Chapter 3

The Concept of Duration

What makes Klages' view of time particularly challenging is that Klages is not simply offering a theory of time among others. He is demonstrating that our ordinary concept of time involves inescapable self-contradictions—contradictions that reveal the fundamental inadequacy of conceptual thought to temporal reality itself.

This is characteristic of Klages's method throughout his career: to show that rational consciousness, in the very act of trying to grasp reality, systematically falsifies it. The contradictions are not accidental confusions to be cleared up through better definitions. They are necessary consequences of the structure of conceptual thought itself.

The stakes are metaphysical. If Klages is right, then our entire framework for understanding existence, persistence, change, and eternity is built on foundations that collapse under analysis. Not because we've made mistakes, but because thought itself—conceptual, rational, identifying thought—cannot capture the reality it claims to know.

Klages begins with what seems like a simple observation: as long as a thing exists, it exists "always" or it "lasts" as long as it does. This means the thing is the same at any given time point, for whatever reasons.

Already, we encounter the fundamental structure: the thing is characterized by sameness, identity, and persistence. It remains what it is across different moments. This is what we mean by saying it has duration.

But notice what has happened. Time itself is never the same—it does not exist at all; it flows. Time is pure flux, continuous transformation, relentless change. Yet the thing in time not only is, but it also persists in relation to the never-persisting time.

This relationship—the persistent thing in the non-persistent flow—is what we call duration. Duration measures how long the same thing remains the same while time flows past it.

But this immediately generates a problem. To speak of duration, we need at least two different time points. We measure duration by the distance between these points—the temporal span across which the thing remains identical.

Yet time itself has no duration. Time does not persist. It is the very opposite of persistence—it is the flowing that makes persistence measurable, but is itself utterly non-persistent.

This leads Klages to what he calls an "egregious paralogism"—the phrase "duration of time" itself.

Think about what this phrase means. Duration presupposes at least two different time points. So "duration of time" would require time to persist across different time points. But those time points are themselves in time, which means we would need a second time to measure the duration of the first time. And that second time would require a third, and so on into infinity.

The concept of time is thus "afflicted with an indeed unavoidable self-contradiction and therefore can never form the basis of adequate knowledge of temporal reality."

Klages is demonstrating that our fundamental concept—time—involves logical contradiction at its very core. We cannot think time without contradicting ourselves. Yet we cannot stop thinking about time because temporal reality is what we actually experience.

The phrase "duration of time" reveals that thinking is condemned to grasp every being, including temporal being, in accordance with the being of things. The thing is the original something, the model and prototype of the noun in general.

This means we systematically reify—turn into things—concepts that do not refer to things at all: process, fate, life, childhood, old age, youth, morning, evening, spring, enmity, sin, duty, and so forth. We treat them grammatically as if they were substances, entities, beings that persist.

It is built into the structure of conceptual thought itself. The concept requires identity, sameness across different moments. But this structure of identity—the thing-structure—is fundamentally inadequate to temporal reality.

We do not measure the duration of a thing by time, but rather time by the duration of a thing.

Read that again, because it reverses our ordinary understanding completely.

We think we measure how long something lasts by consulting time—looking at clocks, counting days, marking years. But actually, we capture two points in time and connect the awareness of their succession. We do not capture their temporal distance directly. We only imagine it according to the duration of unchanging, persistent things.

Or according to the duration of a process, which in turn presupposes a time-stable thing—the clock mechanism, the planetary orbit, the atomic oscillation.

Outstanding logicians, Klages notes, have recognized that the so-called uniform progress of time is merely an assumption whose justification stems solely from its suitability to explain factual coincidences and successions.

Whether the flow of real time is uniform, ever-accelerating, or completely irregular, no measurement of the objectified could determine in the slightest. We assume uniformity because it makes our calculations work, not because we have access to time itself.

This reveals "not so much limits of knowledge but rather its complete inadequacy to the reality of time."

When we consider time in terms of something lasting, we find ourselves able to consider the line it would be accordingly—completed with each now. But we are unable to establish a starting point for it.

According to this notion, time "extends" from a beginningless infinity to the present moment, thus being of one-sided infinity—or much more, both finite and infinite.

This is not a paradox to be resolved. It is a contradiction that reveals "the incompatibility of the elements of the concept of time, namely the ungrasped reality of time with the grasped boundary of time, through which alone we can relate ourselves mentally to it."

With memory, Klages says, we have already left inevitable contradictions and entered "the ground of those mythologies of the mind, which are based on an independent notion of duration."

Duration has its conditional right for the world of temporal existences. But it immediately leads to "abysses of bottomless absurdity" once used detached from these.

Consider: every now of our life is in an instant already behind us, so we must continually add the piece of its temporal distance from the present now to our duration. If we forget that duration applies only to existences, but for time concerns only its relation to these, we will be tempted to lend our growth in existential duration to time itself.

Time will then appear to us under the image of a river that flows from past into future, with the now as the foam crest of its moving front, gaining stretch by stretch anew.

This prejudice is so deeply rooted that Klages must demonstrate the inevitability of assuming a precisely opposite direction of the time stream.

Language leaves no doubt. Using expressions like "time flows," "the past lies behind us," "the future comes," "the past goes"—these unmistakably suggest that the flow tears every momentary now away backwards and into the past.

If it were true, as popular opinion has it—"One, two, three in quick succession / Time runs, we run with it"—we would never be able to age, because we would eternally be in the same now. There would be no duration and existence due to the absence of different time moments.

This assumption, however, cannot be avoided if we align the growth direction of our supposed duration with the movement direction of time and sustain the present moment as the moving hem of time's current.

The now would no longer be a "fixed time point" to which we could ever return, but would be the same with the flow of time "in itself"!

Our actual consciousness of constantly increasing duration, therefore, demands that we consider the existing within us as something timelessly standing, which marks the points that the current of time continuously tears into the past.

The temporal capability within us does not run with time, but time runs past it, as it does past anything—and indeed from the future into the past. What we call duration is merely the measure of our standing within time expressed through it.

Having adopted the completely opposite idea—that we accumulate duration as time flows past us—nothing stands in the way of considering the notion of "infinite duration." And thus the plan is laid out for the most absurd desires for immortality to find fulfillment.

Ask the "common man" what he means by personal immortality, and the answer is that he hopes to continue existing indefinitely after his death.

Not only ordinary people believe this, but half-philosophers at least speculate about it. As for actual thinkers, Klages notes acidly that one of the most praised built an entire system on the explicit confusion of time and duration, attempting to interpret purely temporal phenomena of cosmic life from the perspective of unstoppable increase in existence—thus involuntarily comparing them to the well-known penny given at the time of Christ's birth with compound interest.

This is almost certainly a reference to Bergson's Creative Evolution, whose concept of durée Klages is systematically demolishing. But the critique applies to any philosophy that treats duration as if it could be infinite, as if it could accumulate without limit.

Klages distinguishes two concepts of eternity, both entirely different from "perpetual duration" or sempiternity.

First eternity: Real time itself is truly eternal, because it is not even present in the mathematical now, let alone durable! One would enter eternity who, completely stripped of all existence, would completely "vanish" in time, as perhaps the mystic intended: "To whom time is like eternity and eternity is like time, he is freed from all strife."

This is eternity as pure flux, absolute becoming, the relentless flow that has no duration precisely because it never stops flowing. To participate in this eternity would be to surrender all identity, all persistence, all existence—to become pure flow.

Second eternity: An incomparably different "eternity," namely independence from time, characterizes the object of every general concept—the triangle, virtue, multiplicity. Outside of time is the object of thought itself.

"Eternal" in this sense would be any judgment content, whether true or false, for there is none that could not be thought of as always the same by various minds at different times.

This eternity of timeless being—Platonic Forms, mathematical truths, logical principles—would hardly satisfy the claims of those who dream of eternal duration. As for that, it is a real non-entity.

Klages now delivers the systematic proof that infinite duration is a contradiction in terms.

The name "duration" refers to a necessary attribute of existence. Existence is the form under which we understand something real as being, or as a set being as real.

Since everything real is temporally changeable and everything being is timelessly identical, existence means uniformity concerning the course of time or within temporal boundaries. Duration is the magnitude of the distance between the limiting points.

If we remove the boundaries, the intended immediately loses its direct relation to time. It either becomes time-independent, like the triangle, which no longer exists in time, or becomes the temporal reality itself, which we have seen cannot be grasped because it is always changing.

"Infinite duration" is therefore a genuine contradiction in terms. What exists, endures, and what endures, endures finitely.

What we assume to have existence must have begun to exist at some point in time, just as it will cease to exist at some point in time. The tangible universe of mechanics, for example, has no less a certain duration than every tangible body, every being, every process within it.

Because finite durability belongs to the concept of real being, one is already on the ground of fiction if one even allows the question of whether anything—be it called universe or soul—might actually endure infinitely.

Everyone denies that zero added to zero often enough can result in more than zero, namely something. Yet most are still willing to believe that something added to something often enough ultimately creates not just a larger something, but an infinite one—which is no less absurd than the former.

Consider the reverse: when the curious king in Grimm's fairy tale asks the wise little shepherd, "How many seconds are there in eternity?", no one fails to recognize the senselessness of the question, because "eternity," no matter how often divided, remains no less eternal!

Then one must admit that it is also not conceivable to construct eternity from units. Unity implies countability, and countability excludes infinity.

If we already view the universe as a system of things, we have already established its countability, both in terms of quantity of simultaneous things in space and duration of each in time. Through no conceivable expansion of boundaries do we regain either infinite abundance for the former or eternity for the latter.

The misguided notion of "infinite duration" forms the conclusion—or perhaps better, the constant underpinning—of the myriad errors in history of human thought that have arisen from confusion of real time and objective time.

Because we can only fix the uniformity of the point of a thing in a temporal sequence with help of two time points, we imperceptibly transform the temporally flowing reality into a being-always, which is composed of stretches of existence that mark duration of things on it.

This is the fundamental error: we substitute objective time—the measurable, divisible, thing-like time of clocks and calendars—for real time, which is the actual flux of temporal reality.

Real time flows. Objective time is the framework we impose on that flow to make it thinkable, measurable, controllable. But in doing so, we have already falsified what we claim to understand.

The time point is deducted from the strictly instantaneous now. But the now itself is not a mathematical point. It has a peculiar property of "actual presence" that cannot be captured by the concept of the instantaneous moment.

Most surprisingly, the perceptual object, which is immediately attributed existence, necessarily involves duration of existence—the persistence of the same in reality. We had to consider the point at which only a spatiotemporal multiplicity of images coalesces into a thing as identically present at at least two different temporal points or as traversing a temporal "stretch."

The dependency on time thus attributed to the thing was, however, as closer examination showed, completely different from participation in time.

If we separate real time as not belonging to itself, then now fully the very first—such boundaries are to be justified duration. Suppose the inescapable compulsion is correct from which we take real time as something non-persistent. Then it can have the least duration, but then also no existence, indeed not even the being of the present point.

Real time is neither constant nor of the instantaneity of a mathematical point, but simply fleeting. The phrase "temporal duration of a persistent fact" expresses, in a highly confusing manner, rather its total temporal distinction.

Real time and duration are incompatible. The necessity to give duration to the existing, and to underlay duration again with objective time of linear extension without which it would be incomprehensible, certifies as decisive that the object of thought is only found beyond temporal reality.

Everything offered so far is, Klages notes, "if you will, a new version of the so-called law of identity."

The principle of identity is hardly disputed today as the supreme guiding principle of thought. But it has been fought over for centuries. Locke dismissed it as an empty tautology with regard to the famous "A is A."

Such statements are indeed incapable of designating the principle because they merely repeat the finished product of an act of assimilation instead of showing us the reason for the object of thought.

Nevertheless, since the formula expresses the object of thought in manner of equation twice, it presupposes two acts of thinking concerning it and thus demands the identity of the concept at two different points in time.

The object of thought thus has the characteristic of timelessness, and that, and nothing else, is the meaning of the principle of identity.

Except for one thinker—and Klages does not name him—we do not find it discussed in any logic textbook that, according to the principle of identity, comprehensibility is grounded in the timelessness of the comprehended.

The frequently favored warning against confusing sameness of object of thought with duration already suggests why meaningful version of principle of sameness has not been successful so far. For, as surely as this contains no relation to duration because it disregards temporal fleeing of reality, just as surely would it be without knowledge about the matter "time" neither discoverable nor even capable of being understood.

Discovery of what is identical by nature with itself already relies on the mental act of detaching the object to be found from reality and granting it being. In such a way, of course, as to deprive something of all mutability, it takes away the possibility of ever ceasing to be what it is at the moment of being found.

But if identity means being removed from time, the name leaves no doubt that it is a never-identical thing through the detachment of which the object is "established." The laudable insight into distinction between sameness and duration must not let us forget that not even sameness, let alone duration, could be conceived without something relentlessly changing.

Its metaphysical content is only revealed to us by the principle of identity through its application to this very changeable entity—real time—as it reveals to us the impossibility of comprehending the reality we mean.

If we understand time as something relentlessly fleeing, we only use the concept of fleeing by holding its meaning firm. No matter how relentlessly the fleeing may flee, our concept of relentless fleeing does not flee with it.

But if it remains one and always the same, then what it signifies—fleeing—also remains one and always the same. From which it emerges overwhelmingly that the act of understanding renders the intended transience into absolute rigidity, along with it the most general characteristic of reality itself!

In logic, it is often overlooked that every "posited statement" demands distinction. Indeed, as Klages will demonstrate, it is based on distinction and only takes place as result of it.

We would not have the concept of time-independence without that of time-dependence, not that of transience without that of permanence, not that of change without that of constancy, and vice versa.

The principle of sameness is not a principle of duration, but it transforms into a principle of duration when applied to time-dependent matters, whose pattern and origin are to be found in the thing.

If I assert the sameness of something which I rightly or wrongly consider real, then I have already asserted its duration. Being as such therefore shows a dual aspect:

• Without direct temporal relation it implies the timelessness of the thought object itself
• With direct temporal relation, it signifies the event as an unchangeably enduring entity

The principle of sameness forms the highest peak to which abstraction aspires. We must overlook change to reach constancy. But we must also overlook time to determine what every thought object shares with each, however it relates to time and whether it is called "this table here" or "stream of time" or "principle of identity."

In this, the timelessness of the intellectual act which generates the thought object is validated and expressed.

The trajectory of human reflection ran opposite to our analysis. Originally, existence and duration were grasped—and thus the relationship of timeless object to temporal reality. Only later came the now, specifically as the starting point or end of existence.

Now it begins, now it ends, now it is there, now it is gone. Looking back into deeper backgrounds: life begins once, life ends once. At such breaking points of barely noticed, because all too familiar, persistence, reflection first flashed, illuminating existence, duration, and now together.

In "infinite" reality there is none of the three—for where would time find its end! Duration and non-beginning are mutually exclusive. Beginning and end demand each other.

But where would the causal reason for these two lie in reality?

What has Klages demonstrated through this intricate analysis?

First, that our fundamental concepts—time, duration, existence, identity—involve inescapable self-contradictions when examined rigorously. These are not confusions to be cleared up but necessary consequences of conceptual thought's structure.

Second, that we systematically confuse real time (the actual flux of temporal reality) with objective time (the measurable framework we impose on that flux). This confusion generates the illusion that time itself has duration, that infinite duration is possible, that immortality could mean endless persistence of the same.

Third, that the principle of identity—the foundation of all logical thought—operates by removing its objects from time, rendering them timeless. But this means thought systematically falsifies temporal reality, turning the flowing into the fixed, the becoming into being, the living into the dead.

Fourth, that we cannot think without this falsification. The very structure of conceptual thought requires identity, sameness across different moments. But temporal reality is precisely what never remains the same—it is relentless flux, continuous transformation, absolute becoming.

Fifth, that duration applies only to things—to existences that persist across time—never to time itself. To speak of "duration of time" or "infinite duration" is to commit a category mistake that reveals thought's fundamental inadequacy to temporal reality.

The implications are devastating for any philosophy that claims conceptual thought gives us access to reality. If Klages is right, then the entire edifice of Western rationality—from Parmenides' being to Kant's categories to contemporary physics' spacetime—is built on foundations that collapse under analysis.

Not because we've made technical errors, but because thought itself, in its very structure as conceptual identification, cannot capture what is most real: the flowing, the becoming, the temporal life that is reality itself.