An Intelligent Person's Guide to Philosophy

by Scruton, Roger

  The first-person perspective complicates things, since it causes us to entertain strange and unruly thoughts. When considering my own identity through time, the ‘I’ is always centre stage. What shall I do? What shall I feel or think? But this ‘I’ can be projected beyond death. I can wonder what I should think or feel, in the circumstances where my body lies inert and lifeless. Indeed, while I have no difficulty in imagining the death and dissolution of my body, I have a great difficulty in imagining the extinction of myself. I find it hard to think of a world without also thinking of my perspective upon it. And that means thinking of my own existence, even in a world from which my human life has gone.

  These unruly thoughts have no real authority. Of course, I cannot imagine a world viewed from my perspective, from which the ‘I’ has gone. But the world doesn’t have to be viewed from my perspective. Besides, what is this ‘I’? Where in the world is it? Is it even in the world at all? Surely, the I is no more part of the world, than the retina is part of the visual field. The I is a point of view upon the world but not an item within it.

  Death, Wittgenstein wrote in the Tractatus, is not part of life but its limit. He meant that we do not ‘live through death’, so as to emerge on the other side of it. Death is not an experience in life, and there is no such thing as looking back on death, and assessing it from some new perspective. This thought does nothing to allay human anxieties. However, it is not death that is the object of them, but finitude. It is the thought of our eventual non-existence that disturbs us - the thought that we exist only for a finite time. Schopenhauer wrote: ‘A man finds himself, to his great astonishment, suddenly existing, after thousands of years of non-existence: he lives for a while; and then, again, comes an equally long period when he must exist no more. The heart rebels against this, and feels that it cannot be true. The crudest intellect cannot speculate on such a subject without having a presentiment that Time is something ideal in nature.’ Traditional religion consoles us with the thought of eternal life. Schopenhauer suggests another solution - not that we endure for an infinite time, but that we do not endure at all, since time is unreal.

  Schopenhauer is right in thinking that it is time, not death, that troubles us. All creatures live in time; but self-conscious creatures also situate themselves in time, relating their past and their future to their present, and building time into the very idea of ‘I’. In doing so, they become half aware of the treacherous guest they have invited in, and acquire the longing to expel him, to live in another world, a world outside time’s dominion, in which the self will be free. Is this nonsense?

  6

  TIME

  Probably it is nonsense. But there is something unfathomable about time, and about the experience of being in it; people therefore feel cheated by any philosophy which leaves the matter unexplored. Aristotle says: ‘One part of time has been and is not, while the other is going to be and is not yet. Yet time - both infinite time and any time you care to take - is made up of these. One would naturally suppose that what is made up of things which do not exist could have no share of reality.’ To put the point in another way. If you subtract from time all the bits that are not, you are left only with the ‘now’: and not even with that, for no sooner are you left with it, and it has gone. Many other philosophers have followed Aristotle in thinking, both that the idea of the ‘now’ is essential to time, and also that this very fact casts doubt on time’s reality. Time orders the world as past, present or future; yet each of these is, in its own way, unreal. The idealist philosopher J.M. McTaggart went further, arguing that temporal order is actually impossible, since every event contained in it would have to be simultaneously past, present and future, and these predicates directly contradict one another.

  McTaggart’s statement of the argument is more subtle than that; but the gist is clear. Time is unintelligible without the ‘now’; and the ‘now’ is contradictory. One response is to say that nowness is not a property of an event, and that judged in itself the world contains no ‘now’: there is no past, present or future, but only ‘before’ and ‘after’. Events can be ordered in time relative to one another, but no moment is privileged as ‘now’. On this view ‘now’ is like ‘this’ or ‘I’: it expresses the point of view of the speaker, but not a feature of the world.

  However, it is precisely the situation of the speaker which concerns us. Time would be no problem, if it were not for the fact that there are beings in time who are also conscious of time’s passage. And there seems to be something that they are compelled to think about time, which they cannot put into words, unless it be words like ‘then’ and ‘now’. True, there are those who refer instead to the river of time, adding that you can never step twice into any part of it; there are those who describe ‘time’s arrow‘, adding that it has no target, and comes from nowhere. But those metaphors hardly stand up to examination. There may be a certain uplift in singing ‘Time like an ever-rolling stream bears all its sons away’. But this uplift comes from imagining time as a spatial process. And that is absurd, since processes occur in time, and that in which all processes occur cannot itself be a process.

  There is a temptation to think of time in spatial terms. Modern physics makes use of a single geometry to describe ‘space-time’, with time as a fourth dimension. But physics refers only to the order of ‘before’ and ‘after‘, and not to the ‘now’; this ‘geometrical’ treatment therefore leaves out of consideration the matters which most disturb us. From any philosophical point of view, time is very different from space. First, it has direction: that is to say, it moves always from past to future, and never from future to past. This sounds clear, so long as you don’t examine it too closely; hence St Augustine’s famous remark: ‘What then is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain it to one who asks, I know not.’ And we have already glimpsed part of the reason for St Augustine’s hesitation. It is not time that has direction, but things in time. Nothing ever moves backwards in time. Nothing ever becomes earlier than it was. But that sounds like a tautology. Why, then, is it so mysterious?

  Secondly, you cannot move through time, as you can through space. You are swept along by it. There is no way of hurrying forward to a future point at twice the speed of your neighbour; there is no lingering or dawdling by the way. The temporal order compels you to be exactly when you are at any moment, and nowhen else.

  Thirdly, everything in time occupies the whole of the time during which it exists. You entirely fill one part of the temporal dimension. So too do your contemporaries. There is no jockeying for position in time, no pushing aside of its occupants. Nothing in time excludes anything else. Time does not have ‘places’ that are ‘occupied’. We cannot therefore speak of a position in time, as we would a position in space. Times, unlike places, are not locations over which we can contest, or territories that we can claim. They are all-embracing and inexorable.

  The difficulties over ‘now’ have led some philosophers to doubt that time as experienced is the same thing as physical time. Bergson, in his Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, distinguished le temps from la durée, arguing that while physics can study the first, it cannot know the second, since the character of duration is revealed only by the process of life — of living through the sequence of events. In living through events I acquire a knowledge of their inner order, of the way in which one thing grows from and supersedes another; and this knowledge is enshrined in memory. The remembered order is an order of meaning, in which the uniform flow of physical time is thickened’ according to the subjective significance of events.

  Bergson’s thoughts, which were instrumental in inspiring Proust to write one of the greatest novels of our century, are really meditations on the ‘now’: lived time is time observed, time passing through the gateway of the ‘now’ into the tomb of memory. But that description is as misleading as Bergson’s. It is not time that passes through the ‘now‘, but events: and events retain their order of before and after, wheth
er they are now or then. Why not discard the ‘now’, which belongs not to time but to our perspective, and regard le temps, physical time, the sequence of before and after, as all that there really is?

  Such a dismissive solution does not satisfy us. The problem of time is, in the last analysis, the problem of our own being in time: the astonishment to which Schopenhauer refers stems from the fact that we are related in time to the things which we know and love, and therefore locked with them into the order of then and now. At any moment, our situation is exactly that described by Aristotle: everything that we cherish or fear, everything that matters in the least to us, has either vanished forever, or not yet arrived. All that we have is the infinitesimal fragment of the now, which vanishes in turn just as soon as we try to lay our hands on it.

  Plato described time as ‘the moving image of eternity’. He did not deny the reality of time; but he believed in another, timeless realm, which casts its shadow on the turning spheres below. This idea has recurred so often in philosophy, as to suggest that there is either truth in it, or a permanent need to believe so. Although philosophy is not religion, and stands in judgement over religion as over every other mode of thought, the philosopher was esteemed in antiquity as the purveyor of wisdom. And wisdom is worth nothing if it does not console. Plato’s vision of that higher, timeless realm has soothed so many troubled souls in so many dire conditions, that we should treat it with the utmost respect, even if we cannot endorse it. The vision was adapted to Roman Stoicism by Cicero, to Christian devotion by St Augustine, and to pagan credulity by Plotinus. And when it visited the Roman philosopher Boethius (c. AD 480-524) as he lay in prison awaiting execution, he recorded it anew, in The Consolation of Philosophy, a luminous work which was treasured by poets, philosophers and theologians for a thousand years thereafter.

  The traditional Platonic elucidation of the idea of the timeless and eternal is through mathematics, and through the contrast between durable objects and numbers. It is conceivable that a lump of rock should last through the whole of time; but it is essentially in time, and subject to change over time. If the number 2 exists, then it exists at every time; but it does not exist in time, since it takes no part in temporal processes, nor does it change. It possesses all of its properties essentially and eternally. Nothing ever happens to the number 2; nor does it cause anything to happen to anything else.

  The ontological argument seems to imply that God, if he exists, is eternal in just that way. He possesses all his properties changelessly and essentially, and exists everywhere and everywhen only because he exists nowhere and nowhen. But if God is really outside time, how can he influence temporal processes? For instance, suppose God decides to flood the world. There is then something true of God at one time (namely, that he is flooding the world), that is not true of him at another. Furthermore, if God is related to the world (for instance, as its creator), then every change in the world will be a change in God’s relational properties: he stands now in this relation to the created sphere, now in that. Yet, if God is eternal as the number 2 is eternal, no such thing could be true.

  Similar problems arise when we consider our relation to eternity. How do I encounter that timeless realm, when existing in the here and now? Where and what is that ‘point of intersection of the timeless with time’, which Eliot described as the ‘occupation of the saint’? If we encounter something in time, we know for certain that it is not the number 2; the same ought surely to be true of all eternal objects. And how is it possible to ‘rise’ to the eternal sphere, as Plato so beautifully describes the soul rising and freeing itself, in the Phaedo and the Symposium?

  Spinoza’s approach to these problems is in many ways the most illuminating. By his own version of the ontological argument, he proves that at least one ‘substance’ exists, and also that at most one substance exists: substance being infinite in every positive respect. (Ethics, Part I.) This one substance therefore embraces everything that is, and there can be no distinction in reality between God and the natural world. Either the natural world is identical with God (the one substance), or it is ‘predicated of’ him, as one of his ‘modes’. (The terminology of ‘substance and mode’ was taken over by Spinoza from Cartesian philosophy: the distinction is roughly between that which is self-dependent and self-sustaining (substance), and that which depends on, inheres in, or is known through something else.) Spinoza argues for the identity of God and the natural world, and elects for the title ‘God or Nature’ (Deus sive Natura) as the correct name of the one thing that is everything.

  On this view. the distinction between the creator and the created is not a distinction between two entities, but a distinction between two ways of conceiving a single reality. I can conceive the divine substance now as a whole, self-dependent and all-embracing, and now as the sum of its various ‘modes’, unfolding each from each in a chain of dependency. The first way of conceiving substance is like the mathematician’s way of conceiving a proof: studying the timeless logical connections that deliver truth upon truth from a handful of all-embracing axioms. The conclusions of a proof are eternally ‘contained in’ the axioms, and made explicit in the proof of them: in some such way reality is ‘contained in’ God, and derivable from his eternal essence. The second way of conceiving substance is like the scientific image of the world, as something as yet unknown, but slowly yielding its secrets as we interrogate it through observation and experiment.

  It is in terms of that intellectual contrast that Spinoza explains the distinction between eternity and time. The world can be conceived sub specie aeternitatis (under the aspect of eternity), as a mathematician conceives numbers and proofs; or sub specie durationis (under the aspect of duration), as ordinary people observe the sequence of events in time. There are not two realms, the eternal and the mutable, but again two ways of conceiving the one reality. To study the world sub specie durationis is to study it as it is; time therefore is real. Nevertheless, studying the world in this way, we can never grasp the whole of it: we can never reach the sum of those necessary connections, which show how each truth contains and is contained in every other. When, as in the ontological argument, we see the world sub specie aeternitatis, we see that what is, must be, and that all truth is necessary, eternal truth. Then, and only then, do we have an ‘adequate’ idea of the world.

  In Spinoza’s philosophy, everything less than the whole of things becomes a mode of that whole; all distinction dissolves, and individuals melt away into a vast unruffled sea of being, stretching without limit through eternity. Even if time is real, it has little authority in the philosopher’s view of things. For the grid of duration - of ‘before’ and ‘after’ — divides the one substance in ways that make no sense from the supreme perspective upon them. To see how things ultimately are (to acquire an ‘adequate idea’ of the world) we must discard duration, and see reality under the aspect of eternity.

  There is a price to be paid for this conception of the world, as Leibniz saw. Spinoza’s philosophy lacks what medieval philosophers called the principium individuationis — the principle of individuation - which distinguishes one thing from another, which attributes identity and reality to the human subject, and which attaches our discourse to a realm of objective things. Such a principle requires the framework offered by space and time: we count the individuals in our world by locating them in space, and identifying them through change. We too are individuals. My destiny is of concern to me, precisely because there are things which happen to me. Without identity through time I could not regret the past; I could not plan for the future; and I could not wonder what will happen when I die. And without a position in space I could not act in this world: I could do neither good nor evil, but would be reduced to a state of passive contemplation, with reality drifting by me (although ‘by’ is the wrong word) as in a dream.

  In the face of this, some might be tempted to follow Schopenhauer, who believed that whatever of me survives does so, not because it is me, but because it has ceased t
o be me or anyone, has shed all remnants of identity, and been reabsorbed into the primeval sphere of Will. Although Schopenhauer embellishes this thought with much intriguing metaphysics, it is hardly a consoling one. For it merely emphasizes the fact that my life is finite, that death is the end of me, and that whatever survives thereafter is nothing to me. To think away time is to think away myself.

  Indeed, it is to think away the whole observable world. Kant described time as ‘the form of inner sense’, meaning that all our mental states are intrinsically ordered in time: I could never be conscious of a mental state as mine, without also being aware of it as now, and without relating it to what precedes and succeeds it. An object that existed outside time could not be an object of experience. Nor could it relate to the observable world. How therefore could something whose identity is bestowed by time exist outside time, and still be the same individual? Surely the suggestion is incoherent. Whatever can appear under the aspect of eternity is surely distinct from this, here, now?

  Is that the end of the matter? Not quite, though to proceed further down this path is to enter a realm so dark that only silhouettes are visible. The point, emphasized by many modern philosophers, that objects are individuated through space and time, suggests that the same is true of me, and that I can identify myself only through my spatio-temporal co-ordinates. But this is not true. I may see a figure in a mirror and wonder whether it is me. In the normal case, however, I do not even have the question whether this, of which I am conscious, is me: I just know that it is. Whenever I identify myself as the subject of consciousness, rather than the object, then I do so without reference to a spatio-temporal framework, without criteria of identity, and without the possibility of error.