Defining Time

Defining Time

Can time be defined? Einstein and Bergson had an argument about this: Einstein claimed to define time by clocks (“time pieces”), i.e., by physical objects of a certain type; Bergson preferred to define time by means of consciousness of time (“subjective duration”). Time exists by virtue of clocks, natural and artificial, for Einstein; or it exists by virtue of human experience, for Bergson. Who is right? Neither, in my view. Both are wrong, and for the same basic reason: they both try to define time in terms of human knowledge. Einstein uses our means of measuring time—periodic processes like the earth’s rotation or oscillations in a quartz crystal[1]; Bergson uses our “lived experience” of the passage of time. One method is physical, the other phenomenological. Both are epistemological, either external or internal. There is an obvious problem with this method: clocks and consciousness are both in time. They are subject to time, existing in time, temporal phenomena. How then can they define time—any such definition is circular. It’s like trying to define the time of Australia by the time of Denmark: both are instances of time. You might as well define the time of clocks or experiences in terms of the time of what they measure or are experiences of. How long does it take for the clock hand to go all the way round once? How long does it take to see the sun set? These are events in time, like the sun traversing the sky or an eclipse. And how do we define the time of these events—clock movements and experience durations? Not by means of further clocks or conscious experiences—that way infinite regress lies. Moreover, it is clearly wrong to suppose that time depends on clocks or experiences: time would exist even if no clocks or experiences did. In fact, clocks and experiences presuppose time—they could not exist without it. The dependence goes the other way. There had to be time before clocks and experiences or else these things could not exist. Human knowledge of time presupposes that time already exists, because knowledge is a temporal matter—observing clocks, listening to a symphony. It is thus impossible to reduce time to knowledge of time, since knowledge is a temporal affair. It’s like trying to reduce space to measuring rods or awareness of space: measuring rods exist in space, as do awareness-producing brains. This is tantamount to trying to reduce space to one instance of it, as if the space of a football field can be defined by the space of a foot ruler. Circular! Also, very implausible, since football fields can exist in space in the absence of foot rulers (or other measuring devices) and perceptual experiences. This is just crass verificationism, leading inevitably to idealism. That’s why I say Einstein and Bergson are both wrong.

You reply: but how else are we to define time? How indeed. The fact is no other method suggests itself. Our conception of time is ineluctably anthropocentric. But that doesn’t show that time itself is anthropocentric, intrinsically, constitutively. Clocks and consciousness reveal time only partially, if at all; and its appearance to us may not tell us much about what it is in itself. We cannot picture it, imagine it, compare it to anything else. Efforts to reduce it to space are obviously futile. Empiricism is defeated by time. Rationalism can only take us so far—the mathematics of time not its concrete (sic) being. Let’s face it: we are pretty effing blank about the nature of time. We have some idea of its structure but not of its substance (and the notion of substance seems singularly inappropriate). Time flies too low for us to see it; or too high—way out of sight. It is everywhere but nowhere, a condition of perception but imperceptible. By all means employ a notion of time appropriate to the purpose at hand (physics, phenomenology), but don’t think you have got hold of the thing in itself. Time isn’t even a mystery in the usual sense, because we have so little handle on it to begin with—unlike consciousness or matter. Precisely what is mysterious? Time, you say—but what is that? We can’t even properly specify the thing that is so inscrutable—we can only gesture, waffle, then fall silent. Time reduces us to inarticulacy. It isn’t something that we know very well but can’t explain; it is hardly known at all, save abstractly. We are not acquainted with it—like redness or pain or shape. Nor is our ignorance of it like our ignorance of anything else; even the word “ignorance” fails to catch its degree of elusiveness (we know much more about God or black holes or dark matter or the universe before the big bang). True, I know what time it is and how long it takes to boil an egg, but I haven’t the foggiest idea what these words really mean—what I am referring to with them. Do I ever really refer to time as I refer to people and places—or is this an overgeneralization of the concept of reference? Perhaps I just obliquely allude to time, or attempt to intimate it, or vaguely hint at it. The philosophy of time is a philosophy of something I can’t even specify. Hence all the truly pathetic attempts to pin it down: rivers, arrows, fathers, sands, valleys, waterfalls, storms (okay, I made up the last three). We don’t even have any good metaphors! We just have irksome bafflement, visceral vacuity, intellectual scotoma. We can only bear to think about it every now and then; or else madness threatens. The topic is infuriating, excruciating, and ultimately empty. It’s a problem about nothing, or nothing we can put our finger on. That is why it invites the kind of treatment proposed by Einstein and Bergson—at least we know what clocks and consciousness are. We are not stranded in an intellectual desert, featureless, arid. We can lean into the mirages that time produces in us. Time isn’t just indefinable; it is incognizable.[2]

[1] Do we ever really measure time? It is tempting to see our clocks as analogous to measuring rods, but there is an important difference: we lay measuring rods next to the things we measure with them, but we don’t lay our clocks next to time. We suppose there is a correlation between clock movements and temporal intervals, but we never observe this correlation; it is more a matter of faith. This is why we can entertain such possibilities as that time may speed up while clocks fail to register this fact—the sequence of clicks doesn’t track the actual passage of time. Our clocks are really substitutes for direct observation of time’s passage. The concept of measurement seems overoptimistic.

[2] Time has been a concern of poetry, precisely because it refuses to yield to more “scientific” treatment. But even the poets are defeated by the topic, managing only to lament its passage or rue its authority. The topic of death is never far from the topic of time. Analytic philosophy keeps a safe distance from it or bends it into something more tractable—or else you end up writing as I have just done. Lyrically, pretentiously, despairingly—hardly the stuff of a passable PhD or an article in Analysis. And yet I do have the feeling that time may one day be penetrated, laid bare, by some stroke of genius. It really ought not to be so impenetrable. What prevents us knowing about it? It doesn’t hide behind an opaque screen…