Time, Experience and Death

Abstract

My starting point in this writing is the desire to answer the question of why being dead for one day is exactly the same as being dead for a million years. In the first part of the paper, I try to make clear what the usefulness of the concept of time really consists in. I then link my remarks with a particularly relevant pronouncement of the Tractatus to the effect that death is not an experience. Broadly speaking, my own view is that “time” is first and foremost an organizational and classificatory concept (similar to “space”), that is, it serves to put an order into our experiences, since it enables us to coordinate the order or sequence of events with my subjectivity, i.e., with my particular perspective of reality. The concept of time integrates what on many occasions has been labelled “mental time” and “physical time” or, in Wittgensteinian terminology, “information-time” and “memory-time”. On the basis of this dichotomy, I critically examine what could be called the ‘substantialist conception of time’, which makes ‘time’ a name, a view which in my opinion is refuted. Finally, I show by means of examples what the usefulness of the term ‘time’ in colloquial language consists in and I conclude by putting forward my explanation of why the concept of time has no application to the dead.