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Time, Understanding, and Will
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
Extract
In the passage from the Enneads devoted to discussing and defining the nature of time, it is written that first one must experience eternity, which, as everyone knows, is the model and archetype of time. This initial warning, which is especially serious because we trust in its sincerity, appears to wipe out all hope of finding common ground with its author.
Jorge Luis Borges, History of Eternity
So let us leave the Platonists to wander off down a blind alley. Poor simpletons, they think they will find the secret of discourse about time in the link with eternity. Whereas I, who am powerless in the face of eternity, would prefer to ask: what link can be retained, in discourse about time, between past, present, and future? If there is some link, can the three kinds of time break free of their mutual bonds? Can predicting the future, a time that will be but has never existed before, be disconnected from what determines the future as a product of what already exists and what has already existed? Can the past be what it once was or will it always be what each age decides it should have been?
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References
Notes
1. See also Oded Balaban (1989). The Hermeneutics of the Young Karl Marx. Diogenes, 148, 28-41.
2. Jorge Luis Borges (1995). Nostalgia del Presente. In La Cifra. Buenos Aires: Emecé, 61.
3. "[N]either the future, nor the past exists. It is not correct to say: ‘There are three time dimensions: the past, the present, and the future.' Perhaps it would be truer to say: ‘There are three time dimensions: the present of the past, the present of the present, the present of the future.' For these three sorts of time exist in our minds and I do not see them anywhere else. The present of the past is memory; the present of the present is direct intuition; the present of the future is expectation." St Augustine (1960). Les Confessions. Trans. Joseph Trabucco. Paris: Garnier, book 11, chap. 20.
4. Following the tradition of St Augustine, Fernand Braudel said that history is nothing but a constant interrogation of the past relative to the concerns and anxieties of the present. See Fernand Braudel (1989). La Historia y las Ciencias Sociales. Mexico: Alianza Editorial Mexicana.
5. Relativism does not understand that the logic of relationships implies that the absolute (A) is y for subject1 and that this same A is x for subject2. The term in relation is sacrificed to the relation, which changes the relation into the thing itself.
6. It is important to emphasize that form, in the sense I suggest, is not the form of the content. The form I refer to is not one that can be reached by a presumed process of abstraction starting from content. It is not the form of the content but the form within which I think this content.
7. In a little-studied passage from Hume the negation of causality leads to the annihilation of time. See David Hume (1995). Traité de la nature humaine. Trans. Philippe Bar. Paris: Flammarion, sect. II, 3rd part.
8. Hegel (1976). Science de la logique. Trans. Pierre-Jean Labarrière and Gwendoline Jarczyk. Paris: Aubier Montaigne, vol. I, book 3, p. 277.
9. Ibid., pp. 277-8.
10. See Henri Bergson (1970). La pensée et le mouvant. In Œuvres Edition du centenaire. Paris: PUF.
11. Isaac Newton (1687). Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, book 1, def. VIII.
12. See Immanuel Kant (1781). Critique of Pure Reason, B232.
13. Immanuel Kant (1997). Cosmology. In Lectures on Metaphysics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 24.
14. Immanuel Kant (1781). Critique of Pure Reason, Transcendental Aesthetics, sect. II, Time, § 4, note 3.
15. See Uber die spezielle und die allgemeine Relativitätstheorie, 1921, §§ 8-9.
16. See H. Reichenbach (1949). In Paul Arthur (ed.), Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist. Evanston, Library of Living Philosophers, III, p. 289 et seq.
17. Following Giovanni Battista Vico, we prefer to use the word ‘given', since ‘fact' implies that the ‘given' is a product of action, as does the Latin word factum, a root giving rise to factory.
18. ‘Funes the memorious' in Jorge Luis Borges (1970). Labyrinths. London: Penguin, 87-95.
19. "[I]t sometimes happens that a man undergoes such changes that I would not find it easy to say of him that he is the same man; which has been heard of with reference to a certain Spanish poet who after an illness, although he had recovered from it, nevertheless was left with no memory at all of his past life, so that he would not believe that the comedies and tragedies he had composed were his. Indeed he could have been considered a grown-up child if he had also forgotten his mother tongue. And if this seems incredible, what shall we say about children? A mature man finds their nature so different from his that he cannot credit the fact that he was once a child without the help of other people's remarks about him." To cap this, he adds: "But in order not to give the superstitious material to cook up further questions, I would rather the matter remained undecided." Ethics, part IV, prop. XXXIX, scholium.
20. For the Greeks Prometheus was the symbol of work and future orientation.
21. Epimetheus was the symbol of pleasure and present orientation.
22. Here I am avoiding analysing the nature of desires that are realized spontaneously, which do not imply frustration, because time is not relevant in this particular case. However, I would say that in this case desire and thing desired, form and content, merge into one so that it becomes impossible to distinguish between them.
23. The work of translation has given rise to certain observations from the viewpoint of a linguist. As they confirm the author's views, we give a summary of them here.
Awareness of space before time. Linguistic phenomena confirm this: see Japanese ‘mae' (from ‘ma-he' = ‘true direction’) which means ‘in front' (space) and "before' (time). This identity, which is not by any means modem, or European, led a great physicist to say that the human race is sailing on the river of becoming looking backwards, > ‘before' = ‘in front', that is, towards the past.
Future and desire. The machine analysis of languages may contest the tripartite tense system Aristotle proposed for verbs, since here and there specialized forms are missing. There are even languages where time is not expressed at all through the verb. As regards synthetic forms, in present-day Europe you find the Romance languages (future of the type ‘have to', with addition of incomplete elements in Portuguese), neo-Celtic languages (future based on an auxiliary ‘to be', close to Latin), Baltic languages (future with ‘s-', like ancient Greek and Sanskrit). But there is also a multitude of analytic forms suitable for marking the future. Among them English ‘will', and Byzantine Greek ‘wish' which spread to southern Italian, modem Greek, and as far as Romanian. The same situation exists in modem Persian. We should remember that the synthetic forms of Greek and Sanskrit originated in a desiderative construction. Throughout the world we find synthetic forms, but more particularly analytic forms: ‘be', ‘go' (near future in French, but also in Coptic!), various forms of "must' (it is again a ‘lack', dealt with in a different way by the subject)… and the most original: fogni ‘catch (in flight)', from fog "tooth' in Hungarian. Indeed the import ance of the future and the part that ‘wishing' plays in it show that certain civilizations are more ‘Promethean' than others.
Primacy of the present. Educational tradition confirms the ‘Augustinian' temptation to bring every thing into the present. It is said to be the simplest form. In fact throughout the history of languages the "present' is formed and undone, just like the other tenses. It may lack a synthetic form, cf. tsakonien, a modern Greek dialect (present = ‘be' + participle). In modern Hebrew the present/future (imperfective) becomes specialized as the future and the present is a participial construction. Tagalog (or Pilipino, the national language of the Philippines) marks the present as the intersection of past and future (with double marker): root kain = ‘eat'; um = assertive (active), duplication 1st syllable = repetition (exact or approximate); past: kumain, future: kakain, present: kumakain.
Conclusion. It is clear that linguistic form is not a rigid framework for expressing time. Nevertheless, better understanding between philosophers and linguists is needed. To think that the use of the auxiliary ‘be' (for the three tenses) is not taken into consideration in ontological constructions (the auxiliary is assumed to be empty)! (French translator's note.)