I have here accumulated citations from the apologists of idealism, I have been prodigal with passages from their canon, I have been reiterative and explicit, I have censured Schopenhauer (not without ingratitude), all so that my reader may gradually penetrate this unstable world of the mind: a world of evanescent impressions; a world without matter or spirit, neither objective nor subjective; a world without the ideal architecture of space; a world made of time, of the absolute uniform time of the Principia; an indefatigable labyrinth, a chaos, a dream. It was to this almost perfect disintegration that David Hume was led.
Once the idealist argument is accepted, I understand that it is possible ― perhaps inevitable ― to go even further. For Hume, it is not licit to speak of the form of the moon or of its color; its form and color are the moon. Neither can one speak of the mind’s perceptions, inasmuch as the mind is nothing but a series of perceptions. The Cartesian “I think, therefore I am” is thus invalidated: to say I think is to postulate the I, and is a petitio principii. In the eighteenth century, Lichtenberg proposed that in place of I think, we should say, impersonally, it thinks, just as one could say it thunders or it flashes (lightning). I repeat: there is not, behind the visages, a secret I governing our acts and receiving our impressions. We are, merely, the series of those imaginary acts and those errant impressions. The series? Once matter and spirit—which are continua—are denied, once space is denied, I don’t see what right we have to that continuum which is time. Let us imagine a present moment, any one at all. A night on the Mississippi. Huckleberry Finn wakes up. The raft, lost in the semi-obscurity, continues on downstream. It may be a bit cold. Huckleberry Finn recognizes the soft indefatigable sound of the water. Negligently he opens his eyes: he sees an indefinite number of stars, a nebulous line which is that of the trees. Then he sinks into a memoryless sleep, as into dark water.56 Metaphysical idealism declares that to add to these perceptions a material substance (the object) and a spiritual substance (the subject) is venturesome and vain. I maintain that it is no less illogical to think that they are terms in a series whose beginning is as inconceivable as its end. To add to the river and the river bank perceived by Huck the notion of yet another substantive river with another river bank, to add yet another perception to that immediate network of perceptions is altogether unjustifiable in the eyes of idealism. In my eyes, it is no less unjustifiable to add a chronological precision: for instance, the fact that the above-mentioned event should have taken place on the night of June 7, 1849, between 4:10 and 4:11. To put it in other words: I deny, using the arguments of idealism, the vast temporal series which idealism allows. Hume denied the existence of an absolute space, in which each thing has its place; I deny the existence of one single time, in which all events are linked. To deny coexistence is no less difficult than to deny succession.
I deny, in a high number of instances, the existence of succession. I deny, in a high number of instances, contemporaneity as well. The lover who thinks While I was so happy, thinking of my love’s faithfulness, she was busy deceiving me, is deceiving himself. If every state in which we live is absolute, that happiness was not contemporary to that betrayal. The discovery of that betrayal is merely one more state, incapable of modifying “previous” states, though not incapable of modifying their recollection. Today’s misadventure is no more real than yesterday’s felicity. I will look for a more concrete example: At the beginning of August 1824, Captain Isidoro Suárez, at the head of a squadron of Peruvian hussars, decided the Victory of Junín; at the beginning of August 1824, De Quincey issued a diatribe against Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre; these deeds were not contemporaneous (they are now), inasmuch as the two men died ― the one in the city of Montevideo, the other in Edinburgh ― knowing nothing about each other. . . Every instant is autonomous. Not vengeance nor pardon nor jails nor even oblivion can modify the invulnerable past. No less vain to my mind are hope and fear, for they always refer to future events, that is, to events which will not happen to us, who are the minute present. They tell me that the present, the “specious present” of the psychologists, lasts from between several seconds and the smallest fraction of a second: such is the length of the history of the universe. Or better, there is no such thing as “the life of a man,” nor even “one night in his life.” Each moment we live exists, not the imaginary combination of these moments. The universe, the sum total of all events, is a collection no less ideal than the sum of all the horses of which Shakespeare dreamt― one, many, none? ― between 1592 and 1594. And: if time is a mental process, how can myriads of men, or even two distinct men, share it at all?
The argument set forth in the preceding paragraphs, rather encumbered and interrupted by examples, may seem intricate. I will find a more direct method. Let us consider a life in whose course repetitions abound: my life, for instance. I never pass in front of the Recoleta cemetery without remembering that my father, my grandparents, and great-grandparents are buried there, just as I shall be; then I remember having remembered the same thing innumerable times before; I can not walk through the outlying neighborhoods of the city in the silence of the night without thinking that nighttime is pleasing precisely because it does away with useless details, like memory; I can not lament the loss of a love or a friendship without meditating on how one only loses what one really never had; each time I cross one of the streets in South Buenos Aires, I think of you, Helen; every time the wind brings me the odor of eucalyptus, I think of Adrogue in my childhood; each time I recollect Fragment 91 of Heraclitus, You never go down to the same stream twice, I admire his dialectical skill, for the facility with which we accept the first meaning (“The stream is another”) clandestinely imposes upon us the second meaning (“I am another”) and grants us the illusion of having invented it; every time I hear a Germanophile running down Yiddish, I reflect that Yiddish is, after all, a German dialect, only slightly tainted by the language of the Holy Ghost. These tautologies (and others which I keep back) are my entire life. Naturally, they repeat themselves without precision; there are variations of emphasis, differences of temperature, of light, of general physiological condition, I suspect, nonetheless, that the number of circumstantial variations is not infinite: we can postulate, in the mind of an individual (or of two individuals who do not know each other but in both of whom the same process is operative), two identical moments. Once this identity is postulated, we may ask: Are not these identical moments the same moment? Is not one single repeated terminal point enough to break up and confound the series in time? Are not the fervent Shakespeareans who give themselves over to a line of Shakespeare, are they not, literally, Shakespeare?
I do not know, yet, the ethics of the system I have here outlined. I do not know if they exist. The fifth paragraph of the fourth chapter of the treatise Sanhedrin of the Mishnah declares that, as far as the Justice of God is concerned, whoever kills one man destroys the world. If there is no plurality, whoever would annihilate all mankind would be no more culpable than primitive and solitary Cain—an orthodox point of view—nor more universal in his destructiveness—which may be magical. That is the way I understand it, too. Clangorous general catastrophes—conflagrations, wars, epidemics—are a single grief, multiplied in numerous mirrors illusorily. Such is Bernard Shaw’s judgment (Guide to Socialism, 86): “What you can suffer is the maximum that can be suffered on earth. If you die of starvation, you will suffer all the starvation there has been or will be. If ten thousand people die with you, their participation in your lot will not make you be ten thousand times more hungry nor multiply the time of your agony ten thousand times. Do not let yourself be overcome by the horrible sum of human sufferings; such a sum does not exist. Neither poverty nor pain are cumulative.” (Cf. also The Problem of Pain, VII, by C. S. Lewis.)
Lucretius (De rerum natura, I, 830) attributes to Anaxagoras the doctrine that gold consists of particles of gold, fire of sparks, bone of tiny imperceptible bones. Josiah Royce, perhaps influenced by St. Augustine, is of the opinion t
hat time is made up of time and that “every now within which something happens is therefore also a succession” (The World and the Individual, II, 139). That proposition is compatible with that of this essay.
II.
All language is of a successive nature: it does not lend itself to reasoning on eternal, intemporal matters. Those of you who have followed the foregoing argumentation with no pleasure, may well prefer the following page written in 1928. I have mentioned it already, I mean the narrative titled “Sentirse en muerte” (Feeling in Death):
“I want to set down here an experience I had some nights ago, a trifling matter too evanescent and ecstatic to be called an adventure, too irrational and sentimental to be called a thought. It is a matter, rather, of a scene and of its word: a word already foresaid by me, but not experienced until then with total dedication. I go on, now, to tell the story, including the accidents of time and place which define it.
“I remember it thusly: The afternoon preceding that night, I was at Barracas, a locality not customarily visited by me and one whose distance from the places I later traversed lent an exotic savor to that day. The night had no destiny at all; since it was clear outside, I went out, after dinner, to walk and remember. I had no wish to take any determined route on that stroll; I attempted, rather, a maximum latitude of probabilities in order not to wear out expectation with an obligatory anticipation of a single one of them. I was able, within the imperfect limits of possibility, to walk, as they say, at random. I accepted, without any conscious prejudice but that of avoiding the wider avenues and streets, the most obscure invitations of chance. Still and all, a kind of familiar gravitation led me on, toward certain quarters, whose names I have every wish to remember always and which call forth reverence from my heart. I do not wish in this manner to signify my own quarter of the city, the precise compass of my own infancy, but rather its still-mysterious environs: confines I have altogether possessed in words and very little in reality, confines both neighboring and mythological. For me, those penultimate streets, almost as effectively unknown as the excavated foundations of our own house or our invisible skeleton, are the reverse of the familiar, the very back of the known. My walk brought me to a corner. I breathed the night in a serene holiday from thought. The vision before me, in no wise complicated, in any case, was simplified even further by my fatigue. The very fact that it was typical made it unreal. The street was one of low houses, and though its first sign was one of poverty, the second was certainly one of joyousness. It was of the poorest and the prettiest quality at once. No house ventured to press upon the street; the fig tree was dark over the corner wall; the outer doorways—higher than the lengthened outlines of the walls—seemed made of the same infinite substance as the night. The sidewalk was escarped over the street; the street was of elemental clay, clay of an as yet unconquered America. Further down, the narrow street became part of the pampa, dwindling into the Maldonado. Above the turbid and chaotic earth a rose-colored wall seemed, rather than to house the moonlight, to effuse an intimate light of its own. There could be no better name for tenderness than this rose color.
“I stood looking at this simple scene. I thought, out loud most probably: ‘It’s the same as it was thirty years ago. . . . ‘ I thought back to that date: a recent enough time in other countries, but already a remote one in this fast-changing part of the world. Perhaps a bird was singing and I felt for it a small, close affection, a bird-size affection; but most probably there was no other sound in this vertiginous silence than the equally timeless sound of the crickets. The facile thought I am in eighteen hundred and . . . ceased being a set of approximate words and deepened into a reality. I felt dead, I felt myself an abstract perceiver of the world; I felt an indefinite fear imbued with science, the clearest metaphysics. I did not believe I had gone upstream on the presumed Waters of Time. No. Rather, I suspected I was in possession of the reticent or absent sense of the inconceivable word eternity. Only later did I succeed in defining this piece of imagination.
“Now, I write it down in this way: That pure representation of homogeneous events and matter—the clear night, the diaphanous wall, the provincial scent of honeysuckle, the elemental earth—is not merely identical to what was once represented at that corner so many years before, it is, without similarities or repetitions, the very same. If we can intuit that identity, time is a delusion. The indifference and inseparability of one moment in time’s apparent yesterday from another monient in time’s apparent today are enough to cause time’s disintegration.
“It is evident that the number of such moments, human moments, is not infinite. The elemental ones—the moments of physical suffering and physical pleasure, the moments of sleep’s approach, those of listening to a single piece of music, those of great intensity or great lassitude—are even more impersonal. I derive, in advance, the following conclusion: life is too poor not to be also immortal. But we do not even have the assurance of our own paucity, inasmuch as time, easily refutable by the senses, is not by the intellect, from whose essence the concept of succession seems inseparable. Thus, this half-glimpsed idea remains an anecdote of the emotions, and the true moment of ecstasy and the possible insinuation of eternity—which that night lavished on me—are confined, in confessed irresolution, to this sheet of paper.”
B
Of the many doctrines recorded in the history of philosophy perhaps idealism is the oldest and most widespread. This observation belongs to Carlyle (Novalis, 1829); he alleges that among the philosophers whom it would be legitimate to include, without hope of ever completing the infinite roll, one might fittingly mention the Platonists, for whom the only realities are the archetypes (Norris, Judas, Abrabanel, Gemistus, Plotinus), the theologians, for whom everything that is not the divinity is contingent (Malebranche, Johannes Eckhart), the monists, who make the universe a vain adjective of the Absolute (Bradley, Hegel, Parmenides). . . . Idealism is as ancient as metaphysical disquiet. Its most acute apologist, George Berkeley, flourished in the eighteenth century: contrary to what Schopenhauer declared (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, II,1), his merit could not consist in the intuition of that doctrine but rather in the arguments he conceived in order to attest to it. Berkeley used those arguments against the notion of matter; Hume applied them to the mind; my purpose is to apply them to time. First I shall recapitulate the diverse stages of this dialectic.
Berkeley denied matter. This did not mean, of course, that he denied colors, odors, savors, sounds, and tactile sensations; what he denied was that, aside from these perceptions, all of which make up the external world, there might be something invisible, intangible, called matter. He denied there could be pains no one felt, colors no one saw, forms no one touched. He argued that to add matter to our perceptions is to add to the world another inconceivable and superfluous world. He believed in the world of appearances our senses weave for us, but he understood that the material world (Toland’s, say) is an illusory duplication. He observed (Principles of Human Knowledge, 3): “That neither our thoughts, nor passions, nor ideas formed by the imagination, exist without the mind, is what everybody will allow. And it seems no less evident that the various sensations or ideas imprinted on the sense, however blended or combined together (that is, whatever objects they compose) cannot exist otherwise than in a mind perceiving them. . . The table I write on, I say, exists, that is, I see and feel it; and if I were out of my study I should say it existed, meaning thereby that if I was in my study I might perceive it, or that some other spirit actually does perceive it. . . For as to what is said of the absolute existence of unthinking things without any relation to their being perceived, that seems perfectly unintelligible. Their esse is percipi, nor is it possible they should have any existence, out of the minds or thinking things which perceive them.”
In paragraph 23 he added, forestalling objections: “But say you, surely there is nothing easier than to imagine trees, for instance, in a park or books existing in a closet, and no body by to per
ceive them. I answer, you may so, there is no difficulty in it: but what is all this, I beseech you, more than framing in your mind certain ideas which you call books and trees and at the same time omitting to frame the idea of any one that may perceive them? But do not you your self perceive or think of them all the while? This therefore is nothing to the purpose: it only shows you have the power of imagining or forming ideas in your mind; but it doth not shrew that you can conceive it possible, the objects of your thought may exist without the mind. . .”
In paragraph 6 he had already declared: “Some truths there are so near and obvious to the mind, that a man need only open his eyes to see them. Such I take this important one to be, to wit, that all the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth, in a word all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any substance without a mind, that their being is to be perceived or known; that consequently so long as they are not actually perceived by me, or do not exist in any mind or that of any other created spirit, they must either have no existence at all, or else subsist in the mind of some Eternal Spirit. . .” (Berkeley’s God is an ubiquitous spectator whose purpose is to lend coherence to the world.)
The doctrine I have just explained has been interpreted in perverse ways. Herbert Spencer believed he had refuted it (Principles of Psychology, VIII, 6), reasoning that if nothing exists outside consciousness, then consciousness must be infinite in time and space. The first is evident if we understand that all time is time perceived by someone, but erroneous if we infer that this time must necessarily embrace an infinite number of centuries; the second is illicit, inasmuch as Berkeley repeatedly denied an absolute space (Principles of Human Knowledge, 116; Siris, 266). Even more indecipherable is the error into which Schopenhauer fell (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, II, 1) when he held that for the idealists the world is a phenomenon of the brain. Berkeley, however, had written (Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, II): “The brain therefore you speak of, being a sensible thing, exists only in the mind. Now, I would fain know whether you think it reasonable to suppose, that one idea or thing existing in the mind, occasions all other ideas. And if you think so, pray how do you account for the origin of that primary idea or brain itself?” The brain, in truth, is no less a part of the external world than the constellation of the Centaur.
Other Inquisitions, 1937-1952 Page 23
