Philosophy is most at home with micro-times, intervals as small as the smallest conceivable interval of time. The infinitesimal. Take the tautology; the moon is the moon. Here a repetition does not cease to be a repetition, so we have some minimum of time in which the repetition plays out, but there is scarcely much more time involved in the parsing of tautologies of this type than the mere apprehending of the subject term on its own. The moon is scarcely the moon before it is already the case that is has been the moon all along. But in this interval, infinitesimal as it is, much of philosophy has been contented: it’s time enough.
Where philosophy has groaned, that is, created anything approximating a music, is when intervals themselves seemingly act and produce. Thermodynamic intervals, where a difference is making a difference such that it cannot be differentiated away, but must be integrated, upsetting the micro-interval of the tautology within which philosophers like to play. What if minutes or decades or centuries make a difference that cannot be cancelled out in the final moment of a clever equation or proof of the validity of a syllogism? And would this mean that concepts themselves are subject to their own entropy? The growth and decay and scars and misadventures of the concept, as it hurdles through time and rattles in a suitcase; what if all of this drama cannot be hand-balled off to history or linguistics or psychology or sociology, but must be traced by philosophy itself, if it is to remain in control of its charge, and not lose it all?
A repetition in a micro-interval, a call and response in the minimum of thinkable time, in a reverbless space: even a tautology contains all of the difference between a face and its mask, a sign and its inscription, an attempt and its result. Here philosophy’s love of making distinctions runs up against its general detesting of everything that decays, that changes, that varies. Variation is the engine of distinction, just as the moon’s phases have given us the calendar as time making sense, introducing all the relations, oppositions, displacements, inversions, which make up the whole play of macro-time. Beyond the safe ground of the infinitesimal echoes witness for a hollowness in which the moon never is merely the moon, but a sign of time, of our time.