The language of time: prohibitions, projects, illusions

Abstract

Language is a neutral reservoir-origin of both true and false, as well as deliberately false (deceptive) statements, questions, and descriptions about reality and illusions. The author shares Victoria Welby’s belief that language lacks self-improvement: language as such does not allow us to distinguish truth from falsehood. Statements about language as a source of deception and lies suggest, rather, that language is losing its neutrality due to the social-bodily-emotional elements of communication. The language of time is considered, in its primary social function, to guide prohibitions and permissions along established lines of social labyrinth of interactions. The author proposes a semantic-functional dictionary of the language of time, consisting of four groups of words and phrases, of which only the first group includes exclusively phrases with the word “time”. The article examines the language of time in philosophical concepts using Husserl’s phenomenology as an example, where it becomes one of the main languages after the Logical Investigations. The language of time retains its restrictive functions both within and beyond the doctrine; the “Heraclitean stream” prohibits access to the transcendent and motivates the “exclusion of objective time”, which is the starting point of the method of “phenomenological reduction”, or epoché. Moreover, “epoché” and “retention” (the main term of the concept of subjective time) are words of the Greek and Latin languages, identical in meaning. The concept of the stream of consciousness as a unidirectional train of retentions imposes a significant limitation on the diversity of types of communicative consciousness. The language of time conceals the language of space as the language of movements, boundaries, and differences.