Theme
Time
10 philosophers, 5 traditions
What is time, does anything persist through change, and how do we experience the passing moment? Greek, Indian, Christian, Islamic and modern European thinkers answered in strikingly different ways.
What is time, and how do we live in it? Zeno of Elea argued that a flying arrow is at rest at every instant of its flight, so that motion through time seems impossible. In India Nāgārjuna, whose arguments about motion have been compared to Zeno’s, attacked the idea of independent things persisting through change. Augustine asked “What is time?” and found it in the mind: in memory of the past, attention to the present and expectation of the future.
Mulla Sadra held that existence itself is always in motion, renewed at every instant, so that time is one of its dimensions. Kant made time, like space, a form of human intuition and not a feature of things in themselves.
Around the turn of the twentieth century Bergson set lived duration apart from the measured time of clocks and physics, and Husserl described how each moment of experience holds on to the moment just past and reaches towards the next. Heidegger made temporality the horizon of all understanding of being. Philosophers of time still debate whether only the present exists, or whether past and future are just as real.
Through time
5th century BCE
Zeno of Elea
A flying arrow is always in the now, in one instant after another. At each instant it occupies a space exactly equal to its length, and whatever does that is at rest; so the arrow is at rest at every instant of its flight. Aristotle replied that Zeno wrongly assumed time to be made of indivisible instants.
About 700 years later
2nd century CE
Nāgārjuna
In a long discussion of motion, which has been compared to Zeno’s paradoxes, he questions statements like “the mover moves”: there is no mover without motion, so mover and motion cannot be independent things. His target was the idea that things and their changes exist with natures of their own.
4th century CE
Augustine
Past, present and future do not really exist: the past is gone, the future is not yet, and the present has no extent. Yet time is real for us as memory of the past, attention to the present and expectation of the future, a “distention of the soul” whose unity depends on God’s eternity.
About 800 years later
13th century
Dōgen
Being and time are one: everything that exists is time, unfolding, and time is nothing apart from the beings in which it unfolds.
About 400 years later
17th century
Mulla Sadra
Things are not stable substances to which changes happen: existence itself is constantly in motion, so the young Zayd and the old Zayd are, strictly, two different existents. Every existent is renewed at each instant, so the world is created in time, and time is a dimension of existence itself.
18th century
Immanuel Kant
Space and time are not features of things in themselves but the pure, subjective forms of human intuition, which would not subsist apart from the conditions of our experience. We experience only appearances, ordered in space and time by our own sensibility.
19th century
Edmund Husserl
Every moment of experience has a threefold structure: a primal impression of the present phase, a retention of the phase just past and a protention of what is about to come. Though the contents change from moment to moment, this structure makes inner time-consciousness a unified field of experience.
Henri Bergson
Kant confused time with space. Lived time, duration, is a qualitative multiplicity in which conscious states permeate one another and gather richer content, not a series of separate units laid side by side and counted. He debated Einstein and published his reflections as Duration and Simultaneity.
Argued against Immanuel Kant
20th century
Franz Rosenzweig
Speech is tied to time more deeply than rational thought. We live God’s relations with the world and the self as a sequence in time, creation, revelation and redemption, and the tenses of language are how we grasp them.
Martin Heidegger
Time, or temporality, is the horizon for any understanding of being. Being and Time was meant to show that only when “temporality temporalizes itself” can entities show themselves as entities at all, so that the basic subject of ontology is temporality.
Drew on and argued against Immanuel Kant; studied with, drew on and argued against Edmund Husserl
Sources
- Nina Emery, Ned Markosian and Meghan Sullivan, Time, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Barry Dainton, Temporal Consciousness, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy