Beauty lives though lilies die

Reflections on the past, present and future in process philosophy

Divers, swimwear by George Hoyningen-Huene, AJ Izod, 1930. Source

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the meaning of the virtual in process philosophy, and in the comments tried to answer Julian Resch’s lovely provocations. To summarise, I argued that the virtual:

• Is completely real, but not actualised (i.e. it takes no form, so is not ‘extended’, as Descartes would say);

• Does not reside in the mind as a form of a Freudian ‘unconscious’; not least because it is present in every occasion or event throughout the cosmos. (I’ll return to the idea of memories and the unconscious below);

• Isn't a metaphor for anything, nor is it symbolic or the representation of something. Entities can exist without metaphors, symbols and representations, but they can't exist without the virtual;

• Is inaccessible, meaning that the full extent of what a occasion/event can do can never be fully known or exhausted.

This last idea is particularly interesting because it dovetails so nicely with the idea of time in process philosophy. And if there is one sentinel subject that marks process philosophy apart from most others, it is its radical ideas about time.

The future redux

In the West, our concept of time draws heavily on Enlightenment ideas about linear, measurable, predictable progress. So time is often thought of as a straight line running from the past, through the present, and into the future.

But this idea causes all sorts of problems.

To take just one example, what does the past mean exactly in the idea of linear, chronological time? What are memories?

Clearly memories can’t be formed before the event. Nor in the future, before the event itself has happened. So memories must be produced in the precise moment of the event itself. But in linear time, this precise moment is the present. So are memories — all memories — folded into the present? In which case, what’s the difference between past and present?

What advocates of linear time need, if they’re going to differentiate the past from the present, is some place to ‘send’ memories. I don’t mean a part of the brain, cell nucleus or computer hard drive, but a place marked out in time that is neither now or a time yet to come.

But events in the present can’t be sent ‘back’ in linear time, because that would require time’s arrow to flow backwards, embedding memories in a past that depends on a future present that doesn’t yet exist. This might work in the movies, but you would need more than a flux capacitor to make that possible.

The matter becomes even more perplexing when we think about the future.

In linear time, the future is the next moment into which the present passes. But is the present really ‘passing’ into the future, or is one ‘past’ present merely manifesting as a new alternative present? In which case, this isn’t really the future, but just an endless succession of serial ‘nows’.

And there’s another problem, because if the previous present is now giving way to the new present, what role does the future play? Why do we need the future ontologically at all? What function does it serve in linear time?

Put another way, what can the concept of the future tell us about why ‘the new’ brings us something and not nothing. In linear time, why we have continuity between successive presents and not just random chaos? What shapes what the present becomes?

The only real answer that substance philosophers have offered to explain the way the present is ‘filled up’ by a future yet to come is to turn to transcendentalism. Here some ‘force’ (God, mother nature, universal scientific laws, fate, etc.) sits outside of time itself, and speaks down to the present and helps it shape how it passes.

There are many problems with this, not least the fact that this kind of transcendentalism depends on a force that is completely abstract and hypothetical operating outside of time and space; governing from ‘the beyond’ so to speak.

It also suggests that the future is not radically open, but is, in some ways, limited by the powers that the transcendental force bestows upon us. Nothing in the present can evict this force and we would be consigned to a future that is little more than a series of variations on the present.

The existence of this idea of transcendentalism explains in large part why Western science pays so much attention to prediction, because prediction is the tool we use to guess what this transcendental force is likely to do. Again, this is an image of a future that is not radically open, but is set out like a vast cosmic buffet: pre-planned, orderly and limited.

So here then we have a powerful and almost universal understanding of time that a) can’t explain where memories go, b) requires time travel to create the past, and c) an image of a future that is indistinguishable from the present and relies on God or science to explain why things happen in the world.

Now, on a practical level, when everything we know operates along clock time, it makes sense to know that you’re at the dentist at 4. But if you want to do more than this — if you’re trying to understand philosophically why things happen the way they do in the world, for example — you will soon come up against some major roadblocks with modern Western concepts of time.

So what’s the alternative?

Naturally, the answer to this is radical and not easy to convey in a short post. But this is where we need the idea of the virtual.

The first thing to do is to put aside any mental constructs of time as a line running from the past to the future. Time is not an arrow. To think of it as an arrow is to confuse time with space. When we plot time along a line or measure time in milliseconds/seconds/hours, we mistakenly give each moment real estate that it doesn’t really have.

We do the same thing when we talk about the past behind us and the future in front. We create a mental picture that may be easy to convey, but it’s wrong and misleading. The past is not yesterday and there is no tomorrow.

One of the best ways to think about time in process philosophy is to first of all to stop calling it ‘time’. This has too many associations with ticking clocks and The History Channel. Bergson’s word duration (durée) is better. It implies constant movement and flow and gets us away from the image of points along a line.

The next thing is to think about is the past and the future as ‘two perfectly symmetrical jets, one of which falls back towards the past while the other springs forward towards the future’ (Bergson 1929, p.160).

So rather than thinking about the past and the future as lying behind and in front, think of them as co-existing with the present.

The virtual past and future are absolutely, completely real, but they have no actual manifestation. Only the present is actualised.

What differentiates the past and the future is that the past is full; completely stuffed with intensities that are selected and gathered together (contracted, to use the Deleuzian word) by the present to form self-stabilising formations. (Remember, this is as true for human experiences as it is for everything else in the cosmos.)

The future is the exact opposite. Where the past is full, the future is radically empty. It has no form, yet we know it exists. Most importantly, it has no guiding hand wafting miasmas of influence over it from ‘the outside’, and it bears absolutely no relation to the present or the past. It is not connected in any way.

The future cannot be connected to the past or the present because there has to be a way to explain how it endures. If a present could consume the future entire, then this would end any possibility of a future, and the universe would end in an instant. So something must remain beyond the reach of any and all presents. Some inaccessible, untouchable and virtual future, devoid of all interest and influence must survive for us to even have a future.

So the virtual is present in all durations: past, present and future.

I haven’t spoken about the present here and perhaps I’ll save that for another post. There’s probably more than enough here to chew over.

So I suppose my main points are these:

1. There are significant problems with our classical Newtonian concept of time — something that’s being increasingly borne out in quantum physics — and these limitations make it hard to think of the real experience of duration for all things;

2. There are alternatives, and the process philosophies of Bergson, Deleuze, Whitehead and others offer, for me, the most compelling arguments.

Reference

Bergson, H. (1929). Mind-Energy (H. Wildon Carr, Trans.). Greenwood Press.

*The title of this post comes from the poem The Golden Journey To Samarkand by James Elroy Flecker: “We who with songs beguile your pilgrimage | And swear that Beauty lives though lilies die, | We Poets of the proud old lineage | Who sing to find your hearts, we know not why, - …” Link