The Ontological Roots of Temporality

In order to revisit the question of the nature of time in the context of the present volume, it is advisable to probe successively the following issues. 1.What is time, respectively for philosophy, science, and technoscience? 2. How have its foundations been shaken by Einstein’s relativities, Bergson’s duration and Whitehead’s creative advance? 3.What are the available data? 4.What method should one use to make sense out of them? 5.What is the outcome of their processualization? In conclusion, we highlight the threefold root of temporality disclosed in Whiteheadian organicism

sues?D oesn'tethics presuppose time insofar as,without liberty,therei sn either time nor ethical action?
When addressing the question of time, one has first to acknowledge that there are various experienceso ft ime, and manyw ayst on ame them;e .g., in Greek: chronos,aiôn, aidion, kairos, horai… Theseconcepts, that sometimesoverlap, name various facets of time: physical, cosmological, psychological, linear, circular,r hythmic,p ragmatic, destinal (the life-time), qualitative and quantitative.P ast,p resent,a nd future have distinctive traits.¹ The past is extended, horizonal;the present seems timeless, perhaps point-like; the future is nothing but av irtual tension. If youo bliterate some of these experiences,a nd especiallyi f youc onsider that time has to be quantified, youo pen the floodgates to all the contradictions and paradoxesthat have haunted the Western mind for centuries. This is, precisely, what philosophyh as done first,s cience later,a nd theologyi n the meantime. The subsidiary question is thus: what,i fa nything,i sg ained by the theoretical tropism inaugurated by philosophy, endorsedb ys cience,a nd pushed to the hiltb yt echnoscience? Fort he sake of analysis,l et us brieflyp eruse, respectively, time in philosophy, time in science,a nd time in psychology. In order to obtain ap anoramic view of the history of ideas, it makes sense to "seek simplicity and distrust it" (Whitehead 1964,163).

Philosophy
To define philosophyand to specify what it is all about is aserious matter. Lato sensu,p hilosophye mbodies the quest for the meaning of life, and especially probes the harmonyt hat exists, used to exist,o rc ould exist,b etween humans and theirw orld.² Since it is aq uest,i ts hould not pretend to be able to provide dogmatic answers. Since it tends towards universalharmony, it can nevertheless focus on the notion of wisdom. Stricto sensu,p hilosophya mounts to the shift  See Eugène Minkowski'sl andmark Bergsonian study. See Minkowki (1970).  "The two positive Socratic propositions read as follows.The first: 'It is bettert ob ew ronged than to do wrong',t ow hich Callicles, the interlocutor in the dialogue, replies as all Greece would have replied, 'To suffer wrong is not the part of am an at all, but that of as lave for whom it is bettert ob ed ead than alive,a si ti sf or anyone whoi su nable to come either to his own assistance when he is wronged or to that of anyone he caresa bout'.T he second: 'It would be betterf or me that my lyre or ac horus Id irected should be out of tune and loud with discord,a nd that multitudes of men should disagree with me rather than that I, being one, should be out of harmonyw ith myself and contradict me'.Which causes Callicles to tell Socrates that he is 'goingmad with eloquence' and that it would be betterfor him and everybody else if he would leave philosophya lone" (Arendt 1978,180 -181). from mythos to logos,a nd this required, and fostered, an ew political venture: direct democracy,with its founding principles -isonomia (all are equal before the law) and isègoria (all have the equal right to address the political assemblies)-and its corei nstitutions (ekklêsia,t he assemblyo fa ll citizens; boulê, the council of the 500; heliaia,t he supreme court…). Human beingsb elong to the world; the human logos is the same as the natural logos… Hencethe following threeimportant conceptual thresholds:Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus. Before Plato, one can onlyguess what has been achieved conceptually; Plato himself "moves about amid afragmentary system like aman dazed by his own penetration" (Whitehead 1967a, 147). Aristotle is, arguably,t he first philosopher to hierarchize the concepts of time, focusingo nchronos,g iving to the aiôn as upralunar status, and reducing the kairos to as ubsidiary,a nthropological, matter.W er ecognize time when we distinguish movement,h ec laims, which we do by "before and after" (Aristotle, Physics,219a22sq).Plotinus reconsidered this classification and argued that Kairos belong to the first hypostasis, aiôn to the second, and chronos to the third. Stretchingthese conceptsabit leads to Trinitarian theology, that secures chronological time (i. e., time qua chronos), since it is created with the world and will end with it. Mutatis mutandis,Whitehead will provide aP lotinian ontology of time (seeo ur §5.3).

Science
Although common sense is perfectlya blet od eal with the weaknesses and contradictions of sense perception, science doubles down, so to speak, the philosophical bet,a nd is not afraid of creatinga sm uch epistemological problems as it allegedlys olves. While philosophy, per se,h as, sometimes reluctantly, kept the systematic relevance of qualia,o nt he contrary,s cience, per se,i sd efined by the quantification and the mathematisation of the world. Itsf ounding moment takes place when the experimental protocol (a necessary,i ntellectual, perception of sorts) substitutes itself for observation (sensible perception and its contingent trail of aberrations,errors and misinterpretations) in Galilei's Discorsi (1638).
When Galilei writes "mente concipio" he operates an epistemological Uturn. Whatw eo bserved oes not reallym atter anymore; we have to put nature to the question. Galilei'sstarting point is resolutelyanthropocentric (but not anthropomorphic): Ic onceive in my mind of something moveable thati se ntirely left to itself;Iconceive in my mind of ab odyt hrown on an infinitelye xtended horizontal plane… (Galilei 1638;H eidegger1 967). The power of imagination ac-quired then as cientific relevance that is still actual (remember,e .g., Einstein's photonic ride).
The consequences on the notion of time are remarkable. Time becomes,i n the Greek lexicon, purelyc hronological. Since without measuring instruments, the notion of linear (physical) time is of course difficult to use,itcould be argued that scientific progress is entirelyd ependentu pon the availability of reliable clocks and rods.Moreover,clocks and rods are,inthemselves, pretty much useless: auniversal metrics is needed, and this involves am ore or less explicit ontology of space and time.( Amore sophisticated approach involves aphilosophy of perception unfoldingthe conditions of possibility of measurement: that task is left to philosophy).
Newton'sp hysics (and one should remember that Newton has apparently spent most of his life practicing alchemyrather than physics³)s olvedt he metrical conundrum very elegantly: time and space are absolute, they constitute the divineorgan of perception (sensorium dei). Past and future are perfectlysymmetrical for the divinem echanics.T his move is the root of Kant'sT ranscendental Idealism: time is ac ondition of experience,n ot one of its by-products. Time flows uniformly, independentlyo fw hat happens, or not.
This being said, although science departs from philosophyinits strict mathematisation and experimental protocol, it largely keeps the philosophical deontology and works towards the common good.

Technoscience
On the contrary,technoscienceispurelyutilitarian, and this givesadifferent flavour to Kant'sd efinition of the Enlightenment.The motto "Have couraget ou se your own reason!" ("Saperea ude!"), instead of urging man'sr elease from his self-incurredt utelage ( Kant 1996)n ames now the shift from at heological, dogmatic, reason, to an anthropological, but equallyd ogmatic, reason. Theology was of course alienating, but it kept some room for the opacity of experience and the mystery of life. With the Enlightenment,atotal (scientific) transparency of experience is supposed to be reachable. Of course, Kant himself repeatedly tried to salvage whatever he could of the scraps of meaning ignored by scientific  Newton (Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica,1687) is onlythe tip of the iceberg: according to Keynes, whoexplored the unpublishedworks of Newtoninthe years 1942-1946,the most influential scientist was (also) an avid alchemist, "the last of the magicians".Newton'salchemical research made him prone to embrace pantheism. reductionism;h ec ertainlyc onvinced most his readers,b ut did he persuade them?⁴ "Technoscience" ("TechnoWissenschaft" in German) is aconcept framedby Habermas (1968) and refined by Hottois (1984), among others. It is used here in order to point at the mutual transformationt hat has progressively takenp lace between science and technology.⁵ With the industrial revolution (that flourished circa 1830,ifone takes the generalization of the use of coal as criterion), science has more and more been lured by its practical consequences, and since these have been increasingly commercial, it should be plain obvious thatt he synergy at work has benefited mainlyt oc apitalists.B etter: neither science nor technologyh as ever been axiologicallyn eutral. Technoscience is actually a ménage à trois! In practice, this means that the project of mastering nature (remember Bacon, Vico and Descartes),⁶ that, at one point,c ould pretend to be neutral (but what is the exact link between theôria and episteme in Plato? And how did Newton manageboth his alchemicalquest and his mechanistic worldview?) has become the capitalistic urge to bendc ulture: to know the world, one must first manufacture it.
On the one hand,measurement,and especiallytime measurement,isessential for technoscience. So much so that scientific progress is entirelydependent upon the availability of reliable clocksa nd rods.H istoricallys peaking,the first places wheretime was mastered in order to manufacture the world wereCatholic monasteries.⁷ Technology, such as sophisticated clocks, solvesp ractical issues, of course,b ut it also creates new practical and theoretical problems.⁸ With the rapid expansion of the use of the electrical telegraph in the mid19 th century,s imultaneity became an urgent issue. Is the time of the transmitter the time of the receiver? If not,what inertial system can we use to tune in both sides?O nt he other,B ergsonian, hand, psychological time has two main modalities. Lato sensu,itrefers, first,tolived time qua duration, and, second, to the cosmic living  Alogical argument is supposed to convincethe thirdp arty,but this does not mean that s/he will act accordingly;ifone sets an example, the thirdparty can be persuaded, and follow up in practice.  Ad istinction should be made between technics and technology, tools and machine.  According to,e.g., Francis Bacon (Meditationes Sacrae,1597), Giambattista Vico (De antiquissima Italorum sapientia, ex linguae latinae originibus eruenda,1 710) and René Descartes (Discours de la méthode,1 637),k nowledge itself is power,a nd, morep recisely, powert ob ecome the masters and possessors of nature.  See Musso (2017).  To give contemporary exemplifications: how do youd ecommission nuclear power plants? Howtodispose of the nuclear waste? Howdoyou deal with the scarcity of resources, especially of rare earths?
The Ontological Roots of Temporality time of the élan vital. Stricto sensu,itbelongstothe science that emergedinthe years 1875 -1879,when Wundt was appointed to the chair of psychologyinLeipzig Universität,where he opened the first laboratory of experimental psychology. Psychophysics became strongly anchored in academia; it is still there ( Wundt 1896). Relativity onlye xacerbatest he existing stakes.
To boil it down to the basics, time is now money.This is, so to speak, the price to payf or the gospel of efficiency.

2S haking the Foundations
With this broad horizoni nm ind, we can revisit the rationale for the What is time? Einstein and Bergson 100 years later conferenceh eld in the Università degli Studi dell'Aquila in April 2019.Ameaningful parallel was indeedmade between the April 6, 2009'se arthquake and the April 6, 1922'sc ulturalq uake.

April 6, 2009'sE arthquake
Earthquakesconstitutefirst-rate traumatic events.Clinically, atrauma is an event duringw hich one'sl ife is threatened,o rd uringw hich one watches somebody else'sl ife endangered.A saconsequence, the victim is likelyt os uffer from PTSD,m aking life difficult,o re venu nbearable.⁹ Philosophyp rovides broader concepts to circumscribe the consequences of earthquakes. They underline the stability that we always take for granted in everydayexperiences.Bodya nd ground are presupposed in all experiences.I ft he bodyisa ttacked-traumatized-,ori ft he ground givesway beneath us, we lose our vital confidence and life becomes ameaningless burden. Five complementa- "The essential featureo fP osttraumatic Stress Disorder is the development of characteristic symptoms followinge xposuret oa ne xtreme traumatic stressor involvingd irect personale xperienceo fa ne vent that involves actual or threatenedd eath or serious injury,o ro ther threat to one'sp hysical integrity;o rw itnessinga ne vent that involves death, injury,o rathreat to the physical integrity of another person;o rl earninga bout unexpected or violent death, serious harm, or threat of death or injury experienced by afamilymember or other close associate( Criterion A1). The person'sresponse to the event must involveintense fear,helplessness,orhorror (or in children, the response must involved isorganized or agitated behaviour)( Criterion A2)" (DSM-IV-TR1 994, §309.81). Ah undred years ago, however, hysteria was the trendyc linical tool. While, in the popular literature, PTSD is the concept attached to veterans' impossibility to enjoy life after their mission, hysteria named, first,t he statei nw hich rape and incest leave children, and, second, an unsolved OEdipus complex. ry conceptsa re outstanding,a nd each would deserveapaper of its own: Husserl'sUr-Doxa (Die Urarche Erde bewegt sich nicht,1934), Santayana'sinstinctive faith (Scepticism and Animal Faith,1923), Tillich'sontological security (TheCouraget oB e ,1952),M erleau-Ponty'sp erceptive faith (Le Visible et l'invisible,1964), Arendt'sCommon-sense qua three-fold commonness (TheLife of the Mind,1978). All spell in their own wayt hat life requires that we fundamentally believen ot onlyinthe cosmic harmony of all things(hence in permanent rules which underlie all events), but also in theirduration. If the cosmic unity and stability is falsified by experience, anxiety prevails ever after.

April 6, 1922'sC ultural Quake
Rhetoricallyspeaking, it makes sense to draw aparallel between the loss of ontological security due to an earthquake, and the disarray following the destruction of human temporality by some well-known Nobel prize winner.¹⁰ The meeting between Einstein and Bergson is usually understood as the turning point of Bergson'sfame, but its consequences werefar deeper: it meantand stillmeansthat science'ssymbolic violence was powerful enough to make (some) people renounce to theirown experience,and to prefer aconstruct condemning their life to meaninglessness.¹¹ This is also, by the way, the significance of Watson's Behaviourism (1928). Three points are important to make.
If time is onlyamatter to be quantified by,a nd for,technical contraptions, and, especially, if time must be interpreted as apurelycontingent feature of our subjectivity,what happens between birth and death is anecdotal and insignificant,which means, first,that basiccommon sense is obliterated. When Einstein, in 1955,writes to Michele Besso'sw idow that his death doesn'tm ean much because for people who believe in physics the distinction between past,present and future is onlyastubbornlypersistent illusion, he tries to make sense of death by denying the possibility of life, and of meaning.M oreover,what sort of science  Einstein receivedt he 1921 Nobel Prize in Physicsf or his discovery of the lawo ft he photoelectric effect.B ergson was awarded the 1927 Nobel Prize in Literature.  "La violences ymbolique, c'est cette violenceq ui extorque des soumissions qui ne sont même pas perçues comme telles en s'appuyant sur des 'attentesc ollectives',des croyancess ocialement inculquées.Comme la théorie de la magie, la théorie de la violencesymbolique repose sur une théorie de la croyance ou, mieux, sur une théorie de la production de la croyance, du travail de socialisation nécessairepour produiredes agents dotés des schèmesdeperception et d'appréciation qui leur permettront de percevoir les injonctions inscrites dans une situation ou dans un discours et de leur obéir" (Bourdieu 1994,188).
The Ontological Roots of Temporality requires belief?Second, the meaning of life disappears for the simple reason that time and action are correlated. If action,inthe ethical and political sense, is not possible, we live in apurelydeterministic universe wherenochangeispossible. There is neither ethics,n or politics,n or psychotherapy possible because at best we can onlyshoulder pseudo-decisions made by the universal Logosorthe local Chaos. Third, the interplayb etween science and philosophyb ecomes an empty set.R eal philosophers are scientists -but real scientists are not philosophers…

Bergson'sD uration &W hitehead'sC reative Advance
To some extent,copingw ith the consequences of an earthquake amountst ob e able to deal with the symbolicviolence we have just introduced. In other words, the reconciliation of the human temporality with natural time is not an idle hobby,but an urgent task in societies that are shot through and through by technoscience.
What is time? Our personal experience of time imposes itself upon all scholarlydebates,m etrics, rods and clocks: not onlydoes it make sense in and of itself, but it is also presupposed by all scientific protocols.E xactly, philosophers such as James, Bergson or Whitehead sought aworldview that would explain the successes of science without denying the specificities of our human existence. As ar esult, they provided categories thata re more powerful (i. e., more coherent and applicable) than the scientific concepts shrinking the depth of our experience.
In order to contrast Einstein'sphysical, measured, time, with Bergson'slived, qualitative,time,wec an benefit from Whitehead'so wn scientific expertise and philosophical intuition (no pun intended, but appropriate). In Duration and Simultaneity (1922),B ergson remarks indeed thatt here is no real conflict between science and philosophyassoon as one admits the reality of the creative advance of nature -aconcept framedbyWhitehead in An EnquiryConcerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge (1919).¹² Herei sh ow he sketches it one year later:  "We thus kept as close as possible to the immediate; we asserted nothingthat sciencecould not accept and use; onlyrecently, in an admirable book, aphilosopher-mathematician affirmed the need to admit of an 'advance of Nature' and linked this conception with ours" (Bergson 1965, 62;Whitehead 1964,54). "This work (which takesintoaccount the theory of Relativity) is certainly one of the most profound that has been written on the philosophyofnature" (Bergson 1965, 62 ff1).
The difficulty as to discordant time-systems is partlysolvedbydistinguishingbetween what Ic all the creative advance of nature, which is not properlys erial at all, and anyo ne time series.Wehabituallymuddle together this creative advance, which we experience and know as the perpetual transition of natureintonovelty,with the single time series which we naturallye mploy for measurement.The various time series each measures ome aspect of the creative advance,a nd the whole bundle of them express all the properties of this advance which arem easurable.T he reasonw hy we have not previouslyn otedt his differenceo f time-series is the very small differenceo fp roperties between anyt wo such series (Whitehead 1964,1 78).
When he addresses Einstein'sR elativity,W hitehead hammers basicallyo ne point: although Einstein deniest he uniformity of space-time, his equations and anye xperimentalp rotocol presuppose the independence and uniformity of space-time. We have to takei nto account our ordinary sense experience. In order to understand the meaning and significance of Whitehead'sc reative advance, it is expedient to remind the reader of the wealth of data involved, and of the methodu sed.

3D ata: Radical Empiricism
What are exactlyt he data of speculative philosophy? Clear and distinct ideas? Scientific facts?Bare sense-perceptive evidences? Common sense beliefs?Whitehead, who scrupulouslya dopts the radical empiricism which pedigree was established by James, accepts them all, but not always at face value. In sum: philosophyh as to accept all experiencesb ut onlye xperiences. This correspondst o James' Principle of Pure Experience. "Only experiences" means that our total experience is the sole purveyor of evidences. Anything that is not experienced has no relevancef or speculative philosophy. Of course, this requirement has to be taken cum grano salis: in the course of his/her argument,the philosopher necessarilyi ntroducesa bstractions that "makesaf light in the thin air of imaginative generalization" (Whitehead 1978,5 ).
As we will shortlysee, the point is to make sure these generalizations aim at the concrete experience, that they are not swallowed by apurelyconceptual organism pretending, like Kant'sd ove, to ignorei ts cosmic roots and by-products in order to foster higher degrees of consistency and of coherence( applicability and adequacy are foreign categories in this case). "All experiences" means that basically three layers of evidence should testifyduringour enquiry concerning the principles of natural knowledge:exteroception, the withness of the body, and exceptional mental states.

Exteroception
Ab Jove principium,sense-perception (i. e., exteroception, which is constituted by the five senses open to the external world) has to playamajor role in our data gathering. But our appraisal of its potential should not be naïve: Whitehead, following the empiricist tradition (especiallyBerkeley,Lockeand Hume) insists on the limitedness and possible misleadingness of exteroceptive data. They certainly provide ac lear and distinct picture of our immediate surroundings,b ut they do so by ignoringdetails and especiallybybifurcatingthe perceiving subject and its environment and by neutralizing time and causation.M ore precisely, Whitehead underlines the (ab)use philosophyh as made of the metaphor of vision, that has imposed the idea of the spectator-subject,i .e., of at otallyp assive onlooker factuallyu naffected by the scenery.H ans Jonas, probablyu nder the spell of Whitehead, has shownv ery straightforwardlyt he inevitable bias of the concept of theoria (Jonas 1966).

The Withnesso ft he Body
Sense perception is actuallyavery simplified (though sophisticated) projection established on the wealth of data in which the subjecti si mmersed -better, that constitutes the subject.Afirst steptowards these roots is made by considering interoceptive and proprioceptive data,t hatb otho ccur at the fringes of our normals tate of consciousness.
Interoception namest he internal sensitivity complementingt he exteroceptive one. Itsm essages, comingf rom receptors housed by all organs and tissues, are, through reflex(i. e., non-conscious) action, the sourceofaharmonious bodilyl ife. One can distinguish internal pains( cephalalgia, colic…), internal taste (chemicalsensitivity ruling various reflex activities), and internal touch (sensitivity to variations of pressure, like distension of the bladder or the rectum, stomach contractions, antiperistaltic contractions of the oesophagus, determining the nauseaf eeling).¹³ Proprioception namest he messages of position and movement allowing, with the help of the internal ear'ss emi-circular canals as patialization-i. e., a full (ap)propriation-of the body. Proprioceptive perception grows from sensorial  Bergson alludes to these messageswhen he speaks of "the sensations of 'internal touch' emanatingfromall points of the organism and, moreparticularly, from the viscera" (Bergson 1920, 111). receptors¹⁴ delivering data about the position and the relative movementsofthe different parts of our body. Through reflex action, it regulates the muscular tone and helps us to localise ourselvesinspace and to createasense of depth (stereognosy).P roprioception alsoi ncludes the muscular sensitivity that complements exteroceptive touch in offering estimates on the weight and volume of the prehendeda nd/or moved object.The structuration of our proprioceptive field provides for the fundamental organic anchorageo fo ur identity.
Whitehead's withness of the body (Whitehead 1978,81;312;333) can be said to emerge out of the togetherness of all three of these perceptive modes,internal as well as external. Hence the motto and starting point for philosopherss hould be "meditate on your viscera".¹⁵ An important consequence for the consciousness of time is that,i nt he everyday, 'normal' state of consciousness,w el ive in the past,s implyb ecause all the data take time to arrive at our senses, to be conveyedt hrough the central nervous system, and to be synchronized by the brain.¹⁶

Exceptional Mental States
There remains however at hird cognitive field that has been scrutinized, ab it shyly, by Whitehead's Religion in the Making (1926)and explored, this time extensively,b yJ ames' Varietieso fr eligious experience (1902) and Bergson's Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion (1932): the altered states of consciousness that pave the wayt om ysticism (James' first-hand religious experiences)a nd thereby ground religion itself (second-hand religious experience). At the fringes of the Mediterranean beauty of exteroception lays not onlyt he cognitive and emotional vagueness of the withness of the body but also, beyond it,the religios- Articularcapsule, periosteum, tendons, joints,muscles house sensitive corpuscles and nerve endings similar to the skin'so ne. See Sherrington1 940,3 09;S herrington 1947, 132-133.  "Over the door of Emerson Hall, the PhilosophyBuildingatHarvard, there is an inscription. I have quitef orgotten what it is; Io nlyr emember that it is somethingv ery high-minded. Whitehead said to his class, "Youw ill have noticed that mottoo vert he door.Icommend to youa s amoresuitable mottoand starting point for philosophers 'Meditateonyour viscera'.Heinsisted that philosophers have disdained the informationabout the universe obtained through their visceralf eelings,a nd have concentratedo nv isual feelings" (Emmet 1948, 265-274). The inscription over the door is from the Bible,P salm 8, reads: "What is man that Thou art mindful of him?" The Philosophyf aculty chose aq uotation from Protagoras: "Man is the measureo fa ll things".H arvardP resident Charles William Eliot,s ubstituted the biblical passage without consulting with the faculty.  See Pöppel (1988).

4M ethod: Imaginative Generalization
Whitehead recommends the method of imaginative generalization, that he sketches as the flight of the aeroplane; but who is Whitehead, and whyd oes he matter? Whitehead (1861Whitehead ( -1947 can be said to be the post-modern Plato for twocomplementary reasons. On the one hand, like Platoh eh as studied, taught,a nd contributed to all the science of his time, from Algebrat oN atural theology. Also, he has created au nified, coherent and applicable worldview,m ainlyi nProcess and Reality.A nE ssay in Cosmology (1929). His main sources of inspiration were common sense, algebra, Maxwell'sfield concept (1873), Spencer (1855), and Darwin (1859). On the other hand, unlike Plato, he gave apositive ontological status to the accident,the event.Whitehead is concerned with the sumbebekos. According to his process-organic philosophy:

Whitehead, the Post-Modern Plato
We area ccustomed to associatea ne vent with ac ertain melodramatic quality.I faman is run over,that is an event comprised within certain spatiotemporal limits.Weare not accustomed to consider the enduranceo ft he Great Pyramid throughout anyd efinited ay as an event.B ut the natural fact which is the Great Pyramid throughout ad ay,m eaningt hereby all naturewithin it,isanevent of the same character as the man'saccident,meaningthereby all nature with spatiotemporal limitations so as to include the man and the motor during the period when they werei nc ontact (Whitehead 1964,7 5).

The Flight of the Aeroplane
What does the metaphor of the flight of the aeroplane means?Whitehead writes The true method of discovery is like the flight of an aeroplane. It starts from the ground of particularobservation; it makes aflight in the thin air of imaginative generalization; and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rationali nterpretation.
[ … ]T he success of the imaginative experiment is always to be tested by the applicability of its resultsb eyond the restricted locus from which it originated. In default of such extended application, ag eneraliza-tion started from physics,for example, remains merelyanalternative expression of notions applicable to physics.The partiallysuccessful philosophic generalization will, if derived from physics,find applications in fields of experience beyond physics.Itwillenlighten observation in those remotefields, so thatgeneral principles can be discerned as in process of illustration as in process of illustration, which in the absenceofthe imaginative generalization are obscured by theirpersistent exemplification (Whitehead 1978,5 ).
Twoconsequences are important: first,philosophydoes not amount to what is oftenc alled the "philosophicalc ulture".P hilosophys hould not be understood, and especiallyn ot be taught,a sa nh istorical or ac ulturald iscipline. Qua history,itunfolds legacies (Kant is the heir of Aquinas,who read Augustine, who understood the consequences of the contrastb etween Platoa nd Aristotle, etc.); qua culture, it weavesconcepts (matterand form belong together; together they are likelyt or equire some demiurge to secure their interplay; that demiurge might have abenevolent agenda -or not,etc.) Philosophy is anchored in experience and,when it has sharpened its concepts, they should return to experience to be put to the test.
Second, the data are both immediate and mediate. On the one hand,all the experienceso fagiveni ndividual-whether they are exteroceptive,p roprioceptive,i nteroceptive,o re xceptional-could bring relevant generalizations. This is the radical empiricist wager: nothing can be omitted, experienced runk and experience sober,e xperience sleeping and experience waking…¹⁷ Hencet he intrinsic opacity of the world for the human rationality: "Yout hink the world is what it looks like in fine weather at noon day; It hink it is what it seems like in the earlym orning when one first wakes from deeps leep" (Russell 1956, 39).¹⁸ On the other,s cientific experiments and theories are also eligible. If sci- "In order to discover some of the major categories under which we can classify the infinitely various components of experience, we must appeal to evidencer elating to every variety of occasion. Nothingc an be omitted, experience drunk and experiences ober,e xperience sleeping and experiencew aking, experienced rowsy and experience wide-awake, experience self-conscious and experience self-forgetful, experience intellectual and experiencephysical, experience religious and experiencesceptical, experienceanxious and experiencecare-free, experienceanticipatory and experiencer etrospective,e xperience happy and experience grieving, experience dominated by emotion and experience under self-restraint,e xperiencei nt he light and experiencei nt he dark, experiencen ormal and experiencea bnormal" (Whitehead 1967, 226;James 1950,2 32).  Russell adds: "Ithought his remarkhorrid, but could not see how to prove that my bias was anybettert han his. At last he showed me how to applyt he technique of mathematical logic to his vaguea nd higgledy-piggledy world, and dress it up in Sundayc lothes that the mathematician could view without beings hocked. This technique which Il earnt from him delightedm e, The OntologicalR oots of Temporality ence points at ap roblem of simultaneity,p hilosophys hould help contextualizing the stakes.

The Reformed Subjectivist Principle
All this presuppose what Whitehead calls the "Reformed Subjectivist Principle", that is, and is not,subjectivist.Some form of subjectivism is of course assumed: all experiences point at the existenceofasubject. But thatsubject is made out of these experiences, it does not pre-exist them. Moreover,subjectivity is not limited to the human, or even the animal, realm. Everythingt hat existse xperiences. We end up with avery sophisticated and critical form of panpsychism (James'"-Pure Experience" or Russell's "Neutral Pluralistic Monism"), and, in order to avoid misunderstandings, it makess ense to talk about a "Pan-Experientialism" (Griffin 1977).

Examining the Foundations
Whitehead'sv ery first movei st ou nderstand time in the same wayh et reated space, relationally. Herei sw hat he wrotet oR ussell in 1911: Last night […]t he idea suddenlyf lashed on me that time could be treatedi ne xactlyt he same wayasIhave now gotspace(whichisapictureofbeauty,bythe bye).
[…]The result is arelational theory of time, exactlyonfour legswith that of space.
[…]I tgets over all the old difficulties,and aboveall abolishes the instants in time, e. g., the present instant,even in the shape of the instantaneous group of events.This has always bothered me as much as the 'point' […]. According to the theory,the time-relation as we generallythink of it (sophisand In olonger demanded that naked truth should be as good as the truth in its mathematical Sundayb est" (Russell 1956,3 9).  Desmet especiallyunderliesthe significance, of Minkowski, Silbertein and Cunningham, for the special theory,a nd of de Sittera nd Eddington,f or the general theory. ticated by philosophy) is agreat cook up. Simultaneity does not belongtoit. That comesin from the existenceofthe space-relation. Accordingly,the class of all points in spaceserves the purpose of the instant in time. Also each object runs its own time (properlyso-called) (Russel 1985, 299).
There is abreakthrough, but it is not total. On the one hand,instantsoftime are abolished, relationality instituted, and this pavest he wayt oR elativity.O nt he other hand, Whitehead will soon realize thati tm akes little sense to treat time like space… His 1925 Lowell Lectures,laterpublished,with threeadditional crucial chapters as Science and the Modern World,p rovides the point of inflection. The fourth chapter offers,i ndeed, ak ey discussion of Whitehead'sa rgument against mechanicism: he depicts here the ins and outs of "Simple Location",a major instantiation of his "Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness".B ys imple location, he means first one major characteristic which refers equallyt os pace and to time: "thatm aterial can be said to be here in spacea nd here in time, or here in space-time, in aperfectlydefinite sense which does not requirefor its explanationa ny referencet oo ther regionso fs pace-time" (Whitehead 1967b, 49). In one word: environmental independence. And second, a minor characteristic which differentiates space and time: as regards time, if material has existed during anyperiod, it has equallybeen in existence during anyportion of that period. In other words,dividingthe time does not divide the material.
In one word: temporalindependence of the successive durations. Since the division of time functions, in respect to material, so differentlyf rom the division of space, it is claimed that the "transitionoftime has nothing to do with the character of the material. The material is equallyitself at an instantoftime" (Whitehead 1967b, 49) -and at anyinstant of time. Whitehead adds: "Hereaninstant of time is conceiveda si ni tself without transition, since the temporal transition is the succession of instants" (Whitehead 1967b, 49 -50).²⁰ Whitehead'sp hilosophyofo rganism sets the destruction of simple location and external relations as its goal, and replacesitwith complex (dis)location and extero-internal relations ("prehensions").

Contemporaneity vs.S imultaneity
If we focus on the relativistici ssue itself, one contrast is decisive:c ontemporaneity is not simultaneity.The formeriscommonsensical, while the latter depends upon metrics, clocks, experiments and otherc ontingencies. Whitehead argues that simultaneity should be understood independentlyo ft he speed of light: There arec ertain objections to the acceptanceo fE instein'sd efinition of simultaneity, [ … ]. In the first placel ight signals arev ery importante lements in our lives, but we cannot but feel that the signal-theory somewhat exaggerates their position. The very meaningofsimultaneity is made to depend on them. There areb lind people and dark cloudyn ights,a nd neither blind people nor people in the dark are deficient in as ense of simultaneity.They know quitewellwhatitmeans to bark both their shins at the same instant.Infact,the determination of simultaneity in this wayisnever made, and if it could be made, it would not be accurate; for we live in air and not in vacuo (Whitehead 1982, 53).
Eventually, contemporaneity has also receivedametaphysical meaningw ithin Whitehead'smaturephilosophy. To make a(very) long story short,the argument is the following:apparentlyfollowing James'sreading of Zeno and his bud theory of time and actuality,Whitehead shifts, in 1925,from acontinuist phenomenologyofscience to what he namesanepochal ontology.This amounts to revamping Leibniz, whose monads have now windows and al imited life-span (first the actual entities are subjective, becoming,o rconcrescing,t hen they perish and subsists objectively, qua being or "in transition"); if monads have windows and alife of sorts, the cosmic harmonycannot be pre-established or auto-established (actualities-subject evolve solitude to solitude), it needs the repeated action of a "limitation of antecedent selection" implementedb yt he past and a "principle of limitation" that Whitehead will soon call "God".²¹ To repeat:  "Valuei st he outcome of limitation" (Whitehead 1967b, 94); "The spatio-temporal relationship, in terms of which the actual course of events is to be expressed, is nothingelse than aselective limitation within the general systematic relationships among eternal objects" (Whitehead 1967b, 161); "It has alreadybeen emphasised that an actual occasion is to be conceived as alimitation; and that this process of limitation can be still further characteriseda sagradation" (Whitehead 1967b, 162); "Restriction is the price of value. There cannot be value without antecedent standards of value, to discriminate the acceptance or rejection of what is beforet he envisagingmode of activity.Thus,thereisanantecedent limitation amongvalues, introducingcontraries, grades,a nd oppositions.A ccording to this argument the fact that therei saprocess of actual occasions,a nd the fact that the occasions aret he emergenceo fv aluesw hich require such limitation,both require that the course of events should have developed amid an antecedent limitation composed of conditions, particularisation, and standards of value. Thus,asafurther element in the metaphysical situation, therei sr equiredaprinciple of limitation" (Whitehead 1967b, 178). This is the main path towards God that process thoughtp rovides:w hent he what matters here is that the unison of (immediate) becoming, or "concrescent unison",isdefined by the mutualcontemporaneity of the concrescing actual entities involved, and it manifests itself as ac ross-section of the universe, i. e., a duration experiencedi nP resentational Immediacy (Whitehead 1978,1 24-125;320).
It is the causal independence of the concrescing actualities, theirc onstitutional privacies,thatd efine the mutualc ontemporaneity, not as ynchronisation effected with the help of luminous signals and frames of reference (Whitehead 1978,6 1;123). The unison does not belong to simultaneity and measured time, but to am elodyo fd urations that requireaharmonising principle.

Threefold Root of Temporality
Understandingtogether all the experiences of time requires awider perspective. More precisely: "epistemological difficulties are onlys olvable by an appeal to ontology" (Whitehead 1978,1 89). So far,w eh aves een thatm easured time is the expression of some features of the cosmic growth that Whitehead calls, alreadyi nPrinciples of Natural Knowledge (1919)a nd in Concepto fN ature (1920) the creative advance of nature: "The forward moving time exhibits this characteristic of experience,t hat it is essentiallya ction. This passageo fn ature or,i n other words, its creative advanceisits fundamental characteristic; the traditional concept is an. attempt to catch nature without its passage" (Whitehead 1982, 14).
Let us now resume the argument made in my Threefold Root of Whiteheadian Temporality (Weber 2016,211-227). It involves revisitingthe three complementary modalities of the creative advance: creativity,e fficacy,a nd vision, reframing its Greek mirror (kairos, chronos,a nd aion). First of all, the very idea of time involves change, and more precisely, novelty.I nW hitehead'sl exicon, this is creativity aka becominga nd concrescence. The bud theory is required because, as long as past causal chains hold, there is no real novelty possible, onlyt he repetition of the same, or of ad ifferent mixture of the same. But real novelty is, by definition, totallyu npredictable, wild even-whereas the world disclosed in our decisions taken in the sepulchreofthe concrescenceare respectful of the cosmic tissue, it is because the initial aim has suggested the best compossibility -and because what is best for shoring up asociety of actual occasions is best for one of its actualities. Depthsofvalue, i. e., experiences of highemotional intensity, "is onlypossible if the antecedent facts conspire in unison. Thus,am easureo fh armonyi nt he ground is requisitef or the perpetuation of depth into the future. But harmonyislimitation. Thus,rightness of limitation is essentialfor growth of reality" (Whitehead 1926,1 46).
The Ontological Roots of Temporality experience is somewhat ordered and tame. Actually, creativity is always buttressed on past events, themselvesi ntegrated in some structure (in Process and Reality,space-time is onlyasuperficial expression of the extensive continuum). Moreover,c reativity modifies that structure: "We all remember Bergson's doctrine of the élanv ital and its relapse into matter.The double tendency of advancea nd relapsei sh ere plainlys tated" (Whitehead 1958, 29).
The second modality of the creative advanceisefficacy,which names memory,b eing,a nd transition.I nt urn, this grantst he possibilityo fm easured time. Let us lingerf or am oment on efficacy,t hat provides ac lear ontologicals tatus to the past,s omething that is rare enough in the history of philosophy. The late Whitehead is very clear about the nature of the past.H is standpoint is, as usual,i nformed by common sense²² the history of philosophy, and science;h e writes: We should balance Aristotle's-or,m ore rightly, Plato's-doctrine of becoming by adoctrine of perishing. When they perish, occasions pass from the immediacy of being into the not-being of immediacy.But that does not mean thatthey are nothing.T heyr emain 'stubborn fact': pereunt et imputantur (Whitehead 1967a, 237).
In sum: "This is the doctrinet hat the creative advanceo ft he world is the becoming, the perishing,a nd the objective immortalities of those thingsw hich jointlyc onstitutes tubborn fact" (Whitehead 1978,x iv). Since creativity is wild and efficacy is blind,t heir togetherness is likelyt ob ring growth just as well as teratogenesis. In order to secure apositive growth, and to prevent the eternal return of the same, at hird modality is required: vision, that Whitehead names god qua primordial nature, i. e., superject.M anyq ualifications can be givent o that divinity:p rinciple of concretion,o fc ompossibilization, of unison.I to perates through the deliverance of the initial subjective aim, securing ac osmos housing the highest intensities of experience possible. Providingt he initial aim is maden ecessary by the constraints imposed by the privacyo ri ndependence of simultaneous concrescing actualities.

Conclusion
In conclusion, our argument has led us from the polysemiality of the notion of time to Whitehead'so ntological core: the creative advance of nature. Thinking  Pereunt et imputantur is the inscription on old sundials in religious houses: "The hours perish and arel aid to account" (Whitehead 1958b, 47). together rupture, structure,and adventureisalittle bit like weaving again kairos, chronos,and aiôn. By doing so, we are allowed to make sense of the various experiences of time disclosed in everydayconsciousness, to understand how technoscience has tremendouslysimplified the issue, and to clarify at what price this has made it extremelys uccessful in its experiments and applications. It is Galilei'sexperimentalstandpoint,together with the definition of the principle of inertia, that made Newtonian science and an ew cultural project possible. The price to paywas, and still is, the loss of the cosmic unison of immediacies of becominga nd of the very meaning of time.