( Worth reading article to understand debate on time– f.sheikh) Pastness, presentness and futurity seem to be real features of the world, but are they? On McTaggart’s philosophy of time.
Events happen in order – you whisk icing before decorating a cake. Some events seem to be present, while others are future or past. A birthday party lies in the future, approaching slowly. When the big day arrives, the party is present; afterwards, it slips into memory and the past. Pastness, presentness and futurity seem to be real features of the world, but are they really? Philosophers disagree, and this debate pervades books such as Time and Space (2001) by Barry Dainton, and A Companion to the Philosophy of Time (2013), edited by Adrian Bardon and Heather Dyke.
How did this disagreement come about? Although it sounds like the sort of thing that philosophers have wrangled over for millennia, I say it’s relatively recent. I think the debate was started just over 100 years ago, by one man: John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart.
McTaggart was a Cambridge philosopher, working in Trinity College through the turn of the 20th century. Of their first meeting, Bertrand Russell wrote that he was ‘even shyer than I was’: McTaggart was too shy to enter Russell’s room, and Russell too shy to ask him in. Russell and McTaggart were part of the ‘Mad Tea Party of Trinity’: Russell the Mad Hatter, and McTaggart with his ‘innocent, sleepy air’ the Dormouse. Despite his gentleness, McTaggart was ingenious. A colleague observed that McTaggart ‘added greatly to the gaiety of college meetings’, for he was liable to use arguments that ‘everyone accepted, to support conclusions which no one else had thought of’.
From his earliest work, McTaggart obsessed over time. In itself, this was not unusual – during this period, many philosophers were similarly absorbed. What was unusual is how McTaggart thought about time.
Like most human things, philosophy has fashions. In Western philosophy, time jumps on and off the menu. Medieval philosophers occasionally puzzled over time, with Augustine and Thomas Aquinas pondering God’s eternity. Time became a huge topic from the mid-17th century, when debate raged over ‘absolutism’. Isaac Newton and other absolutists held that time is a kind of being, independent of the created world.
By the mid-18th century, time had slipped off the menu again, especially in Britain. Major British philosophers of this era ignored time, including Jeremy Bentham, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, George Jardine, Mary Wollstonecraft. This was partly due to the Scottish Enlightenment, which discouraged studying abstract, abstruse topics. British interest picked up following the work of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, but this attitude shift took decades to arrive.
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781) put a new spin on time. He twists an argument made by absolutists. Many absolutists argued that we cannot imagine deleting time from the Universe. Even if you destroyed the Universe, time would remain, implying that time exists independently of us. Kant argues that the fact that we cannot dis-imagine time doesn’t tell us anything about the Universe. Instead, it tells us something about our minds. Time is rooted in us: it is a form of thought, a precondition for experiencing anything. Human minds are wired such that our experiences are always temporal, and that’s why we can’t even imagine a nontemporal world. Nonetheless, the world outside our heads, as it really is independent of us, might be nontemporal. Because we must perceive things in time, we don’t know what things-in-themselves are like.
For Kant, human minds play an active role in constructing our perceptions. The world-in-itself might not be temporal, but the world that humans perceive is. This is a form of ‘idealism’, a family of views stressing the activity of mind.
After Kant, idealism swept Germany. But it took ages to arrive in Britain. The Scottish philosopher William Hamilton offered the first serious engagement with Kant in 1836: that’s more than 50 years after the Critique. Nonetheless, after Hamilton, idealism sprouted in Britain, blooming into the movement known as ‘British idealism’ in the 1860s. By then, British philosophers were mixing their Kant with G W F Hegel, and idealism of all kinds ran rife.
Idealism came parcelled with the unreality of time. Almost every British idealist rejected time, from T H Green to F H Bradley. McTaggart arrived at Cambridge as a student in 1885, by which period accepting idealism and rejecting time was de rigueur. He embraced these views, producing chunky tomes on Hegel, leavened by Kant and G W Leibniz.
Although there was nothing unusual in McTaggart rejecting time, there was something unusual about how he did so. McTaggart thought hard about what time might be like if it were real. This emerges in his paper ‘The Unreality of Time’ (1908).
Imagine three events: a rainstorm, a flash of lightning, and rumble of thunder. How do we order them?
posted by f. sheikh