Experiential Time, Personhood, and Community: On Sherover's Priority of the Possible

Cathy B. Glenn, San Francisco State University

If meaning and significance are regarded as being not so much
inherent in things as in the human relationships with them; if truth
is regarded not as some transcendent object of contemplation but
as in the warp and woof of human activity; if, in short, human
experience is seen in any sense as bearing meaning and truth, then
experiential time becomes crucial. A philosophic outlook which
places a premium on creativity, novelty, openness, deliberate
decision, and purposive activity must look to some kind of temporal
realism in human experience as the ontological ground of its values
and their possible realization.
—Charles Sherover, The Human Experience of Time: The Development of Its Philosophic Meaning


CHARLES SHEROVER'S CONCERN WITH TIME and human experience reflects an unmistakably American philosophic perspective, one that recognizes the moral import implicated in actual present pursuits as they attempt to redress the past and keep an eye trained toward future possibilities for redemption. At the same time, Sherover's own emphasis on futurity as the sine qua non of moral personality follows both Kant's and Heidegger's focus on elucidating the essential possibilities of human thinking and experiencing. Sherover, however, picks up where Kant and Heidegger left off—shifting Kant's focus on things to a focus on persons, and moving beyond Heidegger's focus on the structure of experiential time toward an understanding of time as experienced. For Sherover, then, a primacy of the future perspective means taking seriously the primacy of persons and facing, in that respect, "the question of the ontological meaning of possibility-as-such" (Heidegger 283). And if Erazim Kohák is right, that "the term person designates not a being but rather a mode of being which constitutes its world in terms of value and meaning," then Sherover's ontological focus on futurity is crucial in understanding moral personhood as a mode of temporal being.