Introduction: Goldschmidt and the Idea of Time

We now enter the final part of the Stoic egg. We are leaving the shell and entering the albumen, moving from logic to ethics. As we do, let us recall the warning from the introduction: we are not referring to ethics in the traditional sense of normative theory or applied morality, where the focus is on issues of right and wrong, virtue and vice, good and evil. Deleuze's Stoicism, instead, begins from the perspective of time, ontology and action in order to later reach the more recognisable concerns of moral philosophy. The reason is that such moral concerns are not given, pre-made, but must be generated as concerns. Like everything else, ethics too is generative.

As space is the incorporeal proper to physics and λϵκτόν that proper to logic, time is the incorporeal proper to ethics. Like space and λϵκτόν, time, for the Stoics, expresses a double-sided surface structure. Although Deleuze does not articulate this double-sidedness exactly as we do, he makes much of the two faces of time; he even gives them provocative names: chronos and aion. Deleuze gets these terms and the corresponding conceptual distinction between chronos and aion from Victor Goldschmidt's Le Système stoïcien et l’idée de temps.

For Goldschmidt, though there are two faces of Stoic time, the conceptual distinction between them is obscured because of a lack of terminological distinction. ‘Without doubt’, writes Goldschmidt, ‘the theory would have been more scholarly intelligible if, as in the case of void and place, Chrysippus had used two different terms in order to distinguish the two times’ (SS 39). In ‘Albumen A’, we explain Deleuze's Goldschmidtian account of the two faces of time in Stoicism. Beginning with a comparison among three ancient theories, we next consider different meanings of the present in terms of the two faces of time. We then consider the twisted genealogy of chronos and aion, question their role in Stoic texts, and explain how time is a single surface with chronos and aion as, respectively, the extensive and intensive sides.