Temporal Passage
Chapter 9 of Richard Taylor’s Metaphysics (4e)
Augustine’s Quandary:
For what is time? Who can easily and briefly
explain it? Who even in thought can comprehend
it, even to the pronouncing of a word concerning
it? But what in speaking do we refer to more
familiarly and knowingly than time? And certainly
we understand when we speak of it; we
understand also when we hear it spoken of by
another. What, then, is time? If no one ask of me,
I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I
know not. Yet I say with confidence, that I know
that if nothing passed away, there would not be
past time; and if nothing were coming, there
would not be future time; and if nothing were,
there would not be present time. Those two times,
therefore, past and future, how are they, when
even the past now is not; and the future is not as
yet? But should the present be always present,
and should it not pass into time past, time truly it
could not be, but eternity. If, then, time present —
if it be time — only comes into existence because
it passes into time past, how do we say that even
this is, whose cause of being is that it shall not be
— namely, so that we cannot truly say that time
is, unless because it tends not to be?
–Augustine of Hippo, Confessiones lib xi, cap xiv, sec 17
(ca. 400 CE)
Taylor Chapter 9
Taylor says at the beginning of this chapter
that the puzzling aspect of time is its passage or
flow. Now I think that that the idea that time flows
is unintelligible, as I have already noted in the
notes on McTaggart, but I do think that it passes.
Therefore, passage and flow, in my view, should
be clearly and carefully distinguished, not
conflated. Of course, we have not yet tried to say
positively what passage is. (We agree with Gödel’s
view, stated at the end of these notes,
characterizing passage in commonsense or pre-
relativistic spacetime.)
The usual kinds of things we say about time
“are all expressions of change and
movement.” (80) Motion and change seem to be
“basic” and even “necessary” characteristics of
time, according to Taylor. But Taylor then points
out what he means by motion: “Things move in
space, in the sense that something can be in one
place at one time and at another place at another
time.” (81) If this is what is meant by ‘motion’,
then one needs only the resources provided by
spacetime (aka, the B-series) for its
characterization. The motions of things, then,
should not be metaphysically puzzling.
Given what Taylor means by ‘motion’, time
cannot move (What could it mean to say that time
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is at one place, then at another?), but why should
it move? Perhaps time just passes, or lapses.
Similarly, we need only the resources of
spacetime to characterize change, the change of
an object. It is for the object to have a property at
a given time and for that property to be replaced
by a different one at a later time. There is no
mystery here either, and also no reason why time
itself should be supposed to change in this sense.
“Still,” Taylor wrote,
it cannot be denied that things in time
seem to pass into, through, and out of
existence. That can be our datum, our
starting point, and if metaphysics declares
this to be an illusion, then it is up to
metaphysics to show it is. Until the illusory
character of the apprehension has been
demonstrated, then we can say, concerning
anything whatever that exists, that until it
exists is draws ever closer to existing; that
while it exists it grows older; and that after
it ceases to exist it recedes ever farther into
the past. Or at least, so it certainly seems.
(81)
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Let us admit Taylor’s datum: that things seem
to grow less future, become present, and then
become ever more past. (81) This is to endorse C.
D. Broad’s transitory aspect of time.
Pure Becoming
Any kind of change presupposes pure
becoming.
• That is, when one tries to define or
characterize change, pure becoming is part of
the description.
• Pure becoming, then, must be simply
persistence through time, since that is what
change requires of that which changes.
“The fact that something becomes older,
however, or that it acquires a greater age than it
had does not entail that it undergoes any other
change whatever.” (82)
• ‘other’ is out of place if pure becoming is not
a kind of change.
• It would be hopeless to argue that there can
be time without change (as Newton might) if
pure becoming is really a kind of change.
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• Nevertheless, it is tempting to think of
objects (say) or events as becoming less
future, becoming present, then becoming
more past, which is precisely what McTaggart
did. This looks like a kind of change, though
this is probably a wrong way to think about
temporal becoming or the transitory aspect of
time.
The Strangeness of this Idea
1. This idea is supposed to be strange
because it is presupposed by any sort of change.
• But why is this strange? Just because it’s
basic?
• Any change of position requires there to be
some extent of space. Why should change of
property not require some extent of time (or
duration)? Calling this duration pure
becoming does not make it mysterious.
• And is it actually presupposed by any change
whatsoever? Consider the change of
temperature along a poker, with one end in
the fire and the other end in your hand.
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2. It is odd to think of events as changing.
• If an event has duration (is a process, as I
would put it), it becomes older.
• Even if an event is instantaneous, it
constantly becomes less future, present,
more past.
• Suppose that event e2 occurs later than e1, so
that when e1 occurs e2 is 10 minutes to its
future. If e3 occurs 5 minutes after e1, then e2
is only 5 minutes to the future of e3. e2 is less
future than it was five minutes earlier. Is
there any more than this to the transitory
aspect of time?
3. One can not assign a rate to pure becoming.
• One can see why this is so, since rates are
usually measured as changes in some
quantity with respect to some period of time.
• The rate of change of time itself with respect
to time (itself) is either nonsense or the pure
number 1.
Is this strong grounds for denying that pure
becoming (or the passage of time) is an illusion?
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Time and a River
It is tempting to think of time as flowing, like
the water in a river. But this is a poor to
meaningless comparison. The water, for instance,
can flow faster or slower, but (as we just noted)
prima facie no meaning can be given to the notion
of a rate of pure becoming (much less a variable
rate). (This matter may appear quite differently
should we turn to the special theory of relativity.)
The Elusive Present
“The Philosophical problem of temporal
passage, or what has been called ‘pure becoming,’
can be expressed by saying that, when a given set
of events or items of history have been completely
described in terms of which ones come before and
which ones come after some other event or set of
events, we still do not know which, if any, are past
and which future… This seems inconsistent with
the conception of time endorsed by most
philosophers, to the effect that all statements
involving time can be reduced to statements
describing the temporal relationships of events to
each other.” (86)
• But “most philosophers” could just be wrong!
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• Second, it’s not clear that “most
philosophers” believe this anyway. If anything
is a consensus view, it’s that the temporal
relations of events (before, simultaneous)
provide the truth conditions for statements
about pastness and futurity.
• What do questions about relations between
fragments of language have to do with
metaphysics? This is a complex and
controversial set of issues.
• ‘Now’ is an indexical term (indicating
temporal location), like ‘here’, which indicates
spatial location. Can not the above “problem”
of finding the Present be echoed in terms of
space? Where is the Here? Does this dual
problem pose a philosophical problem about
space?
Taylor thinks that the passage of time “cannot
be described in a way that is not an invitation to
absurdity”. (87) But I think that Kurt Gödel did
just that, for pre-relativistic passage, when he said
“The existence of an objective lapse
of time, however, means (or, at least, is
equivalent to that fact) that reality
consists of an infinity of layers of
‘now’ [instantaneous and simultaneous
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events] which come into existence
successively.” (1949: 558)