' quid est ergo tempus?' inquired St. Augustine in his Confessions. ' si nemo ex me quaerat, scio; si quaerenti explicare velim, nescio' (Augustinus, 239.). In any time people were confronted with the same question. Time is the most characteristic mode of our experience and one of the necessary orientation poles for the human being. It is inseparable from the concept of the self and is particularly significant to man because what we call self, person, or individual is experienced and known only against the succession of temporal moments and changes constituting his biography.
It is not easy to avoid ambiguities when defining time and it is almost impossible to find a universal definition of it. The most appropriate interpretation offered by the Oxford English Dictionary discusses time as a limited stretch or space of continued existence. The word ' limited' , however, excludes time theories that consider time an aspect of eternity. The Encyclopaedia Britannica' s definition explains time as ' a general term for the conscious experience of duration' , i.e., currents of events in sequence. Such an interpretation eliminates the differentiation between eternity and temporality but opens up a place for a new discussion. Authors in any epoch did not hesitate to write about unreal events introducing an imaginative concept of time which as such cannot be described as conscious. In discussing this complicated matter Davis states that the difficulty in defining time arises from ' the always hampering fact that no phenomenal object or process can be defined in terms of itself' (Davis, 1.). He introduces the term ' climates of opinion' , with which he labels any predominant concept of time in any particular period of history and argues that the perception of the real happenings depends on the conventions appropriate to the climate of opinion in which the author lived or is still living. From the interesting and/or important thoughts of an age, their range, variety and content, one can arrive at the climate of opinion by which they are moulded. This process was called kollektive Zeitbewertung by Julius Fraser.
Augustinus. Confessions. London: Harvard University Press, 1961.
Davis, Edward. The Concept of Time in Literary Studies. Port Elizabeth: University of Port Elizabeth, 1973.
Fraser, Julius T. Die Zeit: vertraut und fremd. Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag, 1988.
Last modified 2001