Augustine and Heraclitus on the present moment

On the subject of time and our awareness of it, Augustine says the following in The Confessions:

But how does this future, which does not yet exist, diminish or become consumed?  Or how does the past, which now has no being, grow, unless there are three processes in the mind which in this is the active agent?  For the mind expects and attends and remembers, so that what it expects passes through what has its attention to what it remembers…

Suppose I am about to recite a psalm which I know.  Before I begin, my expectation is directed towards the whole.  But when I have begun, the verses from it which I take into the past become the object of my memory.  The life of this act of mine is stretched two ways, into my memory because of the words I have already said and into my expectation because of those which I am about to say.  But my attention is on what is present: by that the future is transferred to become the past. (Confessions 11.28.37-38, Chadwick translation; an older translation is available online here)

So, it seems that for Augustine, for conscious awareness to “attend” to the present moment presupposes also both its “remembering” the immediate past and its “expectation” of the immediate future.  For example, when reciting the twenty third Psalm, my present awareness of speaking the words “…my shepherd…” has the significance and phenomenal feel that it does only because I simultaneously remember just having said “The Lord is…” and also simultaneously expect to follow the words I am speaking with “…I shall not want.”  Awareness of the present moment has intentionality in two directions: it “points” or is “directed” backwards toward the moment that preceded it, and forwards toward the moment that will succeed it. 

Augustine makes a similar point elsewhere, when he says that we cannot hear even a single syllable

unless memory helps us so that, at the moment when not the beginning but the end of the syllable sounds, that motion remains in the mind which was produced when the beginning sounded (De musica 6.5.10, quoted in Roland Teske, “Augustine’s Philosophy of Memory” in Stump and Kretzmann, The Cambridge Companion to Augustine, First edition)

This two-directional intentionality appears to be the key to our sense of the unity of the self over time.  Note that I say, not that it is the key to the self’s unity, but that it is the key to our sense of the self’s unity.  As I’ve said elsewhere, I think the self would in fact persist even if its memory of its past were obliterated.  What would be lost in that case is not its identity, but merely its knowledge of its identity.  The Lockean idea that “who I am” is defined by my memories of the past and plans for the future is bad metaphysics, but it is good epistemology.  Such memories and expectations don’t constitute the self’s identity, but in normal cases (i.e. when one is not suffering from brain damage, mental illness, or the like) they will follow from and manifest its identity.  (They are, to use the Scholastic metaphysical jargon a little loosely, something like “proper accidents” of identity.)  The self’s remembrance of its distant past history and expectation of the carrying out of its long-range future plans is an extension of the memory of the immediate past and expectation of the immediate future of which Augustine speaks.

This two-directional intentionality in the subjective realm of the mind has a parallel in the objective world.  For the Scholastic metaphysician, the natural world is governed by the principle of finality and the principle of proportionate causality.  According to the principle of finality, efficient causes are “directed toward” or “point” forward to their characteristic effects, as toward a final cause.  And according to the principle of proportionate causality, effects “point” backwards, toward their efficient causes.  These principles are, to use Hume’s language (though not his principles), the “cement of the universe” that keeps things and events from being “loose and separate.” 

As I have argued many times, it was the early moderns’ abandonment of immanent final causality -- final causality as an inherent feature (as opposed to an observer-relative feature) of natural phenomena -- that paved the way for Humean skepticism about efficient causality.  As Aquinas argued, if efficient causes were not “pointed” or “directed toward” their characteristic effects, there would be no way to explain why those effects are in fact the ones which characteristically follow.  Things really would objectively be “loose and separate.”  (As usual, see Scholastic Metaphysics for detailed defense of all this Scholastic metaphysics.) 

If “directedness” did not exist even in the mind -- that is to say, if intentionality were an illusion, as eliminative materialism holds -- then the self’s sense of its own unity over time would also be undermined.  Just as the objective world breaks apart into innumerable disconnected distinct existences in the absence of final causality, so too does the subjective world break apart into innumerable disconnected distinct moments of awareness in the absence of intentionality.  Present awareness would not “point” backward to the immediate past or forward to the immediate future.  Its entire content would be limited to the present instant, and there would be no sense of a self that extended beyond that instant.

These implications of Humeanism and eliminativism are, of course, foreshadowed in Heraclitus’s philosophy, at least as traditionally interpreted.  For the Heraclitean, all is flux, and there are no abiding entities.  That includes the self.  There is no “I” that persists over time; there is only an awareness of the present instant followed by an awareness of the next instant followed by an awareness of the next, with no one abiding thing that has all of these awarenesses. 

Now, part of the significance of Augustine’s observation is that it indicates how the Heraclitean account is not true to the phenomenology of the sense of self.  We simply don’t perceive ourselves as existing merely in the present instant, for as Augustine points out, awareness of the present instant also involves in the normal case a remembrance of the past and an expectation of the future.  This two-directional intentionality is built into awareness of the present, and can be absent only when our cognitive faculties are malfunctioning. 

But there is a deeper lesson.  Augustine’s observation also helps us to see why the Heraclitean position cannot really be coherently formulated.  For suppose I try to think the thought that there is no abiding self.  As Augustine would point out, the words “…no abiding…,” as uttered inwardly to oneself, have their significance only insofar as I remember that they were preceded by an utterance of “There is…” and expect that they will be followed by an utterance of “…self.”  Now, these different utterances occur at different times, and are thus the objects of distinct acts of awareness.  But if the Heraclitean position is correct, there is no single abiding self that underlies these acts of awareness.  Thus there would be no one self that could have the thought that there is no abiding self.  The self that begins the thought would not be the same as the self which continues the thought, and neither would be the same as the self that completes the thought.  There would be nothing that actually has that particular thought.  Hence if Heraclitus’s position were correct, no one could so much as formulate it, for no one could last long enough to do so.  And yet we do formulate the position, as is evidenced by the fact that we can entertain it, argue about it, accept or reject it.  The very act of formulating Heraclitus’s position thereby refutes it.

So, Heraclitus was wrong.  How appropriate, then, that in the little montage above, Augustine seems to be hearing Heraclitus’s confession!