Antiquity and the Meanings of Time

The sense that events or judgements can be viewed from a ‘God’s-eye view’ authorial position ‘outside’ time may underlie our sense of their intelligibility, but if not subject to interrogation can give rise to a determinism that can be experienced in life no less than in literature. We saw in Chapter 3 that one form such interrogation could take was the hypothetical question ‘what if...?’ This chapter extends that argument by looking first at the current vogue for counterfactual history, taking as its text Livy’s discussion of what might have happened had Alexander the Great lived and turned his attention westwards, which I examine primarily for what perspectives can be developed from it about historical methodology. Far from being the marginal exercise it has often been taken to be, counterfactual thinking starts to look central to historical interpretation – if, that is, the behaviour of historical actors itself is seen already to have a narrative aspect. This section brings into dialogue with Livy Jorge Luis Borges’s famous story ‘The Garden of the Forking Paths’, which forms a bridge to the second section in which this assumption is explored in relation to one philosopher, Galen Strawson, who is convinced that ‘life’ does not have this narrative aspect, and another, Martin Heidegger, who in his theory of temporality, I suggest, seeks to confine the authorial viewpoint ‘inside’ time and make it the basis of how human beings order their lives and behaviour.

Let us begin by recapitulating a few points that will be developed further here. The use of the indicative, in the essential surplus of knowledge that plays around its use in narrativising what we think we know, brings with it intimations of a deterministic perspective: ‘Oedipus killed Laius at the point where three roads meet’. Hypothetical questions such as ‘what if Oedipus had reached the point where three roads meet a few minutes earlier?’ or ‘what if it wasn’t Laius that Oedipus killed?’ are ways of interrogating the determinism we read out of or into Sophocles’s play. ‘What if...’ questions are at the centre of the recent debate over what has come to be known as ‘counterfactual history’ and its methodological implications for the writing of history more generally. What if the Emperor Trajan had exploited the steam technology that was available to him?¹ In a detailed historical survey which introduces a collection of counterfactual historical essays,² Niall Ferguson suggests that it is by no means a recent phenomenon, though often explicitly presented as marginal to mainstream historiography. For all its vogue in recent times, it remains a sub-genre of historiography, safely corralled in collections that give graphic warning of their provenance.³ So-called ‘mainstream’ history in an avowedly counterfactual mode is less common,⁴ though counterfactual speculation is a feature, albeit often an implicit one, in what Ferguson characterises as revisionist works of history, ‘not altogether surprisingly, in that most revisionists tend to be challenging some form of deterministic interpretation.’⁵ Revisionism will be one of the major themes of this section.

Amongst historians, counterfactual history is variously regarded indulgently as a jeu d’esprit in which reductive explanations (Cleopatra’s nose, in Pascal’s famous example) humorously play with the limits of plausible explanation; or dismissively as a ‘parlour game’, or as ‘Geschichtswissenschlopff, unhistorical shit’, by E.H. Carr and E.P. Thompson respectively, both socialist historians with deep ideological commitments to the form of their explanation. Ferguson suggests a link between their methodological commitment to determinism in historical explanation and their antipathy to counterfactual speculation.⁶ He relates the current popularity to the rise in interest in the role of narrative in historiography – itself a manifestation of the ‘linguistic turn’, the renewed interest in modes of representation that marks the critique of realism and determinism in both the humanities and the sciences. He sees its counterpart in physics in chaos theory,⁷ which suggests that even within deterministic systems, specific initial conditions can soon give rise to unpredictable outcomes even when successive events are seen as causally linked.⁸ So-called ‘chaotic’ systems are, in an image we shall shortly be examining, non-linear.

The ‘what if...?’ question mobilises the revisionist critique of determinism in historical narrative, but also in critical interpretation and methodology – where it can meet with an equally supercilious reaction, as we saw in Chapter 3. As Ferguson’s survey shows, once you start looking for instances of counterfactual speculation, they start presenting themselves readily even in historical writing that methodologically embraces a deterministic stance. One of the most famous instances in a classical text comes in Book 9 of Livy’s history of Rome from its foundation, and it will form the basis for a discussion here that goes beyond the limits Ferguson allows himself. As noted in Chapter 3, Livy offers an explicitly providential viewpoint on the events he narrates, though the phrase ut opinor suggests that the providential viewpoint is a matter of authorial faith (1.4.1). In the strictly annalistic, or year-by-year, form Livy’s narrative adopts, it has reached the late fourth century BC in Book 9, and the Romans’ wars against their neighbours, the Samnites. Livy tells of the infamous disaster of the Caudine Forks, when the Roman army was trapped in a valley with narrow defiles at either end which the Samnites blocked once the Romans had entered it. The soldiers were spared their lives only by submitting to humiliating terms and the ignominy of going under the yoke as the Samnites jeered, before returning to a hostile reception in Rome (9.2–7). After a heated debate amongst the Roman leadership about what to do next, the Romans march back into Samnite territory, the enemy are reduced in a siege, and forced in turn to go under the yoke (9.8–15). ‘Scarcely any other victory of the Roman people is more glorious for its sudden reversal of fortune,’ Livy remarks (9.15.8), and much of the credit for this is given to the consul Lucius Papirius Cursor. Livy devotes an extended eulogy to him (9.16.11–19), which concludes, ‘People even mark him out in their minds as a match in generalship for Alexander the Great, if Alexander had turned his weapons against Europe after he had conquered Asia’ (quin eum parem destinant animis magno Alexandro ducem, si arma Asia perdomita in Europam vertisset).

Comparisons between great Greeks and Romans is a favourite theme in classical literature,⁹ but this one has drawn attention for the surprise of its introduction (prompted by Livy’s own remarks, it is usually referred to as a ‘digression’) and for the counterfactual premise of the comparison: what if Alexander had turned his weapons to the West?¹⁰ Livy’s answer is triumphantly chauvinistic: Alexander is only accounted continually successful because he died before his luck could change; he had effectively shot his bolt after the conquest of the East, and was becoming progressively more unstable; but above all, each of the Roman generals he would have encountered, and there were many of them, was his equal, and he would have been trounced (9.17–18). Whatever one thinks of the historical insights the exercise affords, there is undeniably a strong sense of the ‘retrospective wishful thinking’ to which Ferguson suggests counterfactual thinking can be prone.¹¹ This is emphatically a discourse of desire: Livy (fore)sees Alexander’s defeat as inevitable, to the even greater glory of Roman history. The counterfactual question, far from putting under interrogation Livy’s deterministic story of Rome’s inexorable rise to world domination, serves to endorse it.

There is a supplementary counterfactual here: what if Alexander had lived and turned his weapons to the West?¹² Chronologically, the war against the Samnites and the disaster of the Caudine Forks roughly coincides with the death of Alexander after the conquest of the East (323BC), so, within an annalistic framework, it does not seem wholly arbitrary to introduce the question at this point.¹³ But why introduce it at all? Why invest what could be seen as just a ‘coincidence’ with such weight? Livy’s methodological uneasiness is explicit and worth close attention (9.17.1–2):

nihil minus quaesitum a principio huius operis videri potest quam ut plus iusto ab rerum ordine declinarem varietatibusque distinguendo opere et legentibus velut deverticula amoena et requiem animo meo quaererem; tamen tanti regis ac ducis mentio, quibus saepe tacitus cogitationibus volutavi animum, eas evocat in medium, ut quaerere libeat quinam eventus Romanis rebus, si cum Alexandro foret bellatum, futurus fuerit.

Nothing could seem less to have been the object of my research [quaesitum] from the outset [principio] of this work [operis] than that I should turn aside [declinarem] more than is right [plus iusto] from the order [ordine] of events and, by interspersing the work [opere] with embellishments, that I should seek out [quaererem] pleasant detours [deverticula amoena], as it were, for my readers and mental relaxation for myself; but the mere mention of so great a king and commander calls out into the open those thoughts which I have often silently cast my mind over, so that it’s a pleasure [libeat] for me to inquire [quaerere] what would have been the outcome for Roman history if war had been waged with Alexander.

The pursuit of pleasure and the pursuit of knowledge are here set against each other. The imagery suggests that writer and readers are on a journey together, and that this episode will lead them to stray from the route. A deverticulum is where one would break one’s onward progress for a rest; the addition of the adjective amoenus suggests that such a place would be, as travel guides solicit us, ‘worth the detour’.¹⁴ This ‘digressive’ counterfactual episode is a jeu d’esprit, a distraction from the serious business of what, after all, Livy twice refers to in this passage as his ‘work’ or ‘task’ (opus). There are two journeys involved here, and both follow the same ‘route’. One has been made by the ‘order’ of the ‘things’ themselves, the events of Roman history (ab rerum ordine is picked up by Romanis rebus later in the sentence). Their route is a direct one (ordo refers to the succession of events, but can mean a straight line).¹⁵ This dictates the itinerary to be followed by the second journey, which is that of Livy’s work itself as it moves from the past (the foundation of the city) to his own times (the present of the work’s composition in the time of Augustus), mapping those events in its rigidly chronological, annalistic framework.

The route and destination dictate also his rate of progress, and explain his reluctance to turn aside (the verb declinare suggests deviation from a route). Livy’s massive history, which covers more than seven hundred years, actually needs to move rather more quickly than ‘the events themselves’ if he is to catch up with them, which he never quite does, for the writing of his history itself takes time, and he only has a single life’s span. His narratorial ‘present’, towards which he is journeying, has slipped in Book 9 some years since he began Book 1 in about 30BC, and will slip the best part of his lifetime (he died in 17AD) by the time he gets to the final book, Book 142, which deals with the events of 9BC. Detours are thus rarely to be indulged, for he is always playing catch-up.¹⁶ Apart from the delay it involves, this counterfactual episode, which introduces the prospect of protracted wars against Alexander that spread far into the future of this counterfactual byway, sits uneasily within the annalistic form of the work. The inhospitality to the episode of the annalistic framework, and the intrusiveness of wishful thinking, is seen, for example, in Livy’s eagerness to add to the list of contemporary great Roman generals who could have defeated Alexander those of the generation after Alexander’s actual death in 323BC. This leads Livy to invent a war between Carthage and Alexander before he can turn his attention to Rome, in order to use up time, so that, in this imagined scenario, those generals too would be able to confront him.¹⁷ Narratives of the past may need, as Augustine puts it, to make the truth (veritatem...facere), but the last thing a historian wants is to be seen to make it up, and Livy is in danger of laying open to unwelcome scrutiny the aspect of desire and fulfilment that is part of his fictive craft. Knowledge of Roman history, the professed object of his search or quest (the verb quaerere is used three times in various forms), will best be served if he follows the same route as precisely as he can (repetition without difference is the ideal to which his work aspires, just as, he believes, the events themselves repeat Fate), and so he must crave indulgence for this break in the journey, and present it, precisely, as a methodological aberration, a wandering from the theoretical path (Greek hodos) which he has set himself to follow.

Livy’s work has a point from which it sets out, a starting point (principium), ‘from the foundation of the city’, but, in terms of a journey whose destination is already known, principium shades from ‘beginning’ to ‘guiding principle’ in 9.17.1. His methodology is, to use the journey imagery, the route-map which will take him by the direct route to the destination, which he already knows, because he is, in part, already there, as his narrating self looks back on his narrated self trying to catch up. If Roman history has a pre-ordained destiny, a route along which History’s events can march (to use Kant’s image), so does the author of the Ab urbe condita. In the opening sentence of the preface to Book 1, he sets himself the task of writing the history of Rome, and is already looking forward, very cautiously, to looking back on himself from the imagined moment of completion: ‘Whether I am about to undertake a task worth the effort if I shall have completed the writing of the history of the Roman people from the beginnings of the city I don’t quite know, nor, if I were to know, would I dare to say it’ (facturusne operae pretium sim si a primordio urbis res populi Romani perscripserim nec satis scio nec, si sciam, dicere ausim). The image of the journey in Book 9 gives us a momentary glimpse of the process by which Titus Livius fulfils his self-appointed destiny of becoming ‘Livy, the historian of Rome’s rise to power’.

To indulge in a brief detour at this point is attractive not simply because it coincides with the time of Alexander’s actual death. Thematically, it is an interesting moment as well. The narrative of the Caudine Forks, which immediately precedes the counterfactual episode, tells of how the Romans were going to the aid of their allies in Luceria, deep in Samnite country. Two routes, we are told, were available to them, one through the Caudine Forks, the other skirting the Adriatic through open country, though ‘long almost in proportion to its safety’ (9.2.6). The Romans take the direct route, which results in disaster – though if one takes a slightly longer view, the vengeance they subsequently take on the Samnites for their humiliation leaves them stronger, eventually, as the narrator from his vantage point is aware. But scroll back a little, and you will reach a point, a turning point, if you will, where the decision was made to take the shorter, more dangerous, route rather than the longer, and safer, one. From the perspective of the Romans as they approach it, this is where three roads meet, the road they are on and the fork which will take them in one direction or the other. The decision the Romans make is far from trivial in its consequences.¹⁸ Livy doesn’t – or chooses not to? – narrate the reasons for the Romans’ decision, other than to note that ‘their deliberations were only on the route to be taken’ (9.2.5), moving quickly to the outcome, their entrapment in the Caudine Forks.

Why the reticence? This reference could have prompted a counterfactual question (what if the Romans had decided to take the less direct route?), but in this case didn’t. Elsewhere within the narrative of the Caudine Forks and its aftermath, Livy does focus at some length on the process whereby the historical actors arrive at their decisions, notably the debate amongst the Samnites (to which we will return) about what to do with the Romans when they have become trapped in the Caudine Forks (9.3.3–13). Livy has his methodological approach, one he has on principle decided from the outset to follow, that privileges the narrator’s viewpoint from the vantage point from which he can view events from the perspective he regards as their eventual outcome. From this perspective, the boundaries he has imposed on the episode define it not as ‘the humiliation of the Romans’ but ‘the humiliation of the Romans leads them to turn defeat into victory’. However, if we focus on the brief reference to the two roads, we can ‘recognise’ in it the perspective of those within the narrative who are faced with choice without certain knowledge of the outcome, a perspective he has sidelined. Livy knows, as the Romans involved didn’t, that at a later juncture they did take the alternative route – and it leads to victory.

The narrator too has been faced with choices about how to narrate this episode, though the process in this case is not brought to our attention. When Livy subsequently asks his explicitly counterfactual question about Alexander, he represents himself as approaching a point where three roads meet: faced with a decision whether or not to ask the question, whether or not to stray away from his predetermined course and head off down the side-road, he makes the choice to do so. In so doing, he makes clear that, as a narrator, he is not simply a passive figure who can do no other than follow events. Such counterfactual speculation, he suggests, is an aberration, even though he admits that it has frequently been part of his thought processes (quibus saepe...cogitationibus volutavi animum), albeit a part that he has kept to himself (tacitus) and not brought out into the open (in medium), presumably because he is too obviously ‘making up’ the story he tells of Rome and Alexander. Many readers of Livy follow him in suggesting the rarity value of the episode,¹⁹ though at the price of paying less attention to what he says about his silent cogitations, which concern thinking about what might have happened had some particular circumstance been different. ‘What if Alexander had lived’ is the counterfactual speculation he brings forward for our explicit consideration. But ‘what if the Romans had taken the other road to Luceria’ could provide another opportunity, though in this case it is a ‘road’ Livy himself does not take.

The fork in the road, the point at which it is possible to take more than one direction, is a common trope (a term that itself suggests a ‘turning’) for decision-making, as in Robert Frost’s poem ‘The Road Not Taken’. It is also, as we have seen in the case of Oedipus, a key plot element around which the debate over determinism and free will rages. What follows will take a little time, but is not a digression. Borges’s short story ‘The Garden of the Forking Paths’ is a metaphysical fable that explores this image.²⁰ It consists of two nested and interlocking stories, the outer a spy thriller in which the motive for a mysterious murder is revealed, the inner in which the solution to a scholarly problem is suggested. In the outer story, Yu Tsun, a Chinese spy working in England for the Germans during the First World War, hears that a British agent called Richard Madden has intercepted another German spy, and is hot on Yu Tsun’s trail. Before he is arrested or killed, Yu Tsun must find a way of surreptitiously communicating to the Germans the name of a town in France, the site of British artillery, that they should bomb, but in such a way that the Germans will pay attention to the message amidst the uproar of war, and the British not find out. Yu Tsun’s ruse, as emerges at the end of the story, is to look up a name in the telephone book. However, unlike Augustine consulting the sortes biblicae, Yu Tsun does not open the book at random. He takes a train to the village of Ashgrove, narrowly evading Madden at the station, and finds his way to the house of a Stephen Albert. After conversing with Albert (during which Albert recounts the solution to the scholarly problem which is the subject of the inner story), Yu Tsun shoots him. Just then, Madden arrives and apprehends Yu Tsun. His Chief in Berlin deduces that the name of the town that was to be the target of the German bombs was Albert, and that the news reports of so unaccountable a crime were the means to communicate the secret to the Germans. Yu Tsun has devised a plot, which he resolutely carries through to its end in the full knowledge of the likely consequences for himself, while his Chief, in the classic style of the espionage thriller,²¹ ‘deciphered this mystery’, thus retrospectively re-creating what his agent was up to. Both Yu Tsun’s ‘plot’, prospectively towards its end, and the Chief’s re-creation, retrospectively from the end, are linear, and both involve a strong sense of closure. All this is recorded in a statement dictated and signed by Yu Tsun after his arrest, which also contains his reflections about his experience of time as he has carried out his plot.

The story revolves around three...shall we call them ‘coincidences’? They are, of course, from the internal narrator Yu Tsun’s perspective, though not from the demiurge of this world, the Author Borges’s. As chance would have it, Albert is a Sinologist, who, as it happens, has been studying the work of Ts’ui Pên, who, it turns out, is the great-grandfather of Yu Tsun. Albert relates how Ts’ui Pên was involved, so it was said, in two projects, a novel and an infinite labyrinth, but after his death there was no sign of the labyrinth, and only what appeared to be some rough drafts from the novel. However, Albert turned up a new piece of evidence, a letter in which Ts’ui Pên wrote: ‘I leave to the various futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths.’ Albert concluded that the novel and the labyrinth are one and the same: Ts’ui Pên’s manuscript is not unfinished, but a completed fragment from an infinite book, which represents Ts’ui Pên’s understanding of time – as infinite, a garden of paths forking ‘in time, not in space’,²² as Albert goes on to explain:

A broad rereading of the work confirmed the theory. In all fictional works, each time a man is confronted with several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the fiction of Ts’ui Pên, he chooses – simultaneously – all of them. He creates, in this way, diverse futures, diverse times which themselves also proliferate and fork...In the work of Ts’ui Pên, all possible outcomes occur; each one is the point of departure for other forkings. Sometimes the paths of this labyrinth converge: for example you [Yu Tsun] arrive at this house, but in one of the possible pasts you are my enemy, in another, my friend.²³

Albert’s scholarly theory invokes closure no less than Yu Tsun’s activities and his Chief’s detective work do, but his comments on Ts’ui Pên’s manuscript point to an important difference with Ts’ui Pên which they share: he creates whereas they re-create.²⁴ And herein lies the problem for counterfactual historians as they indulge their creative imaginations. Choose a fork in the road, and follow the path you know was not taken. Is that a direct route to some known destination, or does it fork in turn? And so on: the possible futures proliferate ad infinitum. Allow Alexander to live, and only a little way on you have him waging a war against Carthage. The implication is that after conquering Carthage, he meets inevitable defeat at the hands of the Romans. Livy had the sense to stop there, thus denying posterity the spectacle of Hannibal, the censor from Africa, intoning before a rapt assembly of the Senate and People of Rome, with the vatic pomp accorded only to the native speaker of Latin raised by the dictates of a stern mother, that Corinth must be destroyed.²⁵ Geschichtswissenschlopff!

But...what if the thought processes that go into such speculation are not unconnected with thinking historically more generally? Stephen Albert does the classic thing in the situation he finds himself in. Confronting a stranger in his house (what Derrida would call an arrivant), he keeps talking, keeps the stranger’s attention while trying to work out what to do. So, he explains further to the clearly curious Yu Tsun the meaning of his great-grandfather’s work. At the same time he is thinking out loud as he tries to understand the situation he finds himself in now. Albert suggests two examples to Yu Tsun, the first relating to the possible futures of this situation:

Fang, let us say, has a secret; a stranger calls at his door; Fang resolves to kill him. Naturally, there are several possible outcomes: Fang can kill the intruder, the intruder can kill Fang, they both can escape, they both can die, and so forth. In the work of Ts’ui Pên, all possible outcomes occur; each one is the point of departure for other forkings.

In Ts’ui Pên’s model of time, whenever there are two or more possibilities, each occurs in a different universe: all choices are always made somewhere, every possibility is an actuality, and so universes proliferate ad infinitum.²⁶ The second example is no less significant: ‘Sometimes, the paths of this labyrinth converge: for example, you arrive at my house, but in one of the possible pasts you are my enemy, in another my friend.’ Albert tries to understand his present situation not only by thinking about the outcomes of possible courses of action in the future, but by speculating on possible pasts as well: has Yu Tsun come as a friend or as an enemy? Looking forwards there is a ‘fork’ of possible courses of action; but look backwards, and there is a fork which converges at the point you are at now. Which of two possible paths, Yu Tsun the friend or Yu Tsun the enemy, has led to this point Albert finds himself in? Only time will tell, as what eventuates establishes one of the paths as the ‘correct’ one; and so the direct route to the determined historical past is created – as all but one road at each fork in the past is dismissed as ‘counterfactual’. A narrator who insistently structures his history in terms of a known outcome will give a strong sense of events as determined; contrariwise, if the temporal perspective of the narrated is foregrounded, the element of choice and the quest for understanding and knowledge of their present on the part of those narrated is also foregrounded for our attention.

A frequent feature of Livy’s narrative is precisely that he represents the point of view of his historical actors, through the medium of the speeches he puts in their mouths at what we have got into the habit of calling crucial moments.²⁷ We have seen how Livy doesn’t narrate how the Romans came to the decision to take the shortcut through the Caudine Forks, but he does focus in first on the deliberations of the Romans trapped there (9.3.1–2) and then at greater length on the Samnites wondering what to do with them. He tells us that ‘not even the Samnites’ (ne Samnitibus quidem) had a ‘plan’ for making use of these ‘so happy events’ (tam laetis...rebus, 9.3.4). They are thus uncertain both about what to do in the future, but also how they have come to be in this unexpectedly welcome situation. Here, at any rate, is one reason why Livy may have chosen not to represent the Romans’ debate about the shortcut. We share the Samnites’ puzzlement at the Romans’ unfathomable decision to expose themselves to an unnecessary risk. But consider also that, with his essential surplus of knowledge of what eventually happened, Livy is aware that the counterfactual alternative (why didn’t they take the longer, safer route?) is actualised in the subsequent expedition, when they do take that route (as the brief reference to Papirius marching along the coast in 9.13.6 suggests),²⁸ and achieve victory and revenge.

However, the Samnites themselves do not know what to do in what they might well see as a ‘turn’ of events they had not anticipated. So they agree to send a message to Herennius Pontius, the aged and infirm father of their general Gavius Pontius, asking his advice. Livy has earlier introduced the father as being ‘by far the most outstanding in foresight’ (patre longe prudentissimo, 9.1.2).²⁹ He suggests that the Romans should all be released unharmed without delay. The Samnites reject this advice, and the messenger is sent once more to seek an alternative opinion. The old man then suggests that the Romans should all be put to death. When he has received these replies, ‘contradictory, as if the responses of an ambiguous oracle’ (discordia inter se velut ex ancipiti oraculo responsa, 9.3.8), his son is convinced that the old man’s wits have gone, but he bows to the consensus that Herennius be summoned and consulted in person. When he arrives, he doesn’t change his advice, and speaks only ‘to give the reasons’ for it. His first opinion (which he prefers) would lead to lasting peace with a powerful people by doing them an immense favour (cum potentissimo populo per ingens beneficium perpetuam firmare pacem amicitiamque, 9.3.10); his second would postpone war for many generations while the Romans sought to recover from their losses. Like Stephen Albert in Borges’s story confronted in his home by Yu Tsun, Herennius tries to understand the present crisis in terms of the question ‘have you arrived friend or enemy?’ While the urgency of the situation obliges him to focus his attention on possible futures (spare the Romans or slaughter them?), his preference for the first course of action suggests a possible historicisation of the situation which would configure the Romans as ‘friends’.³⁰ Prospectively, of course, but also retrospectively? Could it be that this possible future also brings into being a past in which the Romans’ war upon the Samnites looks like an aberration? A path which in the past that forked in the direction of ‘enemy’ will have rejoined at this juncture the main road which was called, as roads are in virtue of their destination, ‘friend’? The other alternative conjures up a main road that was always heading directly for ‘enmity’. Gavius Pontius canvasses the old man’s opinion: ‘what if a middle way were adopted’ (quid si media via consilii caperetur, 9.3.11), let the Romans go unhurt, but impose the legal humiliations associated with defeat. ‘That idea of yours,’ the old man replies, ‘is one which neither makes friends nor removes enemies’ (ista quidem sententia...ea est quae neque amicos parat nec inimicos tollit, 9.3.11):³¹ the humiliation will rankle, and the Romans will not be satisfied until they have exacted revenge. This ‘middle way’ is precisely the course the Samnites eventually do follow, and they recognise in the aftermath that they should have heeded the advice Herennius has given: ‘Too late and in vain they praised the advice of the older Pontius, alternatives between which they had fallen’ (9.12.1).

Stephen Oakley suggests that ‘Herennius Pontius is a classic warning figure, resembling many in tragedy’,³² the value of whose advice is only recognised after the reversal of fortune – a peripeteia – has taken place when the Samnites face retribution in the subsequent encounter. This is a reminder of how historiography and other genres cross-fertilise in pursuit of both understanding and effect.³³ Relevant too is Werner Suerbaum’s observation that the ‘warning figure’ is an embodiment within the text of the counterfactual historian,³⁴ though, in the light of my discussion, we could see Herennius as one who is historicising ‘as he goes along’, as a figure not simply of the counterfactual historian, but of the historian tout court. Counterfactuals are explored by historians of every stripe as they go along when they are trying not simply to decide where to go next, but to understand where they have got to now. Cast the mind back to the remark with which Livy introduced the Alexander episode: ‘people even mark him out in their minds as a match in generalship for Alexander the Great, if he had turned his weapons against Europe after he had conquered Asia’ (quin eum parem destinant animis magno Alexandro ducem, si arma Asia perdomita in Europam vertisset). Who are these ‘people’ who are the unnamed subjects of the third-person plural verb destinant? Livy’s contemporaries in their counterfactual ‘parlour games’? Perhaps, as this could be a glance towards the Roman literary genre of the suasoria, an educational exercise in which the student is asked to take on the persona of a figure from history debating the pros and cons of taking a particular course of action at a specified crucial moment in a famous situation. A collection of such exercises and the titles of others survive in the works of the famous rhetorical teacher the Elder Seneca, and the practice extended beyond the rhetorical schools to the literary culture more generally.³⁵ The exercise involves the familiar economy of free will and determinism (the first-person character is confronted by choice, but the impersonator and audience know the outcome of that choice), and does not simply offer rich possibilities of pathos and irony as the character puts forward a vision of the future different from what we ‘know’ happened, but is also a way of subjecting accepted models of historical understanding and of motivation and plausible cause to interrogation through contemplation of antecedent possibilities that were not, in the end, actualised. Faced with the crisis they find themselves in now, the protagonists of the suasoriae are represented also as trying to understand which of the possible pasts still available to them at that moment led to the situation they find themselves in – one of which will determine the choice they make, and how they are viewed historically.

The suasoria had become a formalised exercise in particular social settings, but Livy’s choice of the word destinant could refer to a much broader phenomenon. The syntax of his conditional sentence as a whole is intriguing. The pluperfect subjunctive of the protasis ‘if he had turned...’ gives way to the present indicative of the apodosis ‘people mark him out...’, and this could signify not simply Livy’s immediate present, but a habitual present, with a broader historical frame of reference. A generation after Alexander’s death, Italy was invaded by a Greek king, Pyrrhus of Epirus. Plutarch, in his Life of Pyrrhus, written a century after Livy’s time but drawing on sources that were likely to have been available to him, quotes a speech made in 280BC by Appius Claudius Caecus against a treaty with Pyrrhus:

Where is your usual boldness of speech in the face of all men to the effect that if the great Alexander himself had come to Italy and attacked us in our youth and our fathers in their prime he would not now be celebrated as undefeated, but either fleeing or dying somewhere here he would have left Rome more glorious?³⁶

The implication of these words, if correctly reported, is that already in 280BC the question ‘what if Alexander had invaded Italy?’ was commonplace. Niall Ferguson suggests that counterfactual speculation is only plausible if it reflects future alternatives that can be taken to be ‘real’ in the thoughts of contemporaries, as Livy has taken pains to do in the case of the philosophical arguments of Herennius in the debate amongst the Samnites about what to do with the Romans trapped in the Caudine Forks. In the sense that what actually transpired was often not the outcome that contemporaries expected, ‘the counterfactual scenario was more “real” to decision-makers at the critical moment than the actual subsequent events.’³⁷ What Ferguson regards as ‘the methodological constraint’ of counterfactual speculation (one that he imposes on himself and the contributors to the collection he compiled) is that ‘counterfactuals should be those which contemporaries contemplated’:³⁸ the historian must make no anachronistic assumptions on behalf of his historical characters. Retrospective counterfactual speculation (‘what if Alexander had invaded Italy’) forms part of the argument deployed by Appius Claudius in a debate about what the Romans are to do in the face of the threat posed by Pyrrhus. The habitual present tense of destinant in Livy 9.16.19 may thus be accorded a theoretical aspect: to locate counterfactual speculation about Alexander in the context of the late fourth century BC is not anachronistic. On the methodological level recommended by Ferguson, Livy is exonerated. It also serves to suggest that for people, like Livy himself and students in the rhetorical schools, who are still practising this speculation three centuries later, it is not anachronistic either. Just as Appius Claudius is historicising ‘as he goes along’, deploying a retrospective counterfactual speculation to serve his ideological aims in the present, so too may be the author of the Ab urbe condita. Ruth Morello interprets the significance of the episode in the context of the Augustan principate as an implicit critique of one-man rule.³⁹ An exercise that can seem formal and conventional may not be without repercussions when it is viewed ‘within’ time.⁴⁰

Livy’s own account of how he came to include the Alexander episode allows us to glimpse the temporality of his narrating self, indulging in a time-honoured exercise of counterfactual speculation, but also the temporality of his narrated self, faced with the choice of whether or not to include the Alexander episode. We know the answer to that dilemma, of course, but the glimpse afforded offers us an understanding of the decision and a meta-understanding of theoretical issues involved, as Livy confronts the methodological question associated with counterfactual speculation: does it come upon us as ‘friend’ or ‘enemy?’ In a similar spirit, we could see Ferguson’s musings about counterfactual thinking as marking a point where the practice of history is not sure where it has got to or where it is going, a need to examine possible futures for the discipline which also involves tracing back possible paths which converge on the present aporia – and suddenly we notice coming up behind us and joining us here a path long dismissed as a ‘trivial’ side-road but on closer inspection revealing signs of heavy traffic, the ‘counterfactual’. Could the ‘counterfactual’ turn out to have been the main road ‘after all’? And, pace those who like to see Livy’s episode as the first instance, does the road go back yet further? As Cave remarked of Aristotle’s Poetics, there is an important sense in which the things we see in literature, historiography included, are not there until we see them,⁴¹ until, through the mechanism we refer to as recognition, we ‘realise’ that they have been there all along, had we but known. Even historians long thought to be given methodologically to determinism begin to show signs of a friendly interest in the issues of choice and decision-making. Any methodology for which a universalising validity is claimed creates this effect of drawing attention to traces of the past that have been overlooked previously, or reconfiguring those traces, so that historical actors, and writers, in the past are seen to do what we now believe or want them to have been doing. We make them our own, in that appropriation of the truth Sandor Goodhart cautioned us to be vigilant for.

One further brief discussion will act as a coda to this section. It has, of course, been recognised since antiquity that Herodotus is the ‘father of history’ (Cicero is but the first to refer to him thus).⁴² Does anything he does ‘provide’ evidence for the argument above? As one who is engaged in an emerging style of thinking, the historical, the shape or rationale for which is not yet (even now) defined, his methods presumably do not appear to him fully armed, like Athena from the head of Zeus, but are being developed as he goes along. Like many of his successor historians, he ‘stages’ the decision-making process as a speech or speeches. Let us focus in on the tense debate between the king of Persia, Xerxes, his general Mardonius and Xerxes’s uncle Artabanus (7.8–11) that precedes the invasion of Greece in 480BC, and rehearses the arguments for and against it. Christopher Pelling offers a concise summary of the more remarkable features of this quite extraordinary episode:

No scene shows an uneasy court dynamic more clearly than this, the most elaborate set of speeches of all – and appropriately placed, marking the most momentous decision of the history, for Xerxes has determined to invade Greece. ‘Xerxes has determined...’: the phrasing may seem odd for a debate when he is calling for advice, but the decision has already been taken. ‘I have called you here so that I might pass over to you what I have in mind to do’ (7.8a.2). ‘This is what must be done; but, so that I may not seem to be self-willed, I place the matter before you, bidding anyone of you who wishes to express his opinion’ (7.8d.2). Several phrases in that sentence capture mantras of Greek, especially democratic debate: ‘to express his opinion’; ‘place the matter before you’, literally ‘into the middle’, where all around may regard it as equally theirs; ‘anyone who wishes’, so familiar from Attic decrees. But it is only ‘so that I may not seem to be self-willed’. This is already a travesty of debate, at least as Greeks would understand debate.⁴³

Such a travesty of debate that it would not be unreasonable to assume that Herodotus has made it up, and that nothing of the kind actually took place in the court of a tyrant whose mind was already made up and whose will was binding. The so-called debate may indeed be counterfactual in that brute sense: Pelling goes on to call it a ‘phantom-sequence’, but emphasises that the arguments adduced are not crass, and ‘the complexities only become clear once the later narrative has offered its perspectives.’⁴⁴ But it is not only at the level of the narrative’s, or the historian’s, later perspective. Opinions are expressed by the characters in terms of possible futures, and, in particular, futures that could prospectively turn out to be counterfactual. Thus Mardonius says the Greeks are averse to risk, but should he be wrong, and the Greeks be so foolish as to engage with the Persians, then they will learn that the Persians are the best soldiers in the world.

Herodotus is grappling with the problem of how the Persians came to do what, with the benefit of hindsight, turned out so disastrously in their decisive defeats at the battles of Plataea and Salamis. Put another way, Herodotus is not interested purely in telling what actually happened (his audience knows the Greeks won), but also in tackling the problem that what was to happen, in the determination of Xerxes (and the expectation of others), was not what did happen. The debate is ‘staged’ by Herodotus not in advance of the decision (for the course of action has already been determined – by Xerxes), though well in advance of its consequences. Why does he choose this scenario at all, if the decision has already been made? Artabanus respectfully suggests to Xerxes that, without a debate in which both sides of a question are expressed, it is impossible to choose which the better course is, and that otherwise, one can only accept whatever has been proposed; but if there’s a debate a fair choice can be made. Pelling remarks how the mantras of democratic debate colour the scene. If what will happen, or the truth, is already determined, there is no place for democracy and its debates about what is the better course, or what possible futures lie open; contrariwise, democratic debate asks questions of knowledge, truth – and power. The modern Xerxes who would rule us know that competition is part of human nature and you can’t buck the market, so why have a debate? Herodotus does not permit either his narrated characters or (unlike Livy or Appius Claudius in Plutarch on Alexander) himself as narrator, to indulge in speculation on the basis of a circumstance at that stage already known not to be the case. Nonetheless, his skilful retrojection from the present to the past of the conventions of Athenian democratic debate onto exchange of speeches in the court of Xerxes facilitates the historical elucidation of choice and motivation by evaluating choice in terms of plausible alternatives that were not adopted.⁴⁵

The art of historical narrative, Barthes suggests, is to reduce reality to a point of time. According to Reinhart Koselleck, any such point – any given ‘present’ – is simultaneously a ‘former future’, and this has consequences for the writing of history. As David Carr puts it in his review of the 1985 English translation of Koselleck’s book Vergangene Zukunft (Futures Past),⁴⁶

Because its subject-matter is persons and their lives and actions, it must treat what is ultimately constitutive of them as persons, their possibilities and their future. Thus the subject-matter of history is in an important sense not fact but possibility; or, more precisely past possibilities and prospects, past conceptions of the future: futures past.⁴⁷

As Carr elsewhere suggests, if such temporal configuration inheres in experience itself, then this counts against the view ‘that such structure is overlaid or imposed upon experience by a retrospective and “literary” effort extrinsic to experience itself’.⁴⁸ This is diametrically opposed to Morson’s view that ‘real time is an ongoing process without anything resembling literary closure.’⁴⁹ Carr draws attention to how Koselleck’s views on history are deeply influenced by the German philosophical tradition.⁵⁰ Koselleck does discuss Hegel and Kant, but he never so much as mentions the elephant in this particular room, Martin Heidegger. In any discussion of time and temporality, Heidegger is a very big beast, indeed for some a rogue. He will make his presence visible shortly.

One supposition of this style of scholarly argument, then, is that not only narrators but the historical agents they represent within their work shape action according to the structures of narrative – and so do we in our everyday experience. Some, and my example here will be the philosopher Galen Strawson, strenuously resist this notion. In a trenchant essay entitled ‘Against Narrativity’, Strawson widens the argument to embrace a dizzying array of disciplines:

Talk of narrative is intensely fashionable in a wide variety of disciplines including philosophy, psychology, theology, anthropology, sociology, political theory, literary studies, religious studies, psychotherapy and even medicine. There is widespread agreement that human beings typically see or live or experience their lives as a narrative or story of some sort, or at least as a collection of stories.⁵¹

He cites, for example, the psychologist Oliver Sacks, who says that ‘each of us constructs and lives a “narrative”...this narrative is us, our identities’; the philosopher Charles Taylor, for whom ‘a basic condition of making sense of ourselves is that we grasp our lives in a narrative’ and have an understanding of our lives ‘as an unfolding story’; and Paul Ricoeur, who argues ‘How, indeed, could a subject of action give an ethical character to his or her own like taken as a whole if this life were not gathered together in some way, and how could this occur if not, precisely, in the form of a narrative?’⁵² Strawson first of all sets up a distinction ‘between one’s experience of oneself when one is considering oneself principally as a human being taken as a whole, and one’s experience of oneself when one is considering oneself principally as an inner mental entity or “self” of some sort – I’ll call this one’s self-experience.’⁵³ And this leads to a further distinction, between what he calls ‘Diachronic’ and ‘Episodic’ self-experience, the former that in which ‘one naturally figures oneself, considered as self, as something that was there in the (further) past and will be there in the (further) future’, the latter, by contrast, that in which ‘one does not figure oneself, considered as a self, as something that was there in the (further) past and will be there in the (further) future.’⁵⁴ These he describes as ‘styles of temporal being’ and as ‘radically opposed’.⁵⁵

The world can be divided up, he suggests, into Episodics and Diachronics, and he has no doubts about how he sees himself: ‘I have absolutely no sense of my life as a narrative with form, or indeed as a narrative without form. Absolutely none. Nor do I have any great or special interest in my past. Nor do I have a great deal of concern for my future.’⁵⁶ He is equally confident about others:

Among those whose writings show themselves to be markedly Episodic I propose Michel de Montaigne, the Earl of Shaftesbury, Laurence Sterne, Coleridge, Stendhal, Hazlitt, Ford Madox Ford, Virginia Woolf, Jorge-Luis Borges, Fernando Pessoa, Iris Murdoch...Freddie Ayer, Bob Dylan...Diachronicity stands out less clearly, because I take it to be the norm (the ‘unmarked position’), but one may begin with Plato, St Augustine, Heidegger, Wordsworth, Dostoyevsky, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and all the champions of Narrativity in the current ethico-psychological debate. I find it easy to classify my friends, many of whom are intensely Diachronic, unlike my parents, who are on the Episodic side.⁵⁷

An impressive herd of sheep, to be sure; and the goats don’t look all that bad either. To get some purchase on Strawson’s argument, let’s return to one of his Episodics, Borges, and our old friend (or will he, in the context of this argument, turn out to have been an enemy?), Yu Tsun.

At the opening of the account he has dictated after his arrest, on discovering that a fellow agent has been apprehended and that the ‘implacable’ Madden is after him, Yu Tsun is convinced that he will die that day and is initially at a loss what to do. He goes back to his room and throws himself on his bed, looking through the window at the ‘six o’clock sun’. He recalls his feelings: ‘It seemed incredible to me that that day without premonitions or symbols should be the one of my inexorable death.’ As it turns out, this is not the day of his death, for he lives long enough, at least, to dictate the statement we are reading. But his experience of time is what Morson would call ‘real’ time, in that Yu Tsun experiences no omens or foreshadowing. It also suggests, from what he says subsequently, that his experience of time is what Strawson would call Episodic: ‘Then I reflected that everything happens to a man precisely, precisely now. Centuries of centuries and only in the present do things happen; countless men in the air, on the face of the earth and the sea, and all that is really happening is happening to me...’ There is an Aristotelian feel to his self-centred experience as he recollects it: time as a succession of nows, the past or (except for the certainty of a death he believes imminent) the future not ‘really’ existing. While at this moment, there are ‘countless men’ involved in the war, they have hardly any existence for him; there is little but a residual sense of his own life as part of the ‘total history of the sons of men’, as Augustine put it, of a self that is distended across time in memory and anticipation. For Strawson, we may recall, Episodic self-experience is that ‘one does not figure oneself, considered as a self, as something that was there in the (further) past and will be there in the (further) future.’ But it is a flash of memory, significantly painful, ‘the almost intolerable recollection of Madden’s horselike face’ that banishes what Yu Tsun with the benefit of hindsight dismisses as ‘these wanderings’, and spurs him to action: ‘I said out loud: I must flee.’ The future opens out for him as a time for action, and ‘in ten minutes my plan was perfected.’ He has devised a ‘plot’ with the desired end that he will have alerted (future perfect) his Chief in Berlin. Yu Tsun then relates how his earlier self became the protagonist of the plot he had devised.⁵⁸

In pursuance of his plot, he takes the train to Ashgrove, rushing to catch the eight-fifty. The next leaves at nine-thirty, and he just makes the earlier, unlike the pursuing Madden, whom he glimpses vainly running down the platform as the train departs. The few seconds’ difference make for a close escape, but he now has a precious 40 minutes’ start on Madden. He proceeds through the coaches, and as a man with a mission (emphatically self-imposed), his experience of the present is different from what it had been as he lay on his bed in his room. His attention is heightened, and directed outwards from himself towards his fellow passengers. These he sees not in the abstract as things but as people who show detailed traces, recognisable to him, of life outside their immediate presence in the carriage, traces which suggest a rich diachronic (or, in Strawson’s sense, Diachronic) experience: ‘a few farmers’ (whose occupation obliges them constantly to pay heed to time and the seasons); ‘a woman dressed in mourning’, whose clothing expresses the way she figures herself, considered as a self, in Strawson’s definition ‘as something [sic] that was there in the (further) past’ – a wife – ‘and will be there in the (further) future’ – a widow; ‘a wounded and happy soldier’, looking forward to a future that is so different from the past which has left him maimed. There was also ‘a young boy who was reading with fervour the Annals of Tacitus’, immersing himself, that is, in a literary structure imposed by its author, and eagerly looking forward to what comes next.⁵⁹ As Yu Tsun takes his seat in the train, and thus within a symbolically significant mode of transport heading for its destination without any prospect of deviation, there is nothing for him to do for the duration of the journey but to reflect as, and on, his new-found diachronic self as he moves towards his self-imposed end: ‘I told myself that the duel had already begun and that I had won the first encounter by frustrating, even if for forty minutes, even if by a stroke of fate, the attack of my adversary.’ Living out the plot Yu Tsun has fashioned for himself, Madden’s failure by but a few seconds to catch the same train seems ‘a stroke of fate’. Whereas his earlier episodic self had seen no omens, now ‘I argued that this slightest of victories foreshadowed a total victory’, and, buoyed by that interpretation of events past and future, he also argues that his consequent feeling of ‘cowardly felicity proved that I was a man capable of carrying out the adventure successfully’, thus casting himself forward in his imagination to the moment when he will be able to look back on his enterprise from the vantage point of its successful end and see himself as its brave and resourceful hero all along.⁶⁰

Confusingly for the clear distinction Strawson wishes to set up, Yu Tsun is, at different times and in different circumstances, both an episodic sheep with no story to tell of himself, and a diachronic goat, the hero (or, it may be, from a later perspective the villain) of his own quest, embodying at one moment an Aristotelian take on time, at another an Augustinian one. And, although Strawson pens Borges himself in with the Episodics, Borges’s divergent representations of Yu Tsun’s self and, in ‘The Garden of the Forking Paths’ more generally, of time as both finite and closed and infinite and open could suggest that Strawson has prematurely foreclosed the debate Borges has taken such pains to open up, thus stepping outside that debate and, with the essential surplus he assumes this gives him over Borges, deeming Borges to be really an Episodic.⁶¹ We’re not finished yet. Let us return to Yu Tsun deep in thought on the train to Ashford, philosophising on what it is to be the diachronic self he now finds himself to be, and presenting (as one does) the outcome of those deliberations as directive for humankind hereafter, descriptive is shading into prescriptive ought:⁶²

I foresee that man will resign himself each day to more atrocious undertakings; soon there will be no one but warriors and brigands; I give them this counsel: The author of an atrocious undertaking ought to imagine that he has already accomplished it, ought to impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past.

Morson has a perceptive comment on this: ‘To act resolutely in the present, one must, strangely enough, adopt a species of fatalism. The exercise of will is enabled by the belief (or imagination) that the desired future is in any case already irrevocably decided, indeed, already accomplished.’⁶³ A figure lurks in the shadows here, unobserved by Morson (who never, I think, mentions him in his book), but who looks to the sheepish Strawson, on the three occasions he refers to him in his essay, devilishly like a Diachronic, namely Martin Heidegger, though ‘I do not understand his notion of temporality,’ he concedes.⁶⁴ Well, let’s have a go, keeping Yu Tsun in mind as we do.

The key concern of Being and Time (Sein und Zeit, 1927) is one of the central and long-standing questions of philosophy, ontology: what is Being? Heidegger sees himself as part of a philosophical tradition, and sets his discussion of ontology against that of Aristotle in particular. For Heidegger, Being is not something that is separated from its context in time and place. A hammer has being, and has properties that he calls ‘present-to-hand’ (vorhanden) – light or heavy, and so on – but, more importantly, is an object in use – too light, too heavy, more or less fit for the purposes we might put it to, possible uses and possible ways for it to be. And when things are ‘ready-to-hand’ (zuhanden) in this sense, we don’t pause to contemplate their properties, but just get on with using them in the broader environment in which we situate them in relation to ourselves (unless they aren’t ‘to hand’, or don’t work, when, rather than get on with using them, we are led to think about them – regard them as ‘present-to-hand’ and contemplate the properties they do or do not have). Heidegger’s habitual example of such a broader environment is the cobbler’s workshop, with its hammers, nails and leather, but anyone who works with books will be familiar with the experience of how one treats them as ‘ready-to-hand’, picks them up and opens them at the page one needs without further thought – or suffers a minor existential crisis when they, or what one thought one would find in them, are not there. So also with the tools of our mental environment, ideas, which are ‘ready-to-hand’ when fit for purpose, but when not, oblige us to pause, to halt the temporal flow that is characteristic of the experience of being ‘ready-to-hand’, and view them as ‘present-to-hand’.⁶⁵

The world is full of entities that have being, Heidegger says, but only one being has Being as a concern and frames the question ‘What is Being?’ That is the human being, and so should be the focus of the study of Being. A hammer can’t take charge of its being but a human being is whatever it has decided to be. However, the human being is not disembodied from its context, and its power to decide is not unlimited. Heidegger habitually refers to the human being as Dasein (from the verb dasein, ‘to be there/here’). ‘There/here’ in time as well as place: Dasein doesn’t choose whether to be born, or where, or when, but is ‘thrown’ into the world, and then is, given its circumstances (to which it can respond), its possible ways of being. However, Dasein’s choices can be limited not simply by the circumstances into which it is thrown but by what ‘they’ (das Man) think and do. Fashion, peer pressure, the authority of tradition or whatever – most human beings do what they do most of the time simply because it is the done thing, a condition Heidegger calls ‘fallenness’. In this state of fallenness, ‘inauthentic’ Dasein does what it does simply because ‘they’ do it, whereas ‘authentic’ (eigentlich) Dasein makes up its own (cf. eigen) mind. Dasein is ‘constantly “more” than it factually is’,⁶⁶ always contemplating possibilities, always up to something, even though our usual condition is one of fallenness and inauthenticity. The basic state of Dasein is what Heidegger calls ‘care’ (Sorge), making Dasein ahead of itself, thinking about what to do next, and it is this care that invests the entities around us with significance. The cobbler’s broader environment, his workshop, is not an inert assemblage of things; rather, in relation to the cobbler’s care in completing a pair of shoes, ready-to-hand (and so not the object of his direct contemplation) this hammer is good for driving in these nails. In a broader environment infused with significance by Dasein’s care, those entities may be fellow human beings. Recall Yu Tsun, first on his bed helpless and bewildered: bereft of care, he is locked in the present, and the ‘countless men in the air, on the face of the earth and the sea’ engaged in a terrible war are entities without Being for him. By contrast, later, when he has a plan and is acting on it, each of the passengers he observes on the train is to him a fellow Dasein, up to something as he himself most definitely is, however impassive they, and he, may seem to be in the course of the train journey. And he sees them in terms of their temporality, as human beings in time, with memories, hopes and expectations.

For Heidegger, temporality is of central concern to ontology: ‘We shall point to temporality as the meaning of the Being which we call “Dasein”.’⁶⁷ It is more important when rather than where we are thrown into the world, for we can move from one part of the world to another, as Yu Tsun has done, but we cannot live in the fifth century BC, say, rather than the twentieth or twenty-first AD. But for Heidegger, temporality (Zeitlichkeit), time as experienced by such a being pitched into its existence, is primary, and time in the abstract (Zeit), the time of physical processes, and intersubjective phenomena such as clocks, calendars or chronologies (what Heidegger calls ‘world-time’, Weltzeit) are derivative of it, however much they impinge on us in what we are up to. Recall Yu Tsun’s escape from Madden. The ‘eight-fifty train’ presumably ran in accordance with the timetable every day, but the eight-fifty train has significance, or Being, for Yu Tsun in respect of his plan to evade Madden and kill Albert before he himself is apprehended. In his Introduction to Being in Time, Heidegger sets out his purpose:

Dasein is in such a way as to be something which understands something like Being. Keeping this interconnection in mind, we shall show that whenever Dasein tacitly understands and interprets something like Being, it does so with time as its standpoint. Time must be brought to light – and genuinely conceived – as the horizon for all understanding of Being, and for any way of interpreting it. In order for us to discern this, time needs to be explicated primordially as the horizon for the understanding of Being, and in terms of temporality as the Being of Dasein, which understands Being.⁶⁸

To do so necessitates a reappraisal of ‘the way in which [time] is ordinarily understood...the traditional concept of time, which has persisted from Aristotle to Bergson and even later’.⁶⁹ By this traditional concept of time, Heidegger means Aristotle’s explanation of time as a succession of ‘nows’, and the alternative he proposes has some affinities with Augustine’s notion of the mind’s distentio, though needs to be carefully distinguished from it.

If Dasein is moved by ‘care’ to look to possibilities for action, death marks an end to those possibilities. It need not be felt to be imminent, as it does for Yu Tsun, first in his aporetic state when he helplessly awaits it,⁷⁰ but then as the event that threatens the fulfilment of the plot he has devised. But what Yu Tsun has done in his new-found resolution is, precisely, to emplot the rest of his life, and then insert himself as the protagonist within that plot. A general awareness of death, that at some stage we will no longer be, the attitude that Heidegger calls ‘being towards death’, exerts pressure upon us not to postpone our choices indefinitely, but also, and especially in the case of ‘authentic’ Dasein, informs those choices. Dasein’s awareness of time is not restricted to the present moment, and the immediate choice of what to do next. The attitude of being towards death can prompt a broader review in terms of what one chooses to do with one’s life as a whole. Heidegger envisages Dasein as looking ahead to the future, to the moment of not-being, and from there reaching back through the present to the past. But what choices are to be made in terms of one’s existence as a whole? There are plenty of pre-ordained narrative patterns, ethical codes, careers and so on that one can take off the shelf, as it were, and insert one’s self into (as Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina do);⁷¹ is the cobbler a cobbler just because his father and grandfather were cobblers before him? But for Heidegger, that is what das Man does, and is inauthentic as a result.

Authentic Dasein must become ‘resolute’ (entschlossen, ‘dis- or ‘unclosed’), shunning the ‘talk’ (Rede) of the ‘they’ to survey its life from death to birth in an effort to disclose the possibilities not envisaged by das Man. Of all the possibilities that lie open for Dasein, the roads that might be taken, one is chosen, and for resolute Dasein, it is the road not taken by others. Dasein is therefore to make its life resemble a plot, but not just any old plot, rather one in the course of which it discloses or uncovers, for better or for worse, its authentic (‘own’) self. Recall Yu Tsun once more: he emplots a future for himself that only he can fulfil, and in the course of working out his plot experiences a process of self-disclosure, of who he is. The conversions of Paul and Augustine inform Heidegger’s thinking, and serve to illustrate his notion of Augenblick, the moment of vision which marks the decision of resolute Dasein (though of course, neither Paul nor Augustine themselves would see their future as self-imposed). One might point to Livy, who sets himself to be the historian of Rome’s rise to power from its foundation to his own times, as (already but not yet) an example of resolute Dasein. In his moment of vision at the outset, he wonders whether he will have done something worthwhile if he shall have completed writing the history of Rome; the future perfect, the completed future, is the characteristic mode of resolute Dasein. Livy professes not to know, but embarks on a future filled with anticipation, and in which the choices then made take on the sense of being fated or necessary – as they are, in the sense of being already determined in the moment of vision. Yu Tsun’s plot is, he knows from the prospect of its fulfilment, villainous, but he attests to this sense in his advice: The author of an atrocious undertaking ought to imagine that he has already accomplished it, ought to impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past. For resolute Dasein, its life’s work is mapped out, and it determinedly seeks to follow it through to the end, come what may. Within Heideggerian autobiography and the temporality it constructs, the narrated self is represented as, in the most crucial aspects which ‘disclose’ who one is, in the future of the narrating self rather than in its past, a reversal of Augustine’s autobiographical temporal modality.

Dasein’s temporality has three aspects or ‘ecstases’ (‘standing outside’ or ‘displacement’), which cannot straightforwardly be mapped on to conventional notions of past, present and future, or on to Augustine’s three-fold present.⁷² These conventional ideas are effectively what ‘they’ say about temporality and written into the language we habitually use, so Heidegger plays about with the familiar German vocabulary of time so as to distance himself from it. What ‘they’ call past, present and future do not exist clearly distinguished in and of themselves. For Heidegger, the future is the primary ecstasis: time is time for doing something (recall the connotations of zuhanden), so Dasein rushes ahead towards death, but then bounces back towards itself (Zu-kunft, the ‘future’ as ‘coming towards’),⁷³ a rebound that takes it back also into the past (for which Heidegger’s preferred term is Gewesenheit, ‘having been-ness’) – not the past per se, as having happened once and for all, and gone away (Vergangenheit, ‘having gone away-ness’), but the past that is relevant to the choices that ‘makes’ a moment feel ‘present’. To see the past as vergangen, ‘gone away’, is to regard it as irrevocable, not subject to being called back for re-interpretation, and so under the shadow of necessity, an imposition we can only submit to; to see it as gewesen, ‘having been’, is to regard it as open to our interpretation and decision. Recall my configuration of Herennius Pontius’s advice to the Samnites, which in the version he prefers, rebounds to a past in which the Romans were not (destined to be) enemies but were (potential) friends-to-be.⁷⁴ The German Gegenwart, ‘present’, etymologically suggests ‘waiting towards’, the mark, for Heidegger, of irresolute Dasein, in contrast to the resolute Dasein’s Augenblick. Resolute Dasein’s address of the choices open to it render particular configurations of elements (and not necessarily of the same elements) of the past significant in the light of those choices, and endow them with being in the past, with ‘having been-ness’, but as a having-been that still ‘presents’ itself to us as the possibility of deciding freely. So for Dasein, as well as there being forking possible futures, we must also think of there being forking possible pasts. In the moment of Augenblick, resolute Dasein chooses one of the paths ahead, which links with one of those possible pasts to form a highway from birth to death. Its life is mapped out, and the map can be consulted for the route, to see en route where one has been as well as where one will have been.

For Heidegger, then, the temporality of Dasein is primary, and other notions of time (the World-time of clocks and chronology) secondary and derivative of it. That is not to say that World-time is illusory or unimportant. Livy adopts it (along with its heavy load of metaphysical baggage) as the structure of his history of Rome. It matters crucially to Yu Tsun that he knows he has precisely 40 minutes’ start once Madden misses the train, and when in Albert’s study, he sits facing a tall circular clock: ‘I calculated that my pursuer, Richard Madden, could not arrive for at least an hour. My irrevocable determination could wait.’ He has time to engage with Albert in which he can satisfy the curiosity that Albert has inspired in him, and still complete his plot. The cobbler may keep one eye on the clock so as to finish a repair for a customer in time for it to be picked up, a writer, like Livy, may observe the passage of the years so that he can complete his projected task within the span of life that prospectively remains to him, but still give up a little time to indulge in counterfactual speculation. Chronology also helps us to understand why Heidegger mentions Aristotle, but Aristotle never mentions Heidegger.

Secondary and derivative also in Heidegger’s eyes is Aristotle’s notion of time as a succession of ‘nows’, which, shorn of existential significance, form the basis of no more than units of measurement:

Ever since Aristotle all discussions of the concept of time have clung in principle to the Aristotelian definitions; that is, in taking time as their theme, they have taken it as it shows itself in circumspective concern. Time is what is ‘counted’; that is to say, it is what is expressed and what we have in view, even if unthematically, when the travelling pointer (or the shadow) is made present. When one makes present that which is moved in its movement, one says ‘now here, now here, and so on’. The ‘nows’ are what get counted. And these show themselves ‘in every “now”’ as “nows” which will ‘forthwith be no-longer-now’ and now which have ‘just been not-yet-now’. The world-time which is ‘sighted’ in this manner in the use of clocks, we call the ‘now-time’ [Jetzt-Zeit].⁷⁵

It is not that Aristotle got it wrong. Rather, in making actuality logically prior to potentiality in accordance with a theory of time that emphasises the ‘now’, he got his priorities precisely the wrong way around – though understandably so, for ‘temporality ensnares itself in the Present, which, in making present, says pre-eminently “Now! Now!”’⁷⁶ This is crucial to our ability to plan. If we imagine Livy as saying ‘One day I shall be dead; I must complete my history of Rome by then’, then is ‘not-yet-now’ within a succession of nows, just as ‘I have finished nine books of my history since I began then’, then is ‘no-longer-now’ within that succession. The problem Heidegger has with Aristotle is the way he makes this successions of ‘nows’, with its focus on the present, the basis for his theory of time in principle, and thus as the basis of his metaphysics.

Counterfactual history, with its emphasis not on what happened but on what might have happened, the possibilities that were open to or confronted historical agents, reflects Heidegger’s orientation towards the future (although his writings reflect an ongoing struggle not to do so in principle, and by so doing endow his own notions with universalising metaphysical pretensions).⁷⁷ And this orientation towards the future has consequences for his reading of texts from the past. Heidegger’s own determination to be a great philosopher does not involve him trouncing his predecessors, refuting their arguments conclusively and so relegating them to oblivion. Rather, the texts of past thinkers like Aristotle are to be read with an eye to their possibilities, the possibilities rejected or overlooked as well as the possibilities chosen. Heidegger’s emphasis on the future is again, in these terms, neither right nor wrong, but, in bringing into view what Aristotle overlooked, offers a field of potentiality for subsequent students of time – and, as we know, sets in motion a critique of the dominance in the Western philosophical tradition of the present as the privileged point of perspective and of the metaphysical weight attributed to ‘presence’.

For Strawson, the world is a place where there are ‘Episodics’ and ‘Diachronics’, for Heidegger, it is a place where, like Yu Tsun, you can be ‘episodically’ or ‘diachronically’ as the case may be. Heidegger’s philosophy may be intimidatingly abstract, and unenlivened by the narratives you find in (the also often intimidatingly abstract) Plato, but Being and Time is spectacularly rich in narrativity, for this lies at the heart of Dasein’s sense of self. Practically, the aspiration of resolute Dasein is to be, or more precisely, to have been, a Diachronic. Save that Dasein, being towards death, will never be in the position to pass the absolute, definitive judgement that Strawson passes on himself, since at the point at which such a judgement could be made Dasein will no longer be. And a future Dasein (at any rate, an ‘authentic’ one, orientated towards the future) may see that earlier Dasein not in terms of absolute failure or success, but, as with Heidegger on Aristotle, as a field of possibilities chosen, rejected or overlooked, one who, in the light of the decisions the future Dasein makes, and the potential worlds thereby brought into being, may turn out a friend or an enemy. And so on, ad infinitum. It is this recession to infinity of an ultimate conclusion that makes Heidegger’s metaphysics of time so uncomfortable: one is forever ‘within’ time. The (quasi-)providential – the self, reason, truth – is forever provisional, generated out of an experience of time that looks to narrative to give that experience shape and meaning.

Many philosophers are prepared, even content, to see themselves within time, and their discourse as a historical, and historically contingent, one, amongst them many of those Strawson classes as Diachronics. Insofar as it searches for a transcendent, timeless truth, philosophy must nevertheless negotiate the manifestations of narrativity. Plato does so by embedding his speculations within the elaborately developed settings he gives to his dialogues and through the dramatis personae who engage with each other, so as to present philosophising as going on ‘within’ time, coming to no definitive conclusions and breaking off, to be resumed another day. Though philosophical works may not contain formal narratives, and narrativity may be effaced in certain kinds of philosophical writing,⁷⁸ we need to be on our guard against the idea that it is eliminated entirely. For Richard Rorty, philosophy is ‘a kind of writing’.⁷⁹ Even in its most austere manifestations, it is telling some kind of story, and on the whole philosophers, Rorty suggests, do not make good storytellers: ‘When we do tell stories, they tend to be bad ones, like the stories that Hegel and Heidegger told the Germans about themselves.’⁸⁰ And it can often be their narrativity that persists long after the imperfections of the arguments (in the sense of their lack of completeness) become obtrusive. W.G. Runciman has recently wondered why texts of political theory such as the Republic of Plato, the Leviathan of Hobbes or The Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels have remained canonical and profoundly influential even as their arguments are contested and found wanting. There are no timeless concepts in the Western tradition of political thought, he suggests, but (in a formulation subtly inflected by a Heideggerian critique of the metaphysics of presence) ‘concern about the potential for conflict and disorder which is inherent in all known human societies is timeless’.⁸¹ He expresses the durability of these texts in terms of grammatical modality. If their theory is found wanting in the indicative (‘This is what is going to come about’) or the imperative (‘This is what ought to come about’), they still speak to us in the optative mood (‘If only this were to come about, how much better a place the world would be!’).⁸² It is not simply as discourses of knowledge, but as discourses of desire, for the end, that these texts continue to speak to us. Strawson would, I reckon, be quick to brand Runciman a Diachronic.

In ‘Against Narrativity’, Strawson (in optative mood) would like to eliminate this element. In seeking a final or definitive answer to the question of the self and narrativity, Strawson sets up his terms of reference: ‘I will use “I*” to represent: that which I now experience myself to be when I’m apprehending myself specifically as an inner mental presence or self.’⁸³ By reducing temporality to a ‘now’ divorced from past and future (a problematic notion already for Aristotle) in pursuit of immediate self-presence, Strawson tries to reduce narrativity towards zero, putting an ‘end’ to time either by stopping the succession of ‘nows’ or by transcending their potential infinity.⁸⁴ But only towards zero: the ‘self’ he ‘presents’ is caught up in a process of re-present-ation (‘I will use “I*” to represent’), and remains a self divided into narrating and narrated; ‘I’ has stepped outside ‘I*’ and its temporality so as to circumscribe it. Representation involves making rather than being ‘present’, the bind of the metaphysics of presence that so exercised Plato. And ‘I*’ is so circumscribed by ‘I’ for the sake of argument, the play of desire in which the future obtrudes on the present and the past. Strawson’s Episodic ‘self’ can be, precisely, represented as no less temporal, and textual, than Augustine’s or Heidegger’s.

Inadvertently or otherwise (that issue of the essential surplus of knowledge once more), Strawson puts his finger on this when he talks of ‘styles of temporal being’. Genre is another aspect of being in time. The mimetic drama Oedipus can create effects which would be difficult in a heterodiegetic epic or novel, or in philosophy, and other types of writing have been developed which look to highlight the abstract, the conceptual, the logical, and to occlude the writer and his or her desire. Part of the appeal of genres is that they are to some degree predictable: when a work is assigned to a particular genre (drama, philosophy, history and so on), the structure associated with that genre ‘provides’ a ‘sense of the ending’ against which we read that work – which any particular work can question no less than affirm. That teleological aspect of genre, at the level of form, looks to what Derrida called a predictable, calculable, programmable future, in life and literature alike. Such a future is a modality of the present, but l’avenir may surprise by the content we encounter – the monstrous arrivant which may be the Sphinx at Thebes, the undead Alexander fetching up on the shores of Italy, or Yu Tsun, the figure of Heidegger’s resolute Dasein, at Stephen Albert’s door in a book blandly entitled Antiquity and the Meanings of Time. Like the boy reading Tacitus’s Annals, we all ought to have something sensational to re-read (and re-live) on the train.

4

SELF-DETERMINATION