(Glory be
to the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit
As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be
World without end Amen)
As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be
World without end Amen)
This beautiful seventh century prayer, depending on
your allegiances, has enriched, beguiled or cowed those on their knees all
through the centuries. For, as I will argue, there is no ‘now’, never has been,
and never shall be.
‘Time’; past, present and future
intrudes on our everyday considerations and perhaps ‘ever shall be’. Although
we can find time to be an irritant; late for this, on time for that; time for most of
us is of the essence. ‘Time’ populates our language. After going through the
‘times tables’ last night with my daughter I headed down to my local - let us
call it the ‘Gaping Wound’. There is the inevitable ‘footy’ match on the giant
screen; much talk of when the ref’ should blow for half time, interspersed with
employment talk of being on full time short time and no chance of overtime. I
order a beer get a seat near the fire and open my Dickens paperback, I read,
'...the best of times and the worst of times,’ I continue reading my Dickens,
by the time I look up the punters are baying for the ref’ to blow for full
time. I sip my beer, ‘time’, yes; there is certainly a lot of it about. On the
way back I think of my doleful friend going through his divorce and my advice
to him that ‘time will heal’; yes, time heals wounds. I pass a crumbling
building and I think of how time also corrodes.
Still not many of us agonise over
time, yet some have. Consider
St. Augustine (354 – 430) and his hymnic appeals to his maker about time:
Augustine, as he agonised over time, must have been well aware of the
Aristotelian notion of time as a ‘measure of movement’. But he continued to
torment himself about time. “Where is it (time) coming from, what is it passing
through and where is it going? We cannot measure what has no duration. That
which passes away is the present yet we admit that the present has no
extension. For time passing away necessitates dwelling which infers quasi
spatiality. My mind is bursting to solve this intricate puzzle; does time exist
and if so, where?” He lamented on, “But if time is of the essence, what is the essence of time? I
know what time is, but if someone asks me, I cannot tell him.”
So why 17 centuries later in the Western World, the most time-conscious society of all
time, where we live under the data blizzard of late capitalism, do we
blithely accept we can be in the ‘now’ without any of the Augustine agonistics.
Million selling books, by amiable Scandinavian elves; ‘Oprah’ type chat shows,
that have annihilated reticence helps, as
does the knowing chatter at dinner parties where bien pensants advocate staying in the ‘now’. However the phenomenon
of this quasi religion of ‘living in the now’ which has sprung up is
disempowered if one cares to examine what undergirds its claims.
But hold on, I hear you say, I have a first person
perspective, you know I am reading this now and I am experiencing it now. It is true of all my states; the
egg I had for my breakfast, that bit of bitching this morning with Elise this morning
when I left my daughter at the school gates and being caught in a shower on the
way back - I experienced all that in the ‘now’. Indeed, without exception, it
is true of all my states that whatever I experience, I feel I always experience
it now. However, that feeling that you are in the ‘now’, I would argue
is a naive realism and the feeling that one is anchored by a temporal
internality is a false presumption.
Time appears to us to as one way, tick by tick
waiting for no man, yet, space is different, we can go back and forward in
space. On the walk back from the school I decide I will cut through the alley
and then decide against it as I think I
will encounter too many of those lovely
dog owners walking their adorable Rottweiler’s... he’s lovely he is, almost
talks to you.” So I backtrack; hop over a wall, and jog across the park. I go back and forward in space but not in
time.
Time has altered; the workers in the field used to
judge time through the rhythms of nature; then the monk’s need of exactitude in
time for their ritual of prayers in monasteries maintained observance of time;
the 20th century brought the cinema which by prising open and expanding particular moments of events in the past
altered our views on time. It is in this historical process that the present
ceased to be instantaneous, and merged imperceptibly into the flowing stream of
time: culture evolves and private time fragments as public time coalesces.
“Right ‘now’ I feel
sad, because I feel time is passing”, confides my rather doleful friend.
Yet
what we perceive as ‘now’ as present, is motion. What happens is we notice the
passing of time through the changing pattern of our thought. Given the speed of
transmission of information from receptors to brain means we only perceive what
is past, yet we do not perceive it as past but as present as the ‘now’. It is
on this false premise you get beautiful prayers and million selling books and
inane chat shows that preach nonsense of a par with giving faith healing the
same status as chemotherapy. But let us leave America aside
‘Now’ I look at the computer, I look out of
the window, at the sky, the snow falling in Kent this overarching context
generates in me the experience of
presence. But this first person perspective of all that content I have described
is not the island of presence I presume it to be. For perception, that one is
in the ‘now’ is a causal process and causes always precede their effects. So
despite all those centuries of cups being swirled and the
dregs drained to uncover an oracular presence “...see how the tea leaves lie,
he’s speaking through me, Doris; have you received a parcel recently he wants
to know? Now I see a dark stranger coming into your life.” Tea leaves, the
‘cards’ palm reading, the platitudes of
fortune-telling, although all good fun at the fair, are nonsense because causes
always precede their effect and it is because of this temporal boundary we
cannot tell the future.
When I have that sense
of experiencing the ‘now’, looking through the window at the snow falling I
have to take account of the fact there is an overarching representational
context governing phenomenal (things as they appear) experience. Our
understanding that we are experiencing things now is, excuse the jargon,
phenomenological (appearance based) and not epistemological (knowledge based).
So what then is this
knowledge that is not accessible to me? It is the attentional unavailability of
earlier processing stages. The instruments of representation themselves cannot
be represented as such, and hence the system making the experience of ‘now’, on this level and by conceptual
necessity, is entangled in a cascade of past events. What I have is a
structurally anchored deficit in the capacity to gain knowledge about the now.
When we claim to be in the now, we are passing over
an inbuilt blind spot, we have indulged ourselves in auto epistemic closure. Auto
epistemic closure consists of human beings in ordinary waking states not being
able to realize the fact that the content of their subjective experiences, snow
falling, inevitably has strong, self-constructed aspects, because the snow
falling has representational content,
it is comprised of an abundance of past events.
Article by Dr Peter Cheevers
According to Thomas Heidegger (1889 – 1976), there is a conception of time as
a series of nows which is shared by ordinary people and philosophers
from Aristotle to Bergson. These philosophers and ordinary people (you and
me) will view time with its
fundamental terminology of ‘past’ ‘present’ ‘future' as primordial entity from
which the human experience of time is derived. However, for Heidegger
time is not something which exists in the world and is then reflected in
the human mind but something which arises from human beings and is then
projected on to the world. According to this view it is a mistake to think that
human beings passively experience the time of the outside world. For Heidegger,
the concept of time in general is actively produced by human modes of being
which subsequently temporises our sense of the world. This is in fact
what time is, it is the process of temporising. For Heidegger, we must
hold ourselves aloof from all those significations of past, present, future.
These tensed terms have arisen out of our inauthentic ways of
looking at time.
At times like these, to consolidate an argument,
one tends to climb onto the shoulders of giants; Einstein for instance who felt that
time itself being no more than a man made utilitarian concept, or a colleague,
in a hard to better sentence, pointing out that the triadic structure of past,
present, future, represent a system which is nothing other than a tautology
masquerading as an analytical distinction.
‘Now’, for lack of a
better word, I look at this article: is it terse, is it trenchant and have my
animosities intruded?
Anyway, watch the
chat show, buy the book, but the ‘now’ is not and never has been, Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment