In my last post, I helped myself to the assumption that Augustine's Confessions book eleven is based on a specific and idiosyncratic view of present time, viz., that present time is nothing more than a fleeting instant. In the current post, I hope to substantiate that interpretation and offer a closer reading of the text on which these assumptions are based. Since I offered something in the way of an argument last time for justifying parts of Augustine's view on philosophical grounds, my focus this time will just be on trying to convince you that I haven't just pulled this interpretation of Augustine out of thin air. Having showed that there are (I believe) good grounds for holding this view, I will offer critical comments regarding its cogency.
The account of time that appears in the eleventh book of
Augustine's Confessions is based on
the plausible assumption that time is fundamentally tensed.
Take the two tenses, past and future. How can they
'be' when the past is not now present and the future is not yet present? Yet if
the present were always present, it would not pass into the past: it would not
be time but eternity. If then, in order to be time at all, the present is so
made that it passes into the past, how can we say that this present also 'is'?[1]
Augustine's point can be
made clearer by explicit use of tense: only the present, he claims, 'is' or
'exists,' since, about the past, we can only say that it 'was' or that it 'did'
exist, and, about the future, that it 'will exist.' However, if this is the
case, how does the present ever transition to the past (or from the future to
the present), given the assumption that only the present exists?
A natural reply to this question is to draw a distinction
between (1) 'the present' as that segment or part of time that encompasses all
current time in its totality (i.e., all existing time) and (2) 'the present' as
a conventional designation for some arbitrary period of time only part of which
is really present. For example, we might say that a year is present even if
only a month of this year is present. But, as Augustine recognizes, such a
distinction will work only if we can identify a single part of time as the present in the sense of (1), and there
is reason to think that there is a difficulty in trying to describe the present
as a part.
For,
although we distinguish between long and short times:
Nevertheless we speak of 'a long time' and 'a short
time,' and it is only of the past or the future that we can say this ... But
how can something be long or short which does not exist? For the past now has
no existence and the future is not yet.[2]
Only the present is
real; of the three modes of time, it alone exists. One would also wish to
acknowledge, however, that there are times truly describable by the adjectives
'short' and 'long.' But if only the present exists, does it even make sense to
describe time in terms of parts? For even if one can use part of a time, say, a
month, to represent part of a year, and one stipulates that only the month is
truly present, the same principle of divisibility seems to apply just as easily
to a month.
Moreover, not even a month which is current is
present, but one day. If the first day, the others are future; if the last day,
the others are past; any intermediary day falls between past and future.[3]
Augustine extends this
thought to a single day, as well, and he draws out the illustration by noting that
when the first of the hours "has the others in the future, the last one
has them in the past."[4]
He concludes with the observation that even the moments
that make up an hour seem to flow instantaneously from one to the other. There
therefore seems to be no part of the
present such that this part can be identified
with the present in the sense of (1).
At this point commentators are not very explicit on the positive view of time to which Augustine's views seem to commit him. Gerard O'Daly, for example, denies that Augustine
believed time could be reduced to something like a minimal time or an
indivisible unit of time. He bases his denial on the grounds that although
Augustine admits that any part of time can be
successively divided, the present cannot be reduced to an instant or an
indivisible minimal time, because this would entail that the present has
extension.[5]
This seems to make sense; if the present has extension, it can be further
divided, in which case it will not, contrary to the original assumption, be a
minimal time. If the present time does not have extension, however, it seems it
is more of a point or an instant than a duration of time. Yet, this is still far from giving us a clear picture of time, and what sort of metaphysical commitments it carries.
Like O'Daly, Gareth B.
Matthews also advances the view that Augustine believed the present time to be
divisible to a point or an instant.[6]
Moreover, Matthews's summary of Augustine's view is particularly apt, I think:
In fact, for any period of time we call
"present," no matter how short it may be, part of it will be already
past and part will still be future. Only if we consider now to be a
"knife-edge," an instant without any duration at all, can we find
something that is truly present. But such a "knife-edge" instant
cannot be long or short; it has no duration. And so, by our initial assumption
about time, namely, that times are long or short, such an instant is not time.
So, it seems, there is no such thing as time.[7]
Matthews's illustration
of Augustine's fleeting present as a knife-edge instant captures what seems
like a genuine problem for this way of looking at time. If the illustration is
accurate in its depiction of Augustine's view, it seems the present cannot be
identified with any instant. For any such instant will simply be a dividing
line between the past and the future, and a line does not have any duration. But
a time necessarily seems to have a duration; for one can say of any time that
it lasts; it does not make sense to say that a point lasts.
But Augustine has already advanced the view that neither
the future nor the past exists, since the only time that exists, he thinks, is
the present. This raises a problem: if the present is fleeting in the sense in
which he describes it, it seems he must also concede that the present does not
exist. In consequence, he must, then, either deny that any time exists, i.e.,
deny that time itself exists, or describe some new way of how we can talk about
time without falling into the previous difficulties Augustine has mentioned. In
this connection, Augustine opts for the second alternative; his strategy is to
argue that the human mind measures time through the faculties of memory and
anticipation.
In particular, Augustine's answer relies on his claim
that the future and the past exist
insofar as they are represented in the human mind.
When a true narrative of the past is related, the
memory produces not the actual events which have passed away but words
conceived from images of them, which they fixed in the mind like imprints as
they passed through the senses.[8]
The power of memory is
such that the images that make up an event are imprinted upon the mind at the
time they are perceived by the senses. The memory has the capacity to repeat
events with an accuracy proportional to the force of their original imprint;
and just as the event itself is extended or spread out in time, so the event is
also extended in the memory.[9] To
the question of how we can measure present time when the present, as he has
argued, has no extension, Augustine replies that we measure it as it passes. Time,
he insists, exists, because we measure it, and we cannot measure what does not
exist.[10] In
this sense, then, one can say that the past exists; it does not exist in
itself, one might say, but it derives its existence from the present.
In terms of explaining how we can conceive of the future,
Augustine cautiously stipulates that the future is real only in the sense that
we make predictions regarding what will happen at some later time based on
things as they are in the present.
When therefore people speak of knowing the future,
what is seen is not events which do not yet exist but their causes (that is,
they really are future), but perhaps their causes or signs which already exist.[11]
The example Augustine
uses to illustrate his theory is that of the sun's rising. The prediction is
made in the present at dawn; what has been forecast is future (it does not yet
exist). As Augustine perhaps has implicitly in mind, this account applies to events primarily and to things or objects in only a derivative sense. The sun, he notes, already
exists; what one forecasts is its rising (an event). As applied to things,
Augustine might say that a thing's causal principle or source brings the thing
into being through its bringing the event into being; that is, the thing in
question has the potency or power to bring an event of a certain type into
being, and through bringing this event into being, it also brings another thing
of a certain type into being. Thus, I can observe that a carpenter has the
power by which to cause or create the event in which a chair comes into existence
at some time in the future. But I cannot observe which chair it is that the carpenter brings into existence, since
this chair does not exist in the present.
A natural question that arises at this point is whether Augustine's
view provides an adequate account for the explananda
it is invoked to explain. His question, one might conveniently note, can be
divided into two major parts: (1) how we can talk about the past and the future
if the past and the future do not exist and (2) how we can give an adequate
explanation for the existence of present time if present time is simply a
razor's edge or a sliver that separates the future and the past. The verdict, I
believe, is a negative one. Augustine's solution to (1) is ingenious, but it
does not provide a satisfactory answer to (2).
One can see this by noting a passage in which Augustine
gives an example of how the memory recalls past events.
Thus my boyhood, which is no longer, lies in past
time which is no longer. But when I am recollecting and telling my story, I am
looking on its images in present time, since it is still in my memory.[12]
The key locution to
note from this passage is "in present time." As Augustine has already
stipulated, neither past nor future times exist. He has also called into
question the possibility that even the present exists by noting that the
present would have to be literally a durationless instant or a point. As his
answer to the problem of how the future and past exist, however, Augustine has
argued they exist in the present. This does not seem coherent: if the present
is merely a "razor's edge" that partitions the future and the past, it
is not possible to conceive of it as a time. And if it is not a time, it cannot
serve as the underlying time in which anything is recalled or forecasted. What is most surprising, to me, however, is that none of the commentators on Augustine that I have referenced (and others) have commented on this. Perhaps they simply assumed that the view went wrong elsewhere, and hence did not need criticism in this specific area; or perhaps they were distracted by the otherwise dazzling transition from the ontological features of time Augustine offers in the first part of the exposition in such a way that they did not notice the difficulty that arises when the transition is made.
However, it would be wrong, I think, to conclude that Augustine has to conceive of present time in this way, i.e., as a razor's edge or an instant. Recall, in my last post, I offered a modified defense of Augustine's premise (12) as that premise was represented by Christopher Kirwin. That premise was
(12) when a time is present, every part of it is
present
Now, as I noted, the argument Augustine originally offers for support of (12) is such that if one
accepted it as true, one would have to regard time as such that no time has any duration. But the
new argument that I relied on for supporting (12) does not (so far as I can tell) lead to this
conclusion. That argument, which I will repost for convenience's sake, was this:
(A1) Either a duration of time d is present or it is not.
(A2) If it is not, then d is not present.
(A3) If it is, then d can be divided.
(A4) Either d can be infinitely divided or it cannot.
(A5) If it cannot, then one must arrive
eventually at a unit of time that is indivisible.
(A6) If It can, then d must contain an infinite number of
countable points.
(A7) But it is impossible that there is
an infinite number of countable points in a finite duration.
(A8) Every duration of time can be
finitely divided to a single indivisible time.
From the premises
(A5) If it cannot, then one must arrive eventually at a unit of time that is indivisible.
and
(A7) But it is impossible that there is
an infinite number of countable points in a finite duration.
the conclusion that follows (A8) does not say anything about the indivisible unit of time being a
point or a line (in the sense of a "razor line"). All it says is that it cannot be further divided. In this
connection, one should not that 'instant' can be taken in one of two senses.
In one sense, it can be the point that, in conjunction with another such point, marks off the end
of a line or a duration. In another sense, it can be itself a segment of time, or, more properly, the basic
unit of time, such that a duration of time is composed of many such segments; this is how instants
were conceived of in the middle ages, and, so far as I can tell, there seems nothing incoherent in the
idea. And perhaps the concept is even necessary for thinking about any time; for, if time consisted
only of durations and points (in the sense of razor lines), any time is either a duration or a point. But
a duration cannot be composed merely of points; for a duration, in the relevent sense, contains time,
but a point does not. And if any duration were composed of nothing but smaller durations, there
would have to be a duration such that this duration could not be halved into two smaller durations or
segments. But if anything is a duration, it can be divided, so there is no such duration that cannot be
halved into two smaller durations or segments. So either this process must continue indefinitely, or
one must arrive at a smallest unit of time, i.e., a segment, that is not a duration but which, with other
such units, makes up a duration. As the assumed premise (A7) goes, an infinite division is
impossible. So there is such a smallest unit of time, So, I think it safe to conclude, there must be a
unit of time that is neither a point or a duration but that itself contains time in the smallest
conceivable degree to which any unit can have time.
This, I believe, is substantial. For it implies that Augustine's version of presentism can be
salvaged in a more philosophically defensible form. I emphasize 'can' in this case because, as the
reader might recall, I accepted the revised argument for (10) merely on stipulation; one would still
have to make good on defending one of two crucial premises, viz., (A7), of that argument. But this
is, I think it easy to conclude, a much better position for Augustine than merely having to concede
that his entire view on time, or so as it appears in Confessions book eleven, is incoherent.
point or a line (in the sense of a "razor line"). All it says is that it cannot be further divided. In this
connection, one should not that 'instant' can be taken in one of two senses.
In one sense, it can be the point that, in conjunction with another such point, marks off the end
of a line or a duration. In another sense, it can be itself a segment of time, or, more properly, the basic
unit of time, such that a duration of time is composed of many such segments; this is how instants
were conceived of in the middle ages, and, so far as I can tell, there seems nothing incoherent in the
idea. And perhaps the concept is even necessary for thinking about any time; for, if time consisted
only of durations and points (in the sense of razor lines), any time is either a duration or a point. But
a duration cannot be composed merely of points; for a duration, in the relevent sense, contains time,
but a point does not. And if any duration were composed of nothing but smaller durations, there
would have to be a duration such that this duration could not be halved into two smaller durations or
segments. But if anything is a duration, it can be divided, so there is no such duration that cannot be
halved into two smaller durations or segments. So either this process must continue indefinitely, or
one must arrive at a smallest unit of time, i.e., a segment, that is not a duration but which, with other
such units, makes up a duration. As the assumed premise (A7) goes, an infinite division is
impossible. So there is such a smallest unit of time, So, I think it safe to conclude, there must be a
unit of time that is neither a point or a duration but that itself contains time in the smallest
conceivable degree to which any unit can have time.
This, I believe, is substantial. For it implies that Augustine's version of presentism can be
salvaged in a more philosophically defensible form. I emphasize 'can' in this case because, as the
reader might recall, I accepted the revised argument for (10) merely on stipulation; one would still
have to make good on defending one of two crucial premises, viz., (A7), of that argument. But this
is, I think it easy to conclude, a much better position for Augustine than merely having to concede
that his entire view on time, or so as it appears in Confessions book eleven, is incoherent.
[1] St. Augustine, The Confessions,
translated by Henry Chadwick. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008),
11.14.17.
[2] Augustine, 11.15.18.
[3] Augustine, 11.15.19.
[4] Augustine, 11.15.20.
[5] Gerard O'Daly, Augustine's Philosophy of Mind. (London:
Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd., 1987), 154.
[6 Gareth B. Matthews, Augustine. (New York: Wiley-Blackwell,
2005), 180.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Augustine, 11.18.23.
[9 Augustine, 11.21. 27.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Augustine, 11.18.24.
[12] Augustine, 11.18.23.
No comments:
Post a Comment