Augustine - Infinity and Time

The question that I will be dealing with here concerns infinity and time, in dealing with this question we shall be focusing mainly on St .Augustine’s conception of these ideas though other references shall be made. The first concept that should be grappled with is the perception of time itself. Time to a great degree is memory based. Now Augustine mentioned that when dealing with everyday things , there are some experiences that can only be perceived through particular senses and there are those things that can be perceived through a combination of the senses. For example one cannot tell weather a piece of food tastes bad merely by touching it yet through the combination of touch and taste the ability to perceive particular aspects of the meat changes along with it. Time or at least the awareness of time is not bound to a single sense nor is it known through the cooperation of multiple senses ,yet it is still perceived. According to a recent publication in the Stanford Encyclopaedia it has been suggested that time is a psychological process that we are aware of in thought, this much is true from the perspective that even if we were bereft of all senses we would still be able to think and contemplate and in thinking we are aware of the passing of time as we think. This is done in relation to nothing else which further supports the idea that the perception of time is based in a cognitive process.

“ Time is nothing but a stretching out in length” When we contemplate time we do so in relation to certain events such as a flash of lightening followed by thunder. Most observing these natural occurrences would regard both the flash and ensuing sound of thunder to be one and the same event. Yet when one examines the event more carefully it is seen as not being so simple. In basic terms ,humans have classified time as consisting of the past ,present and the future. Whilst this seems to be reliable enough upon further examination the weakness’s become apparent. When an event is described as being long in duration it relies upon the person in question( the one perceiving) to be able remember the state of the event as it was, what it currently is and most importantly what it could be. The future prospect is difficult to grasp because it deals with potentiality as opposed to events that are remembered(the past) or events that our being experienced in the immediate instant (the present). Yet the perception of time itself is based on the interaction of these elements in a seemingly simultaneous cognition. Time as such cannot be strictly measured. The past no longer actively occurring(outside the mind) cannot be measured because it is immaterial non-existent ,the future being made up only of potentialities cannot be measured because not only do its properties not exist outside the mind but they do not even find form inside the mind because having never existed they have been actualised at any point.

Now there is the occurrence of something very important in Augustine’s work it is the relation of time to God. Now the existence of time universally appears to have much in common with time in the human mind. Time is not an entity starting from one point and ending with another it is all pervading. It could be supposed that much in the same way a humans perception of time is not linear but occurs multiple levels . Augustine was the Christian heir of a work that was already well under way. Augustine was of course a Neo-platonic thinker and as a result of this many ideas that occurred in Plato’s work the Timaeus are apparent in Augustine’s Christian rendering of the subject. Plato’s basic tenets on the nature of time were as follows.time began with the ordering of the cosmos as a whole, and as a result time as an entity along with the ordered universe became ordered in itself. It doesn’t stop here a time before time is mentioned, though the nature of both time, motion and matter are shown to be in a state of disorder. Even to those only giving these hypothesis a brief examination a problem arises. The aforesaid states of motion time and matter though disordered are still existent before existence, this in and of itself merely leaves one with the same problem. Was time always present (the term is used very loosely) or can it only be present in a cognitive sentient being? Yet even from that line of reasoning one notion becomes clear ,that even if time occurs purely as a product of our own high level of awareness, can it be trusted? Granted we know we have some idea of what time is ,but does our experience of it correlate with the thing(time) as it is?

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