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The Money Game: Notes On Fantasies of Temporal Recovery and Preknowledge

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Thomas J. Cottle

Extract

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Temporal recovery and prescience or preknowldge clearly belong to the realm of imagined time, for they brazenly threaten to disobey the unidirectional structure of successive or linear time. It goes without saying that the acts of fantasizing recovery or preknowledge belong to what becomes an expanded sense of nowness. Fantasizing trascends mere temporal imagining, for the processes of recall and expectation are transformed and accelerated into momentary wish fulfillment.

Figuratively speaking, fantasizing and imagining may be thought of as running in opposite directions along the same spatial plane. Apparently restrained by the objective mold of chronological succession, imagining in the form of recall returns the experience to the present while fantasy of recovery “succeeds” in “transporting” us to the “time” of the original experience. Expectation on the other hand, “projects” outward our feelings, hopes, and dreams as bolts of content to fill the emptiness of future while fantasies of preknowledge barely “succeed” in bringing to us, through subjective prematureness, an elaborated interpretation of a now replete future.

Type
Notes and Discussion
Information
Diogenes , Volume 17 , Issue 65 , March 1969 , pp. 110 - 134
Copyright
Copyright © 1969 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

Footnotes

1

The author wishes to thank Dr. Stephen Klineberg of Princeton University and Professor Jacob W. Getzels of the University of Chicago for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper. M. William Bezdek and Mr. William Morgan of the University of Chicago assisted in the collection and analysis of the data. Miss Linda Sherk and Mrs. Linda Janus helped in the final preparation of the manuscript.

References

2 Cf. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will (London, George Allen and Unwin, 1910); Duration and Simultaneity with Reference to Einstein's Theory, translated by Leon Jacobson (Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill, 1965).

3 Herbert Fingarette, The Self in Transformation (New York, Basic Books, 1963), p. 207.

4 William Henry, The Analysis of Fantasy (New York, John Wiley and Sons, 1956), p. 1.

5 On this point, see Philip Merlan, "Time Consciousness in Husserl and Heidegger," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Sept. 1947, 3, No. 1, pp. 23-53.

6 Merdard Boss, Psychoanalysis and Daseinsanalysis, translated by Ludwig B. Le Fedre (New York, Basic Books, 1963), p. 45.

7 Leonard Doob, Becoming More Civilized. A Psychological Exploration (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1960).

8 Joost A. M. Meerloo, The Two Faces of Man: Two Studies on the Sense of Time and on Ambivalence (New York, International Universities Press, 1954), p. 45.

9 Ibid., pp. 87-88.

10 Ibid., p. 96.

11 These terms are suggested by the writings of Florence R. Kluckhohn. See her " Dominant and Variant Value Orientations," in Florence R. Kluckhohn and Fred L. Strodtbeck, Variations in Value Orientations (Evanston, Row Peterson, 1961), Chapter 1.

12 There is a serious and unexplored implication to this divergency in function of fantasies among men and women.

13 Many of these notions come from the writing of Martin Heidegger. See especially his Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York, Harper and Row, 1962). See also Magda King, Heidegger's Philosophy (New York, Dell Publishing Company, 1964).

14 See Bertrand Russell, "On the Experience of Time," Monist, 1915, 25, pp. 212-233; and The Problems of Philosophy (New York, Oxford University Press, 1959).

15 Cf. Heidegger, op. cit.

16 Karl Mannheim, Essays on Sociology and Social Psychology (New York, Oxford University Press, 1953), p. 111.

17 Mannheim, ibid., pp. 111-112.

18 Edward Tirayakian, " The Existential Self and the Person," in Chad Gordon and Kenneth J. Gergen (Editors), The Self in Social Interaction (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1964), p. 175.

19 Quoted in Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1964), p. 175.

20 In the same mood, Tillich advised that upon death, we are returned to time.

21 Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History, The Myth of the Eternal Return (New York, Harper and Row, 1959).

22 Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane (New York, Harper and Row, 1961), p. 71.

23 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (New York, Human ities Press, 1962), p. 413.

24 Cournot, from Traité de l'enchaînement des idées fondamentales dans les sciences et dans l'histoire. Quoted in Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life, translated by J. E. Crawford Flitch (New York, Dover Publications, 1954), pp. 217-218.

25 Unamuno, ibid., p. 218.

26 Ibid., p. 211.

27 Ibid., p. 223.

28 Experiential orientations in time have been well studied by social scientists. See for example, Morris Eson and Norman Greenfield. "Life Space: Its Content and Temporal Dimension," Journal of Genetic Psychology, 1962, 100, pp. 113- 128; M. Wallace, "Future Time Perspective in Schizophrenia," Journal of Ab normal and Social Psychology, 1956, 52, pp. 240-245; and Thomas J. Cottle, "The Experiential Inventory: A Manifest Time Orientation," unpublished man uscript, Department of Social Relations, Harvard University, 1966.

29 Many of these ideas have come from Erik H. Erikson. See his Childhood and Society (New York, W. W. Norton and Company, 1950); and "Identity and Uprootedness in Our Time," in Insight and Responsibility (New York, W. W. Norton and Company, 1964), pp. 83-107.

30 Heidegger, op. cit.