Time as Broken in the Middle

08-14-2024

“Seen from the viewpoint of man, who always lives in the interval between past and future, time is not a continuum, a flow of uninterrupted succession; it is broken in the middle, at the point where ‘he’ stands; and ‘his’ standpoint is not the present as we usually understand it but rather a gap in time which ‘his’ constant fighting, ‘his’ making a stand against past and future, keeps in existence.”
(Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. Edited by Jerome Kohn. New York: Penguin Books, 10).

Arendt’s exegesis of the parable ‘He’ by Kafka, yields this evocative expression that time is ‘broken in the middle’. In the parable, which Arendt cites here in the Preface to Between Past and Future, Kafka proposes to the reader that the human person is hemmed in by forces from the past and the future:

“He has two antagonists; the first presses him from behind, from his origin. The second blocks the road in front of him. He gives battle to both. Actually, the first supports him in his fight with the second, for he wants to push him forward, and in the same way the second supports him in his fight with the first, since he drives him back. But it is only theoretically so. For it is not only the two antagonists who are there, but he himself as well, and who really knows his intentions? His dream, though, is that some time in an unguarded moment – and this, it must be admitted, would require a night darker than any night has ever been yet – he will jump out of the fighting line and be promoted, on account of his experience in fighting, to the position of umpire over his antagonists in their fight with each other.”

Arendt interprets this parable as a “mental phenomenon, something which one may call a thought-event.” In other words, Arendt understands Kafka’s parable as describing what happens when we think. When we think about anything – and, Arendt is interested in thinking through political questions – the past exerts a force on our thought. But, contrary to expectation, the past is not some ‘burden’ or ‘dead weight’ placed upon the shoulders of the human person. The past is never simply dead, nor even past. It propels thought into the future and battles with it, which, again, contrary to expectation, drives the human person back into the past and seems to want to be rooted in something in the past. 

Even if the human person is small in comparison with these infinite forces, the insertion of the human person in this parable is crucial. Without the human person, infinite forces would resolve themselves. Time is broken in the middle by the presence of the human person. Even though the presence of the human person is important to this space-time continuum, still the human person dreams of escaping the battleline into a region far above the fighting to the position of an ‘umpire’. Arendt reads this dream as the “old dream which Western metaphysics has dreamed from Parmenides to Hegel of a timeless, spaceless, suprasensuous realm as the proper region of thought.” Although the presence of the human person is what gives meaning to the space-time continuum, the human person has dreamt of escaping the demands of thinking in the battle-line because of the anxiety of inhabiting this space that is broken in the middle.

All of Arendt’s writings can be considered as ‘exercises in political thought’ – which is, indeed, the subtitle to Between Past Future – in which she invites her readers to resist the urge to flee from the battleline of thinking. Arendt’s exercises in thinking are an invitation to remain bound to and rooted in the gap that is opened up between past and future. Inhabiting this broken middle is what makes us truly human. In fleeing away from the broken middle, we risk losing something rather essential to our humanity. In inhabiting the broken middle, we realise that we are ‘the beginning of a beginning’ – to use Arendt’s favourite way of articulating the fundamental capacity, natality. It is natality, which Arendt finds in Augustine’s City of God which makes us human: “[Initium] ergo ut esset, creatus est homo, ante quem nullus fuit [that there be a beginning, the human person was created before whom there was nobody].” In inhabiting the broken middle, we will never arrive at definitive answers to the riddles that perplex us, but we will strive to attempt ever-new answers to the questions that matter. 

About the Author:
Mark Aloysius, S.J., a Jesuit of the Malaysia-Singapore Region who is a postdoctoral instructor at the Department of Theological Studies in Loyola-Marymount University. He is the author of Arendt and Augustine: A Pedagogy of Desire and Thinking for Politics (Routledge, 2024).