Advent explorations: Chapter 2 of Harold Schweizer’s “On Waiting”

December 16th, 2009 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |

Chapter two of Schweizer’s On Waiting uses as its framework one of philosopher Henri Bergson’s experiments to begin building a philosophy of waiting.

Bergson, “in order to demonstrate the existence of a time other than abstract, mathematical time,”¹ performs the following thought experiment:

If I want to mix a glass of sugar and water, I must, willy-nilly, wait until the sugar melts. This little fact is big with meaning. For here the time I have to wait is not that mathematical time which would apply equally well to the entire history of the material world, even if that history were spread out instantaneously in space. It coincides with my impatience, that is to say, with a certain portion of my own duration, which I cannot protract or contract as I like. It is no longer something thought, it is something lived. It is no longer a relation, it is an absolute.

Let me first say that it is nearly impossible to convey the eloquence of Schweizer’s prose and the brilliance of his insights without quoting the whole chapter. He is a skilled wordsmith, to be sure. That being said, I want to briefly explore two concepts that Schweizer begins to develop in this chapter.

The first is the dichotomy between time and duration. In the sugar/water experiment, Bergson makes the claim that the time waiting for the sugar to dissolve is not time in the mathematical sense (tick… tock… 1… 2…), but rather duration, over which one has no control. In waiting, time is not something we stand in relationship to, but something that we embody. “In waiting,” Schweizer says,

time no longer seems to serve as a transparent medium or instrument, it is no longer something external to which the waiter could refer, from which he would be separate, of which he could avail himself, through which he could pass to accomplish something, as when one takes a leisurely hour to have lunch. In waiting, the hour cannot be turned into lunch; the waiter must live the hour, feel it, embody it.²

It is important to understand what Schweizer is doing here, because there is this thing we call waiting which is not really waiting at all. We wait for our oil change to be done. We wait for the nurse to call us out of the waiting room. We wait for packages to arrive in the mail. We wait for. And when we wait for, time is simply an object, a relation. But when we wait outside of “that mathematical time” we experience time as duration — we experience time absolutely. As Bergson says, “It is we who are passing when we say time passes.”³

Which brings us to the second point. When time is experienced as duration, a whole new world is opened to us — a new world which makes us decidedly uncomfortable. Schweizer makes the argument that time as duration exposes us to our own duration, our mortality: “The waiter’s momentary intuition of her own duration — as this occurs, for example, when we suddenly, but always only intermittently, hear our heartbeat — is accompanied by a certain uncanny discomfort…. She would rather think than feel time.”⁴

Waiting is hellish precisely because it forces us to confront our own death, not because there are simply more ticks and tocks left to do their ticking and tocking.

And so in Advent, we wait. We confront our own death and the death of all and cry out to God, asking to be saved from our enduring hell. We cry “O Come, Emmanuel!” because waiting, confronting our seemingly inevitable demise, is unbearable.

We are not waiting for the time to pass until Christ is born and the herald angels begin their song and the whole blessed celebration begins. We are not waiting for. We are enduring. It is no longer a relation, it is an absolute.

1. Schweizer, Harold. On Waiting. New York: Routledge, 2008. 15. The “abstract, mathematical time” is a reference to Isaac Newton’s idea of time. ↩
2. Ibid., 17. ↩
3. Interesting side note: In 1913 Bergson was denounced by the Pope. His philosophy was considered “false,” “destructive,” and “poisonous” because it was “sugar-coated, subtle, and seductive in nature.” I’ll know I’ve made it when I’m denounced by the Pope. ↩
4. Ibid., 21. ↩