In Part I, I criticized the reduction of “time” in physical science to a naked quantity, little t, that had no reality independent of space or, perhaps, no reality at all. In Part II, human time was brought centre stage. I defended tensed time and examined the phenomenology of tensed experience and the mysteries, problems and experiences of present, past, and future tenses. Having, as it were, cleared the decks by removing some of the misunderstandings blocking our view of time, and brought lived time centre stage, I shall, in this final part of the book, try to see time as it really is. While this requires revisiting some of the topics already touched on, our investigation will take us beyond the theme of time narrowly construed to the nature of human consciousness and of the agency that is central to our lives. We shall find that time – more precisely tensed time – and freedom are closely connected.

DEFINING TIME: PRELIMINARY REFLECTIONS

The brackets round the first word in the title of this chapter are not a misprint. For it is reasonable to question what, if anything, remains of time, or is to be said about time itself, time in general, time as a whole, if we remove from it characterizations that seem to misrepresent it or fail the test of intelligibility, or, if they do make sense, are vacuous. While we have sought to rescue time from the jaws of physics, we have stripped it of other characteristics to the point perhaps where we may wonder whether it has any independent reality at all.

The idea that time has a direction results from representing it as a quasi-spatial line, nothwithstanding that a line-as-dimension cannot have a direction. Other characteristics are also directly at odds with the idea of time as a fourth dimension comparable to the three of space.