Time
14/03/11 22:23 Filed in: Human Nature
What is time?
St. Augustine said of this topic, “If you don’t ask me, I know, but if you ask me, I don’t know.” Time is that fickle or slippery, or however you want to think of it.
In the United States, we must all think of it today. Over the weekend, we sprung forward, setting our clocks ahead for daylight savings time. That means, we lost an hour of sleep, unless we were smart enough to go to sleep an hour earlier. Me? Well, not only was I not smart enough to go to sleep an hour earlier, I took a one-night job working karaoke, which kept me up several hours later.
The loss of sleep is a physical experience.
But there’s also a mental experience as well. I’m well aware right now that the clock reports it being an hour later than at the same relative time last week. Yet, that remains at the surface level of our experience. We also experience time as part of living. We have the past that shaped us, and the future that holds promise for us. In our modern, fast-paced industrial lives, we struggle to hold on to the now. Ask lovers and parents or someone who has lost a loved one what “now” means.
Of the philosophers who’ve spoken about time, Augustine and Heidegger prove the most insightful. Augustine, after much speculation, concluded that time is a mental experience. His understanding would fit well with Einstein’s relativity theory. Our experience of time, while objective in many ways, proves relative to where we are in space. We cannot speak of “time” per se, but must speak of time-space.
Heidegger notes that we experience being-toward-time. For me, the best way to understand this concept is through Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot. Asimov tells the story of a thinking robot who undergoes a procedure that will make him die. The robot has search for a long time for what will make him human. He realizes, in the end, that it must be the experience that death comes; that he has only a short time to carry out his purpose on earth. That captures, I think, Heidegger’s understanding of being-toward-time. Our lives, our experiences, are shaped by a notion of time that gives importance to time, in way that non-human animals and robots cannot understand time.
Even God cannot understand time. He has no being-toward-time. It’s a logical impossibility, for God is eternal, which Max Scheler points out, means He cannot experience a before and after. Augustine and St. Thomas understood this.
The other side of that coin, though, is that we -- human beings -- are beings of time. It’s part of our humanity. Which is why, when you finish reading this post, you might ask yourself: was that a waste of time?
St. Augustine said of this topic, “If you don’t ask me, I know, but if you ask me, I don’t know.” Time is that fickle or slippery, or however you want to think of it.
In the United States, we must all think of it today. Over the weekend, we sprung forward, setting our clocks ahead for daylight savings time. That means, we lost an hour of sleep, unless we were smart enough to go to sleep an hour earlier. Me? Well, not only was I not smart enough to go to sleep an hour earlier, I took a one-night job working karaoke, which kept me up several hours later.
The loss of sleep is a physical experience.
But there’s also a mental experience as well. I’m well aware right now that the clock reports it being an hour later than at the same relative time last week. Yet, that remains at the surface level of our experience. We also experience time as part of living. We have the past that shaped us, and the future that holds promise for us. In our modern, fast-paced industrial lives, we struggle to hold on to the now. Ask lovers and parents or someone who has lost a loved one what “now” means.
Of the philosophers who’ve spoken about time, Augustine and Heidegger prove the most insightful. Augustine, after much speculation, concluded that time is a mental experience. His understanding would fit well with Einstein’s relativity theory. Our experience of time, while objective in many ways, proves relative to where we are in space. We cannot speak of “time” per se, but must speak of time-space.
Heidegger notes that we experience being-toward-time. For me, the best way to understand this concept is through Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot. Asimov tells the story of a thinking robot who undergoes a procedure that will make him die. The robot has search for a long time for what will make him human. He realizes, in the end, that it must be the experience that death comes; that he has only a short time to carry out his purpose on earth. That captures, I think, Heidegger’s understanding of being-toward-time. Our lives, our experiences, are shaped by a notion of time that gives importance to time, in way that non-human animals and robots cannot understand time.
Even God cannot understand time. He has no being-toward-time. It’s a logical impossibility, for God is eternal, which Max Scheler points out, means He cannot experience a before and after. Augustine and St. Thomas understood this.
The other side of that coin, though, is that we -- human beings -- are beings of time. It’s part of our humanity. Which is why, when you finish reading this post, you might ask yourself: was that a waste of time?
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