Before
we look more at relations it is worth pausing to note that relations always
exist in time. This leads us to a perennial philosophical question. “What is
time?” asked Augustine, “If nobody asks me I know; but if I want to explain it
to somebody who asks, I do not know” (Confessions 11.14). This
well-known comment on time points us to an intriguing phenomenon. On the one
hand, time is our natural element. We are immersed in time. We experience the
passing of hours, days and years, and of the countless changes that take place
in them. We remember past times and have a sense of expectancy for what the
future holds, all the time dealing with the pressing concerns of the present.
Everything that exists in reality, every state of affairs, is involved in a course
of events, in a process of be-coming and be-going. We name this coming and
going transience and acknowledge its pervasiveness.
On
the other hand, when we begin to think theoretically about time, when we seek
to grasp it in a concept, the mystery of time highlighted by Augustine returns.
We can see this if we start by asking what is the present. Augustine himself
raised this issue by asking whether the present is so instantaneous as to be
practically non-existent. No sooner have we pointed to this moment now, then it
has gone into the past. Andre Troost has helpfully discussed the issues this
raises. He writes “[i]n this … approach the present is comparable to a
mathematical point without extension, an imaginary point that moves
continuously towards the future, but remains always, at least in theory,
suspended between past and future. In the moment of the “now” the past
perpetually moves up towards the future, which becomes the past in almost the
same moment. In this theory, the “now” has in effect become a shadowy nothing,
a pure idea and no longer a reality.” This
naturally leads to doubt about the reality of time since if the present does
not exist then neither does the past or future. Time is understood as a
succession of point-like nothings. And a thousand times nothing is still
nothing. This idea of time as a sequence of “nows” also means that time loses
both its datability and significance, for how can one ‘now’ be any different
from any other? Despite the familiarity we seem to have with time, in this
approach it has become detached from my practical activities and concerns.
What
should we do, faced with this conundrum? Should we stick to what we experience
of the reality of time, or should we follow the argument where it leads and
accept that time is unreal? I hope that by now you will be ready to identify
that the problem arises from failing to acknowledge and take stock of the fact
that in our reasoning we have lifted time out of the context of cosmic reality.
By isolating time as something in and of itself, we have turned it into
nothing. It is important to repeat that our ability to abstract elements of our
experience is very good and helpful, but its limits need to be carefully
acknowledged. In particular it is important to be aware of what we are doing.
Now in our attempt to understand time better through theoretical abstraction,
we discover that it is intimately interwoven with cosmic reality. This is
evident in the way that abstraction takes us away from time just as it takes us
further from cosmic reality in its fullness. As Troost concludes, “Not a single
atom of reality exists apart from time, and literally everything in our
concrete experience of reality has a specific duration, is involved in the
all-pervasive and all-encompassing “flow” of time, in short: exists in time.”
The
cosmos is fundamentally temporal. That
is the position of reformational philosophy. Despite what might seem like an
overemphasis on structures in our analysis so far, it would be a mistake to
think that reformational philosophy sees reality as static or in
structuralistic terms. Dooyeweerd
understood his theory of time to be central to his philosophy and went as far
as to say that “The idea of cosmic time constitutes the basis of the
philosophical theory of reality in this book.” (NC I.28). Cosmic reality is fundamentally dynamic and
temporal: “all structures of temporal reality,” he wrote, “are structures of
cosmic time” (NC I 105). Such a position
places reformational philosophy in a critical relation towards those
philosophical positions, dating back to Parmenidies, that view reality in purely
structural terms and see time and change as negative characteristics of our
experience of the world.
We
have seen how the modal aspects, although mutually irreducible, are
inter-dependent; they presuppose and refer to each other. Every modal aspect contains within its modal
structure a reference to all other aspects and so cannot be understood outside
of this unbreakable coherence of meaning. The coherence of reality is a “temporal order and connection of all the
aspects” which is expressed by the anticipations of the earlier aspects to the
later aspects and the retrocipations of the later aspects to the earlier (NC
II.49-54). This referring forwards and
backwards is indicative of, and expresses, the meaning character of reality.
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