Temporal Reflections Whilst Sitting in My Back Garden

Sitting in the back garden in 1967 and 2025

 

 

I.

 

The debate as to whether we inhabit time, move through time, or if, indeed, time moves through us, remains a fascinating one for both philosophers and physicists alike. 

 

I suppose it ultimately all comes down to how one interprets the nature of time and its relationship to space. If, for example, one thinks of space-time as a single 4-dimensional continuum, then we obviously dwell within it and experience it as fundamental to our being.

 

But if, on the other hand, one likes to conceive of time in a more classical sense as something distinct from the spacial geometry of the universe, then it becomes possible to think of ourselves as objects that are simply carried along from past to to future via the present as if in a fast-flowing temporal stream. 

 

Personally, I'm quite interested in the so-called block model of time that proposes all moments exist simultaneously. According to this model, the idea of moving in a linear and unidirectional manner through time is dismissed as an illusion of consciousness [1].    

 

 

II. 

 

As I confessed in a post published a while back [2], whilst, paradoxically, I have a minimal sense of identity on the one hand, I've always possessed a strong sense of temporal self-continuity, and have never really bought into the idea of there being seven distinct ages into which a single life might be neatly divided up. 

 

Like the Killing Joke frontman, Jaz Coleman, time means nothing to me, and whether something happened fifty-eight years ago or yesterday, is a matter of indifference; even without shutting my eyes, I can still think the thoughts and experience the feelings I had as a child without making an imaginative journey back in time [3]. 

 

In part, this is perhaps helped by the fact that my spatial coordinates and the objects of my universe - my frames of reference - have remained (relatively) fixed and stable as the images above illustrate [4].

 

 

Notes

 

[1] This block theory, also known as eternalism, in which past, present and future, all exist simultaneously should not be confused with presentism, according to which only a perpetual present exists and therefore has ontological primacy. 

      Nor should it be mistaken for the growing block theory of time, according to which an ever-expanding past and present exist, but the future doesn't; in other words, whilst the present becomes the past and therefore adds to the total history of the world, the present does not precede any future. This model is said to confirm the popular understanding of time in which the past is fixed, the future unreal, and the present constantly changing.     

 

[2] The post to which I refer was titled 'Being is Time: Life in the Present Perfect Continuous' (5 Oct 2022): click here. 

 

[3] I'm paraphrasing from the Killing Joke song 'Slipstream', from the album Extremities, Dirt and Various Repressed Emotions, (Noise Records, 1990): click here. 

 

[4] I'm aware, of course, that time passes (and does so at the same pace) regardless of whether one constantly travels all around the world or sits in the same spot for almost sixty years; that time dilation is related to factors such as gravity rather than the physical location and stationary nature of the subject and that we grow old not matter what we do or don't do.     

 

 

Being is Time: Life in the Present Perfect Continuous

Image credit: UCLA / Horvath Lab

 

Somewhat paradoxically, whilst having a minimal sense of self on the one hand, I've always possessed a strong sense of self-continuity through time on the other, and have never really bought into the Shakespearean idea of there being seven distinct ages into which a single life might be neatly divided up [1].

 

Thus, when someone asked in relation to a recent post adapted from the Von Hell Diaries [click here] whether it made me sad to realise that forty years had passed since the events described on 3 October 1982 - or frightened to think that I would soon be passing from middle age to old age - I had to say no, not really.

 

For like Jaz Coleman, time means nothing to me, and whether something happened forty years ago or yesterday, it's all the same to me [2]. I am that unity of past, present and future. That is to say, I understand time not just as something that can be measured by the ticking of a clock, but as fundamental to our being. Indeed, one might even say that being is time.     

 

And unlike the Killing Joke frontman, I don't even have to shut my eyes in order to remember childhood thoughts and feelings; for I still think those thoughts and experience those feelings. In other words, because I live in what might be termed by a grammarian as the present perfect continuous, I've no need to make an imaginative journey back in time, or to dream.      

 

But aren't you worried that you're just stuck in the past?, asks the same interrogator.

 

Again, the answer is not really. 

 

In fact, I'm more concerned - as a philosopher - with the consequences of privileging the present [3] and having a vulgar conception of time in which the past is denigrated as that which we must move on from and leave behind, as if no longer important, when, in fact, not only does the past inform the present, but it awaits us in the future too [4].

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I'm thinking here of the famous monologue in Act II, Scene VII of Shakespeare's pastoral comedy As You Like It (1623) which opens with the line "All the world's a stage". However, I'm aware of the fact that this division of human life into a series of stages was a commonplace of art and literature and not something invented by the Bard of Avon. Whilst ancient authors tended to think in terms of three or four such stages, medieval writers liked to think in terms of seven for theological reasons.   

 

[2] I'm quoting from the Killing Joke song 'Slipstream', from the album Extremities, Dirt and Various Repressed Emotions, (Noise Records, 1990): click here. The track was written by Jaz Coleman, Geordie Walker and Martin Atkins. Lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group.

 

[3] I am increasingly sympathetic to thinkers such as Heidegger and Derrida who are concerned that the understanding of Being in the metaphysical tradition is dominated by an ontological primacy of the present; i.e., that the present is viewed as more real or immediate than the past or future, with the former seen as merely the 'no-longer-now' and the latter as merely the 'not-yet-now'. 

      This tradition has run all the way from Aristotle to Hegel and beyond; see, for example, Lawrence's 1919 Preface to his New Poems (1918), in which he writes of the incarnate Now as supreme over and above the before and after and of the quivering present as the very quick of Time. For Lawrence, the past and future are mere abstractions from the present; a crystallised remembrance and a crystallised aspiration.

      Lawrence's preface can be found as Appendix I to The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 645-649.      

 

[4] I think Heidegger refers to this ontological baggage in Being and Time (1927) as Gewesenheit (i.e., our been-ness).