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Whatever is general lies outside time and has no place in space. Whatever exists in time and space is ipso facto unique; though in it and through it one sees the general and the timeless, not as separate, but as another facet of the same entity. What is unique at one level is general at another; what is general at one level is unique at another.
William James asked, in relation to the question of unity and multiplicity, why ‘should the absolute ever have lapsed from the perfection of its own integral experience of things, and refracted itself into all our finite experiences?’105 It’s a very good question.
I also believe that the philosophical positions that time is an illusion, or that it is in reality stationary (which amounts to the same thing), or is composed of moments or slices, entail philosophical mistakes with far-reaching consequences. They are, in effect, forms of delusion.
By the very act of conceiving it, we place time itself already outside time.
Spacetime is not necessarily something to which one can ascribe a separate existence, independently of the actual objects of physical reality. Physical objects are not in space, but these objects are spatially extended. In this way the concept ‘empty space’ loses its meaning.
They were in fact reciprocal indeterminate processes that took place – in time. Not only is time not a thing, but things are events in time.
As a result, the Japanese have nothing that corresponds to the Platonic Idea, and in fact no true abstractions in general: they have never developed the dichotomy between the phenomenological world and the world of ideas.
A thing suggests permanence, and separation from what surrounds it. But that is all a matter of the timescale you happen to adopt. Entities that change fast we see as processes; entities that change slowly we see as objects.
Speech is the mode of operation par excellence of the left hemisphere. In order to speak about time we are obliged to spatialise it, and this is so normal that most people are not even aware of the process and cannot imagine trying to avoid it.
The pleasure of ruins captures the imagination because our most monumental efforts to make things that stand still for ever are seen to result ultimately in flow; because nature’s vitality triumphs over the schemes of mankind; because the vestigial and dilapidated give rise to imaginative sublimity, as a mountain partially lost in mist seems more awe-inspiring than one in plain sight. All of which return us from the world of the left hemisphere to that of the right.
Time, once it is measured – clock time – becomes spatialised as a succession of points: time as experienced is no such thing (though we think of it as such). In representing it we destroy its essence: and the consequences are, literally, world-shattering, as we shall see.
Scientists sometimes imagine that their formulations are the reality which the formulations merely represent, whereas they can only ever be practical tools that help us manipulate one aspect of reality for a while. They are not wrong for being partial, like all truth. But the mistake is to take them for the absolute truth.
In quantum mechanics, as de Broglie points out, a particle represents a point precisely located in geometric space with no motion, and a wave represents motion in a pure state with no spatial location.
This inability of language to describe the “profound self”, far from being a contingent defect, reveals the very nature of our linguistic apparatus: language, as part of our intelligence, is essentially a set of abstract signs; its task is to classify objects, to dissolve them into conceptual classes; uniqueness, unless it is an empirically unique collection of abstracts, is beyond its reach.
In keeping with this, a ‘particle’ could be seen as the result of the intellect’s attempt – the attempt of the left hemisphere – to grasp what the right hemisphere sees as a ‘wave’.
Zeno’s method involves destroying the fundamental nature of time and space by atomising them; and what Zeno shows most beautifully in the process is that atomism – the belief that we can analyse reality into distinct, separable, chunks without loss – does not apply to the real world.
The sense that there must be things underlying the flow comes about because we imagine a change as being really composed of states, which are, however, only retrospective, left hemisphere representations. In the famous phrase of Yeats’s I quoted in the Introduction, we cannot ‘know the dancer from the dance’.
Reality is what we experience – ever moving, changing, and continuous. Things, however, are secondary, static, products of perception which supervene on ‘from above’, not support ‘from beneath’, that field of flow.
The matters that concern us become ‘things’ in the focus of our attention. We can use them. The rest of the picture, its background and context, the left hemisphere neglects.
Why a synthesis, and why must it always be begun afresh? Because if you treat the representation of time as itself a kind of time (even if ‘constituted’), you are left with a conundrum. Time as conceived by the left hemisphere is a thing, that just is, once and for all, and can be broken down by analysis. For the right hemisphere, on the other hand, there is only change, forever coming into being and swirling away. Time, for the right hemisphere, is not something distinct from being, from reality flowing: it is always thus a becoming, never a something become.
temporality … constitutes the bedrock of any experience … The disintegration of time consciousness has obviously serious psychopathological consequences for the way one experiences the phenomenal world and relates to oneself.
Making space temporal is an act of vivification; making time spatial an act of vivisection.
Time is the coherence-giving context in which we live. Not to have this is to disrupt many important facets of being, including the sense of belonging, of connectedness, and of meaning to life.
They can, properly speaking, only be said to form multiple states when I have already passed them and turn back to observe their track. Whilst I was experiencing them they were so solidly organized, so profoundly animated with a common life, that I could not have said where any one of them finished or where another commenced.
‘When you have broken the reality into concepts you never can reconstruct it in its wholeness. Out of no amount of discreteness can you manufacture the concrete.’
The only thing that we can predict will always occur at precisely the same time as a given event is – itself! So what if there is really some sense in which what we conceive as two events are in reality two aspects of one and the same event?
The principle of cause and effect breaks down at the quantum level: it appears that effects can be their own causes.
The reality described by quantum field theory helps put one’s finger on the problem. Linear causation may be a valid concept, but only at one, intermediate plane of focus, neither too minute (where there are quantum fields), nor too large (where one encounters complex ‘systems’ such as organisms, and ultimately a human mind).
Scale changes not just how much of some ‘thing’ you have, but what kind of a ‘thing’ it turns out to be.
During life it is possible that the spiritual and physical are entangled, neither causing the other, neither depending on the other for its existence, but their entanglement certainly depending on the co-existence of each: nonetheless each could exist separately, though then they would not exhibit the entanglement we recognise as the mind-brain relationship.
Schelling argued that mechanical cause-effect relations are abstractions from the reciprocal causation of self-organising processes.133 An organic whole, in contrast to a mechanism, does not consist of a hierarchy of parts which exert control over other parts. Instead, it is a maximally responsive and transparent system in which changes and adjustments propagate simultaneously upwards, downwards and sideways, in the maintenance of the whole.
Instead of ‘control’ (LH), I suggest it is more appropriate and more fruitful to think in terms of ‘communication’ (RH).
‘There is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects.’
Chains of causation are conceived as working from the past towards the future: but the future, in the sense of internalised potential, pattern or telos, the drive that is in all living beings, may be as important a driver in the emergence of phenomena as the past.
In a word, our present falls back into the past when we cease to attribute to it an immediate interest
Apart from the obvious experience that time’s arrow moves only one way, so that the past is always growing while the future diminishes (unless each is infinite), the past has been ‘passed’ through the filter of being present, in the process acquiring embodiment, richness of human meaning and uniqueness. By contrast, the future is a theoretical projection, general, disembodied, and free to accept whatever meanings we care to throw at it. In that sense the future is all theory.
Abstract and ideal symbols: clocks are like words, or like money. They take part in a structure that runs parallel with the real world, and each can carry out internal transactions in its own realm.
Objective time, clock time, exists because the mind invented clocks. That invention gave us a definition of an apparently objective time that we believe in too much … [However] objective time has gone. It has gone in relativity, gone from the quantum world, gone in cosmology … Only in the ‘normal’ world, which has been impoverished by our definitions and explanations which define poorly and explain little, does objective time still hold sway.
As absolute … the world repels our sympathy because it has no history. As such, the absolute neither acts nor suffers, nor loves nor hates; it has no needs, desires, or aspirations, no failures or successes, friends or enemies, victories or defeats. All such things pertain to the world qua relative, in which our finite experiences lie, and whose vicissitudes alone have power to arouse our interest …
My theme has been that the parts of ‘things’, most especially living organisms, are never isolated one from another. The finding of quantum entanglement in space, and now in time, underlines how fundamental this truth is to the structure of the world.
The probabilistic laws of quantum mechanics simply do not hold of time-reversed quantum processes.’
Nothing transcends time, not even the laws of nature. Laws are not timeless. Like everything else, they are features of the present, and they can evolve over time.
In the chapter of The Principles of Psychology which James devotes to the perception of time, he asserts that ‘the knowledge of some other part of the stream, past or future, near or remote, is always mixed in with our knowledge of the present thing’.
‘Remember that TIME is Money’, are the first words of Benjamin Franklin’s ‘Advice to a Young Tradesman’.213 Hence time, like money, is ‘stuff’ that can be saved, wasted, or lost. As such it becomes something like money, merely a representation of something else that is real.
Leisure was the disposition of receptive openness to what is, all that we miss as we rush through life on our highway to the grave.
In the time debate, I suggest, we should prefer a view that time is real to one that it is an illusion. We should back those who believe that it is essentially flow and cannot be fragmented; that there are no points in time but only duration; that its nature is incompatible with determinism; that the future is open, not closed; and that time is fundamentally asymmetrical.
My question to you then is, how do you know that the world that passes is inferior to an imagined world in which nothing passed?
Consciousness flows, the body flows; given this, it is hardly surprising that the evolution of the self is such a flow, too.
And ultimately there is, they claim, just one incessant flow: though it may manifest as things flowing, the things arise on the surface of the flow, and do not constitute it.
The tool of conceptual thought is, of course, language. As Kierkegaard put it, ‘immediacy is reality and speech is ideality. Reality I cannot express in speech, for to indicate it I use ideality, which is a contradiction, an untruth.’
