Starting the 1st of January 2025, the blog will pick a ‘word of the week’, to share & explore the selected word. Here’s an expression for the word – Time.
What is time? The concept of time is difficult to understand & even more difficult to explain. Time is our world’s most common denominator, the main currency of reality. But, we experience time in different ways. Sometimes, time flies or time just stands still. The philosophy of time is the study of the nature of time, including its relationship with the past, the present & the future. Philosophers have proposed many theories about time, including that it’s an illusion, that it’s a tool for understanding our world or that it’s a dimension of reality.
In the Middle Ages, Augustine developed the concept of subjective time. He described time as a mental phenomenon of changing perceptions. He distinguished three parts of time – the present, the past & the future. A distinction between the lived time (the subjective experience of duration) & the clock time. The early Greek philosophers believed that the universe & time was infinite, with no beginning & no end. In the Zen essence, all things are linked with one another as moments, has the quality of flowing. Today flows into tomorrow, today flows into yesterday, yesterday flows into today. The Indian philosophy describe time as when our universe goes through repeated cycles of creation, destruction & re-birth.
Immanuel Kant was a pretty big deal when it comes to our understanding of time. He believed that time wasn’t something that just existed on its own, rather it was a feature of the mind. Our brain doesn’t just reflect the world around us in a perfectly accurate way. Instead, it organises everything into different categories so we can understand what we’re seeing. One of these categories is time. So for Kant, time isn’t some concrete thing that’s just out there. Instead, it is an empty form.
So, while Newton approached time more like an objective universal law of nature, Kant saw it more as something that was constantly being shaped by our own thoughts & actions. His idea of absoluteness meant that both time & space are completely unrelated to the motion of objects, that they exist independently. Nietzsche saw things a little differently. He believed that the past isn’t set in stone. Instead, how we remember it changes depending on our current situation & perspective. Heidegger thought that the future was something we could sort of reach out & grab by making choices in the present. Others believed in a more fatalistic view, where the future is pre-determined & we’re all just along for the ride.
In the Static Theory of Time, time is like space & there is no such thing as the passage of time. In the Dynamic Theory of Time, time is very different from space & the passage of time is a real phenomenon. Plato identified time with the period of motion of the heavenly bodies & space as that in which things come to be. Stoicism shares that we should utilise every minute to make the most of our lives to seek wisdom & virtue. It’s not necessarily the amount of time that we have in our life, but how we live that time is important. Einstein determined that time is relative. The rate at which time passes depends on our frame of reference.
Most philosophers agree that time isn’t some kind of a universal force. It’s an essential part of our human experience, something that shapes our memories & connects us. It is both a personal & a social construct. What if one day everything grinds to a halt or fast forwards a hundred years? Can we go back in time? What if birds froze mid flight & planets froze mid orbit? What if all change, throughout our entire universe, completely ceased for a period of time, like in a black-hole? Are such things possible? Time will tell.
