Time is one of the richer and more enduring of philosophical topics because it is one of the more enduring of puzzles. “What, then, is time?” asked Augustine of Hippo, awe and uncertainty in his voice. “If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks me, I do not know.”
He might well have added to this plaintive cry that if someone else were to offer to tell him what it is, the explanation would prove equally unhelpful. For example, the American Heritage Dictionary gives us this definition: “A nonspatial continuum in which events occur in apparently irreversible succession from the past through the present to the future.” Clear as mud! And that is one of the more straightforward definitions one can find. The statements of present-day philosophers—when they can be persuaded to provide definitions at all—are likely to be hopelessly impenetrable to the layperson.
To be fair, though, the difficulty is not the fault of the philosophers. The difficulty lies in the object itself. Augustine was right about that; there is something vexingly and permanently elusive about time. How is it that we all can know what time is, but cannot venture anything definite about it? Is time something substantial, that has an existence entirely apart from us? Or is it, as Kant argued, merely one of the preexisting cognitive vessels into which the stuff of human experience is poured? Who can say?
So, given all this uncertainty, how does it happen that our public speech these days is now festooned with references to something confidently called “real time”? How is it possible that we can presume to be so certain about what counts as real when it comes to something we cannot even define?
Oh, but it’s really quite simple, you might say. To see an event in “real time” merely means witnessing an event as it is happening: not in a video recording being played back later, not on a tape delay, not drawn from memory, but in a manner that unfolds simultaneously with the event itself. But there is an aura of something more to it. This is, after all, real. To see something in real time is a token of its authenticity. When the comedian Bill Maher calls his popular weekly television show “Real Time,” it is his way of implying that the show’s contents are au courant, flowing in tandem with the moment, fresh and frank, with nothing stale or borrowed.
But there are other ways to think about time and our proper relationship to it. To begin with, it is by no means pedantic to point out that more than a century ago—in 1905, to be exact—the very concept of simultaneity was transformed by modern physics into something quite different from what it had been since at least Newton’s day, and different from what is still tacitly presumed in today’s usage of the term real time. After Einstein, the classical concept of a homogeneous universal time that is the same for all observers was overthrown by the theory of special relativity; as a consequence, claims of simultaneity would henceforth depend on the observer’s frame of reference and include a consideration of such recondite factors as the speed of light.
Sure, we use other long-antiquated images, such as the rising and setting of the sun, that are at odds with our scientific understanding of the natural world, because those images are more agreeable to our Lebenswelt, our lived reality. But a term like real time hints at a pretension of scientific precision.
Nor is this Einsteinian objection to our adoption of real time the most important one to be made. Leave science aside; how has it come about that the live broadcast is to be considered more real than the recorded or remembered one? If time is something internal, something applied by us to our experience of the world, shouldn’t our most real understanding of time reflect that fact rather than acquiesce to an external and metric-driven standard for which clocks rather than human sensibilities end up serving as the ultimate referees?
Aristotle defined time as “the number (arithmos) of movement, with respect of the before and after.” Or we might say, even more simply, that it is the measure of motion, the fundamental metric of change. An abstract and spare formulation, but one that leaves room for many ways of measurement, and for the many forms of human experience. It leaves room for the premodern man who knew nothing of clocks but reckoned time by the movement of the stars and the procession of the seasons, or by the diurnal rhythm of night and day. It leaves room for the French historians of the longue durée, who pay attention to profound changes that move with geological slowness, indeed may have required centuries to unfold, rather than chasing after the “real time” of histoire événementielle, the glittering history of events that may be no more substantial in the end than the shadowy objects that flickered upon the walls of Plato’s cave, never leaving a trace.
Most importantly, it leaves room for the detachment and humane reflection that a diet of too much “real time” can render impossible. Proust, who knew whereof he spoke, put it well: “In theory one is aware that the earth revolves, but in practice one does not perceive it, the ground upon which one treads seems not to move, and one can live undisturbed. So it is with Time in one’s life.” That capitalization suggests he had something more Real than real in mind. Great fiction tells us the truth about ourselves in just that way.
We always risk missing the larger picture when we pay exclusive attention to the passing parade, or become completely enveloped by the everyday. It is a perennial problem. But the problem has particular salience for us today, surrounded as we are by countless inducements to distraction. Do we really believe that the meaning of our lives comes to us most reliably through a steady immersion in snatches of “real time,” complete with quantified and time-stamped certifications of their “reality”? Or does such immersion prove to be the source of endless unreality, like computer-generated diversions that cripple our capacity to imagine for ourselves, and draw us to play games in which, as in Vegas, “the house always wins”?
Which understanding of time is most “real”? Is it the “objective” sense of time that is regulated mechanically and measured and certified by clocks? Or is it the deeper sense of time that follows a different rhythm, drawing upon a blend of memory, historical consciousness, imagination, anticipation, and experience? These are questions that I suspect Augustine would have found far less perplexing to answer. So should we.