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Question of the day: does time really pass, or does it only seem to?

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Time & spaceAnalyticJapanese & KoreanProcess philosophyJ. M. E. McTaggartArthur PriorHenri BergsonDōgen#a-series#block-universe#passage-of-time#question-of-the-day
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Its coordinates: 1.4 Philosophy of Time · 1.4.1 Persistence and Change · 1.5 Philosophy of Space

Today's question comes from the card on the philosophy of time: does time pass, or does it only seem to?

It seems obvious that it passes. The exam you dreaded is behind you; the holiday you look forward to is coming. Yet a calendar, a timetable or an equation of physics lists events as earlier and later, with no moving "now" anywhere in it.

In 1908 J. M. E. McTaggart drew exactly this distinction: an A-series of past, present and future, which keeps changing, and a B-series of earlier and later, which never does. He went on to argue that time is unreal, a conclusion few accept. The main positions today:

  • Time really passes. The present is objectively special. For presentists only present things exist; on the growing block view the past is real and the future is not yet.
  • Passage is only how things seem. All times are equally real, and "now" is like "here": it marks where the speaker is. Many think relativity, with no universal present, supports this.
  • Passage is the wrong picture. Bergson held that lived duration is real but falsified when we picture time as a line. Dōgen's "being-time" refuses to treat time as a container that things move through.

Arthur Prior posed a famous challenge: when a headache ends we say "thank goodness that's over", and that relief cannot be about a timeless fact of earlier and later.

The card sets out the rival views: 1.4 Philosophy of Time.

Is your sense that time passes evidence, or an illusion?

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4 answers

  1. Lars Eriksen

    Fellow

    A physicist's half-answer. Relativity takes away a universal "now": observers moving relative to each other disagree about which distant events are simultaneous. But it doesn't take away everything. Along any one worldline, the time a clock records, its proper time, is the same for every observer.

    So if passage is real, I suspect it is local: a feature of each thing's own path, not a front sweeping across the whole universe. That is less than presentists want and more than the block view usually allows.

  2. Siobhán Keane

    Fellow

    Augustine got there first, as he usually does. In Book XI of the Confessions he says that if no one asks him what time is, he knows; if he wants to explain it to someone who asks, he does not.

    His own answer belongs to the third camp. The past is no longer and the future is not yet, so what exists is the present of past things, which is memory, the present of present things, which is attention, and the present of future things, which is expectation. Time is a stretching of the mind, distentio animi. Passage is real, but it is the mind that passes, not a river outside it.

  3. Lucía Mamani

    Contributor

    In Aymara the word nayra means eye, and front, and also the past. The past is in front of us because we can see it. The future is behind, where we cannot see.

    So I am suspicious of the question. "Does time pass" pictures a person walking forward into the future while the past falls behind. My grandmother would say we walk backwards into what is coming, looking at what has been. Whether time passes I don't know, but I know which way I am facing.

  4. Aiko Tanabe

    Fellow

    Dōgen is subtler than "time is not a container", and I'd like to add his other half. In the fascicle Uji, he says that time itself is being and all being is time. He also denies that time simply flies away. But he does not deny passage. He has a word, kyōryaku, usually translated "continuous passage" or "flowing", for the way being-time moves from today to tomorrow, and also from today to yesterday.

    So for Dōgen time does pass, but not in one direction only, and not past us. We are the passing.