The Time of the Soul and the Time of the World The Dispute between Augustine and Aristotle

The major failure of the Augustinian theory is that it is unsuccessful in substituting a psychological conception of time for a cosmological one, despite the undeniable progress this psychology represents in relation to any cosmology of time. The aporia lies precisely in the fact that while this psychology can legitimately be added to the cosmology, it is unable to replace cosmology, as well as in the further fact that neither concept, considered separately, proposes a satisfying solution to their unresolvable disagreement.

Augustine did not refute Aristotle's basic theory of the primacy of movement over time, although he did contribute a lasting solution to the problem Aristotle left in abeyance concerning the relation between the soul and time. Behind Aristotle stands an entire cosmological tradition, according to which time surrounds us, envelops us, and dominates us, without the soul having the power to produce it. I am convinced that the dialectic of intentio and distentio animi is powerless to produce this imperious character of time and that, paradoxically, it helps conceal it.

Where Augustine fails is precisely where he attempts to derive from the distension of the mind alone the very principle of the extension and the measurement of time. We must, in this respect, pay homage to him for never having wavered in his conviction that measurement is a genuine property of time, as well as for refusing to lend any credence to what will later become Bergson's major doctrine in his Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, namely, that time becomes measurable through its strange and incomprehensible contamination by space. For Augustine, our division of time into days and years, as well as our ability to compare long and short syllables, familiar to the rhetoricians of antiquity, designate properties of time itself. Distentio animi is the very possibility of so measuring time. Consequently, the refutation of the cosmological thesis is far from being a digression in Augustine's closely knit argument. Instead it constitutes one indispensable link in this argument. Yet this refutation is, from the start, misdirected. "I once heard a learned man say that time is nothing but the movement of the sun and the moon and the stars, but I did not agree." By this overly simple identification of time with the circular movement of the two principal heavenly bodies, Augustine overlooks Aristotle's infinitely more subtle thesis that, without being movement itself, time is something that "has to do with movement" (ti tès kinèséôs). In so doing, he is forced to see in the distension of the mind the principle for the extension of time. But the arguments by which he thinks he succeeds in doing so do not hold up. The hypothesis that all movement—that of the sun, just like that of the potter's wheel or the human voice—may vary, hence accelerate, slow down, even stop altogether, without the intervals of time being altered in any way, is unthinkable, not only for a Greek, for whom sidereal movements are absolutely invariable, but for us today, even though we know that the movement of the earth around the sun is not absolutely regular and even though we must continually extend our search for the absolute clock. Even the corrections that science continues to make in defining the notion of a "day"—as a fixed unit for computing months and years—attests that the search for an absolutely regular movement remains the guiding idea for any measurement of time. This is why it is simply not true that a day would remain what we call a "day" if it were not measured by the movement of the sun.

It is true that Augustine was unable to abstain entirely from referring to movement in order to measure the intervals of time. But he tried to strip this reference of any constitutive role and to reduce it to a purely pragmatic function. As in Genesis, the stars are only lights in the sky that mark times, days, and years (Confessions, XI, 23:29). Of course, we cannot say when a movement begins and when it ends if we have not marked (notare) the place where a moving body starts from and the place where it arrives. However, Augustine notes, the question concerning "how much time is needed" for a body to complete its movement between two points cannot find a reply in the consideration of the movement itself. So the recourse to the "marks" that time borrows from movement leads nowhere. The lesson Augustine draws from this is that time is something other than movement. "Time, therefore, is not the movement of a body" (24:31). Aristotle would have come to the same conclusion, but this would have constituted no more than the negative side of his main argument, namely, that time has something to do with movement, although it is not movement. But Augustine was unable to perceive the other side of his own argument, having limited himself to refuting the less refined thesis, the one where time is purely and simply identified with the movement of the sun, moon, and stars.

As a result he was forced to make the impossible wager that the principle of their measurement could be found in expectation and memory. Hence, according to him, we have to say expectation is shortened when what we are waiting for approaches and memory is extended when what we remember recedes. In the same way, when I recite a poem, as I move along through the present, the past increases by the same amount as the future diminishes. We must ask therefore what increases and what diminishes, and what fixed unit allows us to compare these variable durations.

Unfortunately, the problem of comparing successive durations is only pushed back one step. It is not clear what direct access we can have to these impressions that are assumed to remain in the mind, nor how they could provide the fixed measure of comparison that he has refused to accord to the movement of the stars.

Augustine's failure to derive the principle for the measurement of time from the distension of the mind alone invites us to approach the problem of time from the other side, from that of nature, the universe, the world—expressions that we are temporarily taking as synonymous, knowing that we will subsequently have to distinguish them, as we shall also do for their antonyms, which for the moment we are terming indifferently soul, mind, consciousness. We shall later show how important it is for a theory of...