Other Than The Present: A Schema for Time
By Brendan De Paor-Moore
One thing which we believe we know: Time is already moving, the present in which I type and you read are windows onto a unique configuration of things which has already flowed into a different form, even before we are conscious of it. Time is movement and movement is ceaseless.
It only takes the most elementary examination to make this knowledge fall into the void: what do we mean “flow,” or “movement”? A flow of what? A movement to where and from where? What if this movement is illusory, a quirk of a consciousness which is all but an elaboration of illusions itself? There is the past, the present and the future — a trilogy of seemingly inescapable and foundational facts of our experience… Yet, as surely for us as for Saint Augustine, we know what time is until someone asks us to explain it.
Conflicts over how to explain Time span the entire history of philosophy. This history could well be effectively rewritten as a series of antagonisms over the fundamental, or metaphysical, nature of time, beginning with Parmenides’ poem “Of Nature”. Parmenides’ conviction that true reality must be unitary and timeless, and then Heraclitus’ assertion that the flux is the real, all the way to Hegel’s assimilation of these abstractions into a logos in and of the flux… Throughout this history, both the passion for the real of Time and the desire to reduce Time to an illusion continuously animate philosophy. The eternal return within philosophy (and it is not a happy one) seems to be that, again and again, we are handed the false dichotomy of, either (a) time as the war of all against all ontologised (the quote “war is the Father of all” is the real key to Heraclitus, and contemporary perspectives that treat time as the product of a historical or subjective will-to-power or are inevitably in the thrall of this), or, (b) treating it as an illusion covering fundamental timelessness and fitting it to the frame of consciousness. Timelessness, here, comes in one of two senses: either it is not so much time that is unreal, as its passage — all times in fact exist simultaneously; a deterministic universe where every effect is already logically decided by it’s prior cause and hence necessarily existing , or, time is real only as its passage, as the one present window of existence, with the past and future only memories and projections.
If you were to ask someone at random for their theory of time, I suspect you are as likely to get the answer “time is an illusion” as you are to hear “time is really the accumulating sum of physical changes in the world”, or “there is really only the present moment”. We tend to accept at face value a split between our subjective experience of time and the objectivity that intrudes violently when the alarm clock wakes us from a pleasant dream, we discover we are late for work and we miss the train. As Jean Baudrillard wrote, “chronometric precision is par excellence the dimension of practical constraints, of society as external to us, and of Death.” No wonder then, that the call to simply “be in the present” is so attractive. If we accept that only the present truly exists, that past events are gone forever and the future is never here, then we can not only attune deeply to enjoying the fullness of this moment, but we have a pressure-gauge to manage the anxiety and stress of an intensely time-structured world. And, isn’t this rigid system of impersonal time and its supposed objectivity at the root of so many of the horrors of modernity? It is the distillation of the threat of smooth functioning machines which will render our messy, fleshy ways obsolete; it is the great chorus of false hopes for the future that ideologues and advertisers can always seem to make us sing, right up to the gates of the work-camp, or to a life of debt and regret? If only time — the great lie — could be abolished, it is thought, then we could all exist where we truly are, in the present. Surely then, having come to re-centre on the tangible, the felt, the alive, the authentic, the madness would end.
Naturally, the most immediate enemy of a critical theory of time is mass-market New Age spirituality. Eckhart Tolle is the current guru who extends a basic version of the the metaphysical theory of presentism into a particularly crude temporal ideology — presentism, as a unreflective and conservative reaction and search for escape from the material rule of capitalist time discipline. His book and meditation guide “The Power of Now” (I recommend trying it out, the exercises he describes are indeed effectively relaxing, and, treated from the critical perspective on temporality that this essay may help you develop, they are interesting experiments in how experiences of time can shift and change even within the one embodied consciousness) develops an argument that “the Now” is a special state of mind and a special reality, that has been systematically destroyed by “future-orientation” — the attempt to create a better, more secure world at some future time. Instead, we should switch off our compulsive desires to control future outcomes and allow our full enjoyment and engagement with presence to transform us into agents of a new form of enlightenment. We will then pass this magic present-ness on to others through our interactions with them.
What needs noting first, however, is that now our discussion of time becomes political. Presentism is replete with themes of romantic conservativism; nostalgia, prelapsarian return, technophobia, etc. While all this certainly is a basis for condemning it, it is also what makes it interesting. It reveals the essential thing — our experience of time isn’t just about the objective and subjective in a way that can be reduced to individual consciousness, but is historical/political. It is worth noting that Tolle’s ideas, even as he condemns all of modernity for its destruction of the present in favor of the future, even as pollution and various forms dehumanisation and exploitation are derided as poisons created by deluded future-worshippers who sacrifice nature and contentment for the ceaseless attempt to reach a future that, by definition, will never come, the subtler, but unavoidable conclusions are quite different. Obviously, any progressive, never mind revolutionary, visions of a better world are to be dismissed right away as illusory future-projections. But, the supposedly critical aspect of Tolle’s worldview is a mere fig-leaf for the implicit suggestion that the present political and social realities are the end-point of futurity, that they provide natural conditions for a flowering of “the Now” — we have reached the moment at last. I would argue instead that the fetishisation of “the Now” (its severance from Time as a whole, or, rather its substitution for a Time that is rendered effectively non-existent) that this presentism creates is itself a psychological reaction to accumulating and intensifying social pressures that make a natural and pleasant inclination to the present almost impossible, hence the need for a “guru” like Tolle to market it back to us in a distorted form.
We should discuss the fact that he (Tolle) is also pretty casual about the actual logical underpinnings of his argument, resting them on the simple self-evident fact that we inhabit a present moment. If there is one thing that philosophy is good for, it is undermining supposedly self-evident facts (and hopefully finding better foundations for new relations between evidence and truth within the field of the argument in question). The brilliance of Sartre’s response to presentism should be recalled, in its wonderful bluntness. The present is precisely what disappears whenever we try to reach it in a strict sense. Saint Augustine said it just as clearly: the present is a knife’s edge between the immensities of past and future, and, in the end, the knife can always be honed more finely.
As soon as we consider the present, we are in fact already considering the past and future as well. Surely our very experience of a present moment must involve the passage of time, and hence be itself divisible into past, present and future? We certainly do have a consciousness that constructs a privileged phenomenological window of time that we know and feel as the present. Neuroscientists have now, it seems, settled on 80 milliseconds for the time lag between an event occurring and it being admitted into this window of consciousness. So, the brain processes input and shoots it forwards into the future that will become the present, once the immediate present of that input is in the past. In other words, to speak of “the present” is to speak of a set of relations between past, present and future that already compose a synthesis. What is more, the very act or process of experiencing time is somehow extended in time, which means, for what is empirically observed as going on in the brain to make any sense, time, as past, present and future, all need to be real. All of this accords very well what is remarkable about the basic interpretations of the physics of time since Einstein and relativity: every event in the past and future is implicit in the current moment. As Einstein put it: “It appears, therefor,e more natural to think of physical reality as a four dimensional existence, instead of, as hitherto, the evolution of a three dimensional existence.” The idea that the experience of time itself occurs in time constitutes an emergent feedback loop of time that multiplies the domains temporality, up to and including not only biological, but also sociohistorical domains, all of which we inhabit, constitute, and are constituted by.
Here we have to carefully define temporality as opposed to time: temporality is not time itself, but relations to and in time, the organisation and significance of time for living beings. Technophobia; nothing is terrifying about machines if not the question of what Time is to a machine. Machines don’t possess temporality, but they have increasingly defined ours, as we went from measuring Time through our bodies and senses, to celestial movements — sundials, to the ticking of the clock, to the omnipresent layer of infinitesimal precision of the 24/7 digital world and the miniature purgatories of a stalled progress bar. Machines are utterly unconscious of time, yet they exhibit its objectivity through their precision in such a way that they appear to be its masters; or, rather, they are the bearers of our own mastery of time alienated from us and used against us in the same manner as the Marxist fetishism of commodities. Imagine, for a second, that there were a self-conscious AI which really had this mastery — that’s clearly an unstoppable will to power. There may be a contradiction in this idea, however, because if sentience implies temporality, temporality may require imprecision, a “flaw”, in its time-ordering (in a word, a humility), which can make the negotiation of temporal experience open to that most beautiful of experiences: the spontaneity of the moment. Without this, there is nothing but the ever tightening binds of obsessional control. The mastery of Time, ultimately, can only appear as a form of domination of the master by their own creation. What we need is a radical and rational reconciliation with Time and with our place within it as beings of temporality .
What if, instead of thinking of machines as representing the future, we tried to come to grips with the vertigo of their presentness? Machines are the representatives of the pure present — the bleeding edge — without “inhabiting” it in anyway — no time exists for them, which is why they present as being a whole ordering of time, which is seemingly infinitely divisible as more processes per second, etc. St Augustine’s knife edge become cyberpunk fractal blade. The movement of infinitesimally precise digital time into the center of our technologies of time-ordering is to witness the edge of the present hone finer by the second, and this experience, by itself, is a mere annihilation of time as a synthesis, a structured totality, a whole. Arguably, all of this is mere metaphor. The critical relation to grasp is: machines save labor, but not for workers. Instead, a diminished number work longer hours, while a growing number cannot find work. One group inhabit an intensifying temporality of longer hours, greater pressures and a 24/7 marketplace, the other faces the inertia of job cues, poverty, itinerant work, casualisation, fragmentation, dependence on decaying welfare, kinship and/or subsidence economies, the black market and informal work. Somewhere between metaphysical and the political-economic (or historico-political) framings of time, the possibility of a rational temporality wanders like a ghost.
The justifying concern of this essay is to propose a schema which I (in all naivety) suggest will open a new space of compossibility between the radically different ways that Time, whether as an object or a background assumption, appears in different disciplines and research programs, and, ultimately, within the lived texture of contemporary ideology. The Time that physics deals with is ultimately “of the same being” as the time that evolution and history occur in, but the reality of the radical effects of scale (just how intoxicating are all the zeroes between the Big Bang and now?) have combined with more secular ideological trends to encourage a division of subjective and objective, noumenal and phenomenal, which appears hopelessly unbridgeable. With this essay, I throw out an open invitation to begin sketching bridges on your cocktail napkins.
Our contemporary relationship to Time is a politico-philosophical disaster. Both in concrete social terms, and in the rarefied conceptuality of science and philosophy, the disorder of our temporality is severe enough that a root-and-branch remapping of how we think about Time could well prove decisive in the ultimate destruction or renewal of reason as a force in history.
The schema comprises a highly general, entirely initial, mapping of four basic orders of time; physical time, historical temporality, biotemporality and metaphysical time. At bottom, the concept on offer is this: that it is possible to conceptually delimit basic dimensions which, in their dynamic interrelationships, comprise the structured totality that is Time. {Physical Time / Biotemporality / Historical Temporality/ Metaphysical Time} Each of these is to be considered as implicating, even nesting, the other dimensions, yet each is amenable to highly specific interest and research, and each has unique and irreducible properties of its own. Initial interrogations of the schema might include such questions as: (1) “Does denoting the physical and metaphysical dimensions as “x Time” and the biological and historical as “x-temporality” have any significance? (2) “Is there an implicit order of material antecedence, and/or hierarchy of meaning among these dimensions?” (3) “Surely Metaphysical Time, should simply be disposed of, as you certainly cannot mean that there is a special kind of immaterial time that is outside the material studies of science and history?” It will be useful to answer each of these questions, as doing so will necessarily involve a brief introduction to each of the four dimensions, and an even briefer exploration of their possible relations.
(1) Yes. Time and temporality naturally do mean different things, and one is not wishing to play fast and loose with those meanings here. Physics and metaphysics would be concerned with attempts provide full and fundamental descriptions of time “in itself”, prior to the biological and the historical. Physical time implies a realist conception of time based on the constant increase of entropy — the arrow of time — and surely the second law of thermodynamics was around long before any creature existed with a sense or a concept of time, not to mention the all the events that were necessary for such creatures to come to be. Beings within time, who relate to time sensually and cognitively, are the concern of the temporalities. Their truth is that of the proliferation of different experiences/cognitions of time. Of course, this was already true within physics itself, at least since Einstein. Newton’s universal, homogenous, empty time was suddenly made to bend and warp and remake itself around the interrelations of a host of perspectives and objects. However, when Einstein explained that how much time elapses for a person depends on how they travel through space (especially near the speed of light) as well as the gravitational field (especially if it’s near a black hole), this did not make physics about temporality — rather it simply showed that temporality had a physical basis. If we then shift to a biological perspective, we see the time measured by atomic clocks isn’t as important to us as the time measured by our internal rhythms.
(2) No such hierarchy or antecedence is necessitated by the schema itself, but I nonetheless want to suggest that it can help us clarify the sense in which an order of antecedence, as a progressive series of moments in the emergence of orders of temporality, could actually occur. From physical entropy, to the counterflow to this created by life’s dynamic decrease of entropy within its own systems, to the evolution of time perception, to the socially elaborated development of shared temporal beliefs and orientations, to the scientifico-philosophical interrogation of these beliefs and their underpinnings, and therefore, back again. What is more, holding to the importance of a definite chronology of the emergence of temporalities within Time is vital to the realism to which this schema is the would be midwife.
(3) The weakest part of this schema is doubtlessly the “Metaphysics of Time”. What is there about the nature of Time which is not, ultimately, a question for the physicists? Yes, but in doing so physicists will, all the same, be doing metaphysics. Or: Yes, but physics is still laden with ultimately metaphysical concepts when it discusses the consequences of its image of time’s reality. Not for nothing did Karl Popper label Einstein’s vision of a deterministic reality to time as a fourth dimension — every event, every cause and effect already laid-out in every direction — a “Parmenidean Block Universe”, and argue that it fails the test of true realism in so far as it denies any meaningful reality to the ways we perceive and cognise Time.
Sartre effectively exposed the logical incoherence of both presentism (we’ve covered this one, right?) and eternalism (all events in all directions in time are equally real and equally existen) in Being and Nothingness, but he based his alternative positing of temporality as a structured totality on the transcendental reality of the subject. The structure of temporality seems, in his argument, to be exhausted by that of subjectivity. Here, we are treating the structure of time as transcending and conditioning subjectivity more than the reverse, and ultimately, no matter how much space is given to subjective experience within any dimension of this schema, the schema itself determines that time cannot be treated as a purely subjective phenomenon. This is, crucially, why a category such as “subjective time” does not appear independently in this schema, instead it would be derived from the dynamic interstice of historical temporality and bio-temporality. We do matter, temporally (in some strange way, our consciousness — considered in its social, biological and psychological totality — may just be the material substance of temporality), but this does not mean that time and temporality rely for their existence on the transcendental constitution of our consciousness. The structured totality of time is ultimately real, independent and external to us, and we are more the consequences of its unfolding than the special angels that bear up and bless its revelation. Although I remain somewhat open to the possibility that we may, in a sense at least, be both.
J.M.E. McTaggart’s “B-series”, Augustine of Hippo’s timeless God, the Buddhist philosophers’ concept of the Dharmadhata — these are some of the various eternalist block universes. Eternalist in the sense that the past continues to exist. Nothing ever falls into nothingness. Something may decay in the present, but its past remains undisturbed. Change, really, once again, is denied. If we accept the four-dimensional thesis of time-realism, if we accept the meaningful existence of past, future and present, and if we mean this in an objective instead of merely subjective, transcendental or interpretative, sense, does this really mean we have to also accept eternalism? What if Time itself is a shifting manifold, neither frozen in an eternal past, nor locked to a predestined future? Moving, shifting, growing, dying — tentacle-y shifts occurring at it’s further edges as probabilities coalesce into inevitability and distant causes are superceded by new possibilities. The past is its rate of decay: the breaking of pottery and the bleaching of bones, the losing of a vital moment to indecision, the fading memory of a dead loved one… Any metaphysics which trades in unreal absolutisations and hypostasisations of Time will always be trading in ontologies that are cut off from historical and subjective experience. They will hence render that experience unmoored from any logical basis. They will make participation in political action insignifigant, because temporal reality on which a sense of history depends will be dismissed, from the high heavens of this supposed enlightenment, as an illusion. Eternalism may offer no hope for a philosophical response to the illogic of capitalism, but I hold that, despite its ill-reputation as reputed “castle-building”, metaphysics can, working painstakingly to reconcile the different disciplinary dimensions of this schema, provide clarity on the fundamental questions with which Time presents us — which is to say, logical clarity as to the fundamental nature of time and how we are temporal beings. This is a necessity for any argument against capitalism, or, indeed, any social order, which desires its logic to be rigorous and grounded.
Or, maybe metaphysics is simply the articulated study of how the other dimensions coexist and interact — the discoverer of this space of compossibility I mentioned earlier. The assumption here might be that all these dimensions here are implicit in one another. How, though, could historical time feedback onto physical time? We could answer, plainly, that the play of social forces will determine what material resources are available to physics and the general ideological framework from which their assumptions and interpretations will be deployed; hence, history will affect, inflect and even potentially derail physical time — as an epistemological category. That is a perfectly satisfactory answer, but it is also somewhat boring. It is bread, not roses. The schema is rather more exciting if we use it in both epistemological and ontological ways. Here we can launch into another branch of speculative metaphysics that is generally known as “science fiction”. Why should not history deliver a civilisation advanced enough to alter the course of time itself, in ways yet unimaginable, or build a simulated universe whose physics determine time differently? Time, after all, is long. I see good reasons for metaphysics to be preserved partly as an arena for such speculations, rather than humourlessly dismissing them, even (perhaps especially) if they remain sophisticated games. History, however, is certainly not a game, and if it smiles, it tends to do so with grim irony.
I would like to enthusiastically thank Sam Shetler, Zrebar Karimi, and Pas Forgione for their support, encouragement and insight in the process of writing this article and thinking through the thought it hopes to give voice to. And John Brady for his superhuman patience and enthusiasm, bordering on the psychotic.
About the author: Brendan De Paor-Moore used to study philosophy at the University of Adelaide. He is now studying to be an Archaeologist. He is an active member of anti-austerity, anti-racism and eco-socialist movements, and has generally led a small but rare sort of life, ever growing weirder and a little wiser.
