Time
and its role in the history of thought and
action
Abstract:
This article
discusses the history of thought about Time
distinguishing process-philosophers and
philosopers of the manifold, philosphers of
everlasting life and philosophers of rebirth in
the flow of time. The prescietific conception of
the individual experience of reality to time and
timelessness is pictured as a ground for the
division between
holders of the cyclic view and holders of the
one-way view of time. Despite of the
original Western religious one way concept, the
cyclic aspect of time has , this article
maintains, gained adherents. With the Greeks the
alternating between love and strife (our Ying
& Yang) opposing the denial of motion and
plurality suggested the flow of time as the
essence of reality. Christian one-way thinking
is thereto recognized as apocalyptic leading to
crisis and collapse also described in modern
social theory. Modern scientific concepts are
described as making systems remaining constant
through time, leading to another kind of
metaphysics.
taken from the
Encyclopedia
Britannica ( on the Net since 19 0kt
'99)
Unfortunately
Brittanica has closed theis services for free
use. Therefore the links in this article run
dead. Someday we will have the knowledge
liberated!!(see filognostic
revolution)
Introduction
Time: a
measured or measurable period, a continuum that
lacks spatial dimensions. Time is of
philosophical interest and is also the subject
of mathematical and scientific investigation.
(See time.)
Time
and its role in the history of thought and
action
Introduction
Time
and its role in the history of thought and
action
Nature
and definition of time
Prescientific
conceptions of time and their
influence
The
individual's experience and observation of
time
Cyclic
view of time in the philosophy of
history
Environmental
recurrences and religion
The
cyclic view in various
cultures
One-way
view of time in the philosophy of
history
Early
modern and 19th-century scientific
philosophies of time
Nature and
definition of time
Time
appears to be more puzzling than space because
it seems to flow or pass or else people seem to
advance through it. But the passage or advance
seems to be unintelligible. The question of how
many seconds per second time flows (or
one advances through it) is obviously an absurd
one, for it suggests that the flow or advance
comprises a rate of change with respect to
something else--to a sort of hypertime. But if
this hypertime itself flows, then a
hyper-hypertime is required, and so on, ad
infinitum. Again, if the world is thought of as
spread out in space-time, it might be
asked whether human consciousness advances up a
timelike direction of this world and, if so, how
fast; whether future events pop into existence
as the "now" reaches them or are there all
along; and how such changes in space-time
can be represented, since time is already
within the picture. (Ordinary change can, of
course, be represented in a space-time
picture: for example, a particle at rest is
represented by a straight line and an
oscillating particle by a wavy line.)
(See metaphysics,
process
philosophy.)
In the face of
these difficulties, philosophers tend to divide
into two sorts: the
"process
philosophers" and the "philosophers of the
manifold."
Process philosophers--such as A.
N. W.,
an Anglo-American metaphysician who died in
1947--hold that the flow of time (or
human advance through it) is an important
metaphysical fact. Like the French intuitionist
H.
B.,
they may hold that this flow can be
grasped
only by nonrational
intuition.
Bergson even held that the scientific concept of
time as a dimension actually
misrepresents reality. Philosophers of the
manifold hold that the
flow
of time or human advance through
time is an
illusion.
They argue, for example, that words such as
past, future, and now, as well as the tenses of
verbs, are indexical expressions that refer to
the act of their own utterance. Hence, the
alleged change of an event from being future to
being past is an illusion. To say that the event
is future is to assert that it is later than
this utterance; then later yet, when one says
that it is in the past, he or she asserts that
it is earlier than that other utterance.
Past and future are not real
predicates of events in this view; and change in
respect of them is not a genuine change. (See
W.,
A. N.,
B.,
H.
)
Again,
although process philosophers think of the
future as somehow open or indeterminate, whereas
the past is unchangeable, fixed, determinate,
philosophers of the manifold hold that it is as
much nonsense to talk of changing the future as
it is to talk of changing the past. If a person
decides to point left rather than to point
right, then pointing left is what the
future was. Moreover, this thesis of the
determinateness of the future, they argue, must
not be confused with determinism, the theory
that there are laws whereby later states of the
universe may be deduced from earlier states (or
vice versa). The philosophy of the manifold is
neutral about this issue. Future events may well
exist and yet not be connected in a sufficiently
lawlike way with earlier ones. (See
determinism.)
One of the
features of time that puzzled the
Platonist
A., in
the 5th century AD, was the
difficulty
of defining it.
In contemporary philosophy of language, however
(influenced by L.
W., a
Cambridge philosopher),
no
mystery is
seen in this task. Learning to handle the word
time involves a multiplicity of
verbal skills, including the ability to handle
such connected words as earlier,
later, now, second, and
hour. These verbal skills have to be
picked up in very complex ways (partly by
ostension), and it is not surprising that the
meaning of the word time cannot be
distilled into a neat verbal definition. (It is
not, for example, an abbreviating word like
bachelor.) (See
analytic
proposition.)
The
philosophy of time bears powerfully on
human emotions.
Not only do individuals regret the past, they
also fear the future, not least because the
alleged flow of time seems to be sweeping
them toward their deaths, as swimmers are swept
toward a waterfall.
(See death.)
Prescientific
conceptions of time and their
influence
The
individual's experience and observation of
time
The
irreversibility and inexorability of the passage
of time is borne in on human beings by
the
fact of death.
Unlike other living creatures, they know that
their lives may be cut short at any moment and
that, even if they attain the full expectation
of human life, their growth is bound to be
followed by eventual decay and, in due
time, death (see also time
perception).
Although there
is no generally accepted evidence that death is
not the conclusive end of life, it is a tenet of
some religions
(e.g., of Zoroastrianism, Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam) that death is followed
by everlasting life
elsewhere--in
sheol, hell, or heaven--and that
eventually there will be a universal physical
resurrection. Others (e.g., Buddhists,
Orphics, Pythagoreans, and P.)
have
held that people are reborn in the time
flow of life on
Earth and
that the notion that a human being has only one
life on Earth is the illusion of a lost memory.
The Buddha claimed to recollect all of his
previous lives. The Greek philosophers
P.
and E.,
of the 6th and early 5th centuries BC, whose
lives probably overlapped that of the
B.,
likewise claimed to recollect some of their
previous lives. Such rebirths, they held, would
continue to recur unless a person should succeed
in breaking the vicious circle (releasing
himself from the "sorrowful wheel") by strenuous
ascetic performances. (See
afterlife,
reincarnation,
B.,
P.,
E.,
Buddhism,
Platonism.)
The belief
that a person's life in time on Earth is
repetitive
may have been an inference from the observed
repetitiveness of phenomena in the environment.
The day-and-night cycle and the annual cycle of
the seasons dominated the conduct of human life
until the recent harnessing of inanimate
physical forces in the Industrial Revolution
made it possible for work to be carried on for
24 hours a day throughout the year--under cover,
by artificial light, and at a controlled
temperature. There is also the generation cycle,
which the Industrial Revolution has not
suppressed: the generations still replace each
other, in spite of the lengthening of life
expectancies. In some societies it has been
customary to give a man's son a different name
but to give his grandson the same name. To name
father and son differently is an admission that
generations change; but to name grandfather and
grandson the same is perhaps an intimation that
the grandson is the grandfather reincarnate.
(See cyclicism,
season,
Industrial
Revolution.)
Thus, though
every human being has the experience of
irreversible change in his own life,
he
also observes cyclic
change in
his environment; hence the adherents of some
religions and philosophies have inferred that,
despite appearances, time flows
cyclically for the individual human being,
too.
The human
experience and observation of time has
been variously interpreted. P.,
an Italiote Greek ( Eleatic) philosopher
(6th-5th century BC) and Z.,
his fellow townsman and disciple, held that
change is logically inconceivable and that logic
is a surer indicator of reality than experience;
thus, despite appearances,
reality
is unitary and
motionless.
In this view, time is an illusion. The
illusoriness of the world that "flows" in
time is also to be found in some Indian
philosophy. The B.
and, among the Greeks, P.
and P.,
all held that life in the time flow,
though
not wholly illusory,
is at best a low-grade condition by comparison,
respectively, with the Buddhist Nirvana
(in which desires are extinguished) and with the
Platonic world of Ideas; i.e., of
incorporeal timeless exemplars, of which
phenomena in the time flow are imperfect
and ephemeral copies. (See
P.,
Eleaticism,
Z.
of E.,
P..)
It has been
held, however--e.g., by disciples of the
Greek philosopher H.--that
the time
flow is of the essence of
reality.
Others have held that life in the time
flow, though it may be wretched, is
nevertheless
momentous;
for it is here that a person decides his
destiny. In the Buddhist view, a person's
conduct in any one of his successive lives on
Earth will increase or diminish his prospects of
eventually breaking out of the cycle of
recurrent births. For those who believe in only
one earthly life, however, the momentousness of
life in the time flow is still greater
because this life will be followed by an
everlasting life at a destination decided by
conduct in this brief and painful testing
time. The view that life in time
on Earth is a probation for weal or woe in an
everlasting future has often been associated--as
it was by the Iranian prophet
Z.
(c. 600 BC)--with a belief in a general
judgment of all who have ever lived to be held
on a common judgment day, which will be the end
of time. The belief in an immediate
individual judgment was also held in pharaonic
Egypt. Both of these beliefs have been adopted
by Jews, Christians, and Muslims. (See
H.,
Z.,
Z..)
Cyclic
view of time in the philosophy of
history
The foregoing
diverse interpretations of the nature and
significance of the individual human being's
experience and observation of time differ
sharply from each other, and they have led to
equally sharp
differences in
views of
human history and of ultimate reality and in
prescriptions for the conduct, both collective
and individual, of human life. Thinkers have
been divided
between holders of the cyclic view and holders
of the one-way view of
time
and between believers in the different
prescriptions
for the conduct of life
that these
differing views have suggested. Variations in
the two
basic views
of time and in the corresponding codes of
conduct have been among the salient
characteristics distinguishing the principal
civilizations and philosophies and higher
religions that have appeared in history to date.
(See history,
philosophy of.)
Environmental
recurrences and religion
The cyclic
theory of time has been held in regard to
the three
fields of religion, of history (both human and
cosmic), and of personal
life. That
this view arose from the observation of
recurrences in the environment is most
conspicuously seen in the field of religion. The
observation of the generation cycle has been
reflected in the
cult of ancestors, important in Chinese
religion
and also in older civilizations and in
precivilizational societies. The observation of
the annual cycle of the seasons and its crucial
effect on agriculture is reflected in a ceremony
in which the emperor of China used to plow the
first furrow of the current year; in the
ceremonial opening of a breach in the dike of
the Nile to let the annual floodwaters irrigate
the land; and in the annual "sacred marriage,"
performed by a priest and priestess representing
a god and goddess, which was deemed to ensure
the continuing fertility of Babylonia.
A
cycle longer than that of the seasons is
represented by the recurrent avataras
(epiphanies,
incarnate, on Earth) of the Hindu god
V.
(V.)
and
in the corresponding series of buddhas and
bodhisattvas
(potential
buddhas). Although the only historical
B.
was S.
G.
(6th-5th century BC), in the mythology of the
northern school of Buddhism (the Mahayana), the
identity of the historical B.
has been almost effaced by a long vista of
putative buddhas extending through previous and
future times. (See
ancestor
worship,
Chinese
religion,
Hinduism,
Mahayana.)
In contrast to
northern Buddhism and to Vaisnava
Hinduism, Christianity
holds that the incarnation of God in
J.
was a unique event;
yet the rite of the Eucharist, in which
C.'s
self-sacrifice is held by Catholic and Eastern
Orthodox Christians to be reperformed, is
celebrated every day by thousands of priests,
and the nature of this rite has suggested to
some scholars that it originated in an annual
festival at the culmination of the agricultural
year. In this interpretation, the bread that is
C.'s
body and the wine that is his blood associate
him with the annually dying gods
A.,
O.,
and A.--the
divinities, inherent in the vital and vitalizing
power of the crops, who die in order that people
may eat and drink and live. "Unless a grain of
wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains
alone; but, if it dies, it bears much fruit"
(John 12:24).(See Christianity,
Eucharist.)
The
cyclic view in various cultures
The cyclic
view of history, both cosmic and human, has been
prevalent among the Hindus and the pre-Christian
Greeks, the Chinese, and the Aztecs. More
recently, the
cyclic view has gained adherents in modern
Western society, although this civilization was
originally Christian--that is, was nurtured on a
religion that sees time as a one-way flow
and not as a cyclic one.
The Chinese,
Hindus, and Greeks saw cosmic time as
moving in an
alternating rhythm,
classically expressed in the Chinese concept of
the alternation between Yin, the passive female
principle, and Yang, the dynamic male principle.
When either Yin or Yang goes to extremes, it
overlaps the other principle, which is its
correlative and complement
in consequence of being its opposite. In the
philosophy of E.,
an early Greek thinker,
the
equivalents of Yin and Yang were Love and
Strife.
E.
revolted
against the denial of the reality of motion and
plurality
that was made by his Eleatic predecessors on the
strength of mere logic. He broke up the
Eleatics' motionless, and therefore timeless,
unitary reality into
a
movement of four
elements
that were alternately harmonized by Love and set
at variance by Strife. E.
Love and Strife, like Yin and Yang, each
overlapped the other when they had gone to
extremes. (See yin-yang,
E.,
E.,
Eleaticism.)
One-way
view of time in the philosophy of
history
When the flow
of time is held to be not recurrent but
one-way, it can be conceived of as having a
beginning and perhaps an end. Some thinkers have
felt that such limits can be imagined only if
there is some timeless power that has set
time going and intends or is set to stop
it. A god who creates and then annihilates
time, if he is held to be omnipotent, is
often credited with having done this with a
benevolent purpose that is being carried out
according to plan. The omnipotent god's plan, in
this view, governs the time flow and is
made manifest to humans in progressive
revelations through the prophets--from
A.,
by way of M,
I.,
and J.,
to the Prophet M.(as
Muslims believe). (See Providence.)
This belief in
Heilsgeschichte (salvational history) has
been derived by Islam and Christianity from
Judaism and Zoroastrianism. Late in the 12th
century, the Christian seer J.
of F.
saw this divinely ordained
spiritual
progress in the time flow as unfolding in
a series of three ages--those of the Father, the
Son, and the Spirit.
K.
J., a
20th-century Western philosopher, has discerned
an "axis age"--i.e.,
a
turning point
in human history--in the 6th century BC, when
C.,
the B.,
Z,
D.-I.,
and P.
were alive contemporaneously. If the "axis age"
is extended backward in time to the
original I's
generation and forward to M.'s,
it may perhaps be recognized as the age in which
humans first sought to make direct contact with
the ultimate spiritual reality behind phenomena
instead of making such communication only
indirectly through their nonhuman and social
environments. (See salvation,
J.
of F.,
J.,
K. T.r.)
The belief in
an omnipotent creator god, however, has been
challenged. The creation of time, or of
anything else, out of nothing is difficult to
imagine; and, if God is not a creator but is
merely a shaper, his power is limited by the
intractability of the independent material with
which he has had to work. P,
in the Timaeus, conceived of God as being
a nonomnipotent shaper and thus accounted for
the manifest element of evil in phenomena.
M.,
a 2nd-century Christian heretic, inferred from
the evil in phenomena that the creator was bad
and held that a "stranger god" had come to
redeem the bad creator's work at the benevolent
stranger's cost. Z.
saw the phenomenal world as a battlefield
between a bad god and a good one and saw
time as the duration of this battle.
Though he held that the good god was destined to
be the victor, a god who needs to fight and win
is not omnipotent. In an attenuated form, this
evil adversary appears in the three Judaic
religions as Satan. (See "Timaeus",
M.
of P.,
evil,
problem of,
Z..)
Observation of
historical phenomena suggests that, in spite of
the manifestness of evil, there has been
progress in the history of life on this planet,
culminating in the emergence of humans who know
themselves to be sinners yet feel themselves to
be something better than inanimate matter.
C.
D., in
his theory of the selection of mutations by the
environment, sought to vindicate apparent
progress in the organic realm without recourse
to an extraneous god. In the history of Greek
thought, the counterpart of such mutations was
the swerving of atoms. After E.
had broken up the indivisible, motionless, and
timeless reality of P.
and Z.
into four elements played upon alternately by
Love and Strife, it was a short step for the
Atomists of the 5th century BC, L.
and D.,
to break up reality still further into an
innumerable host of minute atoms moving in
time through a vacuum. Granting that one
single atom had once made a single slight
swerve, the build-up of observed phenomena could
be accounted for on Darwinian lines.
D.'
account of evolution survives in the fifth book
of De rerum natura, written by a
1st-century-BC Roman poet, L..
The credibility of both D.'
and D.'s
accounts of evolution depends on the assumption
that time is real and that its flow has
been extraordinarily long. (See
D.,
C. R.,
natural
selection,
atomism,
L.,
D.,
"On
the Nature of
Things,".)
H.
had seen in phenomena a harmony of opposites in
tension with each other and had concluded that
War
(i.e., E.'
Strife and the Chinese Yang) "is father of all
and king of all."
This vision of Strife as being the dominant and
creative force is grimmer than that of Strife
alternating on equal terms with Love and Yang
with Yin. In the 19th-century West,
H.'
vision has been revived in the view of
G.W.F.
H., a
German Idealist, that progress occurs through a
synthesis resulting from an encounter between a
thesis and an antithesis. In political terms,
H.'
vision has reappeared in K.
M.'s
concept of an encounter between the bourgeoisie
and the proletariat and the emergence of a
classless society without a government.
(See H.,
Hegel,
G. W. F.,
M..)
In the
Zoroastrian and Jewish-Christian-Islamic vision
of the time flow, time is destined
to be consummated--as depicted luridly in the
Revelation to John--in a terrifying climax. It
has become apparent that history has been
accelerating, and accumulated knowledge of the
past has revealed, in retrospect, that the
acceleration began about 30,000 years ago, with
the transition from the Lower to the Upper
Paleolithic Period, and that it has taken
successive "great leaps forward" with the
invention of agriculture, with the dawn of
civilization, and with the progressive
harnessing--within the last two centuries--of
the titanic physical forces of inanimate nature.
The
approach of the climax foreseen intuitively by
the prophets is being felt, and feared, as a
coming event. Its imminence is, today, not an
article of faith but a datum of observation and
experience.(A.J.T.)
(See apocalypticism.)
Early
modern and 19th-century scientific philosophies
of time
I.
N.
distinguished absolute
time
from "relative,
apparent, and common
time"
as measured by the apparent motions of the fixed
stars, as well as by terrestrial clocks. His
absolute time was an ideal scale of
time that made the laws of mechanics
simpler, and its discrepancy with apparent
time was attributed to such things as
irregularities in the motion of the Earth.
Insofar as these motions were explained by
N.'s
mechanics (or at least could not be shown to be
inexplicable), the procedure was vindicated.
Similarly, in his notion of absolute space,
Newton was really getting at the concept of an
inertial system. Nevertheless, the notion of
space and time
as absolute metaphysical
entities
was encouraged by Newton's views and formed an
important part of the philosophy of
I.
K., a
German critical philosopher, for whom space and
time were "phenomenally
real"
(part of the world as described by science) but
"noumenally
unreal"
(not a part of the unknowable world of things in
themselves). K.
argued
for the noumenal unreality of space and
time on the basis of certain antinomies
that he claimed to find in these notions--that
the universe had a beginning, for example, and
yet (by another argument) could not have had a
beginning. In a letter dated 1798, he wrote that
the antinomies had been instrumental in arousing
him from his "dogmatic slumber" (pre-critical
philosophy). Modern advances in logic and
mathematics, however, have convinced most
philosophers that the antinomies contain
fallacies. (See N.,
Sir I.,
celestial
mechanics,
classical
mechanics,
K.,
I.,
antinomy.)
Newtonian
mechanics, as studied in the 18th century, was
mostly concerned with periodic systems that, on
a large scale, remain constant throughout
time. Particularly notable was the
proof
of the stability of the solar
system
that was formulated by P.-S.,
marquis de
L., a
mathematical astronomer. Interest in systems
that develop through time came about in
the 19th century as a result of the theories of
the British geologist Sir
C. L.,
and others, and the Darwinian theory of
evolution. These theories led to a number of
biologically inspired metaphysical systems,
which were often--as with H.
B. and
A
N W--rather
romantic and contrary to the essentially
mechanistic spirit of D.
himself (and also of present-day molecular
biology).
(See
L.,
P.-S., m.de.)/
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