Topics Time

Question If we move through time, then what is movement? That is to say how is movement, or any change for that matter, possible outside of the context of time?

Accepted:
September 16, 2008

Comments

The idea that we move through time is at best odd, but at worst very confused - no offense at all intended to the author of this fine question, though, as this species of confusion is the motor of philosophy and it is the job of philosophy to describe it and then put it right, among other jobs. The picture is of time around us - and what does this mean? - and us trundling along through it. If indeed this is our conception, the idea of movement has come off its bearings and becomes what lawyers and students call "wordage", as in "we need some wordage to cover this point here". Equally bad, as I see it, is the idea that time moves through us or past us or whatever. You might wonder where it is going, but this question has its own kind of nonsense too. The difficulties here are all due to the A-series conception of time. I agree that the idea of change outside of time is a very interesting one, but I don't see the connection with your first question clearly. What does the question whether we move through time have to do with whether there is change without time? Are you thinking that the idea of moving through time is so strange that perhaps it will give us a clue to understanding change outside time? But things are not this difficult. You can think of the change of direction of a line. That strictly is a change. "Change" comes from cambiare, after all, as in changing money, but all it means, Aristotelian-style, is the substitution of one condition for another. The direction of the road changes in an utterly literal and non-temporal sense, turning sharp left, say, but no time is involved.

One answer to your question is that there may be multiple "orders of time" and, in particular, there may exist an order of time that is separate from the one we normally experience and within which events can occur.

Thus, for example, in Western Europe around and in the centuries before 1500 certain religious rituals, ecstatic experiences, moments in liturgical calendars, may have been experienced as occurring in a special "sacred time" that constitutes a different temporal order from commonplace "secular time." In his A Secular Age (and a book I've mentioned before on this site),Charles Taylor argues that our ancestors in Western Europe possessed this bifurcated experience of two orders of time and he provides a rich account of why it is that almost everyone alive today in Western Europe and North America experiences secular time only.

Question If we move through time, then what is movement? That is to say how is movement, or any change for that matter, possible outside of the context of time? Accepted:September 16, 2008

Question If we move through time, then what is movement? That is to say how is movement, or any change for that matter, possible outside of the context of time?

Accepted:
September 16, 2008