Time, Embodiment and the Self

Andros Loizou

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138712928
• eBook ISBN: 9781351777452
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This title was first published in 2000: Beginning with a sustained argument against the new tenseless theory of time and against McTaggart's A series/B series distinction, the author of this essay goes on to provide a non-paradoxical, tensed, phenomenologically-based account of the 'going on' or 'taking place' of events in time that escapes the paradoxes endemic to 'passage' as understood via the A series/B series distinction. The author then turns his attention to the other main aim of the essay, which is to seek an understanding of time adequate to those more 'embodied' conceptions of the self that place character, and with it the 'constitutive attachments' or 'ground projects' of individual life circumstance, at the centre of the self. This involves a 'redrawing' of the self informed by a wider conception of the will than the one we have inherited via Descartes and Kant, by an account of ground projects, and by the theory of the tripartite psyche in Plato's Republic. It also involves extending the account of time developed in the second chapter in a way that draws on the notion of 'ecstatic temporality' that originates with Heidegger. The essay will be of use to philosophers and advanced students interested in the nature of the self, time, temporality, and phenomenology.

1 McTaggart’s Parody of Time, and the Tenseless Theory

1 Introduction

The difference between the discussion of time in such texts as Heidegger's Being and Time or Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception and in the works of philosophers belonging in the British analytical tradition is, on any account of the matter, striking. Through the one tradition, the continental European, an understanding of time (or 'temporality') is developed which seeks to illuminate, or at least address, some central issues of human existence, the nature of the self etc. in ways which seem at best fanciful, at worst incomprehensible, to philosophers in the analytical tradition. Discussion of time in the analytical tradition, by contrast, has most recently been highly technical, narrowly focused, and for the most part centred round a particular controversy which seems very far removed from any such central issues. The student of philosophy who wishes to understand this controversy among analytical philosophers has, as his starting-point, ordinary everyday speech; but if he wants to make any progress, he must be ready to make some departures from everyday speech and accept a particular hybrid construction of it.

This hybrid language originated with the British idealist philosopher J.M.E. McTaggart.¹ The irony is that whilst for McTaggart this hybrid language served only to 'prove' the unreality of time, for the analytical tradition following the demise of British idealism it has become the unquestioned backdrop against which the central debate over the nature of time is pursued-so much so that almost all parties to the debate no longer see it as hybrid. But this has not always been so in the analytical tradition. There have been philosophers who have questioned McTaggart's language of time, such as C.D. Broad and G.E. Moore in an earlier period, and David Pears in the 1950s.² It is my claim that this hybrid language is deeply flawed, and that the ways in which it is flawed are instructive. To bring out these flaws will be the initial aim of this first chapter. But the main aim will be to provide some compelling arguments against the major variants of the popular and widely-supported theory of time known as 'the new tenseless theory'.

Starting with chapter 2 of this essay, I shall begin to introduce into the discussion some of the key texts in the phenomenological tradition which have a direct bearing on time and temporality. That tradition, as I hope to show, has much to offer us. But I also hope to show how this understanding can be further enhanced, both by attending to the flaws in McTaggart's hybrid language of time, and by taking note of some of the insights and methods of analytical philosophy generally.

I begin, then, with McTaggart.

2 McTaggart’s Language of Time and its Inconsistencies

The hybrid language bequeathed by McTaggart is, of course, the now famous distinction between what he calls 'the A series' and what he calls 'the B series'. The bequest was not altogether a happy one, as I have argued elsewhere.³ I shall not repeat that earlier discussion-but because McTaggart's language has exercised such an influence on English language analytical philosophy, and continues to do so, something needs to be said by way of summary.

McTaggart introduces the A series/B series distinction in the following way:

Positions in time, as time appears to us prima facie, are distinguished in two ways. Each position is Earlier than some and Later than some of the other positions. To constitute such a series there is required a transitive asymmetric relation, and a collection of terms such that, of any two of them, either the first is in this relation to the second, or the second is in this relation to the first. We may take here either the relation of 'earlier than' or the relation of 'later than', both of which, of course, are transitive and asymmetrical. If we take the first, then the terms have to be such that, of any two of them, either the first is earlier than the second, or the second is earlier than the first.

In the second place, each position is either Past, Present or Future. The distinctions of the former class are permanent, while those of the latter are not. If M is ever earlier than N, it is always earlier. But an event, which is now present, was future, and will be past.⁴

The tenseless (earlier/later) series McTaggart called 'the B series', and the tensed (past present and future) series he called 'the A series'. Now to anyone looking on these linguistic devices from outside the debate among analytical philosophers, a number of questions must arise: Are these two distinct series? Or is there just the one time series, presenting, so to speak, two different aspects of time? The reader soon discovers that McTaggart intends the latter. But the question why we should need both series is likely to remain.

To the intelligent layman, the A series may appear to be all that is needed. His initial reading of the two ways in which 'positions in time' are supposed to present themselves is likely to be this: the B series secures for us the order of events-for as McTaggart says, B series positions do not change, and 'if M is ever earlier than N, it is always earlier'-whereas the A series captures the fact that events 'flow' or 'pass' from the future, into the present and thence into the past. So, he or she might now think, the B series embodies temporal order, whereas the A series embodies temporal flux.

Despite its obvious attractions, this does not stand up. The A series is, after all, a series, and not merely a set of qualitative distinctions-it is 'that series of positions which runs from the far past through the near past to the present, and then from the present through the near future to the far future, or conversely'.⁵ The A series does not, therefore, represent temporal flux alone- whatever this could possibly mean-but includes within it, within the overall flux or movement, a serial ordering of events (or 'positions') as well. So our intelligent layman might now legitimately ask: Given that the A series already contains a serial ordering of events or 'positions', why do we need the B series at all?

We distinguish succession from duration, the flux from the abiding or permanent, or (as Broad puts it) between the 'transitory' and the 'extensive' aspects of time/'⁶ But none of this is of any avail if we want to preserve McTaggart's distinction. Only by modifying McTaggart's distinction in the way Gale does-i.e. by transforming McTaggart's A series into what he (Gale) calls 'the pure A series'-is it possible to align McTaggart's A series/B series distinction with such distinctions as transitory/extensive, fleeting/abiding, succession/duration etc.. 'The pure A series' consists simply in distinguishing past, present and future from each other in a purely topological way, i.e. with no series of degrees of pastness and futurity.⁷ One can then identify Gale's 'pure A series' with the transitory aspect of time, leaving the extensive aspect to the B series. The A series is now reduced to something well captured in the metaphor of a spotlight moving along a fixed track-the spotlight of 'presentness' passing to later and later terms of the firm, fixed track of the B series. The separation of the two aspects of time is then complete, but at a price-perhaps too high a price, as we no longer have McTaggart's A series. But as I argued in the earlier essay, for such a misconstrual of McTaggart's A series to be on the cards at all suggests that it is inherently prone to this misconstrual-suggesting perhaps that, just as Gale's 'pure A series' is an attempt to separate the transitory from the extensive aspect of time, so too McTaggart's distinction itself constitutes a somewhat confused step in that direction.⁸

There is something peculiarly paradoxical about some of the ways in which McTaggart represents the relation between the A series and the B series. In a footnote, he says that we either think of the A series as sliding along the B series, or conversely we think of the B series as sliding along a fixed A series: 'The movement of the A series along the B series is from earlier to later. The movement of the B series along the A series is from future to past',⁹ This suggests the image of a track with its fixed points, and a measuring-rod of indefinite length sliding along it; or, alternatively, a reel of film, illuminated and projected onto the cinema screen one frame at a time. Whichever alternative we take, the upshot is the same-the changes of tense determination which alone can constitute the passage of time are no longer represented as internal to the A series, but as changing relations between the A series and the B series. On both, we have not only 'now', but other fixed tense determinations, such as 'yesterday', 'tomorrow', 'two-days-ago', 'last month', 'a year hence' etc. passing to later and later terms of the B series. But in speaking this way, McTaggart has repeated himself. The A series as defined initially is not a series of fixed determinations of this kind, but of changing determinations-for it is already internal to it that the events of tomorrow should change a day hence and so come to bear the determination 'today' or 'now'. We do not therefore need to set up a 'motion' between the A series and something outside it, since it already contains its own 'motion'-thus making the B series redundant.

In a footnote to the Mind 1908 article, McTaggart speaks differently of the 'movement' of events: 'If the events are taken as moving by a fixed point of presentness, the movement is from future to past....If presentness is taken as a moving point successively related to each of a series of events, the movement is from past to future'.¹⁰ Here McTaggart comes close to Gale's 'pure A series', and hence to the separation of the 'transitory' and 'extensive' aspects of time I discussed earlier.

McTaggart is far from clear on how he conceives the relation between his A and B series, and on whether he considers the A or the B series as more fundamental. After introducing the A series/B series distinction, McTaggart says: 'It is clear ...that, in present experience, we never observe events in time except as forming both these series'.¹¹ This remark, taken by itself, might seem to suggest that the two series are equally important. But then he says that the A series is more fundamental than the B series, in the sense that if there were no A series-if the A series were shown to be unreal-there would be no B series. Yet he does not seem to think (he certainly does not say) that if there were no B series, there might still nonetheless be an A series. Indeed, all the indications point to his thinking it an obvious truth that anything that was in an A series would ipso facto be in a B series.¹² In what way, then, is the A series but not the B series 'fundamental'? And then, when McTaggart introduces the C series-which, for present purposes, we can think of as an uninterpreted ordered series, or 'bare seriality' as such¹³-he says that although the A series and the B series are equally essential to time, it is only the A series and the C series that are ultimate- we are told that the B series is derivative. In the face of these different assertions and the seemingly unresolvable tensions between them, it is hard to see what McTaggart's B series really amounts to; and so it is hard to decide whether an event's changing tense-determinations are to be understood through the relations in which the A series stands to the B series, or through the A series alone. The ordinary man innocent of philosophy might be forgiven for concluding that the B series is a fiction, given that the A series as originally defined by McTaggart-i.e. as an extended series of changing tense determinations-can accommodate the extensive as well as the transitory aspect of time.

However, given McTaggart's own account of the A series and the way he first introduces it, even if we tried to banish the B series we would be compelled to reinvent it. For McTaggart's account of the A series is, precisely, one which invites the image of events on a moving conveyor belt, or that of the boat sailing down the canal past the row of houses on the bank. Furthermore, it is an account in which the future is not characterised as 'open' in an ontological sense, but as determinately in being, 'closed'. The death of Queen Anne, he says, was an event with its determinate character 'before the stars saw one another plain'. But in the following respect it does change: 'It was once an event in the far future. It became every moment an event in the nearer future. At last it was present'.¹⁴ McTaggart sometimes speaks of these 'changes' as if they are fortuitous: 'Changes must happen to the events of such a nature that the occurrence of these changes does not hinder the events from being events, and the same events, both before and after the change'.¹⁵ The temptation will always be there, in other words, to reintroduce the 'spotlight' image of an A series-Gale's 'pure' A series-and to view the eternal order of events in terms of the (perforce reintroduced) B series. The 'pure' A series would then come to seem ever more and more ephemeral, and the B series ever more and more solid. In su...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 McTaggart's Parody of Time, and the Tenseless Theory
• 2 The Dynamic of Time
• 3 Redrawing the Self
• 4 The Time of the Embodied Self
• Bibliography
• Index