to landforms, water cycles, the atmosphere. If that's true, then we could say that the evolutionary history of life is like an evolving diacritical system that's composed entirely of differences. Just as I described our opening onto the present as happening against the background of the whole history of the universe, so our organic lives at this moment, our living bodies right now, are memories of evolutionary history, and they exist only as memories of, in a way, the entire history of life and the system of relations that have formed within it at every moment. I think this has really important implications for how we understand our own identities and how we understand our relations with other animals. It's a kind of, you know, rather than thinking of our identity in positive terms, we would need to think of it as an exposure to all of the differences of forms of life, not only now, but through the course of the past and the ways that we are in the memory of those differences.

Ted Toadvine: 13:47

So often in the history of Western philosophy in Aristotle or Descartes or even Husserl, philosophers have spoken about a kind of stratum or a layer of human beings, a kind of animal nature or an animal layer on which human consciousness or subjectivity or existence would sort of be added, something added. But, I think that what both connects us with and separates us from or distinguishes from other forms of life is the node we occupy within organic memory. It's something that we all share, but also something that multiplies the differences between us, both as living forms and as individuals. So in the last part of the book, subtitled Eschatology, I actually shift my focus a little bit from thinking about the past in memory to thinking about the future, and in particular, the absolute limit of the future, the end of the world. I investigate what it means for the world to end and what's left at this end, and also why we seem to take so much pleasure nowadays in imagining the world ending, repeatedly over and over again as our movies and books and video games and so on repeatedly remind us.

Ted Toadvine: 15:00

This might seem an odd way to describe our situation that we're taking pleasure in imagining the end of the world, but I think the fascination with apocalypse in popular culture, it attests to a kind of catharsis. It's as if it releases a repressed desire for the world to to collapse. The other side of that desire for the world to collapse is our commitment to absolute mastery over the future. I think this idea of mastery over the future is even part of what's at work in our everyday ways of talking about sustainability, because we're talking about sustaining the present and thereby preventing the future from arriving. You know, we might also think about the growing conversations around human extinction.

Ted Toadvine: 15:43

People worried about human extinction have started to develop catalogs of all the possible and speculative ways that human extinction might come about, either through things that we do or, you know, through natural causes. And the idea is that we should devote our energies now, today, to managing and minimizing these risks that are perceived as either in the near future or the distant future. I'm especially interested in the ways that this apocalyptic thinking has structured environmentalism. I think it's done so by adopting a particular way of framing time. I draw on Jean Luc Nancy's notion of catastrophic equivalence to try to capture some of the key elements of this.

Ted Toadvine: 16:25

Karl Marx had the idea that money serves as a kind of principle of equivalence because we can attach a price to anything, costs and benefits, and then translate all these into monetary value, into kind of equivalent units. When we do that, we homogenize them. We strip anything away that's singular about this object that we're gonna attach a price tag to. So there there isn't really anything priceless if everything can be converted into a certain dollar amount. Jean Luc Nancy takes this idea from Marx, and he he points out that this process of general equivalence now extends well beyond economics, and all of our technologies now develop in the direction of ever increasing integration and globalization.

Ted Toadvine: 17:11

You know, when I turn on my cell phone, even before I turn it on, how many global networks of different sorts is it connected to and communicating with? And what's required for that communication to happen, for sound and video to, you know, be uploaded to the cloud, for the cloud to be searchable by law enforcement databases, for the phone to track my progress in my car by GPS? This is all about further integration of units, and that requires that all of this information be translated into something homogeneous and equivalent, bits and bytes. And whatever can't be so translated is sort of left aside as irrelevant. It's this interconnectedness of equivalence that makes our systems really vulnerable.

Ted Toadvine: 17:58

So, you know, there's been a lot of scramble lately to think about how we're gonna protect critical infrastructure from hackers. And we see, you know, every time someone kind of takes over some kind of network, financial or medical or what have you, the cascading effects of that through other systems. But part of what Nancy wants us to think about is how this skews our relationship to time. We've begun to think of time as composed of just little homogeneous exchangeable units. A minute today or a minute there is always equivalent to a minute anywhere else.

Ted Toadvine: 18:32

And we've begun to kind of plan our lives and plan our calendars around this kind of equivalence or homogenization of temporal bits. What's obscured by that approach to time is that it covers over the essentially historical character of time. This has really been brought home to me by the work of Jerome Miller and his count of robust evolution. You know, it follows from what I've said earlier about time that every moment of our lives is unique and singular because of its relations with time as a whole. No moment of our lives is ever reducible to a homogeneous and exchangeable unit.

Ted Toadvine: 19:10

And furthermore, the future itself is never just another present because that would eliminate time's historical passage. The future is future only by constantly breaking over open the present to what is not present, to what is not assimilable to this present. This is what Miller calls the traumatological character of historical time, the fact that the future always ruptures the present precisely by being unassimilable to that present. And if that's the case, then all of our efforts to calculatively manage the future amount to a repression of the future as such. They're literally devoted to ending the very unfolding of time, and they therefore risk bringing about the very end of the world that they purport to be aiming to preserve.

Ted Toadvine: 19:59

I've only scratched the surface, but I feel like perhaps I've gone on a bit long about, summarizing these key themes, And I I wanna definitely invite David and Ben now into the conversation to talk about some of the things that they found interesting in the book and maybe to, you know, ask me to elaborate on on what I've just said.

David Morris: 20:19

Did I feel like I I wanna hear something from Ben because, I I wanna ask a question first though. Because Ben has these profound, this work that he's doing on, for example, cave art and the way that that gives us an ingress into the depths of time that you're talking about. And you did take a while, but look, you can't talk about time quickly. I mean, it seems to me you're helping us understand, and the audience for this podcast understand, some of the central themes. And I think some of them are, first of all, the body as our access point into time, The scales of time as massive recursively nested going back into things well before us that are nonetheless participant in us and also I think the profound theme of memory.

David Morris: 21:00

But when you were talking, I just wanted to offer up something because we're talking together on 04/12/2024, but on 04/08/2024, at least in Montreal, there was a total eclipse, I prepared to think about it phenomenologically but it was more striking and unexpected than I could ever have imagined. And it strikes me, you're trying to glimpse this connection between ourselves and prior scales of time through things like the fossil, through things like discussion of evolution. But one thing that is striking about a total eclipse is people aren't prepared for what's going to happen and it seems almost universally the case that even people who think like what the hell, the sun is getting blocked by the moon, that's just astronomy, in fact that's not what's happening, there's a profound transformation of our relationship to the earth and a revelation of the cycles of light and our connection to those. And everybody who sees it is just upended and transformed. And I think partly what they're experiencing is something like their connection to time, to scales of time beyond themselves and I came up with this idea of describing part of it in terms of what I'm calling time flight, right?

David Morris: 22:09

So this moment, all of a sudden in the middle of what's supposed to be the day, it turns to night and the animals around you, the birds, they're starting to do their night things and we're all feeling it's later in the day and then all of a sudden it's dawn with this very, very weird light that's so strange and so different than usual, Like you're on another planet all of a sudden, but we've all experienced or many of us have experienced jet lag. Time flight, it's like you're in a plane going at 2,400 kilometers per hour west for a minute and then swinging around and coming back. Your whole connection to time is upended. You realize our sense of time of when it is in the day, it's part of this cycle and cycle and cycle of the sun and the moon and everything that went into that And it says revelatory. I think people don't have to be phenomenologists.

David Morris: 23:00

They just get it. People in Montreal cheered for this like they cheer when the Canadians went a hockey game, like the whole city is just like, wow, Like there's a revelation of that that is so profound that I think is great evidence for what you're trying to tell us. It's not the evidence that you are mustering. It's a different sort of evidence that's slower. This is like, boom, you're thrust into the middle of Toadvine's account of deep time and memory and the way that our scales coupled to other scales.

David Morris: 23:31

I don't know if you got to see it, but, boy, if you didn't, you better see the next one.

Ted Toadvine: 23:36

Thank you so much for that, David. I know Ben is gonna wanna, say some things about this too, because I, in fact, had the pleasure of viewing the Eclipse here along with Ben and some other friends. The thing is that we had mostly cloud cover, and we didn't think we were gonna see anything, in fact, but we went out anyway, and we did get a few minutes just before maybe it was, like, five minutes before full coverage. We we had several minutes there that were really breathtaking and profound. Although your description of having had the full experience really, really makes me sad not to have had the chance to do that, and I I won't look forward to the next time.

Ted Toadvine: 24:13

And I just wanna say that I think you're absolutely right that that kind of experience can bring to the fore for us a sort of step back from, our usual ways of relating to time and throw into relief for us the broader scales and dynamics that shape our present always, but by remaining in the background more or less invisible to us behind the memory screen, so to speak. And now I agree also that the experience of jet lag does this in an amazing way. Michel Sainte actually makes the comment somewhere that the folks who are often taken as the great thinkers of time, you know, Husserl and Heidegger and Bergson never took a transatlantic flight. And so they never experienced jet lag. They never had the sense of the ways that their bodily time could be thrown out of whack with our conscious awareness of time, our representations of time, and what that might reveal to us about the ways that we are corporally embedded in and the memories of these, complex and interlocked, intertangled dimensions and durations of time.

Ted Toadvine: 25:22

I wanna give Ben a chance also to to talk about I know that he had a profound experience of the eclipse and might wanna reflect on that a bit.

Benjamin Décarie-Daigneault: 25:32

Yeah. You probably saw me with my attempt at, managing the glasses that were a little complicated to manage. Anyways, no. I I absolutely agree that there's something absolutely fascinating here. Ted, your account of like you were saying, David, at the beginning, everything that sort of seems to emerge from this book, especially like the thing that led you, Ted, on the path of those reflections, all seem to emerge from, sensible encounters, encounters that come from sensorial events that can be tracked down to an instant where something happened.

Benjamin Décarie-Daigneault: 26:07

And this thing that happened created something created, but we could call maybe an unraveling of temporality, I guess. I'm super interested in the ways in which those events can sort of disrupt the structure of time itself and the structure of our experience of time and sort of lead us on a sense of urgency of going in a direction or an investigation, a sort of problem. Time becomes a problem suddenly for us through those encounters. I've been very interested in the way you frame those encounters, especially with fossils. I won't come back to that in a minute, but just to get get back to the subject of the eclipse, because there's something absolutely fascinating in the eclipse.

Benjamin Décarie-Daigneault: 26:44

David, you were mentioning all the crowds sort of cheering in Montreal. Unfortunately, here in Pennsylvania, we only had the chance to see a partial eclipse. It was pretty far along. It was, about 95%, but we didn't get the experience of total night and then dawn and all of these things. We got something that was pretty miraculous in my opinion, but but something that really struck me about this is the fact that it's an unraveling of time that is also an absolute like, in terms of collectivity, in terms of social event, it's a collective synchronization.

Benjamin Décarie-Daigneault: 27:15

We're all sort of for once hinging or grasping time in a way that we never do. It's sort of a suspension of time that invites every human being just by the mere fact of being earthlings and depending on the sun for existing basically, and sort of being suspended in time into this absolute synchronization of all of our bodily rhythms, because we're never aware of how the sun affects our existence. We're never really thematized. It never becomes a theme for us or, an issue for us. But when something like an eclipse comes in, there's this sense of unraveling that, of course, just disrupts our bodily rhythms.

Benjamin Décarie-Daigneault: 27:55

As you were saying, it's night and then it's dawn. All of this happens in a way that synchronizes everyone. It's a disruption of temporality that is basically asynchronous because it disrupts the sense, the very sense of what it means to be synchronized. But at the same time, it's perfectly synchronized. Everybody experiences it at the same time.

Benjamin Décarie-Daigneault: 28:10

Coming back to sensorial encounters, I wanted to ask perhaps Ted, you just started talking about your adventure in Lyme Regis and how you've been collecting and hunting for fossils. And I know that those phenomenological encounters with those material traces that bear the traces of something like an incommensurable past, is very important for you in, like, leading you in this path of reflection. And fossils seem to appear to be primary guide in the book, at least, for this sort of phenomenological investigation, on the geological path. So you sort of describe these encounters with fossils as sort of events that do something to the body that unravels something like I was saying with the eclipse. Yeah.

Benjamin Décarie-Daigneault: 28:52

I just wonder if you could tell us more about this privileged, I guess, status of the fossils. Because it seems that the event of encounter that you're describing cannot only be attributed to the old age of the fossil. Because if it was the case, like anything, any pebble on the sidewalk, any drop of water in the windshield, water is very old, it comes from comets and stuff, or any gaze into the night sky, seeing, like, stars and stuff, that could take us on the path of a disruption or unraveling of our habitual sense of temporality. Of course, we see with the eclipse why it's extremely disrupting because of the event that it's it is. But we never look at the sun or the moon saying, like, wow, this is very, very, very old, and this is an encounter.

Benjamin Décarie-Daigneault: 29:33

We don't describe them as encounters because it's sort of in the background. But the fossil seems in the way in which you describe its materiality and the way in which you, like, manipulate with your hands, the fossil, it seems that there's something more, happening.

Ted Toadvine: 29:47

Yes. Excellent. Thank you, Ben. So I do think that there's something particular about fossils, something peculiar about their temporality that makes them really fascinating, and it isn't simply a function of their age. But I would also say that fossils don't need to be involved, and the experience of the eclipse is a great example.

Ted Toadvine: 30:07

But I'd also what always comes to mind for me is maybe the the most famous invocation of a kind of temporal sublime experience is actually one described by James Playfair. He describes a trip he went on in 1788 with James Hutton. James Hutton is often described as the father of modern geology, and they went on a trip to view a particular geological formation that nowadays is known as Hutton's Unconformity, which is found at Siccar Point in Scotland. And what makes this formation so fascinating, what made it perfect for Hutton, is that you have these horizontal layers of strata that were once the bottom of the ocean, and then on top of those, standing more or less vertically, are other layers of strata, and then on top of those vertical layers, more horizontal layers laid down. And Hutton said, when you consider how long it must have taken for every layer to form, and then you consider how whole sort of sandwiches of of layers get turned on their ends and then more layers on top.

Ted Toadvine: 31:09

Hutton was a uniformitarian, so he argued that all of these layers had to be formed basically according to the same processes that we know today. And when we consider how long it would take for those layers to form and then to be, you know, shifted around in that way, it was just an unimaginable span of time from the point of view of early geologists. And what, when Playfair wrote about this, after Hutton's death, he said, and this is the famous line, the mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time. And so just standing there, having Hutton explain what was going on is enough to give you this feeling of vertigo, this feeling of freefall. That experience is often something that comes up when people are confronted with deep time.

Ted Toadvine: 31:56

But as you say, Ben, I often come back to the encounter with the fossil and we use the word fossil nowadays in a very precise way to mean the trace of a former life, which hasn't always been the case. Literally, it's just something dug up. And so for a long time, fossils included just minerals and so on. But if we think about the trace, something that's obviously the trace of a past life, then it intensifies in a peculiar way this encounter with deep time because I believe of the very intersection of durations that gets captured, that gets entangled in that sensible material thing. Any fossil is the trace of a unique event, that life, that singular life.

Ted Toadvine: 32:40

And to the extent that we encounter it as a trace of that life, there's something about it that invites us to enter into a kind of, to enter into its world, to take up, at least in our imaginations, its manner of being and its relation to its surroundings. We might even say that we are invited into its time, into its duration, or the time of its life as an event. But at the same time, the fossil is also stone, petrified. It's embedded in its rock matrix, and it intersects with the time or the duration of stone, which is something that we kind of encounter as immemorial as always having had been there in the way that it is. I found, a really interesting passage in John Sallis that talks about the time of stone.

Ted Toadvine: 33:29

In his words, it's as if stone comes from a past that has never been present, a past unassimilable to the order of time in which things come and go in the human world. So what I think fascinates us about the fossil is the way that it embodies or incarnates the strange intersection of time, the time of a singular life and the anonymous immemorial past of stone. And that means that it both invites us and refuses us, kind of like the way Heidegger describes the refusal or the withdrawal of the thingliness of things. And I wanna be clear that I don't at all mean to suggest that the perception of fossils is somehow innate or necessary as if it doesn't depend on all the ways that our perceptions are informed by our scientific knowledge, our culture, our histories, and so on. So I'm not positing some kind of natural perception that would be universal or purified of what we know theoretically.

Ted Toadvine: 34:24

I think our sense perception is always historically and culturally contextual. That said, I think it's really fascinating that our ancient human cousins, including the Neanderthals, were themselves fascinated with fossils, and that fossils clearly played a kind of symbolic and spiritual value for them. They fashioned them into jewelry. They buried them with their dead and so on. And the idea that fossils were traces of ancient life is also, of course, well known to the the ancient Greeks.

Ted Toadvine: 34:52

It's interesting to consider to what extent our having to kind of rediscover or relearn that fact later might just be a contingent aspect of the history of Western culture and the influence of Christianity.

Benjamin Décarie-Daigneault: 35:03

Yeah. That's absolutely fascinating. One thing that comes from this, I guess, the way in which you describe this, value of the fossil, it's sort of specificity in terms of sort of its crystallization of the meeting of two absolutely heterogeneous and absolutely incommensurable rhythms of existence, A life that is so fleeting. The life of a shellfish takes a couple years, I guess. Whereas the duration of the stone can span for so long.

Benjamin Décarie-Daigneault: 35:32

This sort of crystallization of this meeting of two durations is absolutely fascinating. And also, what you were bringing up this idea that there needs to be a sort of culturally informed or historically informed gaze or sensibility to what we're manipulating when we look at fossils, when we think about fossils is also super interesting, because of course, the stratification of the sediments that have these beautiful shapes and stuff could be just perceived as something that was brought up very quickly. But you sort of need to have this educated notion of how long it takes for Streta to accumulate to sort of appreciate and encounter it in this sense. I've been very fascinated in the past few years about this idea of how encounters with matter can be enriched by what we come to know about matter and how it help us experiencing even more disruptive encounters the more we know about, materiality in a sense, and the more we get interested in. The more we become, as Deleuze would say, we become sensible to the signs of the matter or the rocks, or that's sort of how Deleuze describes the wind in which we come to learn about things by becoming sensible to the signs of what we want to experience.

David Morris: 36:50

I think I wanted to, maybe intervene there and connect up with something I've been thinking. Listening to Ted talk about the fossil in response to your question, you could very well be right but I think Ted's book and point is gonna fall apart if it were only by way of education and language and knowledge and information that this came into view. Now I was thinking as phenomenologists we often want to vary across different cases to find what's structurally similar through all of them. And now we have on the table Ted's well developed example, the fossil. I brought the solar eclipse example to the table.

David Morris: 37:23

We have the geological strata. And I think Ted has given us a kind of underpinning of something that's happening in all these cases. You brought out the singularity point, Ben, in discussion. So we're encountering this here singular thing, but we're encountering it. I think Ted was emphasizing that we need an openness to the history of time.

David Morris: 37:42

There's a history of time that precedes us and I'm very intrigued by the chapter on chronopoesis. I think that's the first chapter after the introduction, maybe on page 35 or so, especially. Ted is alerting us to the simple point that the way we encounter time keeps on opening us up to something prior to us. And I think that opening up to something prior to us has to be through something singular that's sort of thrown up in the detritus of time like a fossil or the formation or now the contingencies of the cycle of the moon and the sun. Like, we're the only planet in the solar system that has total eclipses.

David Morris: 38:17

They're really weird and rare, and it's just like this bizarre contingency of the size of the moon versus the sun and their distance. And we even get to see these. And my dad actually was telling me when there's a lunar eclipse on the earth, the astronauts on the moon see a solar eclipse of the sun, but it's totally boring because the earth is so much bigger than the disc of the sun when you're looking back at it. So it's like none of the exciting stuff that happens here with total eclipses happens there. Like, that's just a fossil of the sizes of things that happen to cough up in our solar system.

David Morris: 38:50

So we're the one planet that happens to have, what I've been thinking of as being revealed in this is our eyes are earth born. We're earth born. Like, there's something about our earth bornness that then it's not just us, it's the other creatures. That was part of the extraordinary thing. Like, everybody on this planet who was in Montreal living and seeing and queued to everybody was having this weird ass thing happen.

David Morris: 39:13

I wanted to bring that to bear because first of all, Merleau Ponty, we know in the primacy of perception, little synopsis, like this thing that I'm trying to do in phenomenology, it's not trying to get rid of a study of essences, it's just trying to bring it down to earth. TED is bringing time down to earth by making us notice how it's not just in here. And I don't think you could notice that the fossil is something interesting to study in the first place unless Ted is right. Like there's something fundamental about, you know, it's like sucked in the wall, that point where what's his name? He touches the bench and he feels his death in the touch of the bench upon him.

David Morris: 39:46

And I think Ted is trying to say, all of a sudden I'm feeling deep time. And that's what Hutton is seeing in the formation. And that's what I think everybody in Montreal, including the birds, was experiencing when the solar eclipse happened. What I'm finding interesting, Ted, is like there's this book, The Blind Spot by Evan Thompson and a bunch of people saying, Hey, science is forgetting the role of subjectivity but you're doing this other thing saying, Hey, you all can't forget about how our experience of subjective time hooks us into something so much bigger and before us. So Merleau Ponty in the Institution lectures, at a certain point, he cites Colette, the novelist, saying birth isn't somebody coming through the door that's been opened up and you're saying time, like there's something pretty profound there that's really exciting in your book.

David Morris: 40:31

I I want you to say more about these passages about repression, Merleau Ponty on repression. Like you make this beautiful argument that to put it simply for the broader audience that hasn't read your book, it's like our being part of something bigger and my subjective time being part of something bigger is something that I repress. Put a hostronoprene and you can't repress it anymore. Put me in a solar eclipse, you can't repress it anymore. Give me a fossil, how can we repress it?

Ted Toadvine: 40:55

You're raising, well, of course, you're making really super interesting and fascinating points, and I appreciate that my book has helped to inspire some of them, but I think you're also bringing a lot of really interesting ways to develop these ideas further. And the language of repression, what's really interesting to me, where that sort of comes from in my discussion in the early chapters is Merle Ponte's own description of the fact that we don't live one time, that there's a kind of time of my narrative self. There's a story I tell myself about my life and what I'm doing right now. And, you know, someone could could say, tell me about your day. And I would tell them, you know, well, I got up and I did this and I did this.

Ted Toadvine: 41:32

And we've got this nice sort of narrative. Or tell me about your plans for the future. What what are you gonna do in your group when you graduate? We ask our students. And so you've got this sort of narrative conception of the time of your life.

Ted Toadvine: 41:44

But at the same time, your body is itself involved in, entangled in all kinds of periodic relations and durations. You're breathing all the time. Your heart is beating, and it doesn't just beat like a clock. It's responding to the temperature in the room and to, you know, things that are exciting you. And it is itself, you know, wired into you know, entangled with all the events going on around it, but it it's keeping a time of its own that's entirely distinct from the distinct from the narrative time I tell myself about.

Ted Toadvine: 42:14

And, you know, meanwhile, my bones, which are themselves minerals, you know, I love the fact that a whole series of very different scholars from John Llewellyn to Jean Luc Nancy to Jane Bennett have emphasized our own minerality. The fact that our bones are, you know, are minerals that are in some sense participate in the time of stone. They are themselves kind of degrading in their own fashion, you know, as we age. Our minds, our conscious sense of time is sort of, like a figure against the background of the ways that we are living a whole nest or a whole tangle of different durations. And we often do repress those rhythms and durations.

Ted Toadvine: 42:56

So for example, if I'm starting to get hungry in this conversation because my body has a certain rhythm of eating and digestion, or if I suddenly had to excuse myself for the restroom, then it would be because my body doesn't respect my narrative time. And nevertheless, everything about time as I think I experienced it as a nice little unfolding story over the course of my day couldn't exist at all without it taking for granted all of that time happening in the background. You know, then we could extend this to broader levels, taking for granted my evolutionary history and everything that that brings to make up who I am, taking for granted the cycles of of day and night and the seasons and so on. And so I think, you know, there's a kind of way that in order to think of myself as my subjectivity, I have to kind of repress what I, at another level, always know is true in terms of my own embodiment and my insertion into the elemental and the organic and all of these different scales and happenings. Merleau Ponty at one point calls the body an inborn complex in the Freudian sense, and I think this is exactly what he means.

Ted Toadvine: 44:06

I have really enjoyed unpacking a bit of the deep time aspects of the book, but we haven't really talked very much about animality or about eschatology. Maybe there's some some ways that we can move from where we are to that.

Benjamin Décarie-Daigneault: 44:19

Yeah. I think, David, you had some nice, reflections about bio diacritics. I just wanted to add to what you were just saying then about when you you were talking about how the the rhythm of the heartbeat, let's say, doesn't respond to a sort of master clock, but is sort of entangled. And I I just thought that it was extremely interesting because you used the idea the the expression that your body doesn't respect your narrative time if you were to, like, respond to a bodily need right now. It's funny to think of how, like, it sort of reveals the sort of encroachment between meaning and materiality and sense and materiality in a way that is very deeply meaningful.

Benjamin Décarie-Daigneault: 44:55

It just, like, reaffirms this idea of Merleau Ponty saying that my body is the pivot of the world or pivots du mon, you know. It's like, saying basically that if my body can disrespect my narrative time and my tasks or the goals that I set for myself today as a goal or something, I can also disrespect my buddy to my my narrative time, I can have like terrible breakup that makes my heart go super fast and make me terribly depressed. And my buddy can react to my narration of myself in this sort of pivot role, which I think it sets up really nicely this sort of nesting of meaning within the body. So very interesting. But, yeah, I I think it's it's also a good way to segue into some evolutionary bio diacritic sort of consideration here, which is, the second part of the book, which is absolutely fascinating.

David Morris: 45:43

It just struck me. I I was thinking about this and listening along and learning. I guess my memory of this book is distorted because the chapter on a relation to animals where I think you make your essential contribution to Merleau Ponty studies, it hinges on I think your exposition, your brilliant exposition of this notion of Merleau Ponty's of our having a strange kinship with animals that we're kin to them and different from them. We need to understand our difference from them through our not being different than other animals. We are animals.

David Morris: 46:12

Part of your biocritical insight and concept hinges on that but I'm sorry to be obsessed by this thing that happened to me on Monday. I have a strange kinship with the other animals with time. It's like you there, you birds, you and me, we're feeling the same thing and that's revealing that we have a strange kinship with the planet. Time isn't up to us. It's at the pleasure of being on this planet, being lit in a particular way.

David Morris: 46:37

Our strange kinship with deep time, let's put it, is not unrelated to our strange kinship with animals because why are the birds doing it? We've inherited similar chronobiological apparatuses that are sensitive and anticipating of being on this here planet together. And we think we're carrying around time within us, but in fact, that's a memory as you put it of these deeper evolutionary processes where if we really wanna understand them, the language of our living bodies being in time is the bio diacritical evolutionary language. It's a language writ in genera and inheritances over massive cycles and again, we repress it. Why?

David Morris: 47:16

Because the genius of evolution is to let us walk around having a sense of time and knowing when we got to eat and stuff like that and we're carrying it around in the pulse of our bodies and then it turns out, no, you need some cues. One of my friends says, that was the greatest lighting cue in the world ever of the eclipse. Right? The cues were cued into all these layers.

Benjamin Décarie-Daigneault: 47:38

I was wondering something similar about how you describe in your account of the bio de critical and the memory that we inherit from our animality and how this sort of idea of an animal stratum is sort of founded on a sort of past that was never present for us, just like the past of, the immemorial geological deep time. It was never present to us either. So I was wondering about precisely that what you what David was just describing, this sort of, the way in which those two types of past that were never present present themselves or or sort of, like, play a role in our present. Can we think of them as playing a similar role in the unfolding of our humanity? And here, I just want to quote one of the most insightful ways of framing this, relation to the deep past that you laid out in the chapter in this in chapter two in the elemental past when you say that there's this prehistory that haunts the world from within.

Benjamin Décarie-Daigneault: 48:33

And this haunting of this feeling that there is a quasi presence of the past that makes the present possible, all the while not being its first cause or something like that, or being sort of chain of events that led to where I am, but something deeper, something that there is a sort of remnant of the past that is active, and that is truly there as present, but as past also in my present, and in the same way that you were describing how my metabolism and the way in which I breathe the way in which all of these sort of animal memories unfold in my daily existence without me knowing about it, and also how my bones participate to the geological time of the Earth, as as you were just saying. Is there sort of a link between these past of animality that was never present to us and the geological deep time that you're describing?

Ted Toadvine: 49:24

Yes. Thank you. Thank you both. Those are really rich and interesting questions. I have been thinking for some time about the ways that phenomenologists talk about our our animality, especially Merleau Ponty, but also thinking a lot about Derrida's concerns over emphasizing a kind of continuity, a kind of biologically based continuity with animals.

Ted Toadvine: 49:47

My students are all very eager, very quick to say, oh, humans are animals too, but that they can't really, elucidate quite what that means apart from just saying, well, you know, it's a evolutionary process. And it actually it took me a while to appreciate what was missing in that account. What brought me to really see a connection between deep time in the geological sense and evolutionary time was the dissatisfaction that I had with our existing concepts of biodiversity. I was working with some colleagues at the University of Oregon, Nikolai Merar and Brenda Bohannon, on some of the problems with the perceived view of biodiversity, and a great example of this is a book by Donald Meyer, What's So Good About Biodiversity? Meyer's book is detailed and very compelling as a kind of exhaustive critique of all the received views about the normative value or the ecological value of biodiversity.

Ted Toadvine: 50:42

You know, often when people say biodiversity today, they're just talking about species diversity. But, you know, the way biologists, the way ecologists think of the notion today is really the diversity of life, its variability, and its variety at all scales, from genes to ecosystems. The challenge, of course, is that to talk about diversity here, you have to identify units and then you have to, you know, agree on certain ways of measuring their variability and their their variety. Meyer says, you know, we take whatever natural holes and then we cut them up into their bio parts, as he calls it. This is his phrase.

Ted Toadvine: 51:16

He says they've been sliced and diced in strategic and tractable ways, which is strong language. But, you know, it really captures something about the way that we approach the notion of biodiversity. And it always assumes that the units we're beginning with are kind of given present things and that their relations of difference can then be measured in static ways at a particular moment in time. As I became unhappy with that, I was asking myself, well, what is it about the differences of life that matters to us? It's gotta be something more than this way approaching it.

Ted Toadvine: 51:52

What are those differences? I started to think about the ways we understand differences in a language. So that's where the diacritical and bio diacritics comes from, is that I started to think about Saussure's idea of diacritical difference, which is that language is nothing but differences. It's differences all the way down. And so you can think about this in terms of how we learn a language at the level of sound.

Ted Toadvine: 52:18

You have to learn to differentiate between the significant phonemes of that language between mat and cat and hat or between sing and sang and sung, when you can hear those differences, which are unique to the particular spoken language, then you kinda know what to listen for. You know where the differences are to be found. The same thing is true then for at the level of the meaning of a language, which is that to learn the language, you have to discriminate between meanings that might otherwise be close. What's the difference between this synonym and that? When you sort of can take on the those differences, that's the sort of measure of the expressive power for you of the language.

Ted Toadvine: 52:57

And of course, these differences change over time. Languages evolve. And so the differences in how a language is spoken or the words that it has in its repertoire undergo transformations. We can differentiate then between thinking about all the differences that make up the English language right now. You know, those meanings are what we try to capture in a dictionary.

Ted Toadvine: 53:19

Or we might think about the differences over time diachronically, for example, if we're thinking about how Latin evolves into French, for example. From whichever perspective, Saussure's big insight was that language doesn't consist of positive things. It's not preexisting units. Those units have their meaning. Those nodes of difference have their meaning only in terms of how they fit together within the whole.

Ted Toadvine: 53:44

And if a word drops out of circulation or we invent a new word, it sort of jostles around the other words so that the meaning of where each one exists within the whole undergoes a transformation. Language sort of varies as a whole. And so I began to ask myself, what would it mean to think about the differences of life from this diacritical perspective, not as a set of strategic, intractable, predetermined bio units, but as differential relations that evolve through time. If we do that, we arrive at very different conclusions about the value of any species. You know, it isn't just the loss of a species, isn't just the loss of one unit.

Ted Toadvine: 54:23

It actually transforms the whole. It's a loss to every other node of difference within that system of differences. And so extinction on this view is not about the loss of one species, however rare or valuable, but it's about the loss of a whole ancient and unique memory and all of its future possibilities. It's like the loss of an entire language family in a way. From my point of view, this gives us a transformed view of who we ourselves are and what it means to talk about a kinship with other creatures that is much richer than just the kind of notion of biological continuity.

Ted Toadvine: 54:59

It means we have to think about the evolutionary process in a more richly temporal way. This isn't just about something in the past. I'm struck, for example, by the idea of the blind spot of our eyes, which is the point where the optic nerve has to pass through the retina of the eye on the front, and it needs to get to the back, and so it has to pass through a hole in the retina, and our minds fill in so that we don't see a big hole in our vision, but in fact, it's just an extrapolation from what we're seeing in the areas nearby. And, of course, the blind spot is it becomes its own kind of symbolic philosophical metaphorical term. So we can begin to talk about someone's blind spot in ways that get taken up in our culture and given their own meanings.

Ted Toadvine: 55:41

But the very fact that our eyes have a blind spot, there's no necessity to that. It's entirely a consequence of our the contingencies of our evolutionary heritage, and we know this particularly well because cephalopod eyes, eyes of squids and octopi, they don't have blind spots. Theirs formed through a different evolutionary pathway, and their optic nerve is on the correct side of the retina and doesn't need to find a way to get to the other side. So just something like this, just that the this is one way that we are the memory of a process that includes not only our particular filial ancestors, let's say, but also all the differences, the nodes of difference, that made up life as a whole in the moment where they were living their lives in the same way that in a certain sense, all of language is involved anytime that we express ourselves.

David Morris: 56:29

I guess I just wanted to try to tease out the way that this is another instance of a structural principle of experience in life, which is when one is talking about our life and our perception and probably living in general, I think this would apply to any sphere where we find living beings, the agent of the living and perceiving and being animal or whatever can never be sort of localized and delimited within some circumscribed sphere. There's these endless nesting of layers and scales through temporality and now you're giving us the evolutionary vision. I'm not me, I'm my microbiome. I'm not one genome, I'm polygenomic. I'm not here right now.

David Morris: 57:07

My mitochondria are going back millions and millions of years to the female lineage of my species because that's just the way it is and yet that very thing gives birth to somebody who comes to take it as obvious that it's just me here doing my stuff. It is a blind spot thing, it's also a repression thing, but earlier on Ben was talking about the role of learning to say things about things, learning how to speak about matter and language and so on. And your mention of the diacritical, there's sort of like a linguistic structure that always exceeds you. Like you get to speak your language, but you aren't your language. There's something else speaking inside of you.

David Morris: 57:44

But that's not the way we feel about language. And language looks to be something that can be policed but it can't be policed. It's living and evolving and breathing. I think I wanted to point that out to ask you because you did want us to think about your third part and your third part of your book is about the stories that we tell about how we're all gonna die or something of that sort. Not just us, but everybody, the whole world.

David Morris: 58:07

It's all gonna go to hell. That's a very old story. You know, there's stories about how we came from somewhere and there are stories about how we're gonna go to hell together. And, you're trying to bring some of your insights to bear on those eschatological stories and some of the presumptions that I think you're thinking are wrong and mistaken. It's sort of like patrolling the diacritical limits of language to frame the way we tell eschatological stories.

David Morris: 58:35

So maybe the point is we try to do that so we seize the future that we wanna have destroyed instead of the future as it's really gonna happen. I'm not sure about that one. Ed?

Benjamin Décarie-Daigneault: 58:44

No. Well, my questions, I think the the main points of reflections that I have on the third part of the book are mostly about that precisely this what does this future this envisioned future that we don't really know exactly how to understand already because we we can make the contours, of how we collectively understand this possible projected future. But my question is mostly about what does this potential future does to the body now? So how does this future exist in our present? And what does it do to the present in a sense?

Benjamin Décarie-Daigneault: 59:18

And thinking about that, because, of course, we've been already talking a bunch of how different modalities of time coexist in the present, and that the the past is never just the past, it's haunting the the present, it's projecting us towards the future. And now, the third part of the book is really about how the future folds into the present and even informs the past. Right? It informs at least our understanding or even the haunting of the way in which the past we allow the past to hunt ourselves. We started thinking of how everything is going to collapse.

Benjamin Décarie-Daigneault: 59:50

And at the same time, we think about how everything is going to collapse, we think about what we're everything that we have that is going to collapse came to be that way into a certain process into a certain past, and we come to realize the richness of the process that led us there. That's a little bit what Ted you were just saying about how the extinction of a species is sort of the extinction of a whole family of languages, because it's also all of these bio diacritical processes are these processes of self differentiation and differentiations between what will come to become individuals be with that will become individuated into species or into individual specimens. All of these bear within themselves a certain past and being confronted to their collapse. If we're thinking about an animal species that's going to come extinct ourselves, thinking of how everything that we've been doing led to this point in the present. The present lives.

Benjamin Décarie-Daigneault: 01:00:42

It's sort of a firsthand testimony of what it would mean for all of these long, laborious processes of differentiation, what it would mean for them to collapse and to basically go extinct. And what I'm wondering about that is looking forward and not looking sort of switching the gaze, not looking back at what we were losing, but looking forward. What does it do to us? What what do you think historically, thinking of our future in those terms, in those types of narratives, what are we doing to ourselves, basically, while while we're thinking of the future in those terms?

Ted Toadvine: 01:01:17

Yes. Thank you, Ben, and thank you, David. So you put a lot on the table, and I don't know that I'm gonna, address all of it, but please redirect, if I don't. I'm thinking about how just how recent our knowledge of prospects of the deep future are and how they emerge for us more or less simultaneously with our recognition of the depth of the past. We haven't known very long that species can go extinct, and it was a hot topic of scientific debate up until Cuvier.

Ted Toadvine: 01:01:50

It took even longer for us to consider that human extinction could be a real possibility. It's a recent book by Emil Torres, Human Extinction, that makes the case that Christianity played a big role in making it so difficult for us for so long to admit the possibility of our own extinction. But suddenly when we begin to realize that, yes, other creatures have gone extinct, then we begin to think, well, what about us? Could this happen? Initially, we imagined plagues or we imagined, you know, massive volcanoes or what have you that might eliminate us.

Ted Toadvine: 01:02:25

But increasingly, of course, especially after world wars in the twentieth century, we started to imagine that, hey, we could do this to ourselves. We could build the big bomb. There were people writing speculative fiction about human extinction due to huge bombs even before Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Our imagination had taken us there. And so suddenly human extinction becomes something that we could do that is a possibility for our future.

Ted Toadvine: 01:02:53

And of course, with Rachel Carson, whose book Silent Spring was published in the run up to the Cuban Missile Crisis, and she explicitly links her concerns about DDT with concerns about nuclear warfare, then we begin to think about our environmental situation as something where we could destroy the world. I think that that kind of projection of a future, of a potential apocalyptic future, is sort of first made possible for us by what we've learned about the past, but it also sort of draws us into thinking about time and our relationship to time in very problematic ways. It leads us to want to master the future. You know what? I come back to the question of why do we enjoy so much watching movies, movie after movie, of the world ending?

Ted Toadvine: 01:03:38

You know, and they tend to have a kind of common structure where there's a big collapse and then there's there's that little band of people who survive, right? There they are, holed up in the whatever it is, you know, and they're taking stock of the resources that they've got. Who can hunt and who can cook and who's gonna do this? Who can fix the car and get us some gas. And there's a kind of clarifying simplicity that we really love.

Ted Toadvine: 01:04:02

Just bring it all down. You know, maybe we're not even gonna be one of those people, but bring it all down and start over. Start fresh. That's part of what makes it really exciting is the starting fresh. But our environmental situation is the result of long spans of colonialism, slavery, capitalism.

Ted Toadvine: 01:04:21

Whose dream is it to start fresh and wash all that away? This is an insight that really brought home to me by Potawatomi scholar, Kyle White, who says, that's a settler fantasy. The apocalypse is a settler fantasy. For indigenous people, they've been living through apocalypse after apocalypse at the hands of settlers. And now we'd like to just say, oh, let's wipe it all away and start over fresh.

Ted Toadvine: 01:04:45

Because when we do, then our our responsibilities, the debts that we owe for the world that we've created, get washed away with it. So there's a kind of pleasure of apocalypse that is the fresh start. That's a kind of liquidation of the past, a refusal to remember how we got here and to take responsibility for it. But there's also, I think, in our apocalyptic thinking, our eco eschatologies, there's a way that imagining the future of the planet as so dependent on us. Part of what's going on with the Anthropocene is the idea that it's not nature anymore that's making the decisions, it's human beings.

Ted Toadvine: 01:05:20

Right? We're in charge now. We can make good decisions or bad decisions. Right? And we need to make the the good decisions.

Ted Toadvine: 01:05:25

But, gee, isn't it convenient that at the very moment when we think it might have been a bad thing to be mastering nature, then now we become absolute masters of nature. Its very future now depends on us. We could flip the switch and it could be gone, or we can decide not to. Gee, all of a sudden, it's still all about us. The Anthropocene intended to give us some some humility, but in fact ends up reinforcing a certain sense of the mastery of nature.

Ted Toadvine: 01:05:52

And so I find all of this quite suspect, and I think it has a lot to do, once again, with how we think about time and our relationship to time. And so I think it requires us to start thinking about what temporal justice at deep scales of time would look like. A couple of ways of approaching that topic get discussed in the book, and one is Jean Luc Nancy's idea that we deepen our relationship to the present. So, as I mentioned when I was starting us off, every moment of time is unique and singular. It can't be reduced to a homogeneous interchangeable unit.

Ted Toadvine: 01:06:30

And so what would it mean to stop calculatively managing what we expect to happen in the future and instead really attend to what presents itself to us in the present, to really be receptive to the singularity and the uniqueness of the moments of time in which we are immersed and entangled, which of course are not instants. The now for us is many durations. It's what I'm doing with my life right now as much as it is what's happening this minute. Another very rich suggestion comes again from Kyle White who discusses in some detail what he calls spiraling time, And he's describing their indigenous experiences of time, but he also invites settlers to ask themselves some very important questions. For example, how is the world that we're living in now the dream of our ancestors?

Ted Toadvine: 01:07:23

How did they in fact bequeath to us a certain envisioned future? My ancestors, my settler ancestors, had for themselves a goal, and in a certain sense they they've accomplished it, and in so doing have continued the apocalypse for others. And if I consider the way that I am engaged in the cycling of time, then I might ask myself today, what kind of ancestor do I want to be for those who are coming after me? This is resisting the idea that all times are interchangeable because where we exist in this spiraling of time will be very much a matter of our responsibility, how we take up what's been bequeathed to us, how we take responsibility for what we have inherited, and also what we leave to those who who come after us.

Benjamin Décarie-Daigneault: 01:08:12

No. That's truly interesting because you too, David, have been very interested in the way in which the idea of like a master clock that homogenizes time as like deeply colonial ramifications. Right?

David Morris: 01:08:24

Well, it's pretty striking that, Ted was talking about the way Christianity might have impeded us from thinking about extinction. But I've studied in some detail Mexica ontology. We call them the Aztecs incorrectly, but for them it's perfectly obvious that this is the fifth sun cycle cosmos. There have been others before, there'll be others after. It's a strange way that we've, in this culture, come to think about time.

David Morris: 01:08:47

All this talk of time, though, is also making me think about where we are, sort of practical clock time for ourselves and our listeners. And I know that, Ben was thinking about your title, The Memory of the World, and I know that you're drawing that from Elle Pontie. I thought it might be good to see if we can approach some kind of ending of this conversation toward a new beginning through what's really striking about that phrase because I think from listening to you talk about the book today, Ted, part of what's at stake in that phrase, the memory of the world is for us to remember what we've repressed, what Christianity might have forgotten, all these things. Remember that there's a world. Remember that you're part of the world.

David Morris: 01:09:26

Remember that these things that we touch, that we feel that we sense, the time that we experience, this is coming from before us, but also even more strikingly, I think you're asking us to remember that the world itself has a memory, that there's some kind of remembering and making sense and storing up and developing something quite important that was there even before you came on the scene and that's what we tend to forget. So I wonder if that's the right way of thinking about what's meant by the memory of the world. Is that why you put it on the cover? What's going on with that?

Ted Toadvine: 01:09:58

Yes. Thank you, David. I think perhaps your ruminations on the title of the book are even more profound than what I could have offered. So, I wish that, I'd had you there to recommend it to me even sooner. The Memory of the World is, it's a quotation that comes from Melle Ponty, and it's one that he uses in the Phenomenology of Perception, his book from 1945, and he doesn't say very much there to explain what that expression means.

Ted Toadvine: 01:10:23

And then it comes up again in several of his lecture courses in the 1950s and and even in some of the notes for his final book that got published posthumously in The Visible and the Invisible. In my book, I don't take the time to kind of work out the intellectual context and genealogy of Mel Punte's use of this expression, but there are some things that he says that inspired my thinking for the book as a whole. And I can say something about how those have shaped my thinking and why that led me to select this as a title. In phenomenology perception, Merleau Ponty uses this phrase, the memory of the world, in the context of describing what he sees as a certain tension, a certain paradox even, in our everyday perceptual experience of things. If we think of space, we know that we experience the world from a certain specific location within it.

Ted Toadvine: 01:11:12

I see the table or the wall from my location in space, which I know is limited. I don't directly perceive the other side of the table. I don't see the part of the wall that the table's in front of, and so on. But even though my perceptions are always limited in this way, they're always localized and from a certain point of view, I still perceive the things around me as having perspectives that go beyond what's immediately perceived by me. I see this table that I'm sitting at here today as a real table, and I see that as a real wall.

Ted Toadvine: 01:11:44

I don't see them as carefully constructed illusions. I see them as being available to be seen from many other, infinitely other perspectives. And this isn't a conclusion that I draw mentally. It's not, something I imagine or something I represent to myself. It's an integral part of my perception itself.

Ted Toadvine: 01:12:03

I perceive the table as a table that has infinitely number of different visual perspectives on it. So to perceive the room around me is to open onto it from a certain location within it, which means opening onto horizons that extend beyond what I can perceive from where I am. And that means that in my very perception of this room is enfolded its relation to what lies beyond it. You know, as I sit here at the table and look at the table, it it sort of includes within it a reference to what's outside my door, what's downstairs, what's down the street, what's in the next state over, what's at the bottom of the ocean, what's on the moon. All of that is in a certain sense implied in, implicated, tangled up with my being here in front of this thing in this at this moment in space.

Ted Toadvine: 01:12:51

In short, you could say that any opening onto space entails a kind of relation to all of space, and it's only through a specific insertion into space that I can enter into that set of relations. Now everything I've just said about space is also true of time. We open on to time through what's happening now, although that now is not an instantaneous point. It it's always a duration, and it's always a duration that's in a complex tangent of relations with other durations. And this means that we're temporal only by living through certain temporal happenings or events that encompass and overlap and are encompassed by other happenings.

Ted Toadvine: 01:13:28

Every present happening carries the past along with it, and it anticipates the future. And just as every spatial perception unfolds a relation to all of space, every temporal happening unfolds relations to the whole scheme of time. This isn't just something subjective. It's not just in our memories or in our anticipation. You know, we know our memories can be wrong, but the background of our temporal experience is a commitment to a truth of the past, to a truth of the past of the world as a whole.

Ted Toadvine: 01:14:00

And that's what Merleptonte here in phenomenology perception calls the memory of the world. Now I started off by saying Merleptonte thought there's something paradoxical in this experience. It is, he says, a paradox that's kind of constituent of all of our perceptual experiences. And that's because the fact that we intend all of space through our opening onto space from right here, and the fact that we intend all of time through our opening onto time from right now, that tempts us to forget that we open onto space and time always from a certain here and now. So we start to treat space and time as fully determinate, as if the world consists of ready made things already arranged in a spatial and temporal system.

Ted Toadvine: 01:14:46

And our sciences just continue along that elaboration of this fully determinate world in terms of systems of relations that are composed of instantaneous moments, whether it's spatial points without depth or temporal instance without duration. Now that scientific view of space and time is certainly useful. It's essential for a lot of what we, have been able to accomplish technologically, but it's an abstraction from space and time in their full concreteness. When we treat space as composed of points lacking any depth, when we treat time as consisting of moments lacking any duration, we lose the very distance and duration and horizonality that makes what's there different from here and that makes what's then different from now. To open onto the past as past or to open onto the future as future can't be about converting them into another present moment within a fixed set of relations the way we do when we imagine a timeline that's made up of points in set relation.

Ted Toadvine: 01:15:50

So the paradox of all of our experience is that somehow we open onto the real world, but that this world is not a determinate world. It maintains its openness, its indeterminacies, its horizons. It's the real world itself that has horizons. Things are farther away from me or nearer, and so they can't be fixed into something determinate and made up of fully present instantaneous moments. Merleau Ponty finds kind of confirmation in his ways of thinking about things some years later when he's reading the works of Alfred North Whitehead in his book, The Concept of Nature.

Ted Toadvine: 01:16:27

Whitehead says there that the process or the passage of nature, as he calls it, is the most concrete happening or the most concrete event of time. And so he rejects the materialist view that's dominated the history of Western thinking, which is the view that all nature exists in a kind of instantaneous present. Instead, Whitehead argues that the creative unfolding of nature is a happening that at each moment involves all of time. In his words, he says, the operative present must be sought for throughout the whole in the remotest past as well as the narrowest breadth of any present duration, perhaps also in the unrealized future. That's a quote from Whitehead's The Concept of Nature.

Ted Toadvine: 01:17:13

Commenting on these passages in his own lectures on nature, Merleau Ponty says, if we wanna understand the process of nature in itself, we could say that nature is the memory of the world. The whole aim of my book is to start from that rich way of thinking of time and of the passage of nature and bring it to bear on how we think about deep time in particular and how this gives us a starting point for relating the time of our lives, our experienced time, for seeing that it is necessarily connected with, in a certain sense, all of time. So I've set out really just to follow through the consequences of that, and that's why the expression, the memory of the world seemed to capture my theme so well. Is it time?

Benjamin Décarie-Daigneault: 01:18:02

That's beautiful.

David Morris: 01:18:04

What a great book. And, thanks for taking the time to talk through this book, which I think is gonna have a really good impact on a broad audience. And I hope this podcast will help with that. This has been a University of Minnesota Press production. The book The Memory of the World by Ted Toedwein is available from University of Minnesota Press.

David Morris: 01:18:25

Thank you for listening.