Recently Published Book Spotlight: Philosophy of the Short Term

Jay Lampert is Professor of Philosophy at Duquesne University. His research spans Continental philosophy, particularly Hegel, Husserl, and Deleuze. He has written three books on the philosophy of time, most recently Philosophy of the Short Term (Bloomsbury, 2024). In this Recently Published Book Spotlight, Lampert discusses how short-term experiences and processes shape our understanding of time, exploring the relationship between short- and long-term temporal structures and drawing on examples from philosophy, film, literature, politics, and science.

What is your work about and how does it fit in with your larger research project?

Life is short, and every part of it is shorter than that, including the parts that are too long for what they are. Time is continuous, and, to put it mildly, long, but all our experiences of time are in short-term segments. How do we segment time? What does it mean for the nature of time if some of it can be short? What does “short” mean? What makes a time segment terminate? When are short-term decisions good?

My previous book argued that open-ended decisions presuppose a future with many possible continuations, overlapping virtual branches that diverge and converge. I argued that we live out many decisional futures over the same period of time. We might think of that as a doubly long-term future: extended indefinitely, and dense with concurrent timelines. In this book, I argue for irreducible functions of the short term.

Understanding time structure—the time it takes for events to start and finish; the lived time of memory, perception, and expectation; the social use of time in historiography and politics—requires analyzing both short and long-time segments, both the segmentability and the indivisibility of time. Multi-layered long-term futures exist, and short-term processes are cut out of the time continuum. In Simultaneity and Delay, I argued that events over time are both contracted into virtual co-existence and also distributed across temporal locations. The immanent relation between simultaneity and delay leads directly to correlated studies of short and long terms. I am not advocating that we should always value the short term. It would waste temporal resources to always value one temporal structure over another. In Husserlian terms, time concepts call for eidetic variation; the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky calls for “laying in rhythmic supplies.”

In each of the three books of this trilogy, I explore a sub-category of time by weaving together a variety of philosophical approaches and interdisciplinary connections. (1) For the study of the short term, I gather and analyze phenomena from such diverse fields as film editing and tense logic, history and physics, literary narrative and climate change activism, romantic liaisons and financial instruments, mathematics, ritual, poetry, and technology. (2) I explore discussions of the short term in the history of philosophy, from Plato to Hegel, Husserl, Ricoeur, and Deleuze. (3) I aim to systematize these results into an overall philosophy of the short term, and to draw implications from short-term temporal segments for a general philosophy of time.

The concept of the short term is not a single measure of temporal quantity, but a set of interactions between temporal quantities, qualities, and functions, and covers a wide range of structural variations.

Who has influenced this work the most?

When I was on sabbatical for the first time in Paris in 1998-99, I sat in on the seminars of Derrida (on excuses and apologies) and Badiou (on the “century”). I was impressed by how they constructed thematic paths over a year of lectures by interweaving a number of philosophers and other authors, disciplines and fields of application, and related concepts. (Derrida’s lectures ran from Augustine’s confessions, to Hegel on forgiveness, to the transcripts of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to the texts of Bill Clinton’s various apologies for the Lewinsky affair.) They allowed themselves to vary the focus week by week, but also connected subtopics and directions until they produced a conceptual system. I was impressed both by the precision of their readings of texts and by the conceptual innovations that their use of multiple approaches opened up. I returned from sabbatical with the idea of trying such a method myself. For years, I had had the notion that Hegelian open dialectic, Husserlian variable synthesis, and Deleuzian multiplicity had more in common than they sometimes seem, on the theme of combinatory complexity. I was finishing a book on Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of history, with its schematic of co-existing timelines of past, present, and future, and I wanted to start a new project on the temporal concepts of simultaneity and delay. I needed to see if I could get results from the conceptual weaving method, so I taught a pair of graduate courses, one on Simultaneity (weaving Bergson, Husserl, Deleuze and others, crossing through special relativity, Apollinaire’s “simultaneist” poetry, biological synchronization, and more), and one on Delay (Plato’s Philebus on delayed pleasure, Hegelian/Althusserian historiography, Derridian deferral, Freudian delayed reaction, music theory, and more Deleuze). For better or worse, this form of conceptual variation has become my mode of writing philosophy. I did not invent it, obviously, but I can recommend it—not for every topic, but some.

Which of your findings do you find most exciting?

Three types of finds arise from this sort of project: hidden gems of the great philosophers, inventions across disciplines, and conceptual variations.

The first arises when one searches the history of great philosophers for mentions of the “short term.” Many philosophers, from Hegel to Ricoeur, talk about the long term; surprisingly few spend more than a few sentences talking about the short term. So a search for those who do discuss the short term at length, like Aristippus of Cyrene, brings to light some lesser-known brilliancies. Even more interesting is that when the well-known philosophers write even just a sentence or two about the short term, close analysis of those passages reveals surprisingly important features of their ontologies and their ethics. Some are subtopics in their own right, like Socrates’ preference for “short” speeches in the Protagoras, or Maimonides’ critique of “time atoms,” or Bentham’s “propinquity” criterion for utilitarian evaluation, or De Beauvoir’s phenomenology of the diminished time remaining for people growing old. Others are references to the short term in great texts that are as short as they could be, like Kant’s mention almost in passing that time-synthesis begins with points “as short as possible” (“Axioms of Intuition”, Critique of Pure Reason), or Hegel’s comment that time originates in the fact that finite things change “sooner or later” (kurz oder lang, “short or long,” Philosophy of Nature). When a reader lets the consequences of small points like these spill into large questions, the history of philosophy becomes fresh.

The second pleasure for me is that concrete short-term operations invented by practitioners in specific fields of activity reveal ontological structures of time that are otherwise easy to miss. For example, short-term psychotherapists (a program that one might well be skeptical about, but that seems to offer worthwhile results in some contexts) have had to invent new measures for what counts as short-term (usually on the order of a few weeks); new ways to begin and end processes; new interactions between time and intersubjectivity (different short-term patterns for individual vs group therapy); new understandings of the sudden and the gradual, envisaging the time after the short term ends; and so on. Or to take the case of short-term aesthetics, performance artists have invented new ways of making the ephemeral sensible; short story specialists (and their formalist admirers) invent new ways to accelerate to an ending; Oulipo members invent new temporal formal constraints (like Jacques Jouet’s poems that must be written between the time a subway leaves one station and the time it arrives at the next); composers (like Boulez) invent new ways to package unpulsed time into blocks; and so on. Politicians, if they are any good, find ways to get something done before their terms end; climate activists who want to intervene in long-term planetary changes have to try to do so quickly, before it is too late; physicists invent instruments to measure time segments as close to the Planck scale as they can; historiographers differ on whether slow developments are better for explaining human affairs than short-term fluctuations, but even the former have to chart the effects of the short term. For that matter, everyday practices that often do not involve much deep thought, from one-night stands to doomscrolling, create new personal and technological temporal patterns, each of which is a starting point for a new pattern, a new concept, of temporal ontological research.

Third, diagramming a category like the short-term forces one to devise distinctions. Some short-term events are short by nature (heartbeats), whereas some are cut short (crashes); some are short definitively (when a matchstick burns up), whereas others can be lengthened (rental leases); sometimes short means speedy, but not always; sometimes the measure of relative shortness is dependent on narrative values, but not always; some events are short relative to the past, some relative to the future; some are discontinuous with the before and after, where others are continuous with predecessors and successors; some short events are last chances. Short-termism is often equated with being shortsighted, but sometimes sooner is better than later. One of my favored techniques of analysis is to make lists of variations on a theme: for example, short events may arise from contraction, deadline, modularity, shelf life, singularity, manageability, provisionality, diurnality, fizzling out, weariness, absorption, relay, abandonment, the pace of life in the modern world, death, and so on. A list of variations expands the field a concept ranges over; my project is to schematize all of this under a general theory of time. The final chapter of Philosophy of the Short Term repurposes Deleuze’s analysis of political “segmentarity” (A Thousand Plateaus) to work up a theory of temporal segmentarity. (Go to Chapter 10 to judge whether it works.)

(An additional pleasure of engaging a topic like this is that after the book is finished, the author keeps finding additional relevant elements. I recently found an argument in Sartre’s Notebooks for an Ethics that, since an agent cannot control how others will take up their actions in the future, moral action ought to limit itself to the short term. I could have written about that in Chapter 8).

Do you see any connections between your concepts and life?

Every person, and people in groups, are bound to act in multiple contemporaneous projects over the same lifespan—some projects are long, some short, some medium in time scope—some contiguous and some with delays between events, some synchronized and some with independent rhythms, some sequenced on a one-way time arrow and some not, some too short to notice and some too long to notice, some measured and some with fuzzy temporal edges, some temporally forced and some temporally free, some where the length has ethical implications and some indifferent. Temporal ontology has value for life if it helps us to analyze and use all of the temporal resources at our disposal.