Dimensions of Time and Social Togetherness

233 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1981.In his Philosophy of the Present, George Herbert Mead urges to "take time seriously." At the opening of the book he declares that "the present implies past and future, and to these we (Mead) deny existence." This leads to the basic proposition that time exists in the present only, and that past and future are hunks of recalled or anticipated space which are imported as "then" into people's "now." It follows that each indiviual has a unique perception of time; this is the first, subjective dimension, which is called by Bergson "inner time" in his Time and Free Will.People cannot share their spatial perception, because they can never be in the same locus at the very same instant. They share experience via concerting inner times. Concert time, the second temporal dimension, is social time in its purity; time as we discuss it and measure it is contaminated by spatial references and is a separate, third dimension, to be called here spaced time.When people concert their inner time they arrive at mutual understanding of the space around them, which is ultimately expressed in their submission to the supra-individuality of the group, and they acknowledge a group's self, sort of supra-self. They preserve the social group through this supraself in face-to-face relationships, in the establishment of cultural symbols that exist beyond these relationships, and in occasional diverted behavior that emphasizes normative behavior.The study is empirically grounded in two years of participant and unobtrusive observations of a jazz orchestra and in many years of participation in the world of professional musicians.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD