PERSONAL EPILOGUE

Because the text of this book, though read in time, is set out in space, you, my much put-upon reader, can see that the end is in sight. Your predominant emotion may be one of relief. My own feelings are more mixed.

Of Time and Lamentation has been a dim possibility for as long as I have been thinking philosophically. I first seriously considered writing about time over 25 years ago. I was playing beach cricket with my (now grown-up) children on the last day of our summer holiday. The holiday had been perfect and I was consumed with anguish at the prospect of the coming scattering, our being dispersed after a wonderful fortnight together into our separate preoccupations, prefiguring the wider dispersal as our lives diverged. The nearest image of transience – of a handful of seeds thrown in the air, briefly together before parting to fall to our separate fates – was unbearable, if perhaps a little premature. I had therefore to take hold of time.

As originally conceived, Of Time and Lamentation was to be a collection of short pieces of what I hoped would be poetic prose. The idea was of something that would connect the puzzles with the epiphanies, the 2,500 years of argument and conversation, with the pangs felt when someone has said goodbye, another has died, a way of life has melted, or we have discovered that we have reached the age when there are more farewells than greetings, more last times than first. It would encompass the world new in a baby's first cry or a child's first day at school, old in a headstone whose letters are infilled with moss; the leaves fluttering in the sunlight and the rings of hoarded afternoons in the sawn log. Or the mystery of the determinate past of my footsteps in the snow and the indeterminate future of the unprinted fields ahead. Or unify the flower clock in the park with the atomic clock in the laboratory.

The world we see around us is saturated with marks of time. The mossed log, the characterful face, the crumbling wall, the worn shoes and the well-thumbed book, are rich with intimations of the past, with effects broadcasting recent or ancient causes. The baby, the sapling, the dawning day, turn our thoughts to the future, or futures, pregnant with possibilities that beckon us. And the inner world is correspondingly charged with the mementos of time past and time future. “Now”, unlike the empty, unextended instants of mathematical time, is informed with an inexpressibly complex past, recalled at will or arriving without summons, bringing regret, nostalgia, satisfaction or joy – or, more practically, information and guidance that take us through projected futures, that are already active, seeming to await us, making us hurried and harried, hopeful and fearful, impatient or resigned, reflective or busy. The humble knotted handkerchief is a present reminder, laid down in a past when this present was future, of a duty whose time has now arrived.

The origins of these pasts and futures are associated, as I have argued, intimately – but of course by no means exclusively – with the most mysterious of our mysterious senses: vision. Without vision, the most spatial of our senses, we would have had a less explicit or immediate sense of being located between a known (though, of necessity, largely forgotten) past and an unknown (but of necessity patchily anticipated) future. But the domination of vision in the immediate presentation of experienced time leads ultimately to a mode of awareness of explicit time that both alienates time from us and yet also makes us able to draw on a deeper and more complex past and reach further into an evermore controlled future, in the service of a present that, while it is enriched in its material possibilities, is, along with the rest of time, conceptually impoverished by the very science that extends our powers.

PERSONAL (1)

When I wake up each morning, I am less likely to reflect that a new day has arrived than that yet another day has departed. What we unthinkingly call “the passage of time” tinges the first few minutes with apprehension. I have entered my seventies and, although the end is as invisible as it ever was, my probability of dying in a given year is many times greater than when, as a teenager, I first tried to imagine the extinction of my life, my world, and all those who had shared it with me. My human being is more “begoing” than becoming. As Christopher Hitchens put it, “every day represents more and more subtracted from less and less”. The merely probable “not-yet” is shorter than the definite “no-longer”; and “ago” is increasingly measured in decades rather than years. An optimistic calculation puts the number of days I imagine as “lying ahead” of me between a half and a third of the number that lie behind me: I am somewhere between supper-time and midnight in my life's day. Since my last phase may be marked by chaos, confusion, pain and despair, the period in which I may be capable, in particular capable of thought, will most probably be even shorter than the quantity of time that remains to me.

This may be why, in certain moods, an ordinary Tuesday can seem, from the ordinary Wednesday that succeeds it, unreachable, beyond recall, in its own special sunlight; a privileged place merely in virtue of owning more of the future than does this present day. The extra day of “being there” becomes a giant stretch when I think of the fewness of my days of “I am” compared with the days of “I am not”, the endless – dateless and data-less – night of my absence which lacks even the quality of darkness.

What's more, the pace seems to be quickening. “I can't believe that a year has gone by since …” is now replaced by a second order dismay: “I really can't believe a year has gone by since I last said ‘I can't believe a year has gone by since …’”. Inflation seems to affect time as surely as it does money.

INTRODUCING THE FUTURE: ALL OUR TOMORROWS

All three tenses seem vulnerable to attack. The past is ontologically weakened by the fact that (by definition) nothing is presently happening in it, its states of affairs are no longer existent, and its material contents owe their survival to being in the present. The present seems to borrow its breadth (or depth) from the other tenses: it lives on borrowed time. And the future – as we shall see – has nothing determinate in it. To say this, however, far from undermining any of the tenses, is to acknowledge that they do not stand alone. There is no present without a past to inform it and a future to give it direction; and there is no future without a past-informed present to anticipate it. The future, therefore, requires no special defence.

The unknown future

When I began this book in earnest, I estimated that I had an actuarial average of about 7,000 or 8,000 tomorrows compared with my 22,000 yesterdays. Quite a few todays later, the number of the former is significantly less and of the latter rather more. I have of course a clearer idea of the number of my yesterdays than tomorrows and can calculate their number precisely because there is a precise number to calculate. This highlights a more general point, in addition to the mathematical one that I am over three quarters through the time for which Raymond Tallis is a walking, talking, thinking enterprise; namely, that the uncertainty in “over three quarters” comes from my tomorrows rather than my yesterdays: I know what is on the numerator but not what is on the denominator. While I can be certain that I have just under 3,500 fewer tomorrows than lay before me when I began this book a decade or so ago, I do not know which tomorrow will be the tomorrow after there will be no more tomorrows. Even if I had a suicide pact with myself, I couldn't guarantee that I would honour it or that I would make it to the appointed day. “Call no life spanned until it is complete” we might say.

THE MYSTERIOUS VERB “TO TIME”

In our commitment to rescuing time from physics, and from reduction to the mere value of a variable, a quantifiable dimension, we have rather taken for granted something deeply mysterious. While all beings (pebbles, trees, monkeys) are, in some sense that we have yet to determine, in time, only one kind of being turns time into an activity. We humans are alone in timing being and beings, in timing what happens – including (or especially) what happens to us and, indeed the span of our lives – and in being on time. We portion time into days and we number days and parts of them; and, apparently uniquely among sentient creatures know that our days are numbered.

Our passage from experienced time to timed time – which builds on the explicitness of time afforded by vision – depends on our utilizing as clocks a subset of the processes in the material world of which we are a part. It is not enough that there are putatively isochronous periodic events, such as the swinging of pendula, the succession of night and day, and the apparent rotation of the stars. We have to see that they might be used to determine the duration and temporal location of other events and processes. And this presupposes a distinction between, and the relations between, events that fill (an interval of) time, events that constitute time (“at” – vide infra – “how long”, “in what order”), and events that are used to measure, or determine a location in, the time. The subclass of events that are generated or domesticated in order to mark time with their periodicity is stranger than we customarily acknowledge. They are in time and, courtesy of us rise above time so that they can be about time.

We should not therefore allow our objection to the reduction of time to a dimension and then to pure quantity to blind us to this astonishing fact. Or cause us to overlook the extraordinary truth that, notwithstanding the gap between lived and measured time, between human time and time shrivelled to “little t”, measurement has enabled us to extend, protect, enrich and enhance our lives; to have the time of our lives. “Measurement began our might”, as Yeats said: it extended our powers beyond anything that could be imagined by our pre-numerate ancestors.

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.

INTRODUCTION

Our inquiry so far has had three major aims. The first has been to rescue time from physics, where, reduced to a tenseless parameter little “t”, it is in danger of disappearing altogether. Our approach was to expose the inadequacies of envisaging time as a pure quantity. The second has been to do justice to the richness of temporal experience by thick descriptions of time as it is lived, whether it is the tensed time of everyday life, or the after-image of time imagined in eternity. And, in the previous chapter, we have tried to determine what remains of time after we strip it of metaphors, such as those of passage, in which we clothe it in our everyday time talk.

Removing these accretions has not (unlike the search for the heart of an onion) left us with nothing. There seems to be something corresponding to “time in itself”; at any rate, we cannot remove time from our account of the world without that account being calamitously incomplete. We cannot translate “before” and “after”, temporal location and temporal duration, “not yet”, “now” and “no longer” into something other than time. They are part of the irreducible furniture of the world – just as hopeful anticipation, backward looking regret, expectation, recollection, hurry and calm, patience and impatience and countless other manifestations of our time-consciousness are ineradicable features of every moment of human life. Time, in other words, cannot be extruded from our changing world; nor, however, can it be extracted as a kind of juice from the ooze of process. In this respect, its existence is syncategorematic, as philosophers would say, though this makes it in no way inferior to space. Objects, after all cannot occupy or (if you are a relationist) sustain space without enduring through time. And entirely empty space, void of objects, not populated and triangulated by events, is as problematic as a temporal vacuum, even though the fact that we seem to see space directly and see time only indirectly, makes the idea of a spatial vacuum intuitively more acceptable: we can, that is to say, deceive ourselves over space more readily because we can visualize it.

NOW

Defining now

Anyone inclined to think that the present is the least mysterious of the tenses, that it is more straightforward or even more basic than past or future, will change their mind once they look hard enough. The trouble begins with the most elementary face of the present: “now”, which, as we noted in the previous chapter, Einstein observed (with some regret) lay as far beyond the reach of science as other aspects of tensed time. No foliation of space–time is geometrically special, and certainly not in the way that the present moment is special. The fact that “now” eludes the grasp of physics may seem scarcely surprising. It is an indexical anchored in “I” or “we” and first-person being and hence is absent in no-person physical science, notwithstanding that the mathematized account of the world aspires to describe the framework of all possible experiences. Even so, it seems to have a reality that goes beyond the apparently equally indexical “here”, as we shall discuss in §6.1.3.

Poincare pointed out that in mechanics something is missing in its grasp of simultaneity: it reduces the qualitative problem of simultaneity to the quantitative problem of time measurement. Some might argue, however, that “now” eludes physical science not because the latter has an impoverished sense of simultaneity but because “now” entirely lacks content and Einstein should consequently not have fretted. Certainly “I am now” and (of the time) “It is now” smack of empty logical necessity because “now” is defined by the time at which the assertion using the token “now” is uttered. It is, however, substantive in a way that Mellor inadvertently highlighted when he attempted to reduce now (and tensed time) to the relations between utterances and that of which they speak.

Why no-one would bother saying either “It is now” or “I am now” may seem obvious but the reasons are worth spelling out because they are different in the two cases. “It is now” unpacks the fact that in its use in particular utterances, “now” refers to the (present) moment in which the utterance is being made: the utterance, that is to say, is devoted to making explicit one aspect of itself.

THE IDEA OF ETERNITY

We may not know when our lives are going to end, but we can be certain that we are always approaching that end. The lengthening contrail of yesterdays warns us that the invisible store of tomorrows is depleting. Underlining this knowledge is a Grand Narrative of our lives captured in the idea of an arc: a phase of growth, maturation, and augmentation followed, after an interval, by a time of shrinkage, and diminution; of progressive empowerment succeeded by disempowerment; of becoming and then begoing. Gain – of friends, loved ones, possessions, CV, standing – is followed by loss. Personhood, attachment, potency, value, and ultimately our individual being, are taken from us. Everything in which we have invested ourselves will disinvest in us. On the way, bereavements – of those whom we love or merely like, of past selves and their worlds, and of our faculties – remind us of the final state in which we shall be deprived of ourselves.

And so we need consolation. One version (and by no means the only one) of that consolation is the idea of the continuing existence of ourselves, and all that we truly love and value, in a realm somehow outside of that temporal world in which we gained and lost everything to which we were attached. That realm has many guises but the one that is most relevant to our present inquiry goes under the name of eternity. Dying, so the not entirely reassuring story goes, is to exchange life in time for life, or at least existence, in eternity.

If the idea of eternity is complex and contradictory, this is because the need for consolation, while it may be the main reason for its presence in our thought about the world and ourselves, is not the only force shaping how it has been conceived.

THE PRESENCE OF THE PAST

We have touched already on the presence of the past and reaffirmed its reality against presentism. We have, however, scarcely touched on “the past” in itself. The imperialism of the present is evident even in our endeavour to curtail it. By looking at the past through the lens of the present, we have done insufficient justice to its complexity and non-homogeneity. The present chapter will endeavour to rectify this.

Preliminary, unsystematic observations

That single, poignant line has been transmitted through all the layers of the past that separate us from its author who lived in Paris over half a millennium ago. Villon's voice was silenced when he died at the age of 30. Few of us can recall anything else of the Ballade whose refrain it forms, or of the Grand Testament he left behind which contains the Ballade, or of the man who wrote it. And yet it can still move us: the poetic dart still has the power to pierce. Thinking back along its trajectory to this moment highlights the many layers of one (Eurocentric) version of the past: yesterday's sudden rain shower; last week's ward round; a holiday a few months ago; a walk 30 years past when a now grown up child was two weeks old; the Fifties of the last century, when the Second World War was still a recent, hideous memory; Einstein's annus mirabilis of 1905, marked by those famous papers that transformed our understanding of the physical world; the birth of a certain kind of fiction with the publication of Madame Bovary in 1857; Napoleon's self-coronation as Emperor in 1804; Captain Cook's arrival in Australia in 1756; the ending of the English Civil War in 1645; 1609 and Galileo's discovery of the moons of Jupiter; the moment in 1543 when Copernicus’ heliocentric thesis was offered to the world; and so back to 1463 and the silencing of the voice that uttered those lines.

THE ATTACK ON TENSE: THE PHYSICISTS

While only a minority of physicists would like to do away with time completely, many, perhaps the majority, are content to dispense with tensed time. The shortest of the numerous arguments for maintaining that “the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion” derives from special relativity and goes like this. The observed time relations between events will depend on the viewpoint (more accurately, the inertial frame of reference) of the observer. One observer will see that A is past with respect to B, another will see them in reverse order with A future with respect to B, and a third may judge them as being simultaneous with A and B co-present. All three are equally valid. There is no referee, occupying a privileged viewpoint, who can adjudicate because, to the democratic eye of physical science all observers are equal. To put this in relativistic terms, there is no privileged foliation of the manifold – a slicing of space–time into spaces at different times – no “now” acting as a universal reference point, underwriting the present.

In the absence of a privileged viewpoint, there is nothing corresponding to the “real” temporal location of an event in relation to another event. “At a given time” is not a relativistic invariant notion. Anyone setting himself up as a referee is in the same boat as the others: he is just another individual at another viewpoint and not privy to locations in an absolute time in which events “really” take place and their “real” temporal order determined.

Vision: from implicit to explicit time

Something we call “time” permeates everything that happens and everything we do. Events, processes, experiences, actions, and activities take place at particular times and occupy stretches of time, are composed of constituents that also occupy time, have a temporal order, and are otherwise related in time to each other. Time also seems to be intimated to us from within our own bodies, incarnate in what we may think of anachronistically as “proto-clocks” formed out of recurrent and cyclical events within the cycle of our days: waking and sleeping, rising and settling down, the patterns of hunger and thirst, and, more prominently, the rhythms of breathing and the heartbeat and the tick-tock of walking. But this inherent time of the body does not amount to fully explicit time, even less “timing”, since it is not clearly offset from the changes in which it is expressed. The rhythm of my heart is, even when it is noticed, interwoven with the activities or emotions that cause the organ to beat faster and more thickly. The temporality of what is going on is consequently for the most part implicit, woven into what is experienced.

Time as something “in itself”, that is available ultimately to be clocked, is most clearly developed in relation to our consciousness of things outside of our bodies, “out there”. The immediate presentation of the world around us, unfolding in or over time, is the first step towards opening up the present to an ever more remote past, an ever more distant future. Eventually we locate ourselves in a common past and future flanking a communal present – in a remembered social history and anticipated social future we share with our fellow humans, and a natural history we share with all beings. Ultimately, we come to be aware of our lives as brief episodes in a story that stretches from pre-history to post-history, from the Big Bang to the Big Crunch.

Foremost among the senses that yield an explicit sense of time, though by no means exclusive, is vision. While it is obvious that vision is a revelation of explicit space it is less easy to appreciate its importance in the revelation of explicit time.