Augustine of Hippo · Theology
In Book 11 of the <em>Confessions</em>, Augustine asks a question that has tormented philosophers ever since: what <em>is</em> time? His answer - that time exists only in the mind that measures it - is one of the most original passages in all of philosophy.
In the eleventh book of the Confessions, Augustine pauses his life story to wrestle with a question of pure philosophy - and produces what many consider the finest short meditation on time ever written. He begins with a confession of bafflement that anyone can feel. We use the word ‘time’ constantly; we measure it, save it, waste it, run out of it. We seem to understand it perfectly. And yet the moment someone asks us to say what it is, we are struck dumb. The deepest puzzles, Augustine shows, often hide inside the most ordinary words. He turns the full force of his analytic mind on this everyday mystery, and what he finds unsettles the commonsense picture of time completely.
Augustine sharpens the knife. We say a long time is past, or a long time is coming - but how can something that does not exist be long? You cannot measure what is not there. And the present cannot be long, because it is always vanishing: by the time you notice the present moment, it has already slipped into the past. Try to grasp ‘now’ and it is gone. Augustine concludes that time, strangely, ‘tends towards not-being’ - its very nature is to cease to be. The only reason we can speak of time at all, he begins to suspect, is not because past and future are out there somewhere, but because of something happening in us.
Augustine’s famous conclusion is that time is a distentio animi - a ‘distension’ or stretching of the soul. When we measure time, what are we actually measuring? Not the events themselves, which are gone, but the impression they leave as they pass through the mind. He gives the example of reciting a psalm one knows by heart: before you begin, the whole psalm is in expectation; as you recite, words pass from expectation, through the attention of the present, into memory; and the ‘length’ of the psalm is really the stretch of your mind spanning what you remember and what you await. The same, he says, is true of a whole life, and of all human history: it is the soul, stretched between memory and hope, that holds time together.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Augustine located time in the mind rather than the world. Reconstruct his puzzle about the past and future, and his solution, in your own words.
Leads to Aristotle.
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