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On Absolute Becoming and the Myth of Passage

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 April 2010

Steven F. Savitt
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Extract

In the literature on time in the twentieth century stemming from J. M. E. McTaggart's famous argument for the unreality of time, two gems stand out. The first is C. D. Broad's patient dissection of McTaggart's argument in the chapter ‘Ostensible Temporality’ in his Examination of McTaggart's Philosophy. Broad carefully, and to my mind persuasively, uncovers the root errors in McTaggart's argument. In addition he tentatively proposes that the features of time that he calls its transitory aspect can be explained in terms of a dynamic aspect of time that he calls Absolute Becoming.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 50 , March 2002 , pp. 153 - 167
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2002

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References

1 The argument first appeared in McTaggart's, J. M. E. ‘The Unreality of Time’ Mind, New Series, No. 68 (October, 1908). A later version of this argument appears as Chapter 33 inGoogle Scholar, McTaggart'sThe Nature of Existence, Vol. II (Cambridge University Press, 1927).Google Scholar

2 ‘Ostensible Temporality’ is chapter 35 of Volume II of Broad's Examination of McTaggart's Philosophy, first published by Cambridge University Press in 1938 and reprinted, with the same pagination, by Octagon Books in 1976. References to Broad in the text will, unless otherwise specified, be to ‘Ostensible Temporality’.

3 , Williams' paper first appeared in Journal of Philosophy 48 (1951). Page references in the text to this paper will be to the reprint in Richard Gale's The Philosophy of Time (Anchor Books, Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1967). The quote above appears on p. 99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Williams, Donald, ‘Physics and Flux: Comment on Professor Čapek's Essay’ in Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Volume II (Humanities Press, 1965): 465–66.Google Scholar

5 Consider the following remark of Julian Barbour's on page 242 of The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics (Oxford, 1999): ‘The coordinates laid down on space–time are arbitrary. Since the coordinates include one used to label space–time in the time direction and all coordinates can be changed at whim, there is clearly no distinguished label of time.’Google Scholar

6 Some use the term event to refer also to sets of events extended in space and time, like World War II. I prefer to use the term, process for such sets of events. The events considered here have or occur at spatiotemporal locations and may have causal relations to one another. In spacetime theories, the spatiotemporal locations themselves are called events as well.

7 My favourite is from Santayana: ‘The essence of nowness runs like fire along the fuse of time.’

8 As only befits a chapter, Chapter 35 of Volume II, of a massive work entitled Examination of McTaggart's Philosophy.

9 I find the essentials of this argument in section 1.22, ‘Absolute Becoming,’ of Broad's chapter. That section appears in part I, ‘Independent Account of the Phenomenology of Time,’ before McTaggart's argument officially enters the stage in Parts II and III, and hence it is easy to see how its importance might be overlooked. I ask those who doubt my reading of Broad to reflect on Broad's remark, which seems to appear out of the blue at the very end of his consideration of McTaggart's main argument, that ‘[t]he fallacy in McTaggart's argument consists in treating absolute becoming as if it were a species of qualitative change…’ (317)

10 There is a parallel argument in the text that one should not treat passage as like motion either.

11 Broad clearly did so in his treatment of time in Scientific Thought, in which he defended the idea that the future is nothing but that once an event becomes (or happens) then it continues to exist forever. I take Broad t o have dropped the latter half of this view of absolute becoming by the time he wrote Examination of McTaggart's Philosophy, given his explicitly deflationary line that for an event to become absolutely is just for it to happen. I find support for my claim, not just in the text of Examination of McTaggart's Philosophy but also in Broad's later statement (on pp. 766-7 of ‘A Reply to My Critics’ in The Philosophy of C. D. Broad, edited by P. A. Schilpp (Tudor Publishing Company, 1959)) that though he once took seriously the idea of the world's history ‘growing continually longer in duration by the addition of new slices,’ he now lumped that idea in with the ‘policeman's bulls-eye’ metaphor as an inadequate way of trying to understand absolute becoming.

12 Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett (Little, Brown and Company, 1991), p. 147.

13 Palle Yourgrau (on p. 22 of Gödel meets Einstein (Open Court, 1999)) says that ‘for Gödel, to spatialize time is to render it ideal (by robbing it of its characteristic mode of existence).’ I think that Yourgau concurs in Gödel's view, and these two are but part of a chorus who have complained that spatializing time ignores its essential characteristic, passage. If what I say in the text is correct, however, one can do full justice to both the extensive aspect of time (that is, spatialize it) and to its transitory aspect, at least in the setting of classical spacetime.

14 I am here consciously echoing the language of David Park in his essay ‘The Myth of the Passage of Time’ in The Study of Time: Proceedings of the First Conference of the International Society for the Study of Time, edited by J. T. Fraser, F. C. Haber, and G. H. Muller (Springer-Verlag, 1972). This paper originally appeared in Studium Generate 24 (1971): 19–30.Google Scholar

15 In Basic Issues in the Philosophy of Time, Freeman, Eugene and Sellars, Wilfrid (eds.) (Open Court, 1971), pp. 195–228.Google Scholar

16 ‘The Meaning of Time’, p. 195.

17 Ibid, p. 211.

18 Of course, indexical expressions like ‘now’ can be used only in circumstances much like those that Griinbaum took to show that becoming is mind–dependent–especially if there is a close connection between conceptualization and possession of a language.

19 Incidentally, if I can infer from the above remark that I have both Broad and Bergson on side for my account of passage, what more could I need to establish its bona fides to supporters of passage?

20 Smart, J. J. C, Philosophy and Scientific Realism (New York: The Humanities Press, 1963), p. 148.Google Scholar

21 In any case, Broad's arguments against construing passage in these ways seem quite difficult to evade. McTaggart's own regress argument, however, may not be so formidable. I have tried to show why it fails in ‘A Limited Defense of Passage’, American Philosophical Quarterly 38 (2001), 261–70Google Scholar.

22 ‘A Bergsonian Approach to A– and B–Time,’ Philosophy 73 (1998): 379–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also his ‘The Metaphysics of A– and BnTime,’ The Philosophical Quarterly (1996): 371–81.Google Scholar I am in considerable sympathy with the ideas expressed in these papers, though I do not wish to express them in terms of Bergsonian intuition or in terms of opposition between A–theories and B–theories of time.

23 I discuss the difficulties of importing the metaphysics of presentism into Minkowski spacetime in ‘There's no time like the present (in Minkowski spacetime),’ Philosophy of Science 67 (2002; Proceedings): S663-S574Google Scholar.