Time

Phillip Turetzky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134770809
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Time offers a comprehensive history of the philosophy of time in western philosophy from the Greeks through to the twentieth century.
In the first half of the book, Philip Turetzky explores theories in ancient and modern philosophy chronologically: from Aristotle to Nietzsche. In the latter half, Turetzky describes the philosophy of time in three twentieth-century philosophical traditions:
* analytic philosophy including philosophers such as McTaggart and Mellor
* phenomenology Husserl and Heidegger
* a distaff tradition which Turetzky identifies as including Bergson and Deleuze.

Part One

The history

INTRODUCTION TO PART ONE

For by time there have been and shall be brought to light all things which were hidden.

François Rabelais

This book is an exploration of the concept of time via a proposal about the role it has played in western philosophy. In particular, it will examine the use of the concept of time as a boundary condition on phenomena. This formula is not a definition of time; although in the sense and to the extent that meaning is given by use, it gives the meaning of time in the context of the history of ontological thought since the emergence of western philosophy among the ancient Greeks.

The statement that time is a boundary condition on phenomena intends something broad enough to be neutral regarding the great diversity of ontological views and systems developed over the last two and a half millennia. Yet the statement also intends something specific enough to play a functional role in such thought. The breadth of the statement is necessary to ensure that we avoid privileging one ontological view over another. However, this neutrality is not without a curious ontological consequence; it makes the role of time, in some sense, prior to considerations about the reality of time. One task of this book is to show that the various debates about the reality of time and about its nature presume that time plays the role of such a boundary condition. The key terms “phenomena” and “boundary condition” each express a family of concepts. The specificity of the statement that time is a boundary condition on phenomena requires some clarification of these expressions.

The core of the family of concepts expressed by the term “phenomena” is that phenomena are those things that appear. However, appearing can refer to the appearing of the thing itself, as when a musician appears on stage, or it can mean an appearance of something that does not itself appear, as when a disease appears through its symptoms, e.g. spots. Something can be a phenomenon in both senses: in the former case, the phenomena are the things themselves, yet in the latter case the spots themselves appear even though they may be taken as the appearance of something else. The spots are phenomena in one sense or the other depending on whether they are taken in themselves or referred to something not appearing. When an appearance is referred to something not appearing, what does not appear can be something that could itself appear, for instance a worm that causes the spots. However, what does not appear may be something that could not appear, as when an electron appears through a track in a bubble chamber, or if a metaphysical entity were manifested in a sensory object. Such complications arise partly because of different ways of distributing the honorific term “real” over what does and does not appear and partly because of variations in other ontological assumptions. So, for instance, a distinction between things manifesting themselves and a consciousness of things may be construed as expressing two different senses of “phenomena.” Which sense of “phenomena” applies depends on whether and in what sense it is legitimate to consider the content of consciousness real and on what ontological claims are made about the nature of consciousness. (Such claims offer answers to questions like: is consciousness necessary for things to manifest themselves? Do things manifest themselves in consciousness directly or only in a mediated way?, etc.) For its purposes, this book must remain neutral regarding the employment of the honorific “real” and regarding the ontological assumptions surrounding what appears. By whatever means and in whatever way things appear as opposed to not appearing, we shall consider their appearances to be phenomena.

As with phenomena, so with boundary conditions. This text shall construe the concept broadly enough to include a family of alternatives regardless of where the honorific “real” is bestowed and independent of other ontological claims. At the same time, the text will retain the core meaning that the boundary conditions constitute a limit to phenomena. The nature of that limit will vary with variations in ontology, but all such variations will exhibit one of the following four boundary structures. Ontologies which posit a separation between metaphysical, or at least imperceptible, entities and phenomena may treat time as a boundary condition of phenomena:

1. as something which does not itself appear but which acts as the most immediate constraint on what does appear;
2. as itself a phenomenon which somehow encompasses and constrains all other phenomena;
3. as something neither strictly a phenomenon nor something which does not itself appear but something intermediate between the two which constrains phenomena (or mediates the relations between what appears and what does not);
4. as a double limit where two sorts of time are posited, one on each side of the boundary between phenomena and what does not appear.

Ontologies which abstain from positing the existence of metaphysical entities tend to treat time as the outer envelope of phenomena (as in 2 above). The exceptions deny the existence of time. Again, how reality is distributed over entities and which auxiliary ontological tenets are put forward are of little consequence for the limiting function of time; whether the boundary comes between phenomena and what does not appear or between or surrounding manifestations of things, time plays the role of a limiting condition even as ontologies vary. Part One will explicate the series of ontologies of time from the ancients to the nineteenth century and show how time serves in each as a boundary condition on phenomena.

CHAPTER I

Greek thought before
Aristotle

For primordial Greek thinking…time, always as dispensing and dispensed time, takes man and all beings essentially into its ordering and in every case orders the appearance and disappearance of beings. Time discloses and conceals.

Martin Heidegger

GREEK MYTHOLOGY OF TIME¹

The ancient Greek philosophers were primarily concerned with the problem of change: how is it possible for the same thing to become different and yet remain the same thing? Things obviously change. But change seemed to require that one and the same thing could be opposite to itself, that it could be hot and cold, wet and dry, moving and at rest; yet such opposites were incompatible. Part of the answer to this difficulty may seem obvious, that in undergoing a change something that did not change took on incompatible opposites at different times. However, at first, the concept of time was not clearly separated from conceptions of change and motion. As with most early cosmological notions, time was first personified as a mythological deity and its cosmological significance was given in origin stories. Later, time came to be treated as an aspect of the natural world. Yet even the most sophisticated of Greek thinkers always treated problems about time as subsidiary aspects of problems about change and motion.

By the time of the early mythographers Hesiod (c. seventh century B.C.E.) and Pherecydes (c. mid-sixth century B.C.E.) the Titan Kronos had become identified with time. The obvious similarity between “chronos,” one of the Greek words we translate as “time,” and “Kronos” certainly influenced this identification, as did Kronos’ attribute as a deity who devoured his children. But most important for our understanding of time is the myth of the mutilation of Ouranos, the sky. A basic outline of the story as told in Hesiod’s Theogony is that great Ouranos (the Sky) hated his children and hid them in the bowels of Gaia (the Earth) until she groaned under the strain. Ouranos covered Gaia, copulating with her until their son Kronos turned on his father, castrating him with a sickle, thus separating sky from earth and allowing the other children to emerge into the gap created by Kronos’ violence. Kronos threw the severed genitals over his shoulder; from the blood came the spirits of vengeance and out of the genitals sprang Aphrodite, goddess of love.²

If we accept the identification of Kronos with time, the image portrayed is of time opening up a gap between earth and sky in which their children emerge. Earth and sky were commonly used as images of the boundary between the human world and the divine. Homer placed Kronos at the lowermost limits of the earth.³ And later, when, in his defense, Socrates denies that he has been concerned with divine matters, he does so by saying that he does not study things in the sky and below the earth.⁴ Time, then, forms a rupture in the divine in which the world of human life and experience can appear. While this act of separation is violent, it is also generative; it produces both vengeance and love. As early Greek thinkers moved away from mythological forms of explanation to more naturalistic forms they retained in various ways the association of time with these images of a boundary on the divine, of violent rupture and change, of generation in general, and of love and vengeance in particular.

TIME AND JUSTICE: ANAXIMANDER

The first recorded mention of chronos (time) in Greek cosmological thought other than myth is found in a fragment of text attributed to a contemporary of Pherecydes, Anaximander of Miletus (c.610 B.C.E. to soon after 546 B.C.E.). Generally accepted as the earliest surviving fragment of western philosophy, it says that the principle of all things is:

some…apeiron [unlimited] nature, from which come into being all the heavens and the worlds in them. And the source of coming-to-be for existing things is that into which destruction, too, happens according to necessity; for they pay penalty and retribution to each other for their injustice according to the assessment of Time [chronos].⁵

The fragment is cryptic and much attention has been given to what was meant by the unlimited or boundless, to apeiron. The fragment addresses the problem of change, which, as we noted above, was the fundamental concern of ancient thought. The unlimited, for Anaximander, was the source of all existing things, which arise out of it and fall back into it; the unlimited plays the role of a substratum, which is unchanging while existing things undergo change. According to the fragment, it is necessary that existing things come to be and are destroyed. Presumably, the necessity attaches to change because existing things are delimited by their exemplifying some opposites while excluding others; hence, existing things are always limited. Whatever is limited, then, is limited by its opposite and the unlimited serves as a principle underlying these opposites; the unlimited is not subject to change because it could have no opposite. We must keep in mind here that all limited things are limited by their opposites; the only stable thing underlying these opposites is the boundless. However, this reasoning suggests that any limited thing must be subject to coming into and out of existence only if limited things are limited in time. For otherwise there could be limited things that lasted for ever and so did not change.

The last part of the fragment, “for they pay penalty and retribution to each other for their injustice according to the assessment of Time,” is the part most likely to be a direct quotation from Anaximander. If we assume that it is existing and limited things which perpetrate injustice and are subject to penalty and retribution, then time somehow orders and constrains the coming to be and passing away of all existing things. Time prevents opposite things from exceeding their bounds and becoming unlimited. How Anaximander thought that this happens is a matter for conjecture, but since time makes the assessment we might assume that it ordains the duration that a given thing exists before it is destroyed or replaced by its opposite (a naturalized form of Kronos devouring his children). Empedocles, a later figure in early Greek thought (mid-fifth century B.C.E.), offered another alternative; he treated the primal opposites as imperishable and claimed that time formed a cycle from maximum mixture to maximum separation. The force of love governed the tendency towards mixture and the force of strife governed the tendency towards separation. The myth of Kronos has not yet lost its grip on these notions.

With Anaximander, that myth is most evident in the images relating to justice. In the myth Kronos achieves vengeance by separating the human world from the divine, where Anaximander thought that time orders limited things, enforcing those limits. Time dispenses justice to all things according to its assessment, which ordains that whatever may arise must also pass away. Time sets limits on the appearing and vanishing of phenomena by governing their duration, but more fundamentally time is a boundary between limited things, phenomena, and the unlimited, out of which phenomena arise and back into which they disappear.

TIME, FLUX AND THE RATIONAL PRINCIPLE OF THINGS: HERACLEITUS

The Presocratic thinkers focused on the problem of change, and time seems inextricably bound up with change. Heracleitus of Ephesus (c. late sixth to early second century B.C.E.) claimed that all things were in flux, yet he also insisted that this flux was subject to a unifying measure or rational principle. This principle (logos, the hidden harmony behind all change) bound opposites together in a unified tension, which Heracleitus likened to that of a lyre, where a stable harmonious sound emerges from the tension of the opposing forces that arise from the bow bound together by the string.

All we have of Heracleitus’ writings are fragments and only one of these mentions time. It says, “time is a child moving counters in a game; the royal power is a child’s.”⁶ The image in this fragment is that time somehow produces change within the order of nature. As a child, time is not the rational principle itself; still it is not just equivalent to changing nature. Little more can be gleaned from the text and even this interpretation may be excessive. However, it is worth noting that the word here translated as “time” is not “chronos” but “aion” from which derives the English word “eon,” meaning a long duration. From the doxography we know that Heracleitus thought that time does not have a beginning; it has had an infinite duration. This seems to place him in opposition to his predecessors, who sought naturalistic cosmogonies while keeping the mythic form of an origin story. Whether Heracleitus also held the view that the world recurs in cosmic cycles is a matter of contention. (We have already mentioned that Empedocles was later to advance a cyclical view of the universe, and some form of a cyclical view would also come to be held by some Pythagoreans, Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics; attribution of a cyclical view to Heracleitus may have been improperly ascribed due to these later views.) If such a cyclic cosmos were compatible with the claim that time has no beginning (and if Heracleitus was consonant with his predecessors), then time had to be to some extent independent of change, i.e. it seems that it would have to be possible for changes in the whole of the cosmos to repeat at different times. Were time to be entirely dependent on or wholly an aspect of change, then nothing could count as a repetition of exactly the same cosmic cycle, for there would be no difference that would mark a difference in just the times when the cycles occurred.

Time, which to some extent is independent of change, would have been, for Heracleitus, not itself subject to changes and hence closely allied to the rational principle of things. Without a beginning, time would be of an infinite duration and so itself a feature of the world that does not change. While every thing was in flux, on Heracleitus’ account, the timeless unchanging rule of the logos constrained and ordered the flux of things. Hence, if time were not identical with the logos, and it could not be reduced to a mere attribute of change either, then it somehow existed in between the rational principle and the flux of things. Much of this interpretation is speculative and the attribution of cosmic cycles to Heracleitus depends on what may be a dubious doxography. The interpretation does, however, suggest a role for time as more than just another property of changing things. The fragment credits time with power, albeit a child’s power, and the lack of a beginning allies time with the unifying rational principle as itself unchanging and as encompassing the whole of things (at least in the past).

QUESTIONING THE REALITY OF TIME: PARMENIDES

Parmenides of Elea (c.520–430 B.C.E.) is a towering figure in the history of western thought who introduced new questions and problems into the tradition. A member of the Eleatic school, a breakaway from the Pythagorean schools of southern Italy, Parmenides is the progenitor of the discipline of logic; his critique of his predecessors invoked notions of possibility and necessity regarding the objects of discourse. The arguments Parmenides put forward so probed ontological matters that none of his successors could ignore them, for they exposed logical difficulties in the very fabric of the philosophical and scientific enterprise. Although his literary style was poetic, he presented deductive arguments and recognized that such arguments formed a coherent system; it mattered little with which arguments one started, he thought, eventually the chain of reasoning would circle back to them again. In addition to these achievements, P...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• PREFACE
• PART ONE: THE HISTORY
• PART TWO: CONTEMPORARY TRADITIONS
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY