14 | The Philosophy of Time

Episode 14: The Philosophy of Time

Welcome to the Cow Behind the Barn: A podcast exploring humanity, the world, and the divine, as experienced and interpreted by an artist. I’m Kevin Caldwell, a Co-Finder of the Table Collective.

First, I need to correct a rather obvious mistake in Episode 12! A friend pointed out that in that Episode I said, as an example of how we think about and use time, “it takes 24 hours for the earth to circle the sun.” An embarrassing mistake since, of course, it takes one year to circle the sun, and 24 hours for the earth to revolve, which long ago used to be understood as if it takes 24 hours for the sun to circle the earth! Grateful for that to be pointed out!

In that same Episode, I shared some of my ways of seeing through my artistic expressions, through a poem, and a song, and I noted that these conclusions of mine were ones that I intuited. How might my intuited way of seeing time stand up to the scrutiny of physics and philosophy?  

So, I looked at the physics of time in Episode 13, and not surprisingly I was surprised by what I learned!

Things like: time is and has been incrementally speeding up ever since the big bang; time is not the same everywhere for everyone; the past, present, and future are not as distinct as our normal way of thinking might suggest. And as it happens, my artistic intuitions expressed in some of my poetry and music are in many ways similar to what physics reveals about the nature of time. 

Before digging in, I want to share a bit about how I have been experiencing the content of the prior episodes emotionally, personally.

I am struck by how fascinated by time I have been for many years, long before beginning this current project. So much of my poetry and music has been inspired by my experiences of past and present and how memory works. But until recently I have paid much less attention to the future. Yes, I imagined it, but did not dwell on it except I suppose as something that would arrive and then also pass away. 

In a way, this tendency towards nostalgia was so powerful that I have also been nostalgic about the future! Missing it before it arrives, as if it were already gone!

These emotional textures in my soul have resulted in an extended and futile effort to cling to the present moment, to hold it, and keep it with me so that it does not slip away. 

The podcast project has inspired me to ask more deeply, at a very personal level, about not just my understanding of time, but really, about my emotional relationship with time. In this Episode I will share two more of my creative offerings which each arose from this relationship with time I have had for so many years.

The first is a song from an album of mine, “ The Locket on a Silver Chain,” which uses poetic-spoken-word and four songs all woven together to explore how our lives are connected in various ways. This is the first of the four songs, “I Saw Your Eyes.”

 

I Saw Your Eyes 

I saw your eyes you did not see me

You were a child staring down the street

At the taillights disappearing, you were trying so hard not to grieve

Then you turned around and walked right through me

And I saw your eyes

 

I saw your eyes no words were needed

I knew all I had to know

You’ve been haunted by all these demons 

Clinging to you down every road you go

And you always say it doesn’t matter

But I see your eyes

 

Torn window screen, creaking open door, paint peeling in the hall

Locket on a silver chain, mama says, “take it it’ll ease the pain”

She’s staring at the wall

 

I saw your eyes like empty spaces

Aching hollow pools of fear

And I wish that I could try and free you 

And make all those dark dreams disappear 

But nothing I can do will ever reach you 

I see your eyes

 

I see your eyes still not believing 

What you saw there on that day

I see wild things all around you

And you’re trying hard to be so brave

I see your hand wrapped around that locket

And I see your eyes

 

This song is an extended reflection on returning to a past set of experiences and events, but also to a self that was “back then” and yet is still here. That can of course simply be a way of talking about a memory. But there is a mysterious (even to me as the artist) line in the opening verse:

“Then you turned around and walked right through me, and I saw your eyes”

Is this a function of a person’s memory? Or is the song portraying a person at two different points in their life, present simultaneously, the older and younger version of themselves there in a shared moment? And I will add that the song is rooted in an actual event in my life. I am aware that in the song I was working through some things, and still am every time I sing it or hear it.

Well, back to my questions as I turn to philosophy and religion: is time absolute, and what is the past, present, and future? 

Also, between the last Episode and this one a new question raised its hand for me to call on, which I suppose I should have seen coming: does time have a beginning and an end?

As I begin, I need to catch up by reaching back to ask how the two prior Episodes might have answered that, and then carry on. 

 

Back to Pragmatics and Physics: Does Time Begin and End?

Does time begin and end? What might the pragmatic approach to time say, and what might physics have to say? 

A pragmatic approach to the question might simply respond with, “we can’t know so it doesn’t matter.”  

According to physics, the beginning of time is understood to be the big bang, the moment in which the universe began to expand rapidly from an incredibly dense state, resulting in both space and time as we know them. The end of time, on the other hand, could potentially be a "big crunch" in which the universe's expansion reverses, collapsing back in on itself, effectively ending space and time as we know it.

Now for what philosophy and religion will say about the other questions. I will use two headings. First, is time absolute, which is related to the question of beginning and ending. Second, what is the past and the present and the future?

 

Philosophy and Time: Is it Absolute? Did it Begin? Will it End?

The nature of time is a topic that philosophers have wrestled with for centuries. What follows is highly selective, using three major thinkers, who represent three approaches.

 

Time as Measurement: Aristotle

Aristotle thought of time as the temporal relations between events, including the gaps between events. In this view of time, time is a kind of number that we use specifically to measure change and movement. Such a view means that there is no absolute time, only time in relationship to events and change. What we call time is our measurement of change and movement.

According to Aristotle, time cannot have a beginning or an end, meaning the universe has always existed and will always continue to exist; he believed that time is intrinsically linked to motion and since motion is always occurring (though physics might suggest that motion only began with the big bang), so time must also be continuous without a starting or ending point. 

Summary: Time is relative, not absolute, and has no beginning or end.

 

Time as Mental Construct: Immanuel Kant

Kant held the view that time is not a real property of the world but is something the mind imposes on the world, a subjective form of our intuition. Time does not exist other than as our mental construction of it. Though we might speculate, we cannot truly know if time has a beginning or end because our perception of it is limited by our minds. What we know of time, what we are conscious of, is that time is a continuous flow, not an absolute reality with a defined start and finish.

Summary: Time does not exist independently of our mental constructions, is not absolute, and its beginning and end cannot be known.

 

Time as Experience: Henri Bergson (“on-ree” “burg-sun”)

Bergson juxtaposed what he called objective time (the time of clocks and calendars) with “lived time”, time as we experience it, which he called duration. 

By duration, Bergson does not mean how long an event or moment lasts. That is clock time. He means that what we experience is the flow of time. Duration includes the past and present and in some way the future, because it is difficult to distinguish the point at which our experience of past and present turn into what had been the future a fraction of a second ago. 

The concept of a distinct "end" and "beginning" of time is an illusion created by our experience of time. 

Time is our experience of this interpenetration or overlap of future, present, and past. There is no clear-cut boundary between them. Just the experience of passing, of “duration.”  

Summary: Time is our experience, not an absolute thing itself, and does not begin or end apart from our experience of time as duration.

We have already had to discuss the past and the present and the future, so what more can we say?

 

Philosophy and Time: Past, Present, Future?

I will again limit myself to three main philosophical theories about the nature of the past and present and future: presentism, the growing-past theory, and eternalism. These theories arose in reflecting on the ontology of time, namely, whether the past and future are in any sense real, or does only the present exist.

 

Presentism: 

This theory holds that only present objects and present events are real. We can recognize this when we compare the vividness of our present experiences compared to our relatively dim memories of past experiences and vague expectations of future experiences. There are also events of which we have no memory, we only know them indirectly, and they are for us in some ways unreal. The dinosaurs have slipped out of reality. We have ideas about them but not from direct experience. They are not real to us. They are gone. The same is true of events we remember from our personal experiences.

 

The growing-past theory:  

Holds that the past and present are both real, but the future is not. The future is indeterminate or merely potential. Dinosaurs are real, still, not only in the past. But an animal that will be real a hundred years from now is not real yet. 

The difference between presentism and growing-past theory might be expressed like this. They both agree that the present is real, however, presentism would say that past things and events were real, growing-past theory says they still are. 

 

Eternalism: 

Eternalism is the view that the present, past, and future all exist, they are real. The differences we experience in relationship to them are subjective differences. We perceive past, present, and future differently, depending upon who we are and when we are. Thus, time is a dimension on a par with the dimension of space and location. My present is someone else’s future, and someone else’s past. This is a view similar to some of what the physics of time says as well.

What about ways that some of the world’s religious heritages have understood time, related to our questions?

 

Time and Religious Heritages

In exploring how various religious heritages view time there are several challenges. One is that the source texts do not always address time explicitly. They hold views of time implicitly, as prior assumptions and not as an object of reflection. A second challenge is that in most cases the authors of the source texts were not asking the questions I am asking. 

To greatly oversimplify, there are two primary religious views of time. There is that of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic world (and I would include the Sikh heritage in this line, relative to time), and that of the so-called eastern world (Hindu-Buddhist-Taoist, and I would include the Baha'i faith here, at least on this question). 

For convenience, I will use the common but inaccurate “eastern, western” taxonomy to organize the Episode.

 

Eastern: Hindu, Buddhist and Taoist Views of Time

Hindu

In Hinduism, time is cyclical and eternal. Time moves through four eras that each last for vast amounts of time, even trillions of years, and the eras end with time ending and then rebeginning. There is a cycle of time made up of cycles of times, all of which have no beginning or end. 

 

Buddhist

In the Buddhist view of time, time is a cyclical flow within an infinite span. What we experience as "temporal intervals" in the passage of time are our cognitive imputations, our ways of perceiving the constant flux and change of existence as sequences of events. Time is not a linear flow, though we experience it as such and then assume our experience is what time really is. 

 

Taoist

In Taoism, time is also seen as a natural flow, one that is to be embraced and experienced “naturally”, by seeking to be in harmony with it, as opposed to fighting time or conquering it. Time is simply an inherent, natural aspect of the universe, and though it has duration, it has no beginning or end. The seasons of the year are an example of the flow of time, and change. One season begins, another ends, in a self-perpetuating endless cycle. 

What is common to these three examples includes: time as endless, time as an aspect of the world rather than a separate entity of its own, and time as a dimension of our experience. Paradoxically, time can begin and end in the different eras of the cycles, and yet time itself has no beginning and end. It may be that a good way to grasp this is to say that there are times relative to the eras and cycles of the cosmos but that time itself is timeless.

Eastern views in summary: time is not absolute as a separate “thing”, it is a result of perception and experience, or what we know of it is our experience. No beginning or end. The past and present and future are all part of the one flow of what we perceive as time. How those three aspects are real, or not, is not directly addressed.

I can see a lot of alignment here with Kant and Bergson, as described earlier. 

 

Western: Jewish, Christian, and Muslims Views of Time

 Jewish 

There is a unique way of seeing a cyclical aspect of time in the Jewish approach, though very different from the eastern way of seeing cycles of time. Historical events in the Jewish scriptures are often presented as a pattern which repeats in a cycle. The pattern includes elements such as: turning away from God, being overpowered by enemies, returning to God, being restored as a people, then turning away again, being overpowered, returning, restoration, and so on. 

A second aspect of Jewish thinking about time might be seen to be in tension with the first. The Jewish view of time is that history is linear. It moves from a beginning towards a completion. History has an “end,” both the sense of termination, and of purpose. 

It seems fair to say that Jewish views of time include both cyclical and linear dimensions. There are ongoing cycles of time in which a pattern repeats but time also moves from a beginning towards an end. The cycles repeat within the line, we might say.

 

Christian

Flowing as it did from its origins as a Jewish religious movement, Christianity also sees time in the two ways I just described. Time began with the creation of the world, and did not exist prior to that. Time will, in most Christian thinking, come to an end (again both in the temporal sense and in the sense of having a purpose) in a new age, ushered in by the second coming of Christ.  Both Jews and Christians believe that God is above and outside of time, and that the time that passes on earth is a dimension of its created order. Time does not exist apart from that order. 

 

Islam

The Muslim view of time is very much in keeping with the Jewish and Christian views. Time is a creation of God. Time is linear, moving from a beginning point to an end point. There is a similar view of cycles, not as eras which begin and end as in eastern thought, but as patterns within the linear flow of history. There will be a day, “the day”, when all will come to a concluding point. Following that, all will be eternal, timeless.

 

Summarizing Philosophical and Religious Views of Time

To attempt a summary I will go back to the questions I have been asking to try to organize the various responses and answers.

 

Is time absolute?

Does time exist as an independent thing that is always the same? Philosophy and religion, while different from each other in details, all agree the answer is no.

 

Does time have a beginning, and an end?

Philosophy: no. 

Religion: yes if we look at the western views and no when asking the east.  

However, even in the western traditions, the point seems to be that it is time as we know and experience it which begins and ends. The idea of eternity is what I would call a timeless view of time, describing a realm of reality that is outside of time. This “timeless time” does not begin or end. The west and east could be using two ways of talking about a similar reality.

I have described the way in which both eastern and western traditions have views of time that can be called cyclical, though in different ways. With the western heritages the cycles recur within the linear flow of history. In Hindu and Buddhist thinking, the linear flow occurs within the cycles. Each cycle could be seen as a line moving towards a future in which there will be an ending and another beginning.

 

What about past, present, and future?

There were three responses to this from philosophy: 

-the only time that exists is the present

-both present and past are real but in different ways

-all three “exist” in some way in the so-called time-scape

What about religious views? It is nearly impossible to understand how different religions might view the nature of past, present, and future without talking about the divine. Though I know this takes us into topics I plan to hold until future Episodes, I need to say something about it here, because for those heritages which include a personal divine being, there is one sort of answer, and for those which do not, there is another. 

I am including Jewish, Christian and Islamic heritages in the former, and Buddhist, and Taoist in the latter (though there are exceptions in both heritages). The varieties of religious tradition we call Hindu include examples of both views of personal deity. Again, very general and inaccurate if we press into details, but true in a broad way. 

If one assumes there is a divine Being which is outside of time, then past and future are as “present” to that Being as is “now.” 

If one does not assume such a divine being? The response might be “the only time that exists is the flow of time, not what has already flowed or will flow,” or that not only are the past and future not real in themselves, but the same is true for the present: it too is not real apart from our perceptions and experiences of it.

 

My Views?

What about me, how do I make sense of the philosophical and religious views of time? There are two ways I can answer that, one is from a considered, reasoned way of absorbing what philosophy and religious reflection have led me to conclude. For that, I am going to wait until the next Episode, though there are hints of it in my prior comments.

The second way of responding is more personal. I shared earlier that the podcast has been an occasion for me to revisit a lot of my experience of time, not just my thoughts about it. And so here I share a poem that represents this experiential element, and is also a response to it, a decision and intention to face time and emotions and experiences, to refuse easy escapes and distractions. Maybe that will invite you to do the same?

 

Unset Bones

Marrow between unknit bones, an old break,

Knotted ends jagged yearning grasping toward each other

Across the tissue padded gap, tender flesh filling in for bone.

 

Under pressure the whole mass shifts, swerves, out of line

Wiring a dull signal of ache up the nerve-ways

To whatever place in the moist gray cave 

Is assigned to register complaint

A throbbing familiar ebb at the edges of a wrinkled consciousness

 

A man alone near a window, a dimming room, in a yellowing house 

Old things pulling dust to themselves on walls lined with shelves 

Water marks of memory drying down into a muddy bed 

A declining evening in the declining days

Of a man long past measuring things by the years, or the weeks, or the days

That may be left.

 

He is not seeking to numb 

Does not rename the sudden flares that explode light 

Onto twisted dream shapes tortured out of forgotten holes in buried places

Does not dumb down regret, 

Does not seek a mirror to face the ways 

His days were traced by other eyes.

 

Nor does he bind a blindfold 

Does not drown down the minutes, filling his ears with other sounds

Does not paint over a memory with false faces.

 

He leans neither from nor towards the dull pulse 

Down in the bruises between the old bones.

In the aching center.

 

He is waiting his way in and out and through the passing of his days.

 

His passive face turned random to the window.

A wall creaks, a rafter settles.

The tissue between the bones is humming. 

There is a plane’s ebbing drone high and away and beyond him

In the clouding sky.

 

Back to What Matters

I invite you, and in doing so, I invite myself once again, to let it all just be there. The past. Myself. This moment. Dull aches from old broken and unset bones. Memory. 

Regardless of what time is and how the past and future relate to the present, this is in many ways what matters most. Until next time…