Time and the Philosophers
by C. E. West
Masonic Craftsman - 1937
Augustine in his Confession said, "What, then, is time? If
nobody asks me, I know; but if I try to explain it to one who
asks me, I do not know." It is an apt quotation of an
admirable review of the thought of the world on the subject,
for it is a universal experience. Through this tangle which
stretches from Aristotle to the present day, we are led by a
mind which is singularly clear and impartial, gifted with a
great critical sense and a refreshing absence of pomp. The
real consideration of the question of the nature of time
begins with Kant, and progresses through Bergson,
Alexander, McTaggart, Dunne. It will appear from these
names that time is a matter of metaphysics, and not of
clocks. To follow the topic in detail would require a volume. It
will be more useful to try to see briefly what it is all about.
For the philosophers range in view from Bergson, to whom
tine is the overactive creator of the universe, to McTaggart,
who holds that time is nothing "real" and no more than a
figment of our faculties.
The discussion of time is singularly difficult. Our universe is
for us organized in terms of space and time and energy.
These terms are the construction of an external world out of
our own feelings. We cannot, or must not - for it is all too
easy - discuss time in terms of tine, so we are left with space
as our dominant image, and time tends to be treated in
falsely spatial images. Metaphors must not be used as if
they were facts. Let us then try to analyze our own
experience of time. It falls for all of us into past, present, and
future. The past is something which we have experienced
and have in memory; the present is in experience now, is in
being; the future is for us in anticipation. The past has been
present, the future will or may become present, the present
is actual. And only the present is actual. But the present is
not merely this, but is always in process of change, a brief
period of which the front is always growing and the back is
always melting. And it is in this change that we apprehend
time. Time in the sense of "duration" is nothing more than
the extension of experience. When Rip Van Winkle fell
asleep he lost that time, for, unlike our nightly sleep, his
contained no sense of duration. Perhaps he did not dream.
The present, then, is the essential and real. The past shares
some reality for us because we have seen its events in
process of becoming and have seen the present derive itself
out of those events. But the future is a battle area and calls
for cautious entry. For the mathematician time is no more
than the measure of the rate of change of a "function," a
purely abstract numerical value which may be putt into an
equation. It has nothing to do with us and our lived time. For
the logician time does not exist. Logic does not know
change, and time is therefore a self-contradiction. For the
determinist, to whose mind the casual link is inevitable, time
is the rate of succession of effect on cause. For him the
present "is caused" by the past. For the intuitive who sees
things growing, like Bergson, time is the rate of growth and
the scene of growth. And in our subjective consciousness
time contains the growing point of experience. How fast,
then, does time move?
Our ordinary standard of time is fixed by accepting the
earth's passage round the sun as an irreducible standard
with which everything is compared. When we say that it
takes a year we state not a fact but a definition; we add
nothing to our knowledge of time, but merely give a name to
a standard event from which numerical values may be given
to the period of other events. The rate of time cannot be
stated in terms of itself. We must hark back. Time is inherent
in events, which happen not merely in space and in time, but
can only happen in the combination of both. Time without
events is unthinkable and without meaning, except as a
naked abstraction. The event is the whole basis of the
space-time conception; without events there is neither space
nor time. So the future, if it is a part of time, must contain
events in some sense. And the nature of the future will
depend to a large extent on the philosophy of the thinker. If
he is a determinist, the future is at least potentially there,
predetermined, and so as good as real, implied, and, as it
were, present in embryo in the present; or actually there in
equal trinity with the past and present in an eternal present,
time being only a figment produced by attention. Time is the
policeman's lantern which travels from door to door, but the
doors are all there all the time. Or if he is a growth-feeler,
then, growth being essentially indeterminate, the future
simply does not exist as in any sense containing events and
is no more than an anticipation of experience governed by
probability. To use a mathematical metaphor, it is an
extrapolation from the curve of past experience. But both
views imply something interesting, for both imply a rate of
the change of the Now. So the idea of time is complicated by
the conception, really held by all, of the speed of time, which
means timing time against something else, which can only
be a measure in another sort of time.
Here we meet Dunne's fascinating theory of a multi-
dimensional time and the necessity of an indefinite series of
times. For "our" time has now become one of the
"dimensions" of the second-degree event in second-degree
time. Incidentally, first time has not become space because
dimensionalized, and the trouble over this would have been
avoided if the term co-ordinate had been used. It is no more
than one of the factors in event two. In spite of the
difficulties, it is useless to refuse the idea of a velocity of
time. Time is either nothing or it is what we feel about it, and
no real general feeling is invalid. Nor do we get much farther
by pushing the inquiry. All that we really know is the Now,
the perpetually evolving present.
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