How do we compose time?

Landmines and Linear Time

By all accounts, the landscape of Southeast Asia remains littered with undocumented land mines, trip wires, and UXO’s (unexploded ordinances).

We do violence to this part of the world when we blithely imagine that the past exists only in the past or that time flows as a smooth arrow always forward. Aided by the image of time as a ticking clock that more or less accurately represents an eternally moving present, we get to declare that all former ticks of Newton’s cosmic clock are history.

Western Metaphysics attends only to a time that moves forward. It has been to its benefit because it gets to write the linear narrative of progress where the past is past and the future is open to accumulation of wealth and prosperity.

Equally, the rigorous determinism of a physicist’s Block Universe, where time is always only an illusion (or a feature of human perception, which amounts to an illusion) equally imposes its violence on this part of the world.

Either we believe everything is already written. It was inevitable. Or we believe that the past is in the past and no longer exists.

The cruelest irony is that many of the landmines are found in the so called DMZ, ‘demilitarized zone.’

What does it mean to fill up this demilitarized space with military ordinances that Eternally Recur for the local population? It’s anything but ‘demilitarized’; it is eternally militarized because we will never find them all.

The wars of the past are eternally present and embedded in the landscape.

Time is always out of joint

Time as Practice is a place for those who want to think about how we compose time. What do I mean by ‘how we compose time’? Ever since Newton, the common understanding of time has been the incessant and uniform ticking of a clock in the background of the universe. In thinking time this way, he was channeling St. Augustine who, in Book XI of Confessions, argued that even if the heavens stopped rotating, time would continue.[1]

Einstein relativized time (at least the present), but he never really dislodged Newtonian time from popular consciousness. For example, most people I talk to about this think of the past as only in the past and thus as non-existent. We can only access it through retrospective (and faulty) memory. For thinkers of time like Nietzsche and Bergson, this is only part of the experience of time, and certainly not the most important part.[2]

Bergson has often been accused of being slippery or ‘wooly’[3]. I definitely experienced this when I began reading him for the first time a few years ago, but at some point it suddenly felt comfortable [4]. I attribute this to spending time internalizing this one phrase: ‘The past automatically accumulates into the present.’ In 1995, I made the decision to move from Long Island to Denver. I made a host of other decisions as well, but let’s just stick with this one for the moment. I live with that chronologically past decision in my present at every single moment. Without the past automatically accumulating in the present, this experience is not possible.

This is exactly the way of doing philosophy that Nietzsche and Bergson (and the other trustees of Time as Practice) sought to elucidate: how can we expand our capacity for experience by taking seriously our entanglement in accumulating time? Let’s take Bergson’s durée first, then we’ll deal with Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence. We’ll wrap up with a little karma.

Durée

Bergsonian durée is a simple metaphysical reality: the past automatically accumulates into the present. With this assertion, he meant to dislodge the more popular belief about time as a succession of present moments where the past can only be understood as in the chronological past.

If you’ve ever claimed that you’ve learned something, or if you’ve ever set an alarm clock, then you have to acknowledge this minimal metaphysical reality of the past accumulating into the present. If the past is only in the past, then no learning would be possible and the alarm clock would not go off.

Indeed, no continuity of experience would be possible. Each moment would not transfer anything to the next because either they are disconnected or they are so tightly connected that they are the same unchanging thing. This is exactly the problem that Zeno’s paradox illuminated more than two millennia ago.

For our duration is not merely one instant replacing another; if it were, there would never be anything but the present — no prolonging of the past into the actual, no evolution, no concrete duration. Duration is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances. And as the past grows without ceasing, so also there is no limit to its preservation. [5]

We experience music as duration, not as one note replacing another in a fixed present without any effects of the past. We don’t watch an Olympic sprint as a succession of the sprinters’ individual strides or watch a ballet dancer’s assemblé as disconnected movements. However, no piece of music exists in its own self-contained present. As original an artist as we might think Mozart was, he was drawing on all of the past to make his creative work possible. More than this, he was drawing on the accumulated capacity for humans to hear sounds and for strings to vibrate the air to trigger that hearing capacity. We could go on ad infinitum tracing these conditions of possibility, which is the point. Durée is precisely this capacity for the past — all of the past — to accumulate in the present, and in doing so, it makes new acts of creation possible.

We need to be careful, however. Durée is not flow as we popularly understand it. We can’t just say, ‘Everything is flow,’ and leave it at that. This simply turns durée into a stable object.

For Bergson, durée is not automatically uniform or smooth.

A river is not a unified, smooth flow. The water closer to the banks is moving slower than the water in the middle. Water making its way around rocks is flowing in a different direction than water flowing downstream. Where the water meets the bank is hard to pin down because the bank is always changing.

The trick in our thinking is to see these movements as interacting durations. Time is nothing but these interacting durations because time is motion, and motion is always instantiated, never abstract. Even a rock diverting a particular current of water is moving in time — just far more slowly than the water striking it. The deeper we look into that rock, the more we will find the accumulation of many durations — geological, physical, molecular, cosmic — all moving at different paces.

If you are able to see the nova explosion later this year in the T Coronae Borealis system, you will see something that happened 3000 years ago in Earth time — about the time that humanity was emerging form the Bronze Age Collapse into the Iron Age.

Reduce this to a smaller scale.

Because light must travel to reach us, what we see does not strike our eyes at the instant it happened. Even the act of seeing requires multiple durations to interact after the light hits the surface of the eye. For sight to happen requires a composition of myriad durées all coalescing from the past in the uneven present.

When we compose a sentence in conversation, we are tapped into the accumulated durées that are the languages we speak [6]. As our interlocutors respond, we respond back. Language is not a spatial entity; it can only be understood as it gets used, which means that it exists only in and through durations.

Like a river, this movement can be more or less smooth, more our less in or out of joint. We have all experienced conversations that flow easily but suddenly get stuck. We keep trying, maybe by changing the subject or filling time with “um.” None of this is conceivable unless we have the basic insight that the past endures and accumulates automatically, but not uniformly, into the present.

Eternal Recurrence

I’m not sure if this observation has been made before, but Bergsonian durée is pretty much what Nietzsche intended with Eternal Recurrence — the past accumulates into a present that is creatively open to the future. When we internalize this, we are either energized by it (because it says our efforts matter) or it crushes us (because we can’t handle the greatest weight of this thought).

Neither durée nor Eternal Recurrence (ER) were intended by their authors as only abstract concepts. They were intended to be far more transformative and experiential than capturing a metaphysical reality in a neat and tidy concept.

Here is Nietzsche introducing the idea of ER in Gay Science 341:

If this thought were to gain power over you, it would transform and perhaps crush you as you are; the question with each and every thing ‘do you want this once more and countless times more?’ would bear upon your actions as the greatest weight! Or how fond would you have to become of yourself and of life, to crave nothing more than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?

To come to grips with the simple fact that the decisions you make will stay with you (and not just you) as part of the accumulated past (which is not just yours) is a thought that either transforms or crushes you — but only if you adopt it as experiential and not merely conceptual [7].

To be sure, ER is one of Nietzsche’s most difficult concepts. I don’t pretend to have offered the final answer to more than a century of commentary and confusion [8]. It seems to me, however, that thinking ER through Bergson’s durée and, as we’ll see next, Nishitani’s reading of karma, brings a whole lot of experiential clarity to ER.

Karma

The twentieth century Buddhist philosopher Kenji Nishitani (another trustee of this project) equated ER with karma. As a student of Heidegger in the late 1930’s, Nishitani was present for his lectures on Nietzsche’s ER. The echoes are clear when one reads them side-by-side.

I’d like to focus on a couple of sentences on karma from Nishitani’s Religion and Nothingness:

To recap the main point, in newness without ceasing, we see two simultaneous faces of time: one of creation, freedom, and infinite possibility, and one of infinite burden, inextricable necessity. Newness is essentially equivocal; thus, so is time. (221)

For Nishitani, karma recognizes that time has two simultaneous faces. One face is the incessant repetition of newness that has a fundamental openness of possibility in its movement. This is one form of Eternal Recurrence (and durée) — the constant and necessary repetition of the newness of the now. This is simultaneously freedom and a burden — we are ‘condemned to be continually engaged in doing something.’ He uses the Sanskrit word samskrta to capture this composition of time [9].

The other face is the accumulation of the past in the present. If time were only an infinite openness to possibility, then the continuity of experience would not be possible. The only thing that would recur is newness itself untethered from the past. As we’ve already covered, the past would truly be in the past and it would have no impact on the present.

This is not just the personal accumulation of the time of my being, nor is it even limited to the accumulation of human historical time. It is the accumulation in the now of everything that has ever been or will be.

Trace this time back, and we end up moving through human history to cosmological durations:

…our existence comes about from within an infinite nexus, reaching back into the past from our parents to their parents, back before the appearance of the human race, the constitution of the solar system, and so on ad infinitum, even as it extends equally without limit into the future. (Religion and Nothingness, 238)

This is the thing about Nishitani’s karma-as-ER: karma requires both the accumulation of durations and the power of our efforts to add to the accumulation. To be sure, this accumulation can certainly foreclose agency, which is what Hegel saw in the Unhappy Consciousness and Nietzsche in ressentiment, which found its modern resting place in the Last Man, but I’ll save this discussion for a later time.

Always New Nows

Richard A. Muller captures, as a physicist, exactly the concepts of time I’ve just elaborated.

The forefront expanding edge of time is what we refer to as now, and the flow of time is the continual creation of new nows. We experience the new moment differently from the preceding ones because it is the only one in which we can exercise choice, our free will, to affect and alter the future. [10]

Has science finally ‘caught up’ to Nietzsche, Bergson, Nishitani and others who have thought through the Eternal Recurrence of new nows and the accumulation of the past into the present? Caught up’ is the wrong word because it ignores the different tempos of philosophy and science.

Philosophy can be chronologically ahead because it doesn’t carry the baggage of ‘falsifiability’ that science carries. Philosophy can be and should be rigorously speculative. It needs to get out ahead of human experience to push its limits.

Falsifiability is a lesser value for philosophy, so it can move faster. Science proceeds more slowly because ‘science is that subset of knowledge on which we can aspire to universal agreement’ [11]. This is a different mission that moves at a different pace.

But it can be helped along by philosophy’s speculations just as philosophy has to update itself by science’s findings. The problem seems to be that physicists are stuck in their own tool box. Nietzsche, Bergson, Nishitani and others beat Muller (and Rovelli and Smollen) to the problem of thinking time, but these thinkers never show up in the popular books of the physicists. Only the ancients show up, and only as a way of showing off that they have taken their humanities courses.

What is worse, all of the major names (Smollen, Muller, Barbour, Rovelli) claim to be speculating when they talk about time.

So, actually, they’re not being physicists but speculative philosophers who are late to the Symposium and armed only with the second law of thermodynamics.

1. This is a complex story that I will take up at another time. Here’s the short version. Aristotle’s time is tied to the steady rotation of the heavens. For Aristotle, as long as this motion can be broken down into countable numbers (like on a sundial), time exists. What guarantees the uniformity of this motion is the ‘unmoved mover.’ Christianity broke this model of time when it introduced an omnipotent creator God who created time of his own volition. If time is a line stretched between Genesis and Apocalypse, and if time is completely subordinate to God’s omnipotence, then Christian time always includes the threat of nihilism. An omnipotent God may choose to end time whenever He likes. For more on this story, I recommend Hans Blumenberg’s The Genesis of the Copernican World. You can read my summary of his analysis of time here.

2. This is not a site about ‘presentism’ versus ‘eternalism.’ I don’t trade in either/or binary oppositions designed to reduce the experiential possibilities of durée, Eternal Recurrence, and karma to ressentiment-fueled battles over who has the right system of concepts.

3. Bertram Russell led this charge in the early 20th century. It seemed to have taken hold after Bergson’s debate with Einstein didn’t go so well.

4. Like a lot of Bergson’s recent readers, I came to him through Deleuze’s Bergsonism, first as a way to understand Deleuze, but then I ended up digging into Bergson and finding a rich world of thought independent of Deleuze.

5. Henri Bergson: Key Writings, 211. This is an excellent introduction to Bergson’s thought. Keith Ansall Pearson and John Ó Maoilearca have done excellent work in pulling together this collection. This particular quote is from Bergson’s most popular work, Creative Evolution.

6. Ferdinand de Saussure, the Swiss linguist, captured this dynamic in his distinction between langue and parole. Langue is the temporally accumulated presence of a living language. Parole is the specific utterances we make when we draw on this accumulation to actualize it.

7. This emphasis of the experiential over the conceptual understanding of ER was the force of Heidegger’s famous lectures on Nietzsche from 1936 and 1940. My understanding of ER is heavily indebted to the English translation of these lectures by David Ferrell Krell, as well as my discussion with my great friend, Helmut Muëller-Sievers at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

8. Bernard Reginster has recently summarized the various ways in which ER has been understood and misunderstood in The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism, Harvard UP, 2006.

9. Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, Jan Van Bragt trans., 1982, California UP, 239.

10. NOW: The Physics of Time, W.W. Norton 2016, page 10.

11. NOW, 263.