E.Belfort Bax

Outlooks From a New Standpoint


Note on “Now”

 
From Outlooks from the New Standpoint, pp.199-203.
 

WHAT is now? The negation of the past and of the future. It is the point at which time vanishes. Time is duration. But now, the present, has no duration. It, therefore, does not exist in time. Again it is impossible to conceive time otherwise than as infinite, i.e., we cannot conceive a time before which is no time, yet it is evident that if now is in time, time cannot be infinite, since if an infinite time has preceded now, now could never have been reached. Yet again, the time which succeeds now can never be infinite, since it has had a beginning in now. So far, therefore, as time with its one dimension of infinite length or duration is concerned, now is distinctly “out of it,” for now has no length, no duration. What, then, is now? Let us consider this now more narrowly. If we do, the first thing that strikes us is that now is the inseparable attribute of I. The actuality of I we may say is identical with nowness. I am and now are at bottom three words signifying one thing. All nowness is the form of I-ness, and all I-ness is the being of nowness. In itself now like I can never be seized. The now which is a definite thought – an object – is not the true now at all, but the conscious moment just left behind. In the same way the I which we think of when we say myself – which is object to us – is not the true I, the I that is thinking, but merely a pseudo-I, a synthesis of thoughts and feelings reflected in this I which are immediately or intuitively identified with that I, but which on analysis are distinguishable as such. This synthesis, moreover, in so far as its content is concerned, discloses itself not merely as distinguishable from the true outlooking, thinking I, but as accruing to it only by accident. Similarly the pseudo-now or past moment of consciousness, which is a definite thought and which is a part of, or, indeed, the foundation of time, is also identified intuitively with the true now which it presupposes. This identification again has to yield to the results of philosophic reflection. The I that thinks is not the I that is thought of, and the now that is present in consciousness and as a part of time is not the now that presents that present to consciousness.

We see, therefore, that the presenting now, though it must necessarily involve the content of the presented now, does so only implicitly. This first becomes explicit or actualised (as phenomenon) in the presented or pseudo-now which constitutes the minimum possible of time and which hence may be regarded as the unit of time. Its content is nothing other than the thinking, outlooking I itself. Reality or experience is, therefore, the actualising or explicating of I-now. I-now in its true sense is impersonal, undifferentiated, potential. It is always rushing into time-consciousness, but yet is never exhausted in time-consciousness – always remaining behind as the infinite possibility or potentiality of consciousness. This potentiality is reflected in the plane of concrete experience or Reality itself as the being or substantiality of things in contradistinction to their mere appearance or actuality. For this distinction is in the last resort traceable to that between the I-now, which thinks and presents, and the thing thought considered per se, that which is thought and presented in it. From one point of view, the thinking and presenting I-now may be regarded as the material, and the thought and presented, as the formal moment in the primal synthesis of reality, or concrete consciousness. Now is the eternal transition from the potential to the actual. But from another point of view, or rather more narrowly viewed, the now is always formal, and it is the I which constitutes its material content. This has already been indicated above. The filling of now is I-ness in the infinity of its determinations which we term sense. The categories or thought-forms which constitute the other factor in experience are, as Kant, with true philosophic instinct, saw, deducible from time, which is in its turn deducible from the timeless now, termed by Kant, the “Synthetic unity of apperception.” This is the form of sensibility from which rather than primarily from the Begriff or logical moment, as Hegel insisted, the universe of thought and things is reconstructable.

Kant truly saw that the logical itself presupposes the presented now or unit of time, although his psychological prepossessions prevented him seeing that the content of the logical, the thing-in-itself which the sense-phenomenon presupposed, was nothing other than the Ego or Subject to which alone the phrase “in-itself” can with any significance be applied. The in-itselfness which Kant saw behind the sense-impression was of course merely the projected in-itselfness of the Ego. But the further and more serious result of this mistake was that Kant separated the “unity of apperception,” the formal now from the I of which it is the form, and after attempting to deduce the fundamental thought-categories from this “now,” or so-called “synthetic unity,” (an attempt of course in itself perfectly justified even if the execution was not very successful), fetched the material element from outside without attempting to incorporate it in his deduction. He thought to make an impossible separation between “Metaphysic” and “Theory of Knowledge.” No metaphysic is worth anything that is not based on a Theory of Knowledge; but, on the other hand, no “Theory of Knowledge” is complete or accurate that does not embrace a metaphysic. The one without the other is a barren abstraction. To get over this difficulty Kant had to separate sensibility from thought proper. His system therefore fell asunder into a dualism. His successors from Fichte to Hegel seized upon the formal side of his doctrine and built thereupon the theory of the exclusive dominance of the concept or completed formal activity – thought. (See Handbook of History of Philosophy, 2nd edition.)

But another and hardly less important blunder of Kant was his making time to be exclusively a form of sensibility. That space is a mode of sensibility alone is obvious,but it is surely scarcely less obvious that time is more than this, being in addition the mode of the formative or active principle of consciousness, deducible from the “synthetic unity of apperception,” or, as I have termed it, the true now. We get rid of Kant’s difficulty when we recollect that actuality or thought is merely a function or rather the resultant of a function of the I, of that which thinks, that its mode is time deducible from the timeless now. It is the thought-form now that sunders or negates the I, that fixes it and thereby dualises it into I and not-I, which in the last resort is nothing more than possible and actual consciousness. The subject, or I, is always the possible, the not-I, its shadow, always the actual.

Will, I take it, is the nisus of this transition, of the realising of the I, in the concrete or real world, or, in other words, on the time-plane. The transcendental act of self-realisation, the fixing of the I in now is reproduced in the empirical sphere as will. Will is the tendency of the Ego to realise itself. But what shall we call will? The best definition of will I can find is “the infinite imperfection of thought.” Perfect thought casts out will. Will may be termed the dynamic of thought, thought the static of will. Will by nature exhausts itself in an act, in a “real” synthesis, which is its object. When once this is attained, will as such is abolished. Could we therefore assume à la T.H. Green, a completed actuality of thought – an actual thought-synthesis which has exhausted all possibility of thought – we should arrive at a will-less God in a timeless Now. Such a synthesis is of course absurd, as it excludes the conditions of a synthesis – it would be a form without matter, an actual without content. But if we grant it, such is its nature. For now as such, always represents completeness. Will in its transcendental source as the becoming the fixation of the I, as consciousness, is necessarily abolished in the completed moment of the fixation or arrestment, i.e., in the Now. Hence the Now is the negation of Will. We see this illustrated (I may observe in conclusion) in the empirical sphere, in the distinction made between Nature, the fixed order of realised consciousness, the synthesis of all nows, and Freedom, or the lawless element of will which we regard as the power of originating events in time without reference to natural causation.
 

THE END

 


Last updated on 14.1.2006