Metaphysics
A view spread in the 20th century was the denial of metaphysics, constructivism – which argues that the essence of the thing is nonexistent.
What the essences are remains to be determined. So far we just speak of material entities.
A further pair of categories that are closely linked to material entities are space and time. There is a kind of truism that every material entity exists in space and time, and their spatiotemporal trajectory can be traced which is the fundamental condition of their existance.
Supposing that neither space nor time are material substances themselves, what is their ontology.
Infinite lines can indicate height, length and depth: this is a nice mathematical model that allows us to locate entities in space.
Then there is the infinite arrow going in one direction known as time. This is also a mathematical model.
In more recent physics there is on the contrary the idea of time travel, a piece of science fiction, and a purely theoretical but not a real option.
So what are time and space? These are just ways to represent these features.
We’ll begin as usual with the two most radically opposed options anti-realism vs absolutism.
Anti realism is the view that neither space nor time exists. Generally we take space and time to be undeniable. Time is related to becoming. And there is also not locomotion, no shift of place. This was spelled out by Zeno, in his paradoxes. Zeno agrees that his paradoxes are nonsensical, even though he proves that they make sense somehow. Zeno argues that any change is an illusion of the imagination. Ultimately there is always at each stage an entirely frozen situation. Aristotle wrote about this in physics, where he argues that it is sophistry. Zeno somehow distorts the situation by representing as static what is dynamic. The tortoise is not at a particular position at a particular moment in time because moments of time simply do not exist. During each temporal interval during which the arrow is in flight it is actually a thing of dyanamism, and as such lacks moments.
There is a kind of attractiveness of the view of Zeno which transcends the mere images and the diagrams that he works with, the idea that time after all may not exist. Very often this has to do with idealism, Plato is deeply impressed by Parmenides. Plato doesn’t deny the reality of place and time but considers them inferior than that which is more real; ideas. Somehow composed of being and nothingness, which explains its negative character. Time is a negation of one moment of time from the next one. Space is the indifferent juxtaposition of things which are otherwise unrelated. Pointing out some space is pointing out something completely irrelevent about the thing itself. This platonic sentiment is usually felt in Hegel as well: in here we see the idea of the indifferent externality of space. Things are ultimately out there, and there is an infinity to it, a bad infinity (the infinity of the coordinate system) because it stretches without meaning or significance. Time is just the succession of one moment to the next, but this is ultimately not what really matters. What really matters is the reality of consciousness grasping things, both theoretically and practically. Knowledge and willing is in the realm of spirit, and is not in the indifferent externality. Some Hegelians go farther than that, like McTaggart. There are 2 different notions of time in Hegel. There is the self-actualisation of spirit, this constitutes history, and this allows for genuine notions of temporal relations.
McTaggart and other British idealists go further. They try to bring out the metaphysical system from hegelianism, which is something that many hegelscholar deny. McTaggart is serious about reading Hegel as an idealist with an idealist metaphysics. Part of that is a denial of time for him. There is a paper by him about the unreality of time. He says that we have two ways of conceiving time. In both ways, time is conceived as a series of moments, a-series and b-series.
The A-series has a center within it which is the now. Then we divide time into two halves: the past and the future. The now moves along the line from the past to the future, but what is given to us is always the present. The past is remembered and the future is anticipated. In both Husserl and Augustine we see something similar to this conception. It is a kind of truism.
The B-series is just a potentially infinite series of moments, or points in time, without any special moment that we place out known as present. People usually say that this is the objective conception of time, wheras the A-series is subjective.
So McTaggart says that the B-series is just an abstraction of the A-series. We need the original givenness of the A-series to get the absolute time of the B-series, which is never given to us. The A-series is unreducibly subjective, and nothing subjective can ever be real, so therefore time is also not real.
In the end, McTaggart reaches the same conclusion as Zeno. We think it is some objective given but it is just imagination tied to our subjective experience.
McTaggart deliberately confuses time and time-consciousness, Russel made a point to this effect in his critique of McTaggart. The reduction of the B-series to the A-series doesn’t work, because we can give the A-series objective determinations without referring to the A-series, by saying for example that some event happened at a certain point of time. You need some tacit parameters but that doesn’t really matter here.
Someone like Schopenhauer has some kind of affinity with the infinite, and argues that space and time are mere images because they are mere images of the never-changing reality of the will. Space and time just belong to its manifestations. Everything temporal and everything spatial which are specified is just an illusion. There are no differences. The principle of individuation which has space and time as a correlate is just the veil of Maya.
In Kant’s antinomies, he points out that space and time are difficult notions, but they cannot be objects no matter how broad you conceive them. Because they are infinite. In his philosophy of mathematics infinities are not real, and if space and time are infinite, they must be forms of intuition (Anschauung). The notion of an actual infinite goes back to Cantor, and before that, the idea of the infinite was always Aristotelian, that is only potential. There is no infinite body or object. There is nothing that is at the same time actual and infinite. What we have in mathematics is nonly the potential infinite. We have a line that can continue ad infinitum, we can keep dividing it forever, but we can never actually reach the limit. This doesn’t tell us anything about the real nature within the thing-itself. If they are forms of intuitions for us, this doesn’t rule out that there may be more than this. Kantian agnosticism therefore holds most clearly here.
There are teleological and ateleological metaphysics. Teleological coneptions have an idea of an endpoint that might never be reached and the process is merely asymptotic. But perhaps it can be reached. In Whitehead’s solution there is no asymptote to be reached, it is rather a temporally infinite improvement of the world. Space is the dimension in which the differences diversify which requires time and space, at least within a modern relativistic framework of space and time. Process metaphysics is not necessarily idealistic.
Certain idealists deny space but not time. For Berkeley space is not real because it exists only in minds, whilst time is necessary for minds to actually think things. In Christian terms it is also needed for the doctrine of salvation: it happens in the future after all.
Augustine is often taken to be an anti-realist about time but not of space. In the confessions, Augustine says that if no one asks, he knows what time is, but if someone asks he does not know. The more he thinks the more he is puzzled. We think of time in terms of present, past and future, but ultimately the future does not exist yet, the past does not exist anymore, and the present is just a fleeting moment and doesn’t exist in a space of non-existance. The past exists only insfar as it is remembered. Probably we should be careful with intepretating these passages as such, but merely about time-consciousness and its paradoxes. Augustine does not say that time does not exist, only that it is a difficult object.
The other extreme is absolutism about time and space. The newtonian account of space and time is often ridiculed as container model. Time is somehow an infinite container of motions, and you have to put them together in a framework of absolute space-time. The idea goes back to Descartes, who has the idea of the coordinate system in which everything can be located. Everything comes into being at a certain place, then it has a trajectory, and then it ceases to exist, and before this it interacts with a bunch of other bodies.
One theological image is of God being at the origin, having equidistance to every thing, and is omnipresent in virtue of being equally related to all. Newton was deist, so he thought that the perfect machine of the universe was created by God, which obeys deterministic laws and that this wouldn’t be possible without God. The initial conditons of the whole system is determined by God.
What is important is the absoluteness of space and time, which suggests that they are not altered by what happens within it. Kant is helpful here: in the CPR he says that space and time is everything that exists in space and time can be removed without altering space and time. We have the image of an empty space and an empty time. This absolute space is somehow populated with all kinds of things, and even if we removed them space and time would remain.
What we have in relativistic frameworks is ultimately not space time as such, but things in space-time, of which being spatial and temporal is a dimension of their existence.
To understand the debate between relativists and absolutists you should study the debate between Leibniz and Clarke. Clarke was a newtonian. Leibniz says that he does not deny the possibility of absolute space-time, but the mere representation does not show its validity – more useful is to consider it relative. Ultimately, we don’t need the absolute conception of space-time. We should rather have one perspective with all possible perspectives, which is indeed the relative model.
In ordinary parlance, we also have relative notions and absolute notions. We use terms like up and down, left and right, but we may also say absolutely where something is, though only in relation to something else. We know from everyday experience that these perspectives can be transformed into one another. If I am standing on the street and someone is speaking to me from a window, we are looking at each other, but one looking downward and one looking upward. Up and down can be translated into one another. In temporal relations before and after is also something in which we can transfer perspectives, we never have the full picture. Space and time are perspective transcendent, but they are the dimension in which space-time happens. Absolute space-time is just the total perspectives of the things that happen within space and time. Leibniz is often called the first perspectivalist in modern philosophy. Perspective is introduced as an access condition to the reality of space and time – they are however not reduced to perspectives.
The first relativist in the philosophy of space-time is Aristotle in Physics. Aristotle’s famous claim is that we need the categories of space and time to determine motion: because motion is nothing but the shifting in place which takes time. The same holds for rest. Rest is the negation of motion. Aristotle’s relativism is about whether we can determine of any object whether it is in motion or resting: no. We must ask relative to what. One and the same thing can be at motion and rest at the same time, but not in the same respect, from the same viewpoint. It only happens in relation to something else. Ultimately what is measurement? It is comparison between one body and another, you use a yardstick for the one to the other. You need as a yardstick as something that does not change, which is always the same. Cosmic motion is the measure of time according to Aristotle. Our primary clock is the sun. We divide time into nights and days, noon and midnight, hours, minutes, seconds etc. Aristotle has the same intuitions that Leibniz had regarding space. We can determine spatial relations by starting from some local perspective and then expand it. Killing someone and being killed by someone. Where am I? On the chair.
We should not interpret rest as immobility. There are some things which are strictly immobile, that are immutable and do not change. These things are very peculiar. In one sense, Aristotle argues that the heavenly bodies and stars are eternal, but they are in motion, a kind of uniform motion. They move, but always in the same motion. Immobility goes along with immutability. Let’s first think of things that have no time, like mathematical objects. These do not change. If we add a 1 to a 1 we get a 2 but it is not a change to the number one. It is simply an atemporal truth. At the same time this means that mathematical objects do not really exist mind-independently. That they are immutable is in virtue of the fact that they are abstract. Being abstract means not being part of any causal interaction or potential change. These things are then ultimately mind-dependent in Aristotle. The only things we find outside the human mind are quantities, that is, real numbers of something.
The cosmos is a potential infinitude because the future is open somehow.
What about God?
God is atemporal in Augustine. God does not change, God is immobile in the strict sense of eternal. For theism, if Aristotle is right, God would be an abstract entity so that He does not exist mind-independently. Therefore in Aristotelian theology, you have a slightly different account in which you say that to be temporal, something must be potentially in motion or in rest. But the prime mover cannot be in motion, because then he wouldn’t be the prime mover, but he cannot be at rest because then he couldn’t move things. So the prime mover moves without moving himself, other things are moved by what He is. If you are impressed by someone, then your impressed does not change the person who impressed you, but you are changed. God does not change, but only changes if he were to engage in efficient causation that requires movement. He is instead in a kind of splendid eternal rest, unalterable being, and everything moves in virtue of being in contact with the ultimate reality of God as such.
God knows what the agents will decide, but the fact that they decide is what the event happening is contingent on according to Leibniz.
In classical deism there is no governance, but a divine supervision of everything that happens. How does this square with the immutability of God? In catholicism, God cannot change, so what is the point of prayer? Aquinas says that if you pray, God already knew that you would, so you change with prayer, but not God.
The nominalists say that we have to abandon the claim that God is atemporal. Being atemporal is a temporal notion. God causally interacts with the world.
The copenhagen interpretation of the theory of relativity is too kantian. It fails to distinguish between measurements of space-time and space-time as well as our awareness of space-time. There are different accounts of space-time as such. You should distinguish space-time from our way of being conscious of space-time which is related to our way of living in it. We usually locate ourselves in the here-and-now. The past is not present, it is remembered and the future is not known. This tells us something of time-consciousness and space-consciousness.
In contemporary metaphysics there is a long and confusing debate over presentism vs 4-dimensionalism. One says that the only thing that really exist is the present, this may bring us to another variety of Zeno’s paradox. 4Dimensionalism argues that past, present, future and space exists. What does it mean for them to exist without a temporal index?
Measurement should not be conflated with time and place itself. You have the standard view in 20th century philosophy of science, operationalism, what a thing is is identical with its measurement. This boils down to the theory which says that time is what is measured by a clock. This is to conflate epistemology and ontology.