Heidegger identifies three categories of time, which he calls ecstasies; the past, the present and the future. The present is the experience of the moment becoming history, and of the future becoming known to us by the past, which necessarily creates a determinate path, and the logic of time is only broken by our inattention. When this happens we are attacked by the novum; The new moment, which is the entrail of the future speeding ahead of us, shocks us with itself.
Thus the present is the constant privation of the moment by the past, and the future by the moment, and vice versa; The future steals the context and history of the present and past to create itself, it is the phenomenon of time.
To Heidegger, this category is rigid and within his hermeneutic cycle, though he doesn't explore it too much, unbreakable.
To Husserl, time is self-referential; the present is only the perception of being as the presence of the subjectivity of consciousness. This is a constant cycle of interpretation, whose articulation is, to us, violent; Time becomes consciousness fleeing itself.
The subject, through time, perceives the world beyond presenced perception, and so the world-as-it-is becomes intrasubjective, viewed through the lens of time. Thus, the objectivity of the present is questioned, and reduced to the level of gnosis; "Time is man's ultimate identity."
But in Sámi eschatology, this morphology does not apply; Upon death, the present doesn't self-arrest in the moment, lacking a future to ebb itself into, it doesn't retract into the now-petrifying source of itself and die, rather the dead sublates time and bloats past its own logos to have presentness in all time and every moment. It isn't the anamnesis, the placenta or tree of knowledge whose fruit is bitten out of by the Traditionalists of today or pagans of old Hellas and of Northern Europe, only listening to a conch shell echoing the principles of the distant past, emanating into the future from before as memory; rather, the world comes to encompass the subject, at all points in time, and everything of it is known, understood and lived by the dead: Sein-jenseits-des-Tode, being beyond death, and, seemingly paradoxically, Sein-davor-dem-Leben, being before life. This permeant being was accessed by the living actively, as the veil between death and life was thin and filmy, so an active dialogue was held with one's ancestors, and thus the world was opened to them entirely. Many pagans believe history lives on in their blood, and that it can be affirmed and continued through this acknowledgement. Not to the Sámi. Blood memory was not how they learned of the world, rather through first-hand knowledge acquired of always.
Substrate life was Sáivu, the transcendent realm, from which all being was derived. It dictated the flow of time, which was seen as oscillating according to it, contrary to the ideas of people like Debord where time was something imposed on the individual, a rigid thing that directed movement and thought, the individual only a passive victim to an alien force, rather than a creative agent partaking in its shape. Thence many Sámi shunned watches, under the philosophy that ‘it takes as long as it takes’.
This lack of linearity was displayed also in their spatial understanding; rather than a definite, striated space of borders, streets, grids and buildings, the Saami adhered to a nodal geography, composed of holy sites (sieidi), campsites (gohttensadji), grazing grounds (guohtun) and seasonal settlements (báiku, dálvaddis, geasseorohat). They didn't set trails often, and rather moved either by their own inclination or to the rhythm of the reindeer.
The Same knew intuitively of the landmarks, but might not necessarily have visited them, or would only be familiar in a temporal manner, whereas they might be known in a more holistic manner by the shaman (noaidi) or the father (ahčči) of the family. The noaidi had the ability to transcend space entirely and enter with the essence of his being the pre-extant reality of Sáivu, where spatiality and temporality were both unreal, or rather hyperreal, meaning every moment of time and every place in space was contained within Sáivu in its wholeness, by means of intense contemplative prayer, drum journeys and rituals, and therefore the noaidi had a more complete knowledge of this nodal geography and the premises from which it manifested temporally, and they moved according to these organico-spiritual patterns across the vast expanses, as was reflected in their spirit; Bounded only by the blue sky above, everything on the horizon theirs to tread and subject to ranging boots and the pounding roar of reindeer flocks. Like spring floods or brooding storms on the distant sky, the Saami roved far across their lands, as was their inclination, out and beyond the waning skyline, and this was the telos of their people, to actualize their boundless spirit, and affirm that they would soon wander among the stars
Will write more about Sámi and Uralic metaphysics
