Time as it is lived

Would you live it again?

In August 1881 the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, then thirty-six, was spending his first summer at Sils-Maria, a village in the Upper Engadine valley of Switzerland, about 1,800 meters (nearly 6,000 feet) above the sea. One day he walked through the woods along the shore of Lake Silvaplana and stopped beside a tall boulder shaped like a pyramid, near the hamlet of Surlej. Years later, in Ecce Homo (written in 1888, published in 1908), he said that the thought of “eternal recurrence” had come to him there, and that he had jotted it down on a sheet of paper under the words “6000 feet beyond man and time.”

He first put the idea before the public the next year, in The Gay Science (1882), section 341, titled “The greatest weight.” It is a question, not a doctrine. Suppose, he writes, that some day or night a demon creeps into your loneliest loneliness and tells you that you must live this life, as you now live it, once more and innumerable times more: nothing new in it, every pain and joy, every thought and sigh, returning in the same order. Would you throw yourself down and curse the demon, or would you answer that you had never heard anything more divine? If the thought took hold of you, Nietzsche says, it would change you, since “Do you desire this once more, and innumerable times more?” would lie on everything you did as the greatest weight (Walter Kaufmann’s translation).

The demon is a test of affirmation, not a threat. In the same book Nietzsche named the attitude amor fati, “love of fate”: to want nothing in your life to be different, forward or backward, for all eternity. (Whether he also meant recurrence as a literal fact about the universe is still argued by scholars.) A common reading sets the circle beside the Greek punishments of Prometheus, whose liver the eagle ate again each day, and Sisyphus, who pushed his stone uphill forever, and hears it as a gloomy view. The comparison fails in one respect: those myths punish one repeated act, while the demon punishes nothing. It offers the whole of your life and asks what you would say. Albert Camus ended his 1942 essay on Sisyphus with the line “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

A generation later a different circle appeared. Oswald Spengler (1880–1936), a German writer, published the first volume of The Decline of the West in 1918 and the second in 1922. Cultures, he claimed, are like living things: each has a spring, a summer, an autumn, and a winter, lasts about a thousand years, and then hardens into a late, technical “civilization.” He called Western culture “Faustian,” after Goethe’s Faust, for its restless striving toward the infinite; in this reading that striving is the straight, forward-driving time of the modern West. Historians today reject his scheme as pseudo-biological: cultures are not organisms, they borrow from one another constantly, and the “seasons” were fitted to the story.

This course sees the circle return once more in the environmental movement. After the Enlightenment’s straight line of progress, it argues, the loop comes back as recycling, closed cycles, and limits. The evidence is real. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) taught a wide public that in nature nothing exists alone. In a 1966 essay, “The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth,” the economist Kenneth Boulding contrasted a “cowboy economy” of open frontiers with a “spaceman economy” in which a closed ship must cycle its materials. The first Earth Day, on 22 April 1970, drew an estimated 20 million Americans. In The Closing Circle (1971) the biologist Barry Commoner gave four “laws of ecology”: everything is connected to everything else; everything must go somewhere; nature knows best; and there is no such thing as a free lunch. The phrase “circular economy” is newer, usually traced to a 1989 textbook by David Pearce and R. Kerry Turner; China wrote it into law in 2008.

Two cautions keep the circle honest. Nature’s cycles are real, but each is driven by a one-way flow of energy from the sun; Commoner’s fourth law is close to the second law of thermodynamics in plain words (Course 5; see also the “two arrows” of Course 15). And society’s loops are partial: recent Circularity Gap reports put the circular share of the world’s material use at under a tenth. So the circle is back as a rule of thumb for living on a finite planet, not as a picture of time itself.

The stream

“If I want to mix a glass of sugar and water,” the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941) wrote in Creative Evolution (1907), “I must, willy nilly, wait until the sugar melts” (Arthur Mitchell’s translation, 1911). The waiting, he went on, is not the mathematical time of a physicist’s equation, a number on a line. It coincides with his own impatience: a stretch of his life that he can neither shorten nor lengthen as he likes. Bergson called this lived time durée, “duration.”

In his first book, Time and Free Will (1889, his doctoral thesis), Bergson argued that science and everyday speech lay time out as a line of equal pieces, just as we lay out space. He called this “spatialized time.” This course follows him with an image: the physicist’s t is a ruler laid beside time. The ruler can count moments, but it cannot catch the flow, where every moment carries the one before. It matters, he said, for freedom: on a line already drawn the future is already there, while in lived duration the future is open and something new can be made.

Bergson’s second move was biological. In Creative Evolution he accepted that species have evolved, but rejected both a purely mechanical account, chance variation sorted by natural selection, and a plan fixed in advance. He proposed an élan vital, a “vital impulse” pushing life toward new forms. This course sets it against Darwin’s evolution, which it calls passive: the environment selects and the organism only waits. Biologists did not accept the élan vital, which they saw as naming the problem rather than solving it.

The two kinds of time met in Paris on 6 April 1922. Albert Einstein, visiting the city, took part in a session of the Société française de philosophie; Bergson made a short speech, and Einstein replied briefly. Einstein’s reply is usually summarized this way: there is no “time of the philosophers,” only the physicist’s time and, separately, the psychologist’s. (Course 19 told how Einstein defined simultaneity by a procedure.) Bergson published Duration and Simultaneity later that year; physicists judged it mistaken, and he later stopped its reprinting. The historian Jimena Canales argues that the exchange marked a turning point, after which the philosophers’ side of time lost ground.

Before the First World War Bergson was among the most famous philosophers in the world; in 1913 he lectured to very large audiences at Columbia University in New York. He received the 1927 Nobel Prize in Literature (announced in 1928) for his “rich and vitalizing ideas,” and after the Second World War his reputation faded.

A present with width

Sing “Happy Birthday” to yourself and stop after “Happy birth.” The silence is not empty. “Happy” has not vanished, “birth” is still sounding, and “day” is already expected; you feel the missing note. Yet at any single instant only one syllable is sounding. If the present were a point with no length, as Augustine pointed out around AD 400 (Lesson 2 told the story), nothing would be left to hold the tune together.

The German philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) answered by describing what hearing a melody is like. In lectures at Göttingen in 1904–05 he divided every moment of awareness into three parts. The primal impression is the note sounding now. Retention is the note that has just sounded and is still held: not remembered as a separate event, but felt as only just gone, and fading as more notes follow. Protention is the leaning toward the note about to come. Together they make a present with width, which the plate below draws. The lectures were first published in 1928, edited by Martin Heidegger.

The psychologist William James had drawn the same picture earlier. In The Principles of Psychology (1890) he wrote that the present we actually live is “no knife-edge, but a saddle-back,” with a certain breadth of its own, on which we sit and look two ways into time. He took the name “specious present” from a writer who published as E. R. Clay (1882): a present that only seems to be a moment. How long is it? James gave a range from a few seconds up to perhaps a minute. Modern work gives smaller figures that depend on the task: the neuroscientist Ernst Pöppel proposed in 1997 that the brain binds events into units of about three seconds, while experiments on simultaneity and order find windows of tens to a few hundred milliseconds, and researchers still disagree.

This course reads Bergson, Husserl, and Heidegger as one project: restoring what physics left out. In this reading the experienced “now” is a field, not a point, and the point-instant of the physicist’s time line is an abstraction drawn from it. That does not refute physics, whose coordinate t works for GPS and for chemistry. It explains why a time made only of points cannot be lived.

Thrown, and heading toward death

Nobody decides to be born. You arrive with a face, a family, a first language, and a country, none of which you picked, in the middle of a story that was going on without you. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) built a famous book on that fact. Being and Time (1927) asks what it means to be, and starts from the one kind of being that can ask: us, whom he calls Dasein, “being-there.”

Two facts, he said, shape our time. The first is thrownness: we always find ourselves already placed in a situation we did not choose, with a past that is not ours to pick: our parents’ past, our family’s, our country’s. That weight of the past is one dimension of time. The second is death. A human being does not merely die but knows it, and Heidegger said that to face one’s own death, to see one’s life as finite and as one’s own, is what makes real choice possible. In this reading death gives the future its role: without an end, doing something now or later, or doing it or not doing it, would make no difference, and nothing could be urgent.

Heidegger also wrote about the clock. In sections 79 to 81 of Being and Time he argued that the ordinary idea of time, a line of identical “nows” that arrive and vanish, is a leveled-off version of the time of a being whose life is finite. This course adds a plain gloss in the same direction. It is the course’s gloss, not Heidegger’s wording: we measure time because it is scarce, and it is scarce because we die. A being that could never die would have no reason to count the hours; sunrise and sunset would not matter to it. On this reading the clock, so useful for sharing a schedule, hides the very thing that makes time matter.

A fair account has to add that Heidegger was elected rector of the University of Freiburg in April 1933, joined the Nazi party that May, and resigned the rectorship in April 1934, and that, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, he never publicly and explicitly renounced his support for National Socialism. Readers still disagree on whether the book can be separated from the man.

The right moment

In the fourth century BC, according to the book that bears his name, Mencius told King Hui of Liang that if the farmers were not pulled from their fields in the busy season, there would be more grain than people could eat (Mencius 1A3). That is timing at its plainest: the work has its season. In Chinese the same word covers the season and the right moment: 时 (shí), a character built from the sun with a sound-part, which means season, time, and the right time.

The word for “the right moment” is 时机 (shíjī). Its second half, 机, began as the name of a loom or a crossbow’s trigger, a small part on which a large outcome turns, and came to mean the critical point. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines shí as the seasons, the configuration of a given moment, and the ability to act as that moment demands. Mencius put it memorably (5B1). He named three earlier sages, one pure, one responsible, one harmonious, and called Confucius “the sage of timeliness” (圣之时者): quick when it was time to hurry, patient when it was time to linger, ready to serve or to hold back as the occasion asked.

The theme runs through the classics. The Zhongyong says the gentleman keeps to the mean as the time requires (君子而时中). A commentary on the Book of Changes says that the great person acts ahead of Heaven without Heaven opposing, and acts after Heaven by following Heaven’s timing (先天而天弗违，后天而奉天时); another says that those who adapt and change are the ones who keep pace with their time (变通者，趣时者也). This course holds that this sense of occasion is the richest part of Chinese thinking about time, and it is what Lesson 1 called timing.

The other half of the experience is flow, and the classics have a famous line for it. In the Analects (9.17), standing by a river, Confucius says: “It passes on like this, never stopping day or night” (逝者如斯夫！不舍昼夜). This course reads the Chinese response to passing as calm acceptance with a light sadness, and contrasts it with Parmenides and Zeno, who called change an illusion (Lesson 1). The Book of Changes gives a reason: “The great virtue of heaven and earth is giving life” (天地之大德曰生), and “life giving life is what is called change” (生生之谓易). Change is how the world makes new life, so it is not simply a loss.

Chinese thinkers also had words for time as extent. The Huainanzi (about 139 BC) defines 宙 (zhòu) as “from the ancient past to the present,” the partner of 宇 (yǔ), space; together they make the word for the universe (Course 19). The Mohist Canon defines 久 (jiǔ) as extension through different times, and adds that a time may have extent or none. The words existed. The weight of the tradition, in this reading, fell on shí.

Did the Chinese see time as a circle? The texts show a ring and a line. For circles: Mencius says that a true king should arise every five hundred years, then notes that more than seven hundred have passed since the Zhou, so that by the count the time is overdue but judged by the circumstances it is ripe (2B13); and he says that the world has had its order and disorder in turn (3B9). The sixty-term cycle of stems and branches named days on the Shang oracle bones, more than three thousand years ago, and years in Han documents, the earliest found in a tomb at Mawangdui sealed in 168 BC.

For lines: era names, each counting its years one after another, are traditionally dated from 140 BC. The Spring and Autumn Annals record the state of Lu year by year from 722 to 481 BC. Sima Qian’s Shiji, finished in the 90s BC, tells about 2,500 years of the past, and Sima Guang’s Zizhi tongjian (“Comprehensive Mirror to Aid in Government,” presented in 1084) runs year by year from 403 BC to AD 959. The British historian of science Joseph Needham (1900–1995) argued in Time and Eastern Man (his 1964 Henry Myers Lecture, published in 1965) against the picture of the Chinese as people of the circle alone.

Now the clock. It is a great achievement. It gave people schedules they share, units that are the same in every country, and, in GPS satellites, a way to find your place on earth by comparing clocks. What it leaves out is what this lesson has gathered: the occasion, the flow, and the finitude. The Chinese calendar shows that the clock and the moment can live together. Its twenty-four solar terms divide the sun’s yearly path into steps of 15 degrees of ecliptic longitude. The full list of names first appears in the Huainanzi; the terms entered the official calendar in 104 BC; since 1645 they have been fixed by the sun’s actual position; and in 2016 UNESCO listed them as intangible cultural heritage. Each is timing kept inside a calendar: Qingming is a date and also a job, to sweep the graves. And the terms keep the moon’s months honest: the winter solstice must fall in the eleventh month, and a month with no major term becomes the leap month. Try the wheel.

This course began by asking what time is, and it kept finding the same thread: how a culture counts time shapes what it builds. A sundial and a farm calendar built the day and the year; a line with a beginning and an end, and then a clock in the town square, built the schedule; Newton and Einstein turned time into a coordinate, until thermodynamics gave it back its arrow. The thinkers of this lesson, and the Chinese idea of the right moment, name what is left when only the clock is kept: a stream with a thick present, a life with an end, and a moment that asks something of you.