Философское антиковедение и классическая традиция
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Abstract: This article seeks to show that the views on time and eternity of Plotinus and Boethius are analogous to those implied by the block-time perspective in contemporary philosophy of time, as implied by the mathematical physics of Einstein and Minkowski. Both Einstein and Boethius utilized their theories of time and eternity with the practical goal of providing consolation to persons in distress; this practice of consolatio is compared to Pierre Hadot’s studies of the “Look from Above”, of the importance of concentrating on the present moment, and his emphasis on ancient philosophy as providing therapy for the soul, instead of mere abstract speculation for its own sake. In the first part of the article, Einstein’s views are compared with those of Plotinus, and with the elucidation of Plotinus’ views provided in the Arabic Theology of Aristotle. The second part of the article studies Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, which, contrary to recent interpretations, is indeed a genuine consolation rather than a parody thereof. The Consolation shows how the study of the Neoplatonic philosophical curriculum can lead the student along the path to salvation, by awakening and elaborating his innate ideas. To illustrate this doctrine, a passage from the little-known Pseudo-Boethian treatise De diis et praesensionibus is studied. Finally, after a survey of Boethius’ view on fate and providence, and Aristotle’s theory of future contingents, I study Boethius’ three main arguments in favor of the reconcilability of divine omniscience and human free will: the distinction between absolute and conditional necessity, the principle that the nature of knowledge is determined by the knower, and finally the doctrine that God lives in an eternal present, seeing past, present, and future simultaneously. This last view, developed primarily from Plotinus, is once again argued to be analogous to that advocated by contemporary block-time theorists on the basis of Eisteinian relativity. God’s supratemporal vision introduces no necessity into contingent events. Ultimate, objective reality, for Boethius as for Plotinus and Einstein, is atemporal, and our idea that there is a conflict between human free will and divine omniscience derives from a kind of optical illusion, caused by the fact that we cannot help but think in terms of temporality.Keywords: Plotinus, Boethius, Einstein, Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a way of life, Philosophy of time, Aristotle, future contingents, free will, predestination, innate ideas, Pseudo-Boethius, De diis et praesensionibus, necessity, Proclus, Porphyry. I. Einstein and the Plotiniana Arabica on Time and Eternity 1. Panofsky on Serapis In a classic article,0 Erwin Panofsky dealt with the interpretation and ancient sources of the painting entitled “Allegory of Prudence”, now in London’s National Gallery. Attributed to Titian,0 this work depicts a male head with three faces – elderly, middle-aged, and young – which is associated with the heads of a wolf, lion, and dog respectively. The work’s Latin inscription: “The present acts prudently on the basis of the past, lest it disfigure future action”0 makes it clear that the three animal heads correspond to the three main divisions of time: past, present, and future. Before giving a history of the manifestations of this symbolism throughout the Middle Ages and into the period of the Counter-Reformation, Panofsky sketches its ancient origins. He identifies the main source of this iconographical tradition in a passage from the fifth-century Latin author Macrobius (Saturnalia I, 20, 13-16), adding that other details of the painting are to be sought in ancient cult statues and other figurative representations of the Hellenistic Egyptian divinity Sarapis. Macrobius informs us that the statue of the Alexandrian god Serapis or Sarapis, who is to be identified with the sun, was accompanied by the figure of a three-headed animal. Of the beast’s three heads, the largest one in the middle was that of a lion; on the right was the head of a dog, and on the left that of a wolf. All three heads were surrounded by a serpent, whose head reached up to the god’s right hand, by which he dominated the monster like a dog on a leash. Macrobius tells us that of the three animal heads, the lion signifies the present because of its power, violence, and burning impetuousness; the wolf’s head signifies the past, since the past snatches away the memory of things; finally, the dog represents the future, which flatters us with hope like a fawning pet. Macrobius gives no interpretation of the serpent that surrounds this beast, but since we are told that time obeys its auctor, we must, I think, understand that Serapis/Sol is the creator of time. Panofsky,0 following Macrobius, therefore interprets Titian’s image as follows: If a snake surrounds the body from which the three heads emerge, it is the expression of a higher unity, of which present, past, and future are only the modes: temporality, whose lack of beginning and end was symbolized early on by a snake biting its tail. I think Panofsky is essentially right, with one exception: rather than “temporality” or duration, the serpent probably signifies the absence thereof; that is, eternity. If this is right, we thus have a conception, dating from the fourth or fifth century AD at the latest, in which time is considered as secondary to and embraced by eternity. On this view, time, with its divisions of past, present, and future, is an epiphenomenon, while the fundamental reality underlying it is identified as eternity or timelessness (Greek aiôn, Latin aeternitas). 2. Einstein als Beichtvater (Einstein the Confessor) A current debate in the philosophy of time is that between advocates of the so-called block universe view, otherwise known as eternalists, and those, known as presentists, who defend the reality of the passage of time and of its division into past, present and future. I will not enter details of this debate here, but I would like to sketch the contemporary origin of this idea in the theories of Albert Einstein, then compare it with a manifestation of a similar idea, first in Plotinus and then in the Medieval Arabic adaptation of Plotinus’ Enneads that circulated under the title of the Theology of Aristotle. In the process, we’ll glimpse some of the ethical implications of the controversy in both ancient and modern discussions. A popular literary genre in ancient philosophy was that of the consolatio, in one variety of which the philosopher provided arguments intended to alleviate the grief of someone who had recently suffered the loss of a loved one.0 Whether he knew it or not, Albert Einstein was continuing this tradition when, in 1949, he wrote to a Rabbi whose young daughter had died: A human being is a part of the whole, called by us “Universe”, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest – a kind of optical illusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us [...] our task must be to free ourselves from this prison [...].0 Pierre Hadot called attention to this text in a book first published in 2001. As he points out there, the idea that many of our worries and sufferings come from our false sense of isolation from the whole constituted by the universe is typical of Einstein, who elsewhere writes that to determine a human being’s value, we must discover the degree to which he has liberated himself from himself.0 Hadot relates this attitude to the ancient spiritual exercise of the “look from above”, in which we imagine flying high above the scenes of our daily life, in order to realize the pettiness of our day-to-day worries and anxieties. We all have a natural tendency to consider ourselves the center of the universe, interpreting everything in terms of our own likes and dislikes: what we like is good, what we don't is bad. If it rains on a weekend, then that's bad, because it spoils our plans for a picnic: we do not take into consideration the fact that the rain may be good for the region, territory, or country as a whole. For ancient schools of thought such as the Sceptics, by contrast, the key to happiness, says Hadot, is to “strip off man completely, or liberate oneself entirely from the human point of view”.0 In Antiquity, Hadot writes elsewhere, “philosophy was held to be an exercise consisting in learning to regard both society and the individuals who comprise it from the point of view of universality”,0 and “philosophy signified the attempt to raise up mankind from individuality and particularity to universality and objectivity”. Hadot went on to discuss the notion of a “practical physics”, the goal of which was, by contemplating the vast spaces of the universe, to be able to put human worries and problems into perspective, and thereby gain peace of mind. Hadot liked to quote Marcus Aurelius (Meditations 9, 32) in this regard: “You have the power to strip off many superfluous things that are obstacles to you, and that depend entirely upon your value-judgments; you will open up for yourself a vast space by embracing the whole universe in your thoughts, by considering unending eternity”. Michele Besso had been Einstein's closest friend since the days when the two were fellow-university students at Zurich, then worked as patent clerks in Bern. Alter a lifelong friendship, in which Besso served as the main sounding-board for many of Einstein's most revolutionary ideas, Besso died in March 1955, only a month before Einstein's own death, whereupon Einstein wrote a letter of consolation to Besso's family: Now, with his departure from this strange world, he has slightly preceded me once again. This means nothing. For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present and future has only the meaning of an illusion, albeit a persistent one.0 For Einstein, then, at least at this late stage of his life, it seems that ultimate reality is eternal, and time – a mere illusion. It follows that death is also a mere epiphenomenon, that is, a surface phenomenon without substantial reality or importance: As Porphyry claimed in his Sentences, time is a parupostasis. It is worth quoting the exegesis of this quote by Einstein given by the philosopher of science Michael Lockwood (2005). According to Lockwood, our grief at the death of a loved one has three primary motivations. Two of these cannot be alleviated by Einsteinian physics: (1) the thought that we shall never see the deceased person again, and (2) the idea that a valuable life has been cut short.0 Einstein's consolation is, says Lockwood, directed at a third source of grief: the notion (3) that the dead person “no longer exists, is simply not there anymore”. This last source of grief, Lockwood continues, derives from the fact that we equate existence tout court with existence now, at the present moment. However, such a view “makes sense only if we think of time in a way that physics shows to be mistaken”. Einstein contends, and Lockwood agrees, that the terms “past”, “present” and “future” do not express objective differences in time, but relative differences, in the same sense as such terms as “to the east”, “here” and “there” express relative differences in space. But if this is so, says Lockwood, people who have lived in other times are analogous to people who are living now in other places. It follows that death is not the deletion of a person’s existence. It is an event, merely, that marks the outer limit of that person’s extension in one (timelike) spatio-temporal direction, just as the person’s skin marks out the limit in other (spacelike) directions (...) Einstein is urging us to regard those living in times past, like those living in foreign parts, as equally out there in space-time, enjoying the same flesh-and-blood existence as ourselves. It is simply that we inhabit different regions of the continuum. What could have led Einstein and his interpreters to talk this way? 3. Einstein on time: the theoretical background One of my favourite films from the 1970’s was the Swiss director Alain Tanner’s Jonas who will be 25 in the year 2000. In one scene, a high-school teacher walks into his class with a length of blood sausage and begins to chop it into slices with a meat-cleaver: each slice, he explains, can be considered a moment in history. If, following Einstein’s theory of special relativity as modified by his former math teacher Hermann Minkowski, we imagine reality as a four-dimensional spacetime continuum, then we can imagine the sausage as representing a world-tube, or the three-dimensional trajectory traced by a person or thing as he, she or it travels through spacetime. In the case of a conscious being, each slice of the sausage can be imagined as a “now” from that being’s perspective, containing everything in the universe he/she/it considers to be simultaneous at that instant. Yet the compatibility between what two or more moving observers consider to be simultaneous, and even the objectivity and meaningfulness of the very notion of simultaneity, were among the first casualties of Einstein’s special theory of relativity, published in 1905. This theory, which showed that instead of representing the world we live in as specified by four dimensions, three for space and one for time, we must think of spacetime as constituting an indivisible whole, led to a number of other paradoxical results. At speeds close to that of light, time slows down and the length of objects contracts. Most interestingly for our theme, what one observer perceives as space, another one in motion may perceive as time: thus, time and space may transform into one another. Finally, depending on whether or not they are in motion with regard to one another, another observer may not consider as simultaneous two events that seem clearly simultaneous in my own reference frame; likewise, he, she or it may consider an event that seems to me to be in my future as having already occurred in his/her or its past. To exemplify these ideas, I’d like to offer a variation on a thought-experiment presented by Brian Greene (2004). Imagine if you will that I am standing here, but that a friend is standing on a planet 10 billion light years away. Each of us has a handheld device called a simultanophone, which provides a constantly-updated list of all the spacetime events its owner considers to be simultaneous at each instant – for instance, right now my simultanophone lists “Barack Obama going for a walk, Queen Elizabeth snoring, the sun rising over Australia, etc., etc”. Now, my friend, although he is very far away, is – for all intents and purposes – immobile with respect to me: that is, we share the same reference frame. The list of events on his simultanophone is therefore identical to mine, and we consider the same events to be simultaneous. Suppose, however, that my friend gets up and decides to go for a brisk jog away from me: his simultanophone will now indicate events under the subheading “earth” that my phone indicates took place 150 years ago, and should he decide to jog in my direction, his simultanophone will list events that my phone says lie 150 years in the future. Let’s say, moreover, that my friend owns a supersonic car, and decides to hop in and drive away from me at a speed of 1000 miles per hour. His simultanophone will now list events that happened 15,000 years ago in my perspective; and if he should slam on the brakes, turn around, and gun his engine in the other direction, that is, toward me, his list of simultaneous events will include events that, as far as I am concerned, lie 15,000 years in the future. As if these results aren’t odd enough, Einstein’s theory of special relativity also states that there’s no reason why either viewpoint – mine or my friend’s – should be considered right and the other wrong: both simultaneity lists are equally valid. There is no basis on which to decide between them. Such phenomena are far from being the only relativistic effects affecting time and simultaneity: others are brought about when one observer is imagined to travel at speeds approaching the speed of light, such as the famous twins paradox. But the simultaphone phenomenon seems particularly revealing. In the words of Brian Greene (2004, 138-39): If you buy the notion that reality consists of the things in your freeze-frame mental image right now [i.e., in my example, the list of simultaneous events that appears on your simultaphone], and if you agree that your now is no more valid than the now of someone located far away in space who can move freely, then reality encompasses all of the events in spacetime. In other words, if another observer in motion with regard to me can already regard as present to him events that I think are in the future, then there’s a sense in which future events already exist, and past events still exist. In the words of Greene, “Just as we envision all of space as really being out there, as really existing, we should also envision all of time as really being out there, as really existing, too (...) the only thing that’s real is the whole of spacetime”. As Paul Davies has written, such considerations seem to leave us no choice but to consider that “events in the past and future have to be every bit as real as events in the present. In fact, the very division of time into past, present and future seems to be physically meaningless. To accommodate everybody’s nows (...) events and moments have to exist ‘all at once’ across a span of time” (Davies 1995, 71). Or in the words of Hermann Weyl (2009): The objective world simply is, it does not happen. Only to the gaze of my consciousness, crawling upward along the life line of my body, does a section of this world come to life as a fleeting image in space which continuously changes in time. If we leave aside the scientists and turn to literature, perhaps the best portrayal of the block-time view appears in Kurt Vonneguts's Slaughterhouse-Five, when Billy Pilgrim describes the perspective of the Tralfamadorians: The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on earth that one moment follows another like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever. Once again, we are reminded of Pierre Hadot’s “view from above”, by means of which, the soul is “capable of observing the totality of space and time”, and “has no fear even of death” (Hadot 1995, 242). The view from above turns out to resemble what Huw Price (1996) has called the “view from nowhen”, that is, the ability to consider reality as characterized by the simultaneity of the block-time view, rather than the fleetingness of a flowing “now”. |
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