https://aeon.co/essays/how-one-man-chang...and-future
EXCERPT (Emily Thomas): . . . Pastness, presentness and futurity seem to be real features of the world, but are they really? Philosophers disagree, and this debate pervades books [...] How did this disagreement come about? Although it sounds like the sort of thing that philosophers have wrangled over for millennia, I say it’s relatively recent. I think the debate was started just over 100 years ago, by one man: John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart.
[...] From his earliest work, McTaggart obsessed over time. In itself, this was not unusual – during this period, many philosophers were similarly absorbed. What was unusual is how McTaggart thought about time.
Like most human things, philosophy has fashions. In Western philosophy, time jumps on and off the menu. [...] By the mid-18th century, time had slipped off the menu again, especially in Britain. ... This was partly due to the Scottish Enlightenment, which discouraged studying abstract, abstruse topics. British interest picked up following the work of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, but this attitude shift took decades to arrive.
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781) put a new spin on time. He twists an argument made by absolutists. Many absolutists argued that we cannot imagine deleting time from the Universe. Even if you destroyed the Universe, time would remain, implying that time exists independently of us. Kant argues that the fact that we cannot dis-imagine time doesn’t tell us anything about the Universe. Instead, it tells us something about our minds. Time is rooted in us: it is a form of thought, a precondition for experiencing anything. Human minds are wired such that our experiences are always temporal, and that’s why we can’t even imagine a nontemporal world. Nonetheless, the world outside our heads, as it really is independent of us, might be nontemporal. Because we must perceive things in time, we don’t know what things-in-themselves are like.
[...] Although there was nothing unusual in McTaggart rejecting time, there was something unusual about how he did so. McTaggart thought hard about what time might be like if it were real. This emerges in his paper ‘The Unreality of Time’ (1908). Imagine three events: a rainstorm, a flash of lightning, and rumble of thunder. How do we order them?
McTaggart put events into two series. Both the ‘A-series’ and the ‘B-series’ order events according to whether they are earlier or later. The lighting flashes after the rain starts, and before the thunder rumbles. Additionally, the A-series takes some event to be special: ‘present’. It brands earlier events ‘past’, and later ones ‘future’. If the lightning flash is present, then rain fell in the past, and thunder will growl in the future.
McTaggart’s argument against time has two steps. First, he argues that the A-series is essential to time. On the B-series, nothing changes, for every event will always occupy the same position in time: the lightning will always flash after the rain. In contrast, on the A-series, things really change as the present moves on: the rain falling was once present, and is now past. The thunder lies in the future but will be present. McTaggart claims that time must involve this kind of change, from future to present to past.
Second, McTaggart argues that the A-series cannot exist. Being future, present and past are incompatible, contradictory properties. An event can be future or past – not both. Yet, McTaggart argues, every event has all these properties: the rainstorm was once future, then present, then past. As these properties are contradictory, he reasons that they are unreal. If the A-series is essential to time, and the A-series doesn’t exist, then time doesn’t exist. Time is unreal. He concludes that reality is timeless and changeless, even though we can’t help perceiving things in time. It’s as though we look at the world, as McTaggart put it, ‘through a window of red glass’, and so misperceive the world to be red.
What inspired McTaggart’s argument? He doesn’t tell us, but I argue that he was drawing on a new, French line of thought [...] French philosophers such as François Pillon, Charles Renouvier and Henri Bergson began stressing the importance of time. Bergson was especially widely read. From the 1880s to 1930s, he rejected what he called the ‘spatialisation’ of time. [...] Countable moments of time are strung along a line. Time seems static, motionless. Bergson describes this spatialised time as ‘mathematical’. He argues that this misses the true, pure nature of time.
Pure time is durée. It is ‘free from all alloy’, as it doesn’t involve space. Unlike mathematical time, pure time is not divisible into countable units. Bergson implies that only conscious beings can experience pure duration. When we listen to music, a C note can melt into a D note in such a way that we cannot mark off one note from another. The past and present notes form an organic whole that cannot be divided into units, and this is how we experience durée. Pure time is melting, changing motion.
McTaggart’s argument for the unreality of time is original. Yet I suspect, in setting up the A- versus B-series, it drew on Bergsonian mathematical versus pure time. There are similarities between Bergson’s mathematical time, and McTaggart’s B-series: both eliminate past, present and future; both are changeless or motionless. There are also similarities between Bergson’s durée and McTaggart’s A-series: they stress the past, present and future, and are all about change or motion. Even if McTaggart didn’t read Bergson firsthand, Bergson was ‘in the air’ of early 20th-century Britain. From the 1900s, Bergson’s books were translated into English, and influential philosophers such as Samuel Alexander and H Wildon Carr published English-language book reviews in major journals.
McTaggart’s ‘The Unreality of Time’ soon drew fire. [...] As the 20th century wore on, these critiques continued. ... Philosophers have since written tens of thousands of pages about it. Twenty-first century thinkers have cited it more than 1,600 times so far ... You might think that these attacks would have eradicated McTaggart’s argument, but instead they invigorated it. As the saying goes: ‘All publicity is good publicity.’
[...] If all the parts of time exist, then 1066 is just as real as 2055 [...] And, in the course of bombarding McTaggart’s argument, philosophers adopted its framework. While defending the reality of time, they aligned their realism with McTaggart’s A-series or B-series.
[...] Following Hermann Minkowski and Albert Einstein, a view that Donald Williams dubbed ‘manifold theory’ gained popularity: physicists unified time and space into a single manifold, spacetime. On manifold theory, all the parts of time are as a real as the parts of space. This lends itself to B-theory, the view that ‘now’ and ‘here’ depend on your point of view. Yet some philosophers disliked manifold theory for exactly that reason: if all the parts of time exist, then 1066 is just as real as 2055. Some felt that this picture of time is too static, failing to capture time’s flow, its ‘jerk and whoosh’, as Williams put it. Philosophers who accept A-theory often reject manifold theory, denying that all the parts of time are real. For example, in 1923 C D Broad argued that the past and present are real, yet the future is unreal.
Today, the philosophy of time is riddled with the A- versus B-theory debate. It’s so pervasive, there is a tendency to think that this is what philosophy of time has always been about. But it isn’t... (MORE - details)
EXCERPT (Emily Thomas): . . . Pastness, presentness and futurity seem to be real features of the world, but are they really? Philosophers disagree, and this debate pervades books [...] How did this disagreement come about? Although it sounds like the sort of thing that philosophers have wrangled over for millennia, I say it’s relatively recent. I think the debate was started just over 100 years ago, by one man: John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart.
[...] From his earliest work, McTaggart obsessed over time. In itself, this was not unusual – during this period, many philosophers were similarly absorbed. What was unusual is how McTaggart thought about time.
Like most human things, philosophy has fashions. In Western philosophy, time jumps on and off the menu. [...] By the mid-18th century, time had slipped off the menu again, especially in Britain. ... This was partly due to the Scottish Enlightenment, which discouraged studying abstract, abstruse topics. British interest picked up following the work of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, but this attitude shift took decades to arrive.
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781) put a new spin on time. He twists an argument made by absolutists. Many absolutists argued that we cannot imagine deleting time from the Universe. Even if you destroyed the Universe, time would remain, implying that time exists independently of us. Kant argues that the fact that we cannot dis-imagine time doesn’t tell us anything about the Universe. Instead, it tells us something about our minds. Time is rooted in us: it is a form of thought, a precondition for experiencing anything. Human minds are wired such that our experiences are always temporal, and that’s why we can’t even imagine a nontemporal world. Nonetheless, the world outside our heads, as it really is independent of us, might be nontemporal. Because we must perceive things in time, we don’t know what things-in-themselves are like.
[...] Although there was nothing unusual in McTaggart rejecting time, there was something unusual about how he did so. McTaggart thought hard about what time might be like if it were real. This emerges in his paper ‘The Unreality of Time’ (1908). Imagine three events: a rainstorm, a flash of lightning, and rumble of thunder. How do we order them?
McTaggart put events into two series. Both the ‘A-series’ and the ‘B-series’ order events according to whether they are earlier or later. The lighting flashes after the rain starts, and before the thunder rumbles. Additionally, the A-series takes some event to be special: ‘present’. It brands earlier events ‘past’, and later ones ‘future’. If the lightning flash is present, then rain fell in the past, and thunder will growl in the future.
McTaggart’s argument against time has two steps. First, he argues that the A-series is essential to time. On the B-series, nothing changes, for every event will always occupy the same position in time: the lightning will always flash after the rain. In contrast, on the A-series, things really change as the present moves on: the rain falling was once present, and is now past. The thunder lies in the future but will be present. McTaggart claims that time must involve this kind of change, from future to present to past.
Second, McTaggart argues that the A-series cannot exist. Being future, present and past are incompatible, contradictory properties. An event can be future or past – not both. Yet, McTaggart argues, every event has all these properties: the rainstorm was once future, then present, then past. As these properties are contradictory, he reasons that they are unreal. If the A-series is essential to time, and the A-series doesn’t exist, then time doesn’t exist. Time is unreal. He concludes that reality is timeless and changeless, even though we can’t help perceiving things in time. It’s as though we look at the world, as McTaggart put it, ‘through a window of red glass’, and so misperceive the world to be red.
What inspired McTaggart’s argument? He doesn’t tell us, but I argue that he was drawing on a new, French line of thought [...] French philosophers such as François Pillon, Charles Renouvier and Henri Bergson began stressing the importance of time. Bergson was especially widely read. From the 1880s to 1930s, he rejected what he called the ‘spatialisation’ of time. [...] Countable moments of time are strung along a line. Time seems static, motionless. Bergson describes this spatialised time as ‘mathematical’. He argues that this misses the true, pure nature of time.
Pure time is durée. It is ‘free from all alloy’, as it doesn’t involve space. Unlike mathematical time, pure time is not divisible into countable units. Bergson implies that only conscious beings can experience pure duration. When we listen to music, a C note can melt into a D note in such a way that we cannot mark off one note from another. The past and present notes form an organic whole that cannot be divided into units, and this is how we experience durée. Pure time is melting, changing motion.
McTaggart’s argument for the unreality of time is original. Yet I suspect, in setting up the A- versus B-series, it drew on Bergsonian mathematical versus pure time. There are similarities between Bergson’s mathematical time, and McTaggart’s B-series: both eliminate past, present and future; both are changeless or motionless. There are also similarities between Bergson’s durée and McTaggart’s A-series: they stress the past, present and future, and are all about change or motion. Even if McTaggart didn’t read Bergson firsthand, Bergson was ‘in the air’ of early 20th-century Britain. From the 1900s, Bergson’s books were translated into English, and influential philosophers such as Samuel Alexander and H Wildon Carr published English-language book reviews in major journals.
McTaggart’s ‘The Unreality of Time’ soon drew fire. [...] As the 20th century wore on, these critiques continued. ... Philosophers have since written tens of thousands of pages about it. Twenty-first century thinkers have cited it more than 1,600 times so far ... You might think that these attacks would have eradicated McTaggart’s argument, but instead they invigorated it. As the saying goes: ‘All publicity is good publicity.’
[...] If all the parts of time exist, then 1066 is just as real as 2055 [...] And, in the course of bombarding McTaggart’s argument, philosophers adopted its framework. While defending the reality of time, they aligned their realism with McTaggart’s A-series or B-series.
[...] Following Hermann Minkowski and Albert Einstein, a view that Donald Williams dubbed ‘manifold theory’ gained popularity: physicists unified time and space into a single manifold, spacetime. On manifold theory, all the parts of time are as a real as the parts of space. This lends itself to B-theory, the view that ‘now’ and ‘here’ depend on your point of view. Yet some philosophers disliked manifold theory for exactly that reason: if all the parts of time exist, then 1066 is just as real as 2055. Some felt that this picture of time is too static, failing to capture time’s flow, its ‘jerk and whoosh’, as Williams put it. Philosophers who accept A-theory often reject manifold theory, denying that all the parts of time are real. For example, in 1923 C D Broad argued that the past and present are real, yet the future is unreal.
Today, the philosophy of time is riddled with the A- versus B-theory debate. It’s so pervasive, there is a tendency to think that this is what philosophy of time has always been about. But it isn’t... (MORE - details)