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Stratification of the Meaning of Time
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 February 2009
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It is no accident that when Socrates, Critias, Hermocrates, and Timaeus came to discuss the historicity of the Ancient Athens in correlation to Socrates' idea of the ideal city, they were led to the problem of the metaphysical reality of time. In Timaeus, time becomes the hinge of correlation between historical reality and eternity. And so it is with Augustine. In his Confessions, after a lengthy discussion of his personal history he sets out to construct an ontological structure for the interpretation of history as a whole. Right there, he encounters the problem of time. ‘What, then, is time? If no one asks of me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not.’ Lament as Augustine may, he plunges right into the puzzle.
The problem of time is more than a pastime interest for metaphysical speculation. It is at the root of our understanding of the structure both of physical and of human existence. Einstein's relational concept of time affects our understanding of the structure of physical reality, just as the former Newtonian habit of looking at time as an independently flowing stream governed our former way of seeing things. With the suggestion in the Newtonian model that one moment of time flows into the one immediately next in sequence, we unconsciously look at events as flowing one into the other, and so we perceive events in terms of causal connexions. The relational model breaks the necessity of causal connexions and replaces it with a concept of functional dependence.
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References
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