The Syntax of Time: The Phenomenology of Time in Greek Physics and Speculative Logic from Iamblichus to Anaximander (Ancient Mediterranean and Medieval ... Neoplatonism, and the Platonic Tradition, 2)

190 Pages·2005·0.69 MB·English

by  Peter Manchester

THE SYNTAX OF TIME
ANCIENT MEDITERRANEAN
AND MEDIEVAL TEXTS
AND CONTEXTS
editors
ROBERT M. BERCHMAN JACOB NEUSNER
STUDIES IN PLATONISM, NEOPLATONISM,
AND THE PLATONIC TRADITION
edited by
ROBERT M. BERCHMAN
(Dowling College and Bard College)
AND
JOHN F. FINAMORE
(University of Iowa)
EDITORIAL BOARD
Donald Blakeley (UCalifornia, Fresno), Jay Bregman (University of Maine)
Luc Brisson (CNRS-Paris), Kevin Corrigan (Emory University)
John Dillon (Trinity College, Dublin), Stephen Gersh (University of Notre Dame),
Lloyd Gerson (University of Toronto), Gary Gurtler (Loyola of Chicago),
Jeremiah Hackett (University of South Carolina), Ruth Majercik (UCalifornia, Santa Barbara)
Peter Manchester (SUNY Stony Brook), Jean-Marc Narbonne (Laval University-Canada)
Sara Pessin (University of Denver), Sara Rappe (University of Michigan)
Frederic Schroeder (Queens University-Canada), Gregory Shaw (Stonehill College)
Suzanne Stern-Gillet (Bolton Institute-UK), Yiota Vassilopoulou (University of Liverpool)
Michael Wagner (University of San Diego)
VOLUME 2
THE SYNTAX OF TIME
The Phenomenology of Time in Greek Physics
and Speculative Logic from Iamblichus to
Anaximander
BY
PETER MANCHESTER
BRILL
LEIDEN•BOSTON
2005
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Manchester, Peter, 1942-
The Syntax of time / by Peter Manchester.
p. cm. — (Studies in Platonism, Neoplatonism, and the Platonic tradition ; v. 2)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 90-04-14712-8 (alk. paper)
1. Time. 2. Time—History. 3. Philosophy, Ancient. I. Title. II. Series.
BD638.M343 2005
115—dc22
2005050179
ISSN 1871-188X
ISBN 90 04 14712 8
© Copyright 2005 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands
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CONTENTS
Preface and Acknowledgments ................................................ vii
Chapter One Two-Dimensional Time in Husserl and
Iamblichus .................................................................................. 1
The Problem of the Flowing of Time .................................. 1
The Flux of Consciousness .................................................... 5
The Transparency of the Flux .............................................. 9
Time-Framing in Locke and Hume .................................... 11
The Dimensions of Transparency ........................................ 15
Two-Dimensional Time in Husserl ...................................... 19
The Figure of Double Continuity ........................................ 22
The Double Intentionality of Disclosure Space .................. 38
Two-Dimensional Time in Iamblichus ................................ 43
Time as the Sphere of the All .............................................. 49
Chapter Two Time and the Soul in Plotinus ...................... 55
Two-Dimensional Time in Neoplatonism ............................ 55
The Schema of Participation ................................................ 60
The Silence of Time in Plotinus .......................................... 72
Chapter Three Everywhere Now: Physical Time in
Aristotle ........................................................................................ 87
Soul and the Surface of Exoteric Time .............................. 87
The Spanning of Motion ...................................................... 91
The Scaling of Spans ............................................................ 96
The Unit of Disclosure Space .............................................. 101
The Soul of Physical Time .................................................. 104
Chapter Four Parmenides: Time as the Now ...................... 106
Parmenides Thinks about Time ............................................ 106
Signpost 1: Being Ungenerated and Unperishing .............. 109
Signpost 2: Whole; Signpost 4: The Coherent One .......... 118
Signpost 3: Now is All at Once and Entirely Total .......... 126
Conclusion .............................................................................. 134
vi contents
Chapter Five Heraclitus and the Need for Time .................. 136
Review: The Path to Heraclitus .......................................... 136
From Husserl to Heraclitus via Iamblichus ........................ 137
Time in Heraclitus: The Circular Joining of ée‹ and afi≈n 141
Heraclitus as a Gloss on Anaximander ................................ 150
Appendix 1 Physical Lectures on Time by Aristotle: A Minimal
Translation .............................................................................. 153
Appendix 2 Fragment 8 of the Poem of Parmenides:
Text and Translation ............................................................ 170
Bibliography ................................................................................ 175
Index ............................................................................................ 179
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I have left these chapters marked by the time it has taken me to
begin, execute, and declare an end to this project. The first three
are essentially the same as those presented in 1984. They are frozen
in time with respect to bibliography, but have been a basis, from
then until now, for my instruction in the doctoral program in phi-
losophy here at Stony Brook, where the positions taken still seem to
be holding up.
The three, the chapters on Husserl, Plotinus, and Aristotle, have
always accompanied a fourth on Parmenides. Until this year, that
meant a reprise to the article I wrote in 1977–78 for the January,
1979 Parmenides issue of The Monist, “Parmenides and the Need for
Eternity,” which was formally the first composition for the project
“the syntax of time.” The Husserl, Plotinus, and Aristotle chapters
were written over the subsequent five years to explain and defend
unconventional ways I had characterized their positions in notes for
that paper, giving the set of four a certain unity and finish. There
was always supposed to be a fifth chapter on Heraclitus, by way of
pointing toward Anaximander and my translation of his famous
phrase, “according to the syntax of time.” This was not forthcom-
ing, however, until Thanksgiving 1999.
By the millennium it seemed the manuscript was complete—that
is until January of this year, when I discovered that the entire expos-
itory strategy of the 1979 Parmenides paper was based on an error.
This meant it could no longer be reprinted. I needed to write my
way out the same door I had come in through twenty-five years ear-
lier. The Parmenides chapter is now entirely new.
Through these years, I have had the sustaining interest and enthu-
siasm of graduate students at Stony Brook. In spring of this year,
in PHI 600 (Ancient Philosophy), our topic was “Heraclitus, Parme-
nides, Empedocles, and the Vocation of Philosophy,” with Peter
Kingsley as guest for a month. As in other PHI 600 seminars on
Plato and Platonism and on Aristotle over the years, the level of
work has been very high. I want in particular to acknowledge the
Greek Cabal that formed around a previous seminar on the Presocratics
in fall 1997, and then refused to die the following spring. This has
evolved into an ongoing extracurricular Greek group, who, among
viii preface and acknowledgments
other things, have helped me review the translations of Aristotle and
Parmenides presented in the appendices for elementary errors. (Any
remaining errors are all substantive, and all mine.) Too many to
name, it is the many doctoral students in philosophy I have met at
Stony Brook from 1986 to the present that I want first to acknowl-
edge, for their stimulation, collegiality, and probing attention.
For the opportunity to work at Stony Brook, I thank Thomas
J. J. Altizer and Robert C. Neville, and for the invitation to partici-
pate in the graduate program in philosophy, Edward S. Casey. They
are all very good at making books, and, together with their encour-
agement, their example should have helped me get this one made
more quickly.
The welcome I have felt in the study of ancient Greek philoso-
phy was extended to me first by the late Arthur Hilary Armstrong,
F.B.A., M.A. in Classics (Cambridge), Gladstone Professor of Greek
in the University of Liverpool, Visiting Professor of Classics at
Dalhousie University, Halifax, whom I met there in the fall semester
of 1975 as a post-doctoral fellow in classics, with support from the
Killam Foundation of Canada, for which I would like to express my
continuing gratitude. I had written a dissertation comparing Heidegger
and Augustine on temporality (The Doctrine of the Trinity in Temporal
Interpretation, Graduate Theological Union, 1972), and had decided
to abandon the Heidegger discussion and look into the Greek back-
ground of Augustine, specifically Plotinus. I wrote to Armstrong saying
I needed an “antidote to Heidegger,” and he was delighted to assist.
It was my privilege to grow into friendship and collaboration with
Hilary Armstrong, starting with that semester in classics at Dalhousie
in which I read Ennead III, 7 On Eternity and Time with him. Initially
he resisted my Husserl-motivated interpretation, but finally warmed
to it. At the time he was struggling to complete the translation of
the Sixth Ennead for the Loeb, and we had much conversation about
philosophical Greek. I owe to him whatever judgment I am able to
exercise about how to balance philosophical and philological consid-
erations when they come into conflict in the reading of ancient texts.
I also learned a great deal from him about directness and clarity of
voice,thoughthese are lessons I have found harder to put into practice.
To all who have cared to see this work complete, my thanks.
Peter Manchester
Stony Brook University
Thanksgiving, 2004
CHAPTER ONE
TWO-DIMENSIONAL TIME IN HUSSERL AND IAMBLICHUS
The Problem of the Flowing of Time
Beginning with Aristotle, philosophers have regularly attempted to
correct familiar ways of speaking that construe time itself as a motion—
a passing, for example, or more canonically, a flowing. They have
just as regularly failed. Because it is sustained by the ancient com-
parison to a river, the notion that time flows is past rooting out.
And yet it remains a difficult, even a doubtful observation.
Time cannot itself be a motion, Aristotle explains, since motions
are faster and slower, and faster and slower are discriminated with
respect to time. Time is not motion, he concludes, but at best “some-
thing about motion.”1
Plotinus rejects even an indirect connection to physical motion.
To make time a feature of motion or something defined in relation
to it (e.g. the measure of motion) turns time into a redundant accom-
paniment, a motion running alongside of every motion.2
Still, a Platonist like Plotinus must confront the systematically deci-
sive text in Timaeus according to which time is a “moving image of
eternity.”3 But Iamblichus, the fourth century Neoplatonist for whose
interpretation of Plotinus we are preparing in this chapter, stipulates
that the “moving” of time is neither like, nor among, sensible motions,
since it is motion with respect to eternity alone.4
Contemporary writing has belabored the point beyond tidy attri-
bution. A recurring objection goes like this: If in some way it makes
sense to say that time flows, then it ought to be possible to say which
way it flows. Does it flow from the past, welling up into the present
and spilling out into the future? Or from the future, looming nearer
1 Physics IV, 10: 218b10–11, 219a10.
2 Enneads III 7 (45), 7–10.
3 Plato, Timaeus 37D.
4 Commentary on Timaeus, Fragment 64 (Dillon). Iamblichi Chalcidensis in Platonis
Dialogos Commentariorum Fragmenta, Ed. John M. Dillon (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1973).