Feeling Time. Amit S. Yahav
compleat tierce or octave, without being able to tell whence he derives his standard. A painter forms the same fiction with regard to colours. A mechanic with regard to motion. To the one light and shade; to the other swift and slow are imagin’d to be capable of an exact comparison and equality beyond the judgments of the senses. (48–49)
Hume argues that we have strong intuitions about temporal quantities that rely on repeated practice, which belie both theoretical understanding and the contingencies of sensory experience. Our estimations of temporal measures, he suggests, are irreducibly practical, arising from doing more than from knowing, from practice more than theory. But if, say, a violinist’s practice is constituted by repeated performances of a number of musical pieces, what counts as an ordinary time-teller’s practice? Hume begins the paragraph indicating that consulting our watches might be the practice at stake: “The various corrections of our measures, and their different degrees of exactness, have given us an obscure and implicit notion of a perfect and entire equality,” he writes. And as Stuart Sherman has documented meticulously, the technology for individual watches and clocks, which was developed in the seventeenth century, became widely available for middle class consumers in the eighteenth century, turning chronometric measuring into a general practice. But if we allow Hume’s analogies the power of illuminating the principle that they compare with, then we might notice that in these Hume does not highlight steady beat or determinate lines or parts—elements of musicians’, painters’, and mechanics’ craftsmanship that more obviously support a numerical estimation of proportion and are thus more obviously analogous to watches and clocks. What Hume is after in invoking a musician’s ear for an octave, a painter’s eye for color, and a mechanic’s sense of motion are discriminations that rely on contrasts rather than on more minutely expressed comparisons but that nonetheless deliver fine-grained assessments. While the sources of these qualities are precise mathematical proportions, the artist gauges them not as such, but rather as the sum of a sensual effect—a particular shade of turquoise rather than blue, or a C-major scale rather than a D-major scale. Thus Hume directs us to think of our temporal assessments more along the lines of estimations of qualities than approximations of chronometry—school time feels different from commute time which feels different from dinner time. Even when Hume discusses temporal measure and extensity, then, he describes these as intuitions comparable to feelings about intensities of sensual effects more than to estimations of length.
Hume returns to questions of time in his examination of the passions in Book II of the Treatise, where he devotes chapters vii and viii of Part III to examining how spatiotemporal position variously shapes our feelings towards objects. If the discussion in Book I stresses that duration has various qualities that arise from varying arrangements of impressions and ideas (whether simultaneous or in succession), then here the varying qualities of experience are determined by the spatial and temporal arrangement of objects in relation to us. Hume argues, for example, that because we can perceive distant space co-extensively with ourselves but the experience of time is necessarily successive, it is harder to think vivaciously of distant times than of distant places. Additionally, because the past flows away from us while the future gets closer to us, it is easier to imagine a future than a past. Such observations may seem surprising for twenty-first-century readers who tend to privilege the ways in which the succession of our ideas repeatedly connects up with memories—whether as compulsive and disturbing trauma, or as sweeter and more deliberate nostalgia. But for Hume—and as we will see in the next chapter, for Richardson and Hutcheson as well—a succession of ideas that aims to project the future seems like an especially valuable ethico-cognitive activity. But in any case, even as we may or may not agree with the content of Hume’s observations about our feelings toward past and future, we should recognize the extent to which he insistently attends to qualities and to the way by which such qualities are generated by compositional determinations. When examining varying strengths of feeling, Hume considers their organization in time; when defining time, Hume thinks about aesthetic qualities that arise from organizational patterns. Throughout the Treatise we find a homology between sensibility and temporal process, and between particular varying manifestations of sensibility and particular varying patterns of temporal process.12
Crafting the Succession of Ideas: Addison and Diderot on the Pleasures of Reading
In a beautiful examination of the way walks—actual physical movement along varying architectural paths—shape Addison’s model of the mind, Sean Silver discovers recurrent interchanges of design and nature, representations and originals. While the walk as a whole follows a predesigned path, certain moments of prospect invite the walker to digress on his own reflective rambles. Good writing in Addison’s estimation works similarly, according to Silver, with a well-ordered composition that includes well-placed opportunities for readers to digress on their own imaginative excursions. “These ‘hints’ are the opportunity, as the etymology of the words suggests, for the reader to be ‘seized’ by a moment; they activate the imagination’s secondary pleasures, those pleasures that occur when ‘the imagination takes [a] hint’—or, we might suspect, is taken by one—‘and leads us unexpectedly into cities or theatres, plains or meadows.’”13 This double principle of the workings of the mind, Silver argues, aligns Addison with his contemporary associationists. In Addison’s model the task of the poet is “to create an image in such a way that it prompts a rich chain of pleasurable associations in the mind of his anticipated reader” (140). Addison’s “empiricist epistemological model adapted to an aesthetics” (136), then, conceives of the mind’s labors through the two principles of well-organized encasement and materialist digression that Silver also finds in Hooke, Locke, and many others.
For my purposes here, Silver’s appraisal of Addison is especially valuable, as it brings us very close to recognizing the temporal dimensions of Addison’s aesthetics. For in the tradition of associationist empiricism, entrusting the poet with eliciting a succession of ideas also entrusts him with mediating readers’ durational experience. But, more like Hume than like Locke, Addison explicitly approaches duration as variously patterned and intensely qualified. And he emphasizes how we can fashion it as such, conceiving of qualitative durational experience as a consequence of crafting. For Addison human time, while contained within an equable flow, does not at all resemble it and is actively and variously shaped by reading materials that prompt varying associative chains.
In his Spectator 476 (5 September 1712), Addison identifies two styles of writing, each differently shaping the experience of its readers by way of the form of succession it promotes:
When I read an Author of Genius, who writes without Method, I fancy myself in a Wood that abounds with a great many noble Objects, rising among one another in the greatest Confusion and Disorder. When I read a Methodical Discourse, I am in a regular Plantation, and can place my self in its several Centers, so as to take a view of all the Lines and Walks that are struck from them. You may ramble in the one a whole Day together, and every Moment discover something or other that is new to you, but when you have done you will have but a confused imperfect Notion of the Place; in the other, your Eye commands the whole Prospect, and gives you such an Idea of it, as is not easily worn out of the Memory. (4:186)14
The nonmethodical discourse gives pleasures that are physical and serial; it is analogized to a day hike in which visibility is limited but surprising new discoveries and motion abound. The methodical discourse gives pleasures that seem at first to be more purely cognitive and synchronic; it is analogized to the static observation of architecture. The nonmethodical discourse shares a temporal medium with the vehicle of its simile, thus emphasizing duration, while the methodical seems initially to promote the illusion of atemporality by virtue of being coupled in a simile of a spatial, rather than a temporal, medium. And yet Addison begins to suggest the temporal stakes of even the methodical discourse by casting its value in terms of the traces it leaves for future recall. If “your Eye commands the whole Prospect,” this matters only because it “gives you such an Idea of it, as is not easily worn out of the Memory.” This suggests that while the nonmethodical discourse supports the succession of ideas in something like a continuous present—“a whole Day together”—the methodical essay supports the succession of ideas in the future; as the future becomes present, one can connect one’s present ideas to past ones more readily with a methodical essay