A long history of time
“The time we have each day is elastic; the passions we feel expand it, those we inspire shrink it, and habit fills it.”
(Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu, t. 4: Sodome et Gomorrhe I et II, 1921-1922)
The 2020 edition of Les Mystères de l’UNIL should have focused on the theme of time. As a partner in the event, the Bibliothèque Cantonale et Universitaire de Lausanne (Lausanne Cantonal and University Library) wanted to offer both the general public and the university public an opportunity to showcase its collections through an exhibition and a double thematic selection. As with all spring events, UNIL’s Mysteries unfortunately fell victim to the measures taken by the Swiss authorities to contain the coronavirus pandemic.
Nevertheless, it seemed a salutary reminder that, in these troubled times of a crisis that is not only health-related, saturated with speeches prophesying the end of the world – or of a certain world – that time, like the world, has a long history. Those in charge of the collections at BCUL’s Unithèque site have therefore maintained the emphasis initially planned, in order to explore simultaneously the apprehension and learning of time by human beings, and the birth and infancy of time and the world. This selection of documents on the long history of time and representations of time in knowledge and culture, in the arts and literature, but also in science, can be found in the Renouvaud catalog.
Time, between objectivity and subjectivity
What is time? Is it a physical, objective and mathematized fact, or a human, subjective and sensitive one? A reality of nature, or a synthesis of human consciousness? Or a complex construction elaborated by human beings to orient themselves in the social world? Intrinsically linked to memory and self-development, time is a notion that human beings acquire by various means throughout their lives, from the earliest age. As babies, we perceive time through the awakening of our senses and the stimulation of our environment. Then, the appropriation of language, which enables us to tell stories, offers us the possibility of constructing a temporal framework to situate events. Finally, education reveals the many facets of time, and teaches us that the origin of the Universe was, among other things, time. But what is the nature of cosmic time? Does time, and by extension the Universe, have a beginning and an end? Finally, isn’t it chimerical to claim to be able to provide answers to these questions? This is what French philosopher Paul Valéry implies, when he describes time as an enigma, an abyss and the torment of thought(Variété V, 1944: 132), while Paul Ricœur writes that “speculation on time is an inconclusive rumination.”(Temps et récit 1, 1983: 21) Despite the vertigo that any attempt to define and delimit time seems to engender, almost all human knowledge has confronted it.
Physical time
Our conception of physical – or cosmic – time is heir to the ideas of Aristotle, Galileo and Isaac Newton on the gravitation of bodies, and Immanuel Kant on classical mechanics. This was re-examined in the 19th century, culminating in Albert Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, which demonstrated the interdependence of time, space and matter. Nevertheless, the theoretical model of General Relativity, however elaborate, does not solve all the mysteries of the Universe. It offers one explanation, opposed by another, provided by Quantum Mechanics. The limitations and aporias of these two theories were the starting point for British physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking’s investigations into the birth and unfolding of the Universe in the second half of the 20th century. Synthesized in his 1988 book, A Brief History of Time, Hawking’s thesis sought to reconcile the two theories within a new, all-encompassing theory, the quantum theory of gravitation, in order to answer the existential questions posed by human beings about the world in which they live and the time at their disposal: “Where did the universe come from and where is it going? Did it have a beginning, and if so, what was there before ? What is the nature of time? Will it ever end?”(A Brief History of Time, 1989: 17).
A time for philosophers
For Heraclitus, time is the driving force of Nature, but above all, it is elusive, as it constantly flees, as expressed in this well-known fragment by the pre-Socratic philosopher: “We bathe and we do not bathe in the same river”(Fragment 12). So, what is time?
In antiquity, a scientific and mathematical definition of time began to emerge. For Plato, time is a characteristic of the sensible world, “a moving image of eternity”, “a certain eternal image progressing according to number”, as opposed to the eternity of being, characteristic of the intelligible world(Timaeus 37d). Similarly, for Aristotle, time is the motor of things, and intimately linked to movement. Rejecting any opposition between the sensible and intelligible worlds, Aristotle nevertheless agrees with Plato on the importance of number in the definition of time, which he defines as “the number of movement according to before and after”(Physics, IV, 219b). From a physico-mathematical point of view, time can be defined as a succession of instants, just as a line is a succession of points. Even today, the philosophy of physics seeks to define the nature of time, taking into account the latest advances in science, as shown by the thesis defended at UNIL by Cristian López in 2019 or the recent book edited by Jiri Benovsky.
Saint Augustine, on the other hand, was interested in lived time, as opposed to time described from a physical point of view. For him, time is a subjective construct of the mind, directed towards the past or the future: “it is memory in relation to what I have said; it is expectation in relation to what I am going to say”(Confessions, XI, 27, 36). It is this subjective time that certain modern philosophers are also interested in. Bergson, in particular, who lectured on the idea of time at the Collège de France, was interested in subjective time, which he defined as “the lived time of consciousness”. This time, which he called duration, is not quantifiable. It cannot be measured. Memory and anticipation mingle with the present to define this lived time: “duration is the continuous progress of the past, which gnaws at the future and swells as it advances”(L’évolution créatrice).
On the one hand, time presents itself as a series of intervals: quantifiable time that lets us know how many days we’ve spent at home since March 13, how many hours we’ve spent video-conferencing, or how much time we’ve spent preparing meals, watching TV series, or teaching our children; on the other hand, we have the lived time of consciousness: this subjective time determines the quality of our days, whether they’re decidedly too short, or interminable. Beyond the temporal norms that enable us to measure time and live together, to the rhythm of seasons, days and hours, lived time also expresses our relationship to ourselves and to the world in which we live, each at our own pace.
Human times
For Kant, time has no objective existence. Human time is the result of a subjective perception of physical or cosmic time and its flow: perception of durations, of the production of rhythms and of temporal order. Nevertheless, the organization of social life is based on the establishment of a conventional time – which varies according to era and culture – to which individuals constantly adhere and refer. For Norbert Elias, the definition of temporal norms and boundaries is a fundamental aspect of the “process of civilization”, and dates back to Antiquity. For Emile Benveniste, time quantified in this way by clocks, calendars or rites, whether religious or secular, is the guarantor of social order: without the markers of the calendar, “our whole mental universe would drift away [and] the whole of history would speak the discourse of madness.”(Problèmes de linguistique générale, 1974: 72). For geographers, temporal conventions are correlated with the spatial dimension and condition human mobility and the way in which individuals relate to, inhabit and invest their environment, particularly in urban space. But alongside this conventional time, human temporalities and individual perceptions coexist that are of interest to the human and social sciences.
Historical disciplines (archaeology, geology, history, art history, history of religions) delve into the “dark abyss of time”, particularly anthropological time (rhythm and domestication of time), and delineate the “regimes of historicity” (Hartog, 2003) that follow one another. This concept seeks to describe, for a given society or social group, the relationship they establish between past, present and future. In Western societies, we usually distinguish between a pastist regime, oriented towards tradition and in force until the end of the French Revolution; a modern regime, oriented towards progress and the future; and a presentist regime, which we have entered since the middle of the 20th century, characterized by growing difficulty in projecting ourselves into a desirable or even conceivable future. The pandemic we are experiencing in 2020 has heightened this difficulty and opened the door to the emergence of countless apocalyptic scenarios predicting the end of (human) times. The latter often reflect various contemporary representations of the past, present and future, which are still largely dependent on the ways in which different religions and cultures have approached the question of time: cyclical, linear, apocalyptic, messianic, eschatological, etc.
Understanding, learning and expressing time
If “[…] time is a complex social construct rooted in social life” (Tartas 2010: 18), its apprehension is the result of learning that begins at birth, as shown by the pioneering work of Jean Piaget. The social sciences, and in particular education and psychology, have made this learning process one of their key areas of study, demonstrating that the question of time is intrinsically linked not only to self-awareness – “being-time” for André Comte-Sponville – and memory, but also to the acquisition of language and speech.
Philosophers, psychologists and linguists all agree that language is a fundamental mediator of temporal constructs. Cognitive linguistics and psycholinguistics are the main fields of study for this capacity, which is unique to human beings. Historical or diachronic linguistics, comparative in essence, describes and analyzes the traces of time in particular languages, either to reconstruct a lost – or hypothetical – original language, or to highlight the multiple strata in the evolution of a language or language family. Finally, since the seminal works of Ferdinand de Saussure and Emile Benveniste, and their extension by the reflections of the Romanist Harald Weinrich deployed in Tempus: besprochene und erzählte Welt(Time : le récit et le commentaire), general linguistics set out to explore the expression of time in language, among other things through the analysis of verbal forms(Théorie des aspects, des modes et des temps) and the “temporal grammar of narratives”, and thus laid the foundations for narratology, which was initially classical, i. This laid the foundations for narratology, firstly classical, i. e. focused on verbally-expressed narratives, and secondly post-classical, i.e. attentive to the plural and transmedia realization of narratives.
Telling and showing time
Constitutive of human experience, the narrative mode, or the ability to narrate, makes temporality, both physical and human, intelligible, as Ricoeur writes: “The common character of human experience, which is marked, articulated, clarified by the act of narration in all its forms, is its temporal character. […] Perhaps even any temporal process is recognized as such only insofar as it can be narrated in one way or another.”(Du texte à l’action, 1986: 12). Some writers have devoted their entire works to the question of time, lost and found, such as Marcel Proust, whose literary experience of temporality inspired George Poulet, a figure of the “Geneva school”, to write his tetralogy Etudes sur le temps humain. Others, like Michel Butor, have used time to renew the aesthetics of the novel. The work of time, or time at work, crosses almost all literatures, from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, from modernity to the present day, and almost all generic forms, from poetry to drama, via the novel, and questions a plethora of authors, from Dante to James Joyce, from Virginia Woolf to Paul Celan, from François Rabelais to Annie Ernaux.
Fictional literature has also exploited the theme of imaginary time travel, a theme that is abundantly present in the history of cinema. Think, for example, of Robert Zemeckis’s Back to the Future franchise(1985), Simon Wells’s adaptation of H. G. Wells’s novel The Time Machine (2002) or Eric Bresse and J. Mackye Gruber’s The Butterfly Effect (2004). And since, in the spring of 2020, the days seem to go by uniformly, why not rediscover Harold Ramis’ Groundhog Day(1993) or escape to the stars with Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2015)?
To find out more about some of these aspects, or to spend your semi-confinement time thinking about time, browse our selection of documents from home at this address. Enjoy your reading!
Joëlle Légeret and Maël Goarzin
