In: A. Pedretti (ed.) Of of: A book conference.
Zrich, Switzerland:
Princelet Editions, 2136, 1984.
086
Thoughts about Space, Time,
and the Concept of Identity
I
Space, we believe, is where things are and Time what provides the stretch for them to
be there when we look again.
By saying things are or are there, we convince ourselves that they exist and
what exists, we intend, must do so, irrespective of our perceiving or experiencing it
in any way. Mount Etna towers over Sicily regardless of any Sicilians, the Monalisa
smiles whether the Louvre is open to the public or not, and the river Inn flows down
the Engadin even when no one dangles a toe in its icy water. All that (and more) is
what we hold to be reality. The mountain, the painted smile, and in spite of what
Heraclitus said even the flowing river, are supposed to have their place and to
remain what they are. They must keep their identity, must remain the self-same
individuals, or else cease to exist. There does not seem to be much of a problem in
this. The pen I hold in my hand does not become another while youre watching it.
You are quite sure of that at least until youve seen a sharper do a sleight of hand
with cards. Then you suddenly realize that things can change their identity under your
very eyes. It is a question of speed and speed, after all, is the quotient of space an
time. The conservation of individual identity may be more of a problem than it
seemed.
Space is the medium in which things maintain or, as the case may be, change
their location; time is the medium in which they must conserve their identity lest they
disappear qua things and be reduced to momentary apparitions.
II
The reality in which things are and perdure is so firmly embedded in the way we think
that it seems downright indispensable. Berkeley, who questioned whether a tree
falling in the depth of the forest made a sound, was met with indignation and ridiculed
as a fool. But, as so often, ridicule and indignation were to cover up a feeling of
unease. Berkeley, indeed, touched a sensitive spot. He had realized that conceptions
such as tree and falling and making a sound contained, as integral parts,
relations; consequently, in order to know any such relations, the knower had to do the
relating.
Ernst von Glasersfeld (1984) Thoughts about Space, Time, and the Concept of Identity
The suspicion that any concept involved some doing on the part of the conceiver
was, it seems, in the air at that time. Vico stated it bluntly: Facts are the result of
facere, which is Latin for to make.. It was an uncomfortable idea. It undermined the
traditional notion of truth and thus the solidity of all one wanted to consider real.
What one makes oneself can hardly be expected to have that perennial reliability one
would like to attribute to the real world.
III
Juan Caramuel, a Spanish nobleman who became Bishop of Vigevano in the second
half of the 17th century, was perhaps the first to speak quite explicitly of the
conceptual constructions of the mind. He was also the first, at least in the Western
world, to realize that a number system does not have to be decimal. Among a dozen he
designed, right up to base 12, there was the binary one which, today, is used by
computers. He seemed to love numbers, and some of his thoughts about the roots of
mathematics and algebra were far ahead of his time. More than 30 years before Vico
and Berkeley published their respective treatises in 1710, Caramuel knew that
number is a thing of the mind. He demonstrated the point by means of a delightful
story:
There was a man who talked in his sleep. When the clock struck the fourth
hour, he said: One, one, one, one this clock must be mad it has struck
one four times. The man clearly had counted four times one stroke, not the
striking of four. He had in mind, not a four, but a one taken four times;
which goes to show that counting and considering several things
contemporaneously are different activities.
If I had four clocks in my library, and all four were to strike one at the same
time, I should not say that they struck four, but that they struck one four
times. This difference is not inherent in the things, independent of the
operations of the mind. On the contrary, it depends on the mind of him who
counts. The intellect, therefore, does not find numbers but makes them; it
considers dif-ferent things, each distinct in itself, and intentionally unites
them in thought.1
I know of no earlier mention of operations of the mind. Locke employed the
term to specify an object of reflection, Vico used it repeatedly in his revolutionary
epistemological treatise2 and Berkeley certainly implied such a constructive activity in
several of the notes in his Commonplace Book3. They all came after Caramuel, and
none of them attempted to specify in any detail what these mental operations could be
and how they might work.
IV
To my knowledge, operational analyses of concepts were provided for the first time by
Jeremy Bentham in his Theory of Fictions. It is there, that I found the following
insight:
No two entities of any kind can present themselves simultaneously to the
mind (nor can so much as the same object present itself at different times)
Ernst von Glasersfeld (1984) Thoughts about Space, Time, and the Concept of Identity
without presenting the idea of Relation. For relation is a fictitious entity,
which is produced, and has place, as often as the mind, having perception
of one object, obtains, at the same time, or at any immediately succeeding
instant, perception of any other object, or even of that same object, if the
perception be accompanied with the perception of its being the same:
Diversity is, in the one case, the name of the relation, Identity in the other
case. But, as identity is but the negation of diversity, thence if, on no
occasion, diversity had ever been, neither, on any occasion, would any such
idea as that of identity have come into existence.4
Here, Bentham does not seem to have found the clearest way of saying what he
had in mind. When I came upon this passage, I had to read it several times before
things fell into place. What he did have in mind is obviously beyond my or anyone
elses reach. But I can try to interpret what I make of his statement.
The insight which, to me, seems so important is somewhat obscured by the
inherent ambiguity of the word same. This has at times confused the clearest
thinkers, because it is not the kind of ambiguity that is usually and easily resolved by
the context. There are, however, contexts in which it does come out clearly. Take, for
example, the two statements: This is the same girl I saw yesterday and She bought
the same dress as her sister. The girl is one and the same individual, seen twice; the
dresses are two, considered equivalent in every respect that one chose to take into
account when comparing them.
Bentham is not concerned with the difference between individual identity and
equivalence. He opposes identity to diversity. Yet, in this passage, he comes very close
to making two further distinctions. He begins by saying that the mind cannot focus on
more than one item at one moment, but makes up for this by relating items registered
at different moments. Relations, therefore, are not perceived but fictitious and he
uses that word in the same sense as Vicos factum (made). No sooner has he said this,
he seems to contradict it by speaking of the mind having perception of one object
and at the same time obtaining perception of another object. The operative word,
here, is obtaining. It is intended actively, as procuring or producing, and it springs
from what is stated at the beginning of the sentence where Bentham introduces all this
as an example of how relations are produced.
Sameness and difference, then, refer to relations, and relations are instituted
or constructed by the experiencing subject. Any such construction is a sequential
affair, a succession of moments of a minds focused attention plus the minds activity
of relating.
There are no two items in the flow of ones experience that could not be
considered the same, nor are there two items that could not in some respect be
considered different. The experiencer is always free to choose the criteria of
similarity. If and when, however, one decides to consider two segments of experience
to be the same, this decision by itself does not yet determine whether one will consider
them two experiences of one and the same individual item or experiences of two
equivalent items.
Ernst von Glasersfeld (1984) Thoughts about Space, Time, and the Concept of Identity
V
The construction of individual identity is perhaps the most crucial in the conceptual
edifice we call reality. William James, who formulated quite a few ideas that shallow,
bigoted psychologists after him tried to bury, was well aware of the importance of this
construction.
Permanent things again; the same thing and its various appearances and
alterations; the different kinds of thing ... it is only the smallest part of his
experiences flux that anyone actually straightens out by applying to it these
conceptual instruments. Out of them all our lowest ancestors probably used
only, and then most vaguely and inaccurately, the notion of the same
again.5
It is remarkable how many contributors to the history of Western epistemology
remained, in this respect, on the most primitive level of reflection. To become aware of
an experience being the repetition of another, certainly requires reflection, if only to
the extent that it requires registering the outcome of a comparison with an experience
that is no longer actual. It does not, however, require the conception of permanent
things. It concerns experience alone, experience segmented into chunks, if you will,
but not items that exist in their own right, independently of the experiencer. I may
judge the pain I have at this moment to be different from the pain I felt last week; and
to make that judgement I do not have to hypothesize that the one comes from my
sinus, the other from an impacted wisdom tooth; in fact, to compare any two percepts,
I do not have to externalize their origin. Nor do I have to believe that these percepts
are images of objects. But, as William James suggested, to do so, greatly helps in
straightening out the flux of ones experience. It also creates the conceptual
structures that are usually called space and time.
VI
I do not want to reiterate here how an experiencer might come to generate recurrent
items that can then be judged equivalent or different. A model that could do that
has been worked out and it includes the conceptual operations that generate objects
and the relational world they need to exist.6
The book to which Jean Piaget gave the title The Construction of Reality in the
Child deals with just that.7 It is a difficult book and part of its difficulty stems from the
fact that books must present ideas sequentially. This one begins with a section on
Permanent Objects, continues with chapters on Space, Causality, and Time, and ends
with one on the resulting Universe that constitutes reality. Though it deals with
different aspects of one and the same development, they necessarily are presented one
after the other and the reader is left with the task of integrating them. Judging by the
vast majority of what has been written about Piaget, his approach to cognitive
development, and particularly his theory of knowledge, it seems that very few readers
were able to accomplish the required integration. (In fact, one gets the impression that
few read much beyond the first chapter.)
I felt it necessary to say this because I believe my conclusions are similar to
Piagets, though I have come to them on a different path and am not particularly
Ernst von Glasersfeld (1984) Thoughts about Space, Time, and the Concept of Identity
concerned whether or not the model I present is applicable to childrens development.
If it should be and I tend to think that it is it merely confirms my belief to have
come up with a viable interpretation of Piagets theory.
VII
The question that remains, then, is this: If an experiencing subject can come to
conceive of repetition, what else must he or she do to conceive of objects or, if we
want to use the traditional term, of things-in-themselves?
In order to maintain that the thing I am picking up now is the self-same
individual item I had in my hand yesterday, even if it has not been continuously
present in my experiential field, I have to do a good deal more than decide that there
is no relevant difference between todays item and yesterdays. What is needed is
precisely a conceptual construction that can substitute for the actual experience of an
items continuous presence. Such a construction is complex, indeed, because it must
satisfy several requirements.
In order to conceive of the continuity of an item that is not being experienced
continuously, the knowing subject must, first of all, have a means to recognize the
experiential items when they turn up again. This, of course, is the mechanism of
repetition. The recurrence of comparisons that yield the judgement This is an item I
have experienced before, will lead to the abstraction of whatever it is that is used to
recognize the item in its repeated occurrences. Depending on what other tasks such an
instrument of recognition is supposed to perform, it is variously called a template, a
concept, or a definition. The point that matters in the present context is that any
such instrument of recognition, once it is assembled, may serve also as representation.
I insist on the hyphen, because without it the word has been persistently used by
more and less naive realists who want to make us believe that representations are
mental images of things that lie outside. In my way of speaking, instead, representation simply means presenting again, on an imaginary level, something that
is not available as immediate experience.
Re-presentations play an important part in perception because they enable the
perceiver to recognize items when only part of their necessary components is
actually being perceived at the moment. Re-presentations make it possible to
complete experiences so that they can be considered a repetition of a prior one, and
they make it possible to conjure up, for instance, a visual experience when the visual
field is blank. But and I want to emphasize this they can consist of nothing but
experiential material which, in one form or another, they produce as a re-play. Thus,
there is no basis for the assumption that re-presentations arise as internal images of
an outside world; instead, it seems quite plausible that they constitute the material
which the cognizing subject externalizes in the construction of reality.
Only when one has abstracted a more or less permanent re-presentation of an
item from repeated experiential situations, can one possibly conceive of that item as
being in any sense independent of the flow of ones immediate experience. Such
independence, however, is precisely what must be specifically attributed to the item if
one wants to think of it as continuous irrespective of its being experienced.
Ernst von Glasersfeld (1984) Thoughts about Space, Time, and the Concept of Identity
The attribution of that independence brings with it the need for further
conceptual expansion. The continuity of the item implies that it must be at least
potentially accessible even when it is not in the subjects experiential field. That is to
say, there must be a place where it can await being experienced. This place, by
definition, lies outside the range of present experience and constitutes what I have
called proto-space because it has yet no metric and is no more, but also no less, than
a space where externalized items can hibernate while they are not being experienced.
By using metaphorical expressions such as await and hibernate, I have in a
somewhat surreptitious way introduced the conception of time. This is, indeed,
inevitable. It is, however, again a proto-time because, like the primitive conception
of space, it has no metric and serves to provide no more than the mere continuity of
items while they are not themselves involved in the flow of immediate experience. It
does no more than spin a thread from appearance to appearance, outside and beyond
the succession of items and events that the subject registers with deliberate
awareness. It is like a second lane, in which hypothetical continuities can be
maintained, out of sight, as it were, while the subjects attention dwells on the flow of
immediate experience. These hypothetical threads bridge the experiential gaps in
which the items they connect are not actually experienced. As such, they do not
constitute time they are merely threads of individual identity. But they become an
indispensable component of the conception of time when, as threads of continuity,
they are mapped onto the succession of actual experiences registered between the
occurrences of the individual item they connect. Then they are suddenly seen as
running along or through that succession of experiences, lending it both continuity
and extension.
VIII
In this model, the conception or, as Bentham would have said, the fiction of individual
identity is the key element in the conceptual construction of the basic notions of space
and time. Both arise as corollaries of the shift that takes place when the relation of
sameness is transposed from the realm of the subjects experience to the fictitious
realm of independent reality. Whereas experiential items can, indeed, be compared to
one another by the reflecting subject who can then judge them to be the same or
different, items posited beyond the experiential interface are not accessible to any
such operation and must, therefore, remain incomparable in the original sense of that
word. If, in spite of their inaccessibility, one attributes to them a more or less
permanent individual identity, one necessarily has to create a space where they can
reside and a time during which they conserve their identity while other things
occupy the experiencing subjects attention.
IX
Incidentally, this model also throws an interesting light on the concept of change and,
consequently, on the concept of causation. To say that the flowers on my desk have
faded, I must believe that the dry, drooping things I now see are the identical
individuals that I saw bright and dewy a few days ago. If I suspected a substitution, I
Ernst von Glasersfeld (1984) Thoughts about Space, Time, and the Concept of Identity
could not rightly think of fading, nor would I have grounds to look for some agent that
might have caused the change that did not take place.
In fact, the construction of the concept of change requires a judgement of
different with regard to the two experiential items that are considered to be one and
the same in the sense of individual identity. On the other hand, it is precisely the
concept of change that makes possible the attribution of individual identity to
experiential items that are found to be different. Indeed, that attribution has
sometimes nothing whatever to do with sameness in the sense of equivalence and may
be based solely on whatever is taken as evidence of continuity.
A person whose identity is questioned because the years of absence have made
him unrecognizable to his family, will, as a last resort, recount memories of events
experienced in their company. More often than not, this will do the trick, because the
possession of specific memories is accepted as unquestionable proof of individual
continuity. (It does not matter how he looks or sounds today if he remembers how
we climbed the wall and stole the strawberries from the garden next door, he must be
my brother!) It may come as a shock to realize that this proof is valid only because
we do not believe in telepathy. If we considered possible the transmission of thoughts,
memory could no longer serve as evidence of identity.
X
One question that remains is surely this: Why should we be so eager to invest
experiential items with individual identity? There may be several answers, but the one
that seems the most satisfactory to me stems from the suggestion made by William
James when he spoke of subjects straightening out their experience. This
straightening out means making order, attempting to systematize. Whatever form that
effort takes, it must be based on repetition, on the abstraction of regularities, and
therefore on the assumption that experience will always allow us to maintain
something constant. And what could be a more powerful way of keeping an object
constant than simply to assume that, when we are not experiencing it, it must remain
the individual it was when we did experience it. When people first did this, they were
probably unaware of creating the world of being which would for ever supply
philosophers with the unsolvable problems of ontology.
Ernst von Glasersfeld (1984) Thoughts about Space, Time, and the Concept of Identity
References
1 Joannes Caramuel, Meditatio prooemialis. In A.Parea, P.Soriano, & P.Terzi (Eds.),
Laritmetica binaria e le altre aritmetiche di Giovanni Caramuel, Vescovo di
Vigevano. Vigevano: Academia Tiberina, 1977. Originally published, 1670. (p.13; my
translation)
2 Giambattista Vico, De antiquissima Italorum sapientia. Naples: Stamperia de
Classici, 1858. Originally published, 1710.
3 George Berkeley, Commonplace Book (1706-1708). London: Faber & Faber, 1930.
4 C.K. Ogden, Benthams Theory of Fictions. Paterson, New Jersey:1959. (p.29)
5 William James, Pragmatism. New York: Meridian Books, 1955. Originally
published, 1907. (p.119)
6 Glasersfeld, E.von, Notes on the concept of change, Cahiers de la Fondation
Archives Jean Piaget, No.13, 1993, (91-96). Geneva: Fondation Archives Jean
Piaget.
7 Jean Piaget, La construction du rel chez lenfant. Neuchtel: Delachaux et Niestl,
1937.
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