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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 March 2025
1 Habit as the Constituting Activity of Actual Existence
In the Timaeus (37 b ff.) Plato places the creation of time at the basis of the world's structure. Let me extend this demiurgic function to the Spinozist conatus, in the organisation of its own world, that is, that of its perseverance. Starting from an evaluation of the constitution of time, Spinoza leads us from his example in Ethics II, 44 Schol. via Ethics II, 18 finally to the discovery of the fundamental importance of the compositional activity proper to the conatus of the body – or to the body itself insofar as it strives to persevere in being. This leads us into the realm of Habit and the associative mecha-nisms that underlie memory and without which, Spinoza notes, the mind would be powerless.
Moreover, no one doubts but what we also imagine time, viz. from the fact that we imagine some bodies to move more slowly, or more quickly, or with the same speed.
To imagine time is to imagine it simultaneously as outside and independent of us, while, at the same time, we imagine it as present to us, which is consistent with the definition of the mind's imaginative faculty. To imagine time in this way is thus to objectify a mode of thinking that has a necessary reality only in the (relative) confrontation of humans and nature. This exteriority and presence, however, only has meaning in the (imagined) presence of coexisting things. For the reality of time exists only through the relationship that the mind, when it imagines, establishes between bodies in motion:
to determine this duration, we compare it with the duration of other things which have a certain and determinate motion. This comparison is called time. Time, therefore, is not an affection of things, but only a mere mode of thinking, or, as we have already said, a being of reason. For it is a mode of thinking that serves to explain duration. We should also note here – since it will be of use later, when we speak of eternity – that duration is conceived as being greater or lesser, and as composed of parts, and finally, that it is only an attribute of existence, and not of essence.
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