Adventures in Unfashionable Philosophy

11. Faces of Time (1987)

e l e v e n Faces of time (1987) The following essay appeared in thought, a Fordham University journal that unfortunately is no longer being published. Though fairly easy to read, the essay clarifies and develops a Bergsonian idea, already alluded to, of the two radically different conceptions of time that arise from two different ways of using the mind. In particular I suggest , perhaps originally, how the future can be thought to inhere in the present as well as how the two different kinds of time are interrelated. —Time is our own more than commonly supposed. most of us have shared st. augustine’s frustration in his candid, even desperate, admission that although he knows what time is if no one asks him, he cannot explain it to anyone who does (Confessions XI, 14). 141 Originally published as “Faces of time,” Thought 62, no. 247 (December 1987): 414–22. Reprinted with permission. 142 Adventures in Unfashionable Philosophy In that remark there is as much philosophic wisdom as candor. Furthermore , in those same reflections augustine implicitly distinguished two different kinds of time, or two different aspects of time, both of which seem undeniable yet mutually incompatible. though the following reflections are not a study on augustine, they will suggest that augustine was right in noticing these diverse aspects of time and that they are not so incompatible as at first appears. time is part of the fabric of our lives yet tends to evanesce when we try to look it in the face. like an actor of ancient Greece, time seems to prefer appearing to us only behind masks. In augustine’s meditation on time we seem to discern two of these masks. Perhaps there are others. But since I think that the two manifestations of time noticed by augustine are among the most fundamental—and seemingly the most irreconcilable with each other—I shall concentrate only on them. I propose to reflect on their interrelationships with a view to discerning the face of time behind its masks. ClOCK tIme the first mask is the time of lectures, air schedules, and the morning alarm clock: the time we carry around on our wrists. In our technological culture—though notably not for peoples sometimes called “primitive”—it is what first answers in our minds to the name “time.” this is the kind of time augustine was thinking of when he asked how long is the present and found it shrink before his intellectual gaze into a timeless instant, since every supposed present, like any other temporal width, is itself divided into past and future by the razor-edge of an instantaneous present (Confessions XI, 15). But since the past exists no longer and the future not yet, augustine was left with the paradox that only the present is real yet cannot itself embody time, since it can be no more than a timeless instant. let us call this mask “clock time” and take a still closer look at it. Clocks, by imitating the rotation of the earth on its axis, enable us accurately to coordinate our activities with that common motion and with each other. We thus use the motion of a body in space as a measure for other motions, and this is, of course, what Newton called “rela- Faces of Time 143 tive” time. Clock time, then, exactly fits aristotle’s definition of time as “the number [measure] of motion [in space] in respect of ‘before’ and ‘after’ [in the motion].”1 It is object time, the time by which we measure the intensity, so to speak, of the motion of bodies in space. It is not precisely the motion itself but rather a measure, a gauge of that motion. the asymptote, as it were, of clock time—its ultimate distillate—is Newton’s “absolute time”: absolute, true, and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equably without relation to anything external . . . : relative, apparent, and common time, is some sensible and external . . . measure of duration by the means of motion, which is commonly used instead of true time; such as an hour, a day, a month, a year.2 Newton’s immediately subsequent definition of space exactly parallels this definition of time: “absolute space, in its own nature, without relation to anything external, remains always similar and immovable .” time, as Newton has defined it, shares most of the essential characteristics of space. thus...