Patrick Deneen, Henri Bergson, and Understanding Time

“The decision to break time into past, present, and future reflects a tendency to see time as more or less analogous to space.“

Introduction

“Ah, Faustus,  Now hast thou but one bare hour to live, And then thou must be damn’d perpetually! Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven, That time may cease, and midnight never come; Fair Nature’s eye, rise, rise again, and make Perpetual day; or let this hour be but A year, a month, a week, a natural day, That Faustus may repent and save his soul!” – Christopher Marlowe in The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus

Philosophers ancient and modern have long known that there is a close proximity between how an epoch conceived of time and its politics. This is because there is close association between how we conceive of time and the sense of meaning we have about life. Often, philosophers responded to vulgar conceptions of time by trying to sting the body politic into embracing a more holistic or complex vision. Plato famously insisted that the wise person saw past the doxa of temporality to understand the eternal world of the forms, including that of the beautiful city. In The Confessions, St. Augustine spent an entire book anguishing over the nature of time as perceived by eternal God, lamenting “What is time? Who can easily and briefly explain it? Who even in thought can comprehend it, even to the pronouncing of a word concerning it?” Augustine vacillated on whether even inquiring into such questions could provide us with spiritual insight into the sacred mind of God—or if it approached sin by trying to exceed the limits of finite human understanding. Faith was ultimately required to solve the dilemma.

Modern philosophers since Kant have tended to take a different tack. While their peers in antiquity—and through the Christian epoch—wanted to understand the relationship of eternity with the more unreal realm of transient temporality, Kant insisted that such was truly impossible. The transcendental structure of the mind was such that time, along with space, was a pure intuition projected onto the empirical world. It may well be that time existed in itself, or it may not. Hegel reformulated this argument to present time as the progressive unfolding of history. In earlier epochs, human beings saw meaning in life as flowing from the eternal world of the gods or God himself. However, we moderns liquidated eternity to say all such meaning needed to emerge from our selves, as historical beings gradually taking responsibility for our freedom and morality. For Hegel, when we understood time as just history we recognized that we, and we alone, create the sense of moral meaning needed to give life purpose. As Robert Brandom put it in his epochal A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit:

“Where for the Greeks the norms had been part of the natural world, for Faith they are part of the supernatural word. But that is a specific difference within a general agreement that norms are grounded in ontology and matters of fact, in something about how the world just is antecedently to its having human beings and their practical attitudes in it. Those norms and their bindingness are not understood ad products of human attitudes and activity, though they in fact are instituted by people acting according to the pure consciousness of faith. Believers institute these norms by their attitudes, but they do not understand themselves as doing that. Faith has not embraced the fundamental, defining insight of modernity: the attitude-dependence of normative statuses.”