Abstract
Time dominates prison life. Inmates use phrases like “hard time” to describe life in penal institutions. They obsess about the past, longing to change it or alter its meaning. They plan for the future, hoping to escape their dismal circumstances. Prison administrators also concern themselves with time. They carefully plan out days and activities, recognizing that by controlling time they control people. Nineteenth-century wardens of British and American prisons meticulously organized time. They were convinced that idle time creates sinful behavior, and therefore regimented every hour of the day. Young people in particular were subjected to careful time management lest they fall into idleness. Early prison wardens also frequently linked time with architecture, emphasizing how organized space developed positive character. Inmates would move only at designated times and for regimented distances. Buildings would instill fear and respect for the law. Routines would replace disorderly behavior, and orderly space would undermine criminal habits and behavior.
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Notes
Oscar Wilde, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” in De Profundis: The Ballad of Reading Gaol and Other Writings (Ware Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, Ltd., 1999), 115.
In this paragraph, I draw extensively on W. Norris Clarke’s accounts of time and change; see W. Norris Clarke, S.J., The One and the Many: A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), 161–177. I also rely on Yves Simon’s work on motion and motionless cognition
see Yves R. Simon, Foresight and Knowledge. Edited by Ralph Nelson and Anthony O. Simon (New York: Fordham University Press, 1999).
My account of how we experience time is inspired by Husserl and his students. For Husserl’s influential discussion of time, see Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time 1893–1917. Translated by John Barnett Brough (New York: Springer, 2008). I have also learned from William James’s famous discussion of time
see William James, The Principles of Psychology (New York: Dover, 1950), Volume One, Chapter 15. Finally, I have followed Ingarden’s account
see Roman Ingarden, Cognition of the Literary Work of Art. Translated by Ruth Ann Crowley and Kenneth Olsen (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 94–114. Ingarden discusses time and being extensively in his major work on ontology
see Roman Ingarden, Der Streit um die Existenz der Welt. Bd. I, II/I, II/2 (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1964 )
For a partial English translation, see Roman Ingarden, Time and Modes of Being. Translated by Helen R. Michejda (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1964).
For an excellent discussion of different kinds of time, see Robert Sokolowski, “Timing,” The Review of Metaphysics, Volume 35, No. 4 (June, 1982), 687–714. Sokolowski carefully distinguishes between clock, calendar, rhythmic, and mythic time.
Roman Ingarden, Man and Value. Translated by Arthur Szylewicz (München: Philosophia Verlag, 1983), 84. In this and the next paragraph, I rehearse Ingarden’s discussion.
Hans Jonas, “Immortality and the Modern Temper,” in The Phenomenon of Life. Edited by Eleonore Jonas. With a Forward by Lawrence Vogel (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 266
Herodotus, The Landmark Herodotus. The Histories. Edited by Robert B. Strassler. Translated by Andrea L. Purvis. Introduction by Rosalind Thomas (New York: Anchor Books, 2007), sections 7:45–46
In the next two paragraphs, I am drawing on the insightful article by the Polish philosopher Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz, “Happiness and Time,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 27, No. 1 (1966), 1–10.
Eva Brann insightfully discusses the idea of pathological relations to time, see Eva T. H. Brann, What, Then, Is Time? (Lanham, MD: Row-man and Littlefield, 2001), 180–199. I have learned much from this book.
W. Norris Clarke, “The Immediate Creation of the Human Soul by God and Some Contemporary Challenges,” in The Creative Retrieval of St. Thomas Aquinas: Essays New and Old. Edited by W. Norris Clarke (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 176. Medieval philosophers who develop this same point include Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus.
Kenneth L. Schmitz, “Purity of Soul and Immortality,” in The Texture of Being: Essays in First Philosophy. Edited by Paul O’Herron (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2007), 203–204. Yves Simon discusses the immateriality of cognition
see Yves R. Simon, An Introduction to the Metaphysics of Knowledge. Translated by Vukan Kuic and Richard Thompson (New York: Fordham University Press, 1990 ). John F. Crosby carefully explores the reflective awareness of self
see John F. Crosby, The Selfhood of the Human Person (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1996), 145–244.
Romano Guardini, Freedom, Grace and Destiny: Three Essays in the Interpretation of Existence. Translated by John Murray (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1965), 108
For other discussions of this same concept, see Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture. Forward by James Schall, S.J. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2009), 93–109.
W. Norris Clarke, S.J., Person and Being (Aquinas Lecture) (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1993), 55. Pope John Paul II develops the link between action and self-possession
see Karol Wojtyla, Person and Community (Catholic Thought from Lublin). Translated by Teresa Sandok, OSM (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2008).
Romano Guardini, The Art of Praying: The Principles and Methods of Christian Prayer (Manchester, NH: Sophia Institute Press, 1995), 12.
For George Jackson’s memoirs, see George Jackson, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson. Introduction by Jean Genet. Forward by Jonathan Jackson, Jr. (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1994)
For critical looks at Jackson’s actions in San Quinton, see Paul Liberatore, The Road to Hell: The True Story of George Jackson, Stephen Bingham and the San Quinton Massacre (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1996)
Eric Cummins, The Rise and Fall of California’s Radical Prison Movement (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994 ). I find Cummins’s account persuasive, and do not count myself among Jackson’s admirers.
Clarke, “The Immediate Creation of the Human Soul by God and Some Contemporary Challenges,” 175–176. The secondary literature on universals is vast. For works that inform my argument in this chapter, see Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations: Volume One. Translated by J. N. Findley. Edited with new Preface by Michael Dummett, and a New Introduction by Dermot Moran (New York: Routledge, 2001)
J. P. Moreland, Universals (Montreal, Canada: McGill-Queen’s University Publishing, 2001)
D. M. Armstrong, Nominalism and Realism, Volume I, Universals and Scientific Realism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
Yves R. Simon, Freedom of Choice. Edited by Peter Wolf. With a Forward by Mortimer Adler (New York: Fordham University Press, 1999), 103.
For this argument about language and universals, see J. P. Moreland, “An Enduring Self: The Achilles’ Heal of Process Philosophy,” Process Studies, Volume 17, No. 3 (Fall, 1988), 193–199. This kind of argument about universals appears frequently in Indian philosophy. Non-Buddhist philosophers often argue that Buddhists cannot account for universals. For an older, but still excellent, discussion of these debates
see Raja Ram Dravid, The Problem of Universals in Indian Philosophy (Delhi: Motilal Books; 2nd edition, 2001).
W. Norris Clarke deals extensively with the creative imagination; see W. Norris Clarke, S.J., “The Creative Imagination: Unique Express of Our Soul-Body Unity,” The Creative Retrieval of St. Thomas Aquinas: Essays New and Old (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 191–208.
I have learned much from reading Amie Thomasson’s excellent article on Ingarden and cultural objects; see Amie Thomasson, “Ingarden and the Ontology of Cultural Objects,” Existence, Culture and Persons: The Ontology of Roman Ingarden. Edited by Arkadiusz Chrudzimski (Frankfort, Germany: Ontos Verlag, 2006), 115–137. I have also learned from Jeffrey Mitscherling’s work
see Jeffrey A. Mitscherling, “The Identity of the Architectural Work of Art,” Contemporary Issues in Aesthetics. Edited by in Jane Forsey (supplemental volume of Symposium, Volume 8, No. 3 (Fall, 2004)), 491–518. I thank Jeffrey Mitscherling for corresponding with me about this article.
Roman Ingarden, Ontology of the Work of Art: The Musical Work, the Picture, the Architectural Work, the Film (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1989), 257.
For a similar refutation of the physicalist account of cultural objects from an analytic philosophical perspective, see Michael Wreen, “The Ontology of Intellectual Property,” The Monist, Volume 93, No 3, (July, 2010), 433–449. I have benefited from conversations with Michael Wreen. To make the argument I have made, philosophers sometimes appeal to Leibniz’s principle of the “indiscernability of identicals.” It holds that for two objects to be identical, they must have identical properties.
In discussing cultural objects, Ingarden draws on Husserl’s famous attack on psychologism. Husserl developed this argument in the first volume of his Logical Investigations, and provoked serious debate. Ingarden was one of the first thinkers to apply Husserl’s arguments to artistic works. For an excellent collection of articles devoted to psychologism, see Mark Amadeus Notturno, Perspectives on Psychologism (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill Academic Publishers, 1989). Some contemporary thinkers maintain that aesthetic and other experience exist in the brain
For example, Searle holds that brain processes “have logical semantic properties,” see John R. Searle, Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 42
Because I reject Searle’s philosophical naturalism, I cannot agree with his position on semantics and the brain. For a good discussion of Searle, see Ingvar Johansson, “Searle’s Monadological Construction of Social Reality—Criticisms and Reconstructions,” John Searle’s Ideas about Social Reality: Extensions, Criticisms and Reconstructions. Edited by David Koepsell and Laurence S. Moss (Hoboken,NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2003), 233–255.
Ingarden’s technical term for the existence such objects enjoy is “purely intentional existence.” Neither real nor ideal existence, it represents a third mode of existence that arises with consciousness. For a recent attempt to defend this idea, see Jeffrey A. Mitscherling, Aesthetic Genesis: The Origins of Consciousness in the Intentional Being of Nature (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2010). Mitscherling has also written one of the best guides to Ingarden’s thought
see Jeffrey A. Mitscherling, Roman Ingarden’s Ontology and Aesthetics (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1997).
Ingarden, Ontology of the Work of Art, 255–257. Ingarden defends the idea of a distinctive aesthetic experience. For extensive discussions of this topic, see the essays collected in Roman Ingarden, Selected Papers in Aesthetics (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1985)
For an excellent article on the aesthetic experience, see Bohdan Dziemidok, “Roman Ingarden’s Views of the Aesthetic Attitude,” Roman Ingarden and Contemporary Polish Aesthetics. Edited by Piotr Graff and Slaw Krzemien-Ojak (Warsaw: PWN, 1975), 9–31. The essays in this volume are superb because they are written by Polish philosophers familiar with Ingarden’s work and legacy. Some twentieth-century thinkers reject the idea of a distinctive aesthetic experience or attitude
For one example, see George Dickie, “The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude,” in Joseph Margolis, Philosophy Looks at the Arts (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1985), 100–117
For two other discussions, see Nicolas Wolterstorff, Works and Worlds of Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980)
Mitscherling, Aesthetic Genesis: The Origins of Consciousness in the Intentional Being of Nature, 69–98.
Philosophers use the terms “derived intentionality” or “borrowed intentionality” to describe how inanimate objects share in consciousness. For Ingarden’s treatment of the topic, see Roman Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art. Translated by George G. Grabowicz (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 117–125
See also Amie Thomasson, Fiction and Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008)
John R. Searle, Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 160–179. To link derived intentionality and cultural objects, we need a full discussion of performative utterances, collective intentionality, and constitutive rules
Ingarden sometimes draws on the work of his teacher, Adolf Reinach. For Reinach’s main work, see Adolf Reinach, “The A Priori Foundations of the Civil Law.” Aletheia III. Translated by John F. Crosby (Irving, TX: International Academy of Philosophy Press, 1983), 1–142. Although his work differs from Reinach’s in important ways, Searle provides insights into speech acts and collective intentionality. For his most recent discussion, see Searle, Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization. Barry Smith has written extensively on these topics. For one discussion see Barry Smith, “John Searle: From Speech Acts to Social Reality,” available at http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/articles/SearleIntro.pdf.
Phenomenologists sometimes call this kind of experience an “empty intention.” Robert Sokolowski develops this idea extensively; see Robert Sokolowski, Introduction to Phenomenology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 22–41.
Robin Evans, The Fabrication of Virtue: English Prison Architecture, 1750–1840 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982). For another discussion of the architecture of Pentonville, see Johnston, Forms of Constraint: A History of Prison Architecture, 88–98. For a time, Oscar Wilde was incarcerated in Pentonville.
Michael Ignatieff, A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1850 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978 ). Ignatieff’s book is controversial among historians of the penitentiary. Ignatieff wrote a self-critical article
see Michael Ignatieff, “State, Civil Society and Total Institutions: A Critique of Recent Social Histories of Punishment,” Crime and Justice, Volume 3 (1981), 153–192. Writing about Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon prison, Janet Semple criticizes Ignatieff
see Janet Semple, Bentham’s Prison: A Study of the Panopticon Prison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 1–19. Semple also criticizes Foucault’s famous discussion of the panopticon
For Foucault’s account, see Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. (New York: Vintage, 1995), 195–230.
Ibid., 363. For an extraordinary nineteenth-century discussion of the effects of solitary confinement, see Harry Mayhew and John Binny, The Criminal Prisons of London and Scenes of Prison Life (London: Griffin, Bohn, and Company, 1862 ). Nineteenth-century British architects were often influenced by developments in the United States, where wardens experimented with solitary confinement. David J. Rothman wrote path-breaking studies of these experiments, focusing particularly on those in Pennsylvania and New York
see David J. Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971)
David J. Rothman, Conscience and Convenience: The Asylum and its Alternative in Progressive America (Boston: Little Brown, 1990). Since these early works, research on the history of the prison has exploded. For an excellent historical overview of it
see Mary Gibson, “Review Essay: Global Perspectives on the Birth of the Prison,” The American Historical Review, Volume 116, No. 4 (October, 2011),1040–1063
Ingarden uses the technical term “concretization” to describe individual experiences of works of art. For one of his most extensive accounts of this process, see Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art, 331–355. His discussion of this concept provoked controversy in Poland and Germany. For one good discussion of this controversy, see Michael Glowinski, “On Concretization,” Roman Ingarden and Contemporary Polish Aesthetics. Edited by Piotr Graff and Slaw Krzemien-Ojak (Warsaw: PWN, 1975), 33–45.
Ingarden, Ontology of the Work of Art, 290–291. Ingarden contrasts the temporality of different works of art in his book on music; see Roman Ingarden, The Work of Music and the Problem of Its Identity. Translated from the original Polish by Adam Czerniawski (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 79–82.
James Kessler “Prisons in the USA: Cost, Quality and Community in Correctional Design,” Prison Architecture: Policy, Design and Experience. Edited by Leslie Fairweather and Seán McConville (Oxford, England: Architectural Press, 2000), 91. Although I learned much from reading this article, I reject Kessler’s excessive optimism about the transformative power of prison architecture.
Ingarden, The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art, 196. For a discussion of how architects interact with correctional clients, see Leslie Fairweather, “Does Design Matter?” Prison Architecture: Policy, Design and Experience. Edited by Leslie Fairweather and Sean McConville (Oxford, England: Architectural Press, 2000), 61–67.
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Jeffreys, D.S. (2013). Is Time Our Enemy? Spirituality and Creativity. In: Spirituality in Dark Places. Content and Context in Theological Ethics. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137311788_2
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