Abstract

Augustine's troubled meditation on time in book 11 of the Confessions follows his aborted attempt in book 10 to locate God in his memory (God proved to be everywhere and nowhere at once). A remembered God implies the sanctification of time, and it is not at all clear that Augustine's experience of time has ever been of something sublime. Perhaps the best that Augustine can hope for in his meditation is to be able to confess his forgetfulness of what time is, an oblivion that has sundered his life from his knowledge. This essay engages with Wittgenstein's sense of Augustinian time, the so-called "quid est" question. "Something that we know when no one asks us, but no longer know when we are supposed to give an account of it, is something," writes Wittgenstein (Philosophical Investigations §89), "that we need to remind ourselves of."

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