Intelligence and the Discovery of Time
The Enlightenment was not simply the triumph of reason over religion. It was humanity’s discovery that history had become its own responsibility—and intelligence had to learn to navigate an uncertain future.
What is the relationship between intelligence and Enlightenment?
Like Kant, I see the Enlightenment as both a historical threshold and an ongoing moral orientation to the future. He asks, 'whether we at present live in an enlightened age'. He answers, 'No, but we do live in an age of Enlightenment' and continues, 'we have a long way to go.' His characterization of Enlightenment, in other words, is an ongoing human endeavor to take over the direction of history. We often lose the thread that his primary target in that essay is 'matters of religion', which he sees 'as the focal point of enlightenment.' If a society is going to 'emerge from self-incurred immaturity', it is going to need to think anew and jettison traditional authorities, especially moral authorities. Since enlightenment starts with each individual going to work on himself and his conscience, the role of religion will need to change because religion is closest to that problem of conscience.
There are two things that I want to point out that are largely unsaid in Kant's 'What Is Enlightenment?' First, immaturity is a moral immaturity that each of us must overcome, and this is an ongoing orientation to oneself and to a collective future. Morality and matters of conscience remain central to Enlightenment. Second, Kant is writing amidst a profound change in human consciousness—what Stephen Toulmin and June Goodfield called the elongation of time. European Christianity prior to the Enlightenment dominated temporality. The age of the Earth was assumed, even by Isaac Newton, to be about 5700 years old. The events of Genesis were calculated to have occurred around 4000 BC give or take a few years. Looking forward, humanity was waiting for the second coming, the apocalyptic eschaton that would usher in the end of history. The experience of history was one of waiting for that end to come.
Geologists in particular were finding tactile evidence that couldn't square with 5700 years. I recently went to the Enlightenment room in the British Museum, where I saw a fossil collection from William 'Strata' Smith, a canal engineer who found fossils of sea creatures in his excavations of the British landscape. His nickname 'Strata' comes from the stratifications he could see along with the fossils that fundamentally changed everything human consciousness understood of itself and its place in time. Parts of Britain used to be under the sea, and creatures had existed long ago that no longer exist. This is not just learning a new fact that broadens your perspective. This is the emergence from immaturity as a wholesale change in consciousness, intelligence, and the hold of received dogma on both of those.
Today elongated time is settled fact, which makes it hard to see retrospectively. What Toulmin and Goodfield called The Discovery of Time in their 1965 book, is, I think, the Enlightenment's greatest legacy. It marks the beginning of a massive change in human consciousness that must be temporally stretched in both directions--the deep past and the uncertain future. This isn't just an elongation of time as if the timeline simply got longer; this is a kind of somersault that unravels the authoritative narrative of history and leaves consciousness to find its own story in an Earth where seemingly everything that appears stable is actually moving and evolving. The change in the nature of time itself was forced upon consciousness in a tangible and unavoidable way.
One of the ways that consciousness and intelligence deal with this somersault is to see these rock strata and fossils as calculable processes. The geologist James Hutton writes in 1788 (Theory of the Earth): 'Great things are not understood without the analyzing of many operations, and the combination of time with many events happening in succession.' There is a great confidence in Hutton's Theory of the Earth that, while 'the Mosaic history' doesn't answer to the evidence, we can still make sense of past time by assuming that these processes can be read and deciphered, though we can't do so now. In other words, our intelligence can rise to the challenge, but it will do so in the absence of our trusted moral authorities. How will we put them together again. This is, I believe, the problem of Enlightenment that Kant captures in his essay and that we ought not lose in our age of artificial intelligence.
So there is a causal relationship between the elongation of time and the demise of Christian time?
This is a highly contested point in the scholarship, and I tend to find Hans Blumenberg’s perspective more compelling than others. For Blumenberg, time was always a problem for Christianity. Strung on a line between Genesis and Apocalypse, time is neither inherently progressive nor measurable. It’s God’s will, and He is in charge of what happens between the two end points. For Blumenberg, ‘secularisim’ does not run like a thread alongside ‘sacred’ history waiting for its chance to take over. It emerges—I can lean on the image of the somersault here—out of the impasses related to human consciousness having to come to terms with a time that is becoming more and more experienced as delay as well as complicated by astronomy becoming a legitimate form of knowledge. Copernicus, after all, was making an intervention into astronomy.
We don’t have a one-way causal relationship, nor do we have a dialectical relationship where two competing modes of consciousness, secular and sacred, are in competition with each other. The secular emerges from the sacred, and the long and problematic struggle with time is central to that somersault. For Blumenberg, this transformation is the replacement of eschatological temporality by human self-assertion as taking responsibility for the future, which he finds to be defining for modernity. It provides its legitimacy as having its own orientation to time that is not just the remnants of a sacred template. This transformation, which is evident in Copernicus, opens the problem of stabilizing time because everything is now in motion and the cosmos no longer appears to have been ‘made for us’. This is the transformation Blumenberg traces: the movement from a cosmos made by God for us to a world that we need to make for ourselves. This is not a straight linear story. The ‘made for us’ never was an unproblematic stability, but the modern age ultimately transforms the ‘made for us’ into human self-assertion.
The regularity, predictability, and computability of motion became the struggle for a stabilizing answer from Copernicus—who saw perfect spheres moving in perfectly circular motions by God’s design—to classical physics that ensures regularity through the assertion of natural laws that are fundamentally mathematical. The measurability of motions stabilize the potentially nihilistic universe and makes it possible for ‘human self-assertion’ to be a legitimate basis for history.