No More Learning

6. time
In appearance, the following objection raised by our imaginative objec- tors against our characterization of the spirit, as the act of thinking and self determination, is conclusive. The objection can be formulated as a question: during the time that the spirit does not think or is conscious, does the spirit cease to exist?
The answer can also be formulated as a question: what makes them think that such time exists?
It is not the case that the soul does not exist during the time it does not act, but rather that such time does not even exist.
Time is not an empirical data. It can only be known by self- consciousness, but self-consciousness is an act; therefore, it is impos- sible to perceive time without action. Our objectors presuppose time illegitimately with no grounds whatsoever.
Aristotle made these conclusive remarks: "time is something related to movement" (Phys IV 219a 9); "it is evident that there is no time with- out movement and change" (ibid. 218b 34).
If there is neither movement nor change in the soul, there cannot be any time in it. Our objectors speak of an exterior time which they be- lieve to find in the movement of the stars and the earth. However, such attribution is completely mistaken: it lies entirely in the Newtonian
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myth of an absolute time that comprises the universe. Apart from be- ing a myth, the absolute time has been refuted by the science of our century.
Such attribution, as I said, is ungrounded, since we are not entitled to attribute to the soul a time of which it has no experience. The soul could not care less of what happens to the celestial bodies and other things alike.
The absolute time has been refuted. If Einstein demonstrated some- thing that thing was the relativity of simultaneity. Although not many physics think about this, such relativity means that there is no cosmic 'now' that penetrates the entire universe. This inexistent cosmic 'now' is the absolute time that our objectors want to introduce into the soul from the outside, i. e. , from the exterior things. As we said, however, the soul has its own time, a time that, as any other time, is essentially 'something about movement', because 'it is evident that without move- ment and change there is no time'. Therefore, there can be no time in the soul without experience. This time had already been discussed in the study of the 'time' that elapses (? ) between the death and the corpo- real resurrection, but the most lucid theologians suspected wisely that this was a pseudo-problem, for such time is extrinsic to the soul and has nothing to do with it.
It is important to mention here --as Hegel already stated it (cfr. II 1)-- that the absolute time is nothing more than an abstraction. By means of experience we can only know concrete time and real events. Just like absolute space, so absolute time is a mental construct completely separated from experience. Such an abstraction has been constructed by men in order to determine a universal, but this they do by eliminating the concrete times which each of us experiments and which are the only ones real. This has been stated by the sociologist Niklas Luhmann:
Time is gradually being abstracted, separating itself from the empirical world, it loses its intrinsic dependence from the habitual succession of events and things, it breaks the knot which bounded it to the vital rhythms [. . . ] It transforms into an abstract continuum of points of time in which everything can move itself according to 'laws' and 'systems' which are not time (1976, 56s).
We will demonstrate afterward that this abstraction in fact is not time. Before we do that, however, it is important to emphasize that
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Newton himself, in his Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, was not unaware of the fact that he was constructing a big abstraction that was different from what he calls 'vulgar time', which is the one that we truly experiment and that actually exists. Newton says there:
Absolute, true, and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equably without relation to anything external, and by another name is called duration: relative, apparent, and common time, is some sensible and external (whether accurate or unequable) measure of duration by the means of motion, which is commonly used instead of true time; such as an hour, a day, a month, a year (1977, 8).
As we will later say in a more detailed analysis, time cannot be an empirical data, not even relative time. But what is really amazing of this ghostly construct is that Newton does not even try to define his absolute space or time --something that he could not do because those things were only the products of his own imagination. On the one hand, he justifies his not providing a definition of space and time by saying that everybody knows what they are; on the other hand, he in- sists in distancing himself from what everybody understands by space and time, because such vulgar ideas do not seem reliable to him:
I do not define time, space, place, and motion, as being well known to all. Only I must observe, that the common people conceive those quantities under no other notions but from the relation they bear to sensible objects. And thence arise certain prejudices, for the removing of which it will be convenient to distinguish them into absolute and relative, true and appar- ent, mathematical and common (Ibid).
What a resort! First he says that he does not need to define space or time because the laymen know what they are, and then he rejects the conception that the laymen have of them. It is evident that Newton needed some way out: he was unable to define absolute time for the simple reason that it does not exist.
With the above we have refuted the objection raised against us, since it rested entirely on the myth of absolute time. But we need to clarify, once and for all, the concept of time: the central thesis of this chapter still has to be confirmed and studied in more depth.
It is obvious that our objectors --as innocent as only they can be-- suppose that time is continuous. Newton would also like to capture such
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continuity when he says that time 'flows' and that it is 'mathematical'. Now, in the sense that Newton and our objectors conceive it, conti- nuity is not a data of our psychological or empirical experience. It could not be the former case, because no one can be incessantly having acts of self-consciousness, but it could not be the latter either, because even if we gratuitously suppose that physical time is continuous, our per- ception of time is not uninterrupted: no one can be carrying out acts of perception incessantly.
In our century something both curious and incongruent has hap- pened: even though physics have rejected absolute time for not being an empirical data, they still believe in a relative time that possesses the same dubious continuity which is not and cannot be an empirical data. And they do exactly the same thing in regard of absolute and relative space.
The highly dubious continuity we have alluded to is the mathemati- cal one. Following Bergson, Capek has very well remarked that the mathematical is a "disguised discontinuity" (1973, 321), for it supposes the existence of several different units --called 'points' in the case of space and time--; one wants them to yield the impression of continu- ity because one thinks of them as standing in a juxtaposition, but in fact they are external from one another. That is called contiguity, not continuity.
As Poincare? noticed, one demands a strong nexus between the ele- ments of the continuum for that is what really makes it a whole; in the real continuity, the point has no priority over the line, but rather the line has priority over the point. According to its true concept, the continuum is unity in multiplicity; but in mathematical continuity "only the multi- plicity subsists; the unity has disappeared. " (1909, 30)
Hegel had observed this long time ago: "To the imagination that lacks the concept, continuity easily transforms into juxtaposition, which is an extrinsic relation of the units between themselves, in which each unity preserves its absolute discontinuity and exclusion" (WL I 181).
The inescapable conclusion --a conclusion which requires an intel- lectual honesty of which physics commonly lack-- is that the time and the space of the physics are contradictory entities:
It is not contradictory in imagination that one puts points in space, mo- ments in the continuous time or the now of time within continuity length (day, year), but its concept is contradictory. The identity within itself means
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absolute continuation, extinction of all distinction, of the negative, of all the being-on its-own; on the other hand, the point is the pure being-on-its-own, the absolute distinguishing itself and suppression of all identity and coher- ence with others. Now, both things are affirmed as one in space and time; therefore, space and time are contradictions (GP I 307).
"The space is within itself the contradiction of the indifferent exte- riority and the continuity without distinction" (EPW 260).
Notice well that this is not only about absolute time and space. We are not rejecting certain entities on the grounds that they cannot be made objects of our experience. This is much more about all sorts of space and time in Physics. What Hegel demonstrated was that space and time in Physics are contradictory in their very same concept. In the name of this strictly contradictory time, the objection was raised against the spirit as act of self-consciousness and self-determination.
Since mathematical continuity is not true continuity, it is now im- portant to emphasize that the time of the physics is not time.
Jerome Rothstein is very brave to admit that the empirical data do not suffice to build up time. He explicitly states the following: "It is hard to give any sense at all to the term 'past' without presupposing memory or a record of some kind" (Bastin, 1971, 293). Resorting to memory is to witness the reflection of the subject upon himself, that is to say, to wit- ness self-consciousness; so we are in the true time, identified with our self. In contrast, the alluded time of the physical world is simply not time. I don't know why it has taken so long for an exceptional physic like Rothstein to realize that, since Hegel had already demonstrated this with absolute clarity. In regard to the three dimensions of time, Hegel explicitly made this remark. "In addition, one cannot distinguish in nature [. . . ] such distinctions; they are only necessary in the concep- tion of the subject, in memory, fear or hope" (EPW 259 A). This is why Hegel said that, sooner or later, the meaning of all concepts consist in "vital and spiritual situations" (WL I 335).
The absolute lack of time that characterizes the time of physics, instead of diminishing, has been accentuated with the theory of rela- tivity: the expression 'space-time' denotes this, for the four-dimension- al space of Minkowski is simply space (not time), but physics have the whim of calling it so. It happens just what we saw (II 5) with decretory definitions: what they do is to stick to something different and leave time aside.
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Eddington expresses this naively: "In the four-dimensional world we shall accordingly regard 1 second as the equivalent of 300,000 ki- lometres, and measure lengths and times in seconds and kilometres indiscriminately" (1978, 46).
Their procedure is very simple: since a six inches bomb irrigates one hectare of wheat, they take 'wheat' as a synonym of 'water' in- discriminately .
A more lucid physic, Herbert Dingle, has expressed this clearly:
It is therefore because of our voluntary choice of measuring processes that we can speak of the 'union' of space and time into 'space-time'. This has nothing to do with any philosophical notions of space and time in themselves; it is a consequence of the wisdom of making sure that, after expressing motion in terms of space and time, the measurement of time shall depend on the measurement of space. Only on this account is it possible, as Minkowski did, to represent the time-co-ordinate as a fourth space-co-ordinate and describe motion geometrically as a track in a four- dimensional continuum. (Schilpp, ed. , II 1970, 543s).
Although they intend to preserve relative time and evade absolute time, the physics of our century fail in fact to recognize time itself --something that also happened in classical physics with the pos- tulation of an absolute time. This, of course, should not surprise us because time is not something physical.
Mathematical time is not time because --as Hegel demonstrated-- it lacks true continuity. We will later study real continuity as real time. Following a very different path, physics introduced an 'infinite divisibil- ity', which seemed to be a proper feature of space, but the quantum of Planck has demonstrated that it does not even exist in space.
According to the experimental discoveries of quantum physics, it is false that the material reality is infinitely divisible. If we start frac- tioning the material, we will find sooner or later something that is not further divisible. But it surprises me that physics had to wait for Planck, since Hegel demonstrated this in the text we quoted before (GP I 307): it is contradictory not only that time consists of temporal points, but also that space consists of spatial points. In addition, it is evident that something extended cannot be the result of unextended elements.
By means of a dilemma whose second branch derives into a new di- lemma, it is easy to explain that, whoever affirms the infinite divisibility
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of space and rejects the quanta, forcefully affirms that the ulterior com- ponents of space are unextended points. The dilemma is the following one: the ulterior components are either divisible or indivisible. And if they are indivisible, they must necessarily be either extended (quanta) or unextended (points).
We cannot choose the first branch of the dilemma, for if they are divisible they cannot be the ulterior components; they can only be the resulting segments of the last division.
But if we say they are divisible, we would necessarily have to choose between extended or unextended ulterior components. Therefore, whoever rejects the quanta affirms that the ulterior components are points.
It is evident, however, that the sum of unextended elements cannot render something extended. Even before Planck's experiments, the only thing logically sustainable was that the ulterior components of space were quanta i. e. indivisible extended elements. Mathematical space --meaning a space that is infinitely divisible-- is a contradiction of which Hegel timely warned us. Now, on the grounds of the spurious identification of space and time, physics always presented the image of an infinitely divisible time in substitution of a continuous time which is, as we will later see, the only true one. Physics incurred and keeps incurring in two big mistakes: first, to confuse time with space; second, to attribute an infinite divisibility to time that even space lacks.
It is of primal importance to notice that the confusion of space and time is a widespread epidemic: the layman does not have the concept of time. This does not wash away the blame of physics, since the pur- pose of science is not to reaffirm indefinitely the false beliefs of common people. Some figure that time is a fluid, as we saw Newton did; but a fluid is something spatial; evidently, they are imagining themselves being right at the side of a river, which is something spatial: but none of that can be comprised in the concept of time. Others --and this occurs more often-- imagine a line that goes all across the imaginary visual field from one end to the other; they call the left segment 'past' and the right segment 'future'; they call 'present' a very little segment (or point, as they commonly refer to it) that falls within the visual axis.
All those things are spatial and have nothing to do with time. Besides, it is clear that all those images suffer from the aforementioned exteriority between their elements, and thus they lack the true conti- nuity that characterizes time.
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Again, what the physics and the laymen have is a fantastic image of time, not its concept. No image can be proclaimed the meaning of the word time because all images are spatial. They only need to imagine time to transform it into something which it is not.
The past imagined by the physics is of an illusory nature; it con- sists in a physical fact with its own observable characteristics, but the character of past as such is not empirically observable, not even by a magnifying glass. Even if it was situated in the past, the present or the future, the object would be entirely the same in terms of its empirical features. Therefore, time is an instance that the knowing subject intro- duces into the picture. He takes it not from the empirical data but from the spirit. A determined event belongs to the past for the spirit; and this is so because the spirit remembers it. Rothstein remarked correctly that it is difficult to give meaning to the word past without presupposing memory.
No object has a label that says 'I come from the past'. It is perfectly obvious that 'past' is something that has to be predicated from the present. Consequently, the past has to be contained in the present, and that proposition is not metaphorical but strictly rigorous. That is really a continuum; the multiplicity in unity; the multiplicity that is both iden- tical with and different from the unity. It is not a contiguum or a juxta- position of external elements. Just in the truly and authentic continuity can be time, but it only exists in the spirit. By no means can an event become from the 'past' only because I imagine it placed on the left side of my imaginary screen, or because I imagine it somewhere 'behind'. Both 'left' and 'behind' are spatial contents; they have absolutely noth- ing to do with time. If the past is not present in the present, it is no past at all, given that if it is not present, what we have is exteriority and not continuity .
Likewise, the present character of an object or a fact --in other words, its 'simultaneity with me'-- is not empirically verifiable, even though physics have invested in this proof incalculable endeavors and witty arguments. First, it is obvious that, if the objective data was past or future instead of being simultaneous with me, its empirical features would be exactly the same; hence, its simultaneity with me is not one of its empirical features.
Second, having rejected absolute simultaneity for not being an em- pirical data, the theory of relativity tries in vain to preserve relative simultaneity --i. e. the simultaneity of two close events--, disregarding
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the fact that relative simultaneity is as unverifiable as the former. Actually, physics have to define sooner or later relative simultaneity like this: two events that occur in my proximity are simultaneous if I perceive them simultaneously. The definiendum reappears in the defi- nition, and hence nothing has been defined and we still do not know what simultaneity means. Besides, it is obvious that this definition re- sorts to self-consciousness, for what it really says is the following: the events are simultaneous if my perception of the first event is simulta- neous with my perception of the second event. This definition shows that empirical data cannot build up that dimension of time called si- multaneity, just as it happened before with the past.
But there is still more to this. Whoever says that they are simultane- ous if I perceive them simultaneously and in my proximity, presup- poses necessarily that there is simultaneity between the close event and my perception of it, but that has two mayor drawbacks. The first one is circularity, for a simultaneity that is not being defined is presupposed, and that is exactly what we are trying to define. And the second one is that this same presupposition shows that simultaneity is empirically unverifiable. One tries to prove the simultaneity of two close events by the procedure of perceiving them simultaneously, but that very same procedure needs to assume that the occurring of the event and my perception of it are simultaneous due to their proximity. The si- multaneity of two events locally close is not verifiable because every verification processes presupposes it.
It is worthy to notice that the real inclusion of the past in the present --which, as we said, is necessary for the past to be past-- is also necessary in order for the present to be present. Bergson already stat- ed that there is no self-consciousness without memory. That is one of the most valuable observations made on this subject. Consciousness of the present is not --as no act of consciousness can possibly be-- an unextended atom of time. It does not occur in a timeless point, for that would not be consciousness of duration, i. e. consciousness of time. If it does not include the past, the present cannot be present. Those unextended instants just exist in the abstract thinking of mathemati- cians, not even in the imagination of mathematicians, since what is unextended is not imaginable; and, of course, those instants are not time, for they suppress continuity and duration, which are indispens- able in order to speak about time. It is very symptomatic that experi- mental psychologists, being astonished and dazzled by the prestige
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of mathematics, have substituted the term 'psychological present' for the term 'specious present'. The psychological present has duration and, therefore, really includes the past; in contrast, by definition, the mathematical past does not exist, and this is the reason why a men- tality strongly rooted in physics has to conclude that the psychologi- cal present deceives. They want to correct the only present that exists by means of an unreal one. Besides, they are violating the principle according to which nothing that is not subject to experimentation ex- ists. The only present that exists is the psychological present, that is to say, the present of self-consciousness, since the empirical data do not suffice to build up the present, the past or the future.
We have incorporated the sincere recognition of Rothstein to our analysis by stating, without memory, the word past lacks meaning. It is absolutely transcendental to notice that, if memory or remembrances are considered simple reappearances of the experiences we had, we do not obtain thereof the idea of past, for such experiences did not present themselves as from the past because they did not have that feature and are only being repeated exactly as they occurred.
Such memory that can only repeat things is all what the materialist psychologists manage to conceive. But the idea of the past and the existence of time itself remain unexplained. True memory implies an 'I have experienced this', and consequently, self-consciousness, not as a simple 'companion' but as the identity of contents (cfr. III, 5). One requires the spirit, whose experiences have real continuity between themselves, because the spirit consists in its experiences and, as we saw, it is the substance whose accidents are not accidental.
Referring to experimental psychologists, Hegel said something that nowadays would be the solution to much of this discipline's problems. "The incapacity of understanding this universal which is in itself con- crete but remains simple, is what has triggered by some people the belief of preserving peculiar experiences in peculiar fibers or regions (of the brain); according to them, the diverse can only have an isolated spatial existence" (EPW 453). What such psychologists do not manage to understand is that such localized and spatialized experiences would be just like the past of the physics, which could not be experienced as past, and hence is not past.
"The self must be a totality, and yet this totality must be as simple as the self" (EGP 277). The so-called big problem that psychologists face while dealing with time is not that big at all, since, on the one hand, the
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difficulty they come across with stems from the supposed intermediate periods of time during which the spirit does not act --which, by the way, are mistaken, for those periods of time are attributed externally to the soul--; on the other hand, that equals to attribute the soul some- thing that is not time, for the simple reason that the time of physics does not actually exist. Capek says admirably: ". . . forgetting rather than remembering needs an explanation. " (1971, 156).
As a complementary remark, let us just say that most of recent neu- rological researches do not provide favorable results to the so-called thinkers who believe in the storage of experiences in fibers or special regions. Every day we witness more cases in which the extirpation of a zone that was happily declared the monopolizer of certain function only has as its consequence the transitory numbness of the said zone. Ernest D. Gardner comments: "nevertheless, the anatomical distinc- tions are often not clear-cut, the connections between nerve cells are enormously complicated and not at all well understood, functional specificity is often lacking, and species differences in function are hard- ly understood at all. " (EB 24, 832, 1)
Also, in the case of oblivion, emotional inhibitions and personal in- terferences originated in interpersonal relationships have undoubtedly a great bearing. We will soon see that the constituent of the self is in- terpersonality. The following observation of Benton Underwood has a reach that goes beyond biological adaptation:
. . . it is helpful to consider what would happen if memories failed to fade. [. . . ] Without forgetting, adaptive ability would suffer; for example, learned behavior that might have been correct a decade ago may no longer be. Cases are recorded of people who (by ordinary standards) forgot so little that their everyday activities were full of confusion. Thus, forgetting seems to serve the survival of the individual and the species. (EB 23, 947, 1).
We do not even need to deny the 'enagrams' or the recording of ex- periences in certain areas of the nervous tissue. With or without them, what happens is that true memory remains as unexplained as it was before. At the most, the exact repetition of memories would stem from them; but that means, as we previously said, that they do not appear as past memories, for the simple reason that they did not have that character before and, in theory, they are being repeated exactly as they occurred.
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Without an 'I already lived this', there is no past and, consequently, no time. The self identifies itself with its experiences; it is not a substratum different from them; on the contrary, they build up conti- nuity in the strict sense of this word: "the continuity of a universal and a being-with-itself which is not interrupted by the infinitely different limits which are constituted by the impressions and intuitions" (WL I 182). We have seen how in the content of the self all other contents (v. g. substance, being) are included, without this implying that the self ceases to be what it is or that it is interrupted. True memory is of a con- ceptual nature and implies thought and congruency: the imaginary is only a sequel. And Hegel says about this sequel:
"The proceeding of intelligence in the imaginations is both to inte- riorize the immediate and to put itself as perceiving in itself, and to suppress the subjectivity of interiority by freeing itself from itself and from the being in itself in its own exteriority" (EPW, 451).
With respect to the material that comes from empirical impressions, it is obvious that "only in thought does it turn into the concrete im- manence which is the concept" (ibid); only on that level are we aware of it, and, therefore, when it comes to remembering it, that level is the most decisive one.
Therefore, there should not be any misunderstanding about the term memory, when we say that physics strive in vain to make the word time to have a physical meaning, i. e. to make it to have a meaning without the intervention of memory, the self and self-consciousness. They mention, for instance, the lapse that goes between two sunsets. Besides the fact that the words 'lapse' and 'goes' lack empirical mean- ing, (cfr. II, 5) human intelligence has reached the necessary maturity to face, in all its harshness, the fact that two successive sunsets is not an em- pirical data. Furthermore, even if these sunsets were exactly the same in terms of their empirical features, we could say that their being two is not an empirical data. Sensibility cannot perceive numbers. Empiri- cally speaking, each of these dawns is what it is; they exist indepen- dently from each other and have nothing to do between them. Only memory makes them successive, and only there lies time. The time of the physics is not time.
After joyfully rejecting absolute time for being empirically unverifi- able, it is unsettling that physics do not realize that every kind of time is empirically unverifiable, not only the absolute one. They even seem to incur again in the postulation of absolute time when they dump at
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