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ABSTRACT
The Scottish philosopher Norman Kemp Smith (1872–1958) is best known for his 1929 English translation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and for his incisive commentaries on Descartes, Hume, and Kant. These achievements have overshadowed his original philosophical work in several areas, including the experience of time. A realist with idealist sympathies, Kemp Smith developed a non-transcendental version of Kant’s conception of time as a ‘pure intuition’ (though he insisted that temporal perception involved ‘categories’). He employed this conception to solve a problem that was widely discussed in early twentieth-century European and American philosophy, which William James dubbed the ‘specious present’: how can we perceive an extended duration, like a full golf swing, or the cadence of a brief tune, if we only perceive the present? A closely related problem: if we only ever perceive the present, how can we distinguish among the future, present, and past? In this paper, I explain Kemp Smith’s proposed solution, and compare it with two of his contemporary influences: Samuel Alexander and George F. Stout. Finally, I suggest that these problems are still with us, and are likely to be for some time, especially if we ignore the insights offered by earlier discussions.
Acknowledgements
For helpful comments I am grateful to Anthony Fisher, Amy Ihlan, Emily Thomas, and two exacting referees for BJHP. Thanks also to Anthony for sharing with me his transcriptions of several of Kemp Smith’s letters to Samuel Alexander.
Notes
1 In neither of his early nor late studies of Descartes – the 1902 Studies in the Cartesian Philosophy, and the 1952 New Studies in the Philosophy of Descartes – does Kemp Smith deal with the problem of durational perception in detail. He does however criticize Descartes for failing to grasp what Kant later insisted upon, that consciousness of time is involved in all knowledge, simple and complex: “That we possess such consciousness, has never been denied by any philosopher, and is, therefore, the really indubitable fact, by the analysis of which Descartes ought to have started” (Studies, 257).
2 Roy Wood Sellars says Kemp Smith is a “Critical Realist” (“Re-Examination of Critical Realism”, 56). See further Mander’s brief but incisive discussion of Kemp Smith’s ontology in his British Idealism, Chapter 15.
3 Kemp Smith likely sympathized with the following soliloquy in Alexander’s Space, Time, and Deity, which immediately follows Alexander’s criticisms of absolute idealism: “If I may for a moment touch a personal note, I am all the more anxious not to over-emphasize differences from a school of thought in which I was myself bred … As to the terms I should be heartily glad if we might get rid of them altogether” (Space, Time, and Deity I, 7).
4 I should emphasize that my focus will be on Kemp Smith’s account of durational experience in relation to a pair of close influences and interlocutors to whom he dedicated his Prolegomena: Samuel Alexander and George F. Stout. I hope this focus will present a vivid picture of one active debate within early twentieth-century Euro-American philosophy of time, a problem (I will argue) that is still with us. Kemp Smith, of course, had many philosophical concerns, and many other influences. These influences include, besides the Early Moderns he studied: Richard Avenarius, Henri Bergson, Bernard Bosanquet, F. H. Bradley, C. D. Broad, Henry Head, William James, Bertrand Russell, A. N. Whitehead, and so on. Many of these figures are treated in detail in other contributions to this volume of BJHP. For twentieth-century discussions of Kemp Smith’s philosophy and biography, see the three memorial introductions to the collection of Kemp Smith’s papers, Credibility of Divine Existence, especially G. E. Davie, “Significance of the Philosophical Papers”.
5 Kemp Smith uses ‘contemplation’ as a technical term that is basically synonymous with what Locke calls ‘reflection’. Kemp Smith seems to adopt Alexander’s terminology here. See, for example, Alexander, Space, Time, and Deity I, 12–13.
6 In this volume, Fisher presents an interesting account of early twentieth-century discussion of temporal experience in America, especially Adams; but also W. James, J. Royce, G. Santayana, and the Australian Samuel Alexander. “Temporal Experience and the Present in George P. Adams’ Eternalism”. Fisher quotes and discusses passages which show very clearly that Adams was grappling, around the same time as Kemp Smith, with the same problem of temporal experience. For example: “There is something that perdures throughout a succession of next-to-next moments and constitutes them phases or aspects of an individual event. When an event is viewed as an arbitrarily selected slab of process, this perduring somewhat is neglected and abstracted from. The event regarded solely under the rubric of succession, or before and after” (“Temporal Form and Existence”, 223). Fisher sees Adams as drawing ontological conclusions from his treatment of the problem, specifically a form of eternalism. See also Adams’ earlier “Reason and Experience”. As we will see below, Kemp Smith is reluctant to draw such conclusions; rather, his view, following Kant, is that human cognition has a natural grasp of earlier and later times, even if we cannot know the ontological status of other times besides the present.
7 Compare Kant: “The infinitude of time signifies nothing more than that every determinate magnitude of time is possible only through limitations of one single time that underlies it. The original representation, time, must therefore be given as unlimited” (A 32/B 47–8; 75). Smith says explicitly that insofar as we intuit or apprehend time, certain concepts or ‘categories’ are presupposed. For example, “The objects of intuition, time and space, are indeed apprehended as continuous; but, as we find upon analysis, such continuity already involves the employment of the category [of totality, or whole and part] as a condition of its apprehension” (Prolegomena, 134).
8 Much of what recent commentary there is on Kemp Smith concerns his treatment of Hume. Thus, both Wright, “Two Kinds of Naturalism”, and Loeb, “What is Worth Preserving?”, focus critically on Kemp Smith’s account of Hume’s naturalism in the two-part paper’ “Naturalism of Hume”, and his later, more comprehensive, Philosophy of David Hume. Both articles are very useful on Kemp Smith’s reading of Hume, but neither goes into detail on either Hume’s or Kemp Smith’s philosophy of time.
9 Later, Thomas Reid, in “Of Memory” in his 1758 Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, first articulated the problem of the experience of duration in a form bequeathed to the philosophers discussed here. His target in this essay is Locke’s view that we derive our idea of duration from reflection on the train of succession in our ideas (see Locke’s Essay 2.14.4; 182). Reid takes this to involve memory, by which we perceive the ‘distances’ among our successive ideas. Then he raises our puzzle: “If we speak strictly and philosophically, no kind of succession can be an object either of the senses, or of consciousness; because the operations of both are confined to the present point of time, and there can be no succession in a point of time” (Essays, 325–6). See further Anderson and Grush, “Brief History of Time-Consciousness”, 5–10.
10 Compare Kant: “Time is not an empirical concept that has been derived from any experience. For neither co-existence nor succession could ever come within our perception, if the representation of time were nor presupposed as underlying them a priori” (A 30/B 46; 74).
11 So, although Kemp Smith agrees that James’ ‘specious present’ raises an important problem about the perception of duration he finds James’ analysis inadequate in itself, as noted above, and would certainly dispute James’ dismissive remark that “Kant’s notion of an intuition of objective time as an infinite necessary continuum has nothing to support it” (Principles of Psychology I, 642).
12 See Gorham, “Spatial Analogy in the Emergence of Absolute Time”.
13 “Subjectivism and Realism in Modern Philosophy”, 174, in The Credibility of Divine Existence.
14 He seems to make the same point in a letter, dated 31st August 1920, to Samuel Alexander: “In employment of the categories [involved in space and time] the point I had chiefly in mind is not how conceptions can be used in application to intuition, but how the intuitions themselves are possible” (University of Edinburgh Special Collections. Collection 1038, Document ALEX/A/1/1/264.8). Thanks to Anthony Fisher for sharing with me copies of this and other unpublished Kemp Smith letters.
15 “To S. Alexander and G.F. Stout, in grateful indebtedness” (Prolegomena, vii). In the Preface, Kemp Smith acknowledges the important early influence of Bergson (Prolegomena, x), but does not mention him at all in the text. On the other hand, he states: “among present-day writers, my chief debts, in questions bearing directly on the theory of knowledge, are to Mr. Alexander and to Mr. Stout” (Prolegomena, x). See also his letter to Alexander, dated 27th January 1924 (University of Edinburgh Special Collections. ALEX/A/1/1/264/10).
16 In his 1925 review of the Prolegomena, A. O. Lovejoy justly accuses Kemp Smith of equivocation on the subjective versus objective status of sense, especially apprehensions of the past. Lovejoy quotes Kemp Smith and then criticizes him: “When we picture previously experienced happenings and existences, we paint the past time and the distant space in terms of sensa now being experienced by us”. These present entities “render sensible and particularize a time and space which they do not themselves reveal”. (Kemp Smith, Prolegomena, 195). Lovejoy: “True, what we apprehend ‘in and through them’ are the ‘“actual events of the past”, not mental and private objects”. But the “apprehension is described, not as immediate, but as a “picturing” by means of sensa which are private and are now” (Lovejoy, “Review of Prolegomena”, 190). On Kemp Smith’s approach to ‘subjectivism’ see also Davie, “Significance of the Philosophical Papers”, Section III.
17 On the difficult question of time’s reality, for Alexander, see further Thomas, “Space, Time, and Alexander”. On Alexander’s distinction between the actuality of the present versus the non-actual reality of the past, see Fisher, “The Present in George P. Adams’ Eternalism”. For a good overall discussion of Alexander’s philosophy of perception, and Alexander’s disagreement with Stout, see Nasim, Bertrand Russell and the Edwardian Philosophers, Chapter 2.
18 In a short but provocative 1921 book on Spinoza and time, a subject which Alexander frankly confesses is “beyond my competence”, Spinoza and Time, 19, he nevertheless argues that Spinoza failed to grasp the true nature of time: “there is no sense in a duration which is not a duration that is passing away” (Spinoza and Time, 23). In the same text, Alexander suggests that Spinoza should include duration, no less than extension or space, as an attribute of God/Nature. Spinoza and Time, 33; see also 38; and “Lessons from Spinoza”. Thomas briefly discusses Alexander’s proposal to temporalize Spinoza’s God/Nature (“Space, Time, and Alexander”, 554–5).
19 “Reproduction and association, taken merely by themselves, account for the renewed apprehension of what has been apprehended before but they do not of themselves explain the emergence of any really new knowledge. Thus, if B has been perceived as succeeding A, when on a subsequent occasion A is perceived again, then in the absence of any primary reference to the future, the utmost that can result is that A will be thought of as having been followed by B, not as about to be followed by B. B never has in any way been thought of as belonging to the future and therefore association cannot recall it as belonging to the future. On the other hand, if in perceiving A the mind looked onward to a further development of the present situation, B when it came would be identified with this anticipated development. It would initially be apprehended as something future relatively to A. Hence the possibility of its being re- produced in this same relation to A” (Manual, 441).
20 Kemp Smith makes just this point in the Prolegomena, that mere perception of the local ‘before and after’ (what Kemp Smith call ‘protensity’) cannot account for the apprehension of ‘real time’ or full temporal unity (Prolegomena, 111, n1). He makes the same point about the gap between the perception of ‘extensity’ and spatial unity. Besides the Manual, 438–40, see Stout’s “Primary and Secondary Qualities”, 148–53, on the perception of extension or space. See further Nasim, Bertrand Russell and the Edwardian Philosophers, Chapter 1, for a good discussion of Stout on the perception of space, and Stout’s overall philosophy of perception (though Nasim has little to say about the perception of time).
21 See also Fundamental Points in the Theory of Knowledge, where Stout says “the existence of the present feeling cannot be apprehended as being [merely] present; for this involves the thought of its relation to a before and after” (Fundamental Points, 18–19).
22 The brief and testy 1900 Stout-Hodgson exchange in Mind, has received little attention; but see Anderson and Grush “A Brief History of Time-Consciousness”, 21–4. Anderson takes up Hodgson in much detail in “The Hodgsonian Account of Temporal Experience”. Schaar presents an illuminating account of Stout’s early contributions to analytical philosophy, especially logic and mereology. But there is little discussion of time. See G. F. Stout and the Psychological Origins of Analytical Philosophy. See also Passmore, One Hundred Years of Philosophy, 172–202, and Nasim, Bertrand Russell and the Edwardian Philosophers, Chapter 2.
23 Good pre-histories of the problem includes Anderson and Grush, “Brief History of Time-Consciousness”, and Gallagher, The Inordinance of Time. Both include excellent discussions of seminal figures like James and Husserl. See also Passmore, One Hundred Years of Philosophy, 279, and Davie, “The Significance of the Philosophical Papers”, 61–91, on Kemp Smith. On Alexander on space and time see especially Thomas, “Space, Time, and Alexander”, including the bibliographic notes 3 and 4 of that paper; Thomas, “Samuel Alexander’s Space-Time God”; Ruja, “Samuel Alexander's Concept of Space-Time”; and generally, the new collection on Alexander, edited by Fisher, Marking the Centenary of Samuel Alexander’s Space, Time, and Deity.
24 Yet another excellent recent discussion is Phillips’ “Perceiving the Passing of Time”. He brings our attention to the experience of ‘drawn out’ time in accidents and trauma – such as car crashes or (in my own case) falling from a roof – and asks how such experience can be reconciled with the ‘matching’ doctrine of some temporal ‘realists’, that “whenever our experience apparently presents us with an event with a certain duration, our experience itself persists for a matching period of time” (“Perceiving the Passing of Time”, 227).
25 Though, to the contrary, see notes 22–24 above.