"On thinking things over: A Paradox" by Heinrich von Kleist

This paper discusses to what extent I agree or disagree with the author's main assertion that “reflection, or thinking things over, finds its proper moment after rather than before an act”.

Notoriously, problems about time proliferate the moment we reflect on time-consciousness, or look for conceptual consistency between our ordinary temporal locutions. But it matters that reflec- tion and language might be cited as alternative sources of this per- plexity; for it is a sound principle of philosophical reasoning that answers to problems must, on pain of missing the point, be given in the same context as that in which they arise. If, for example, logico- linguistic analysis showed the notion of tense to be self-contradicto- ry, as McTaggart claimed, it would be an act of scientific imperial- ism to lay it down that the fact that a favoured interpretation of time in relativity physics dispenses with tense means that there is no real problem. Some clearing of the ground is in order before we can hope to arrive at a sense in which language and reflection might be set up as rival theories as to the origin of philosophical problems about time. In the first place, it has to be conceded that between them they could never hold the field (Fisher 1997). For problems also arise within sci- ence, and in the semantic gap between pre-scientific and scientific concepts of time. Yet though we might be baffled by how the 'time' of relativistic physics connects what we ordinarily under- stand by the word, this does not put our ordinary understanding of time in contradiction with itself. It puts it out of joint with a non- ordinary understanding that could never be an understanding of our time. On the other hand, self-contradiction, the eclipse of self- understanding, is the stigma of any reflective disclosure of time as a problem. We expect to be able to mean what we say. Yet it has long been recognized that temporal talk is Pickwickian, in that we never can really mean what we say. When we say that parts of an event are past we think we mean that they have ceased to be. When we say that we measure an event we think we mean that we mea- sure the whole of it(Fisher 1997).

And when we say that the dinner lasted an hour we think ...