Of Time and Lamentation: Reflections on Transience

PART I

Killing time

The laws of physics contain a time variable, but it fails to capture key aspects of time as we live it – notably the distinction between past and future. And as researchers try to formulate more fundamental laws, the little t [the time variable] evaporates altogether.

Musser, A Hole at the Heart of Physics, 30

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: seeing time

Ineluctable modality of the visible.

Joyce, Ulysses, 45

1.1 VISION: FROM IMPLICIT TO EXPLICIT TIME

Something we call time permeates everything that happens and everything we do. Events, processes, experiences, actions, and activities take place at particular times and occupy stretches of time, are composed of constituents that also occupy time, have a temporal order, and are otherwise related in time to each other. Time also seems to be intimated to us from within our own bodies, incarnate in what we may think of anachronistically as proto-clocks formed out of recurrent and cyclical events within the cycle of our days: waking and sleeping, rising and settling down, the patterns of hunger and thirst, and, more prominently, the rhythms of breathing and the heartbeat and the tick-tock of walking. But this inherent time of the body does not amount to fully explicit time, even less timing, since it is not clearly offset from the changes in which it is expressed. The rhythm of my heart is, even when it is noticed, interwoven with the activities or emotions that cause the organ to beat faster and more thickly. The temporality of what is going on is consequently for the most part implicit, woven into what is experienced.

Time as something in itself, that is available ultimately to be clocked, is most clearly developed in relation to our consciousness of things outside of our bodies, out there. The immediate presentation of the world around us, unfolding in or over time, is the first step towards opening up the present to an ever more remote past, an ever more distant future. Eventually we locate ourselves in a common past and future flanking a communal present – in a remembered social history and anticipated social future we share with our fellow humans, and a natural history we share with all beings. Ultimately, we come to be aware of our lives as brief episodes in a story that stretches from pre-history to post-history, from the Big Bang to the Big Crunch.

Foremost among the senses that yield an explicit sense of time, though by no means exclusive, is vision.¹ While it is obvious that vision is a revelation of explicit space it is less easy to appreciate its importance in the revelation of explicit time. Even so, it is the case; and it is of fundamental significance not only for the metaphysics of everyday life, but also for the development of the physical sciences that have challenged that metaphysics, and for the relationship between the two. The key role of vision in making time explicit, which predisposes us to spatialize it, lies at the root of the intellectual, cognitive and cultural developments that are examined critically in this book.

Before I argue for the privileged relationship between vision and explicit time, I want to pre-empt a serious misunderstanding. The world we humans live in is not merely a sensory bubble, revealed to individual viewpoints. It is the product of the joint labour of all of us – our predecessors and our contemporaries.² Each of us acquires the world in which we live our lives largely off the shelf rather than constructing it directly out of sense experience. World-acquisition is overwhelmingly dependent on sign systems, the most elaborate of which (though not by any means the earliest or the most fundamental) is language as conventionally understood. The temporally deep world extends far beyond that which is revealed to vision; and it is available to anyone who can participate in the community of shared consciousness that is humanity. And this of course includes individuals who are congenitally blind. I make this perhaps rather obvious point in order to head off the objection that the initial importance of vision in humanity’s development of the intuition of temporal depth would preclude those without sight from full participation in a world saturated in explicit time – something that is manifestly untrue. In some respects, people who have congenital blindness bypass the ground floor of explicit time as presented through vision (as I shall describe) and proceed directly to the higher levels. What is more, they draw on the explicit time made available through other senses – touch, hearing, and the experience of kinesis – which are overshadowed in the experience of the sighted for whom the visual sense dominates in explicit time.

I want, also, to pre-empt another potential misunderstanding. What I will describe is how we come to perceive the passage of time as it is conventionally understood. I shall argue in §2.2.3 that there is no such thing as the passage of time. The tendency to use dynamic metaphors is rooted in the fact that time becomes explicit most clearly through a particular, universal form of change, namely motion. Time made explicit through motion is liable to be thought of as being itself in, or a kind of, motion; hence talk of the flow or passage of time.

Let us now examine the special relationship between vision and explicit time. Consider an object moving across your visual field. It occupies a succession of positions, P1, P2, P3, etc., at times t1, t2, t3, etc. The object survives the move, essentially unchanged. But, more importantly, the positions occupied by the object outlast the period during which they are occupied by the object. P1 (composed of the matter that surrounds the object at t1) is still there at t2 when the object has moved on to P2. And P3, a position the object has not yet reached, is also present and visible at t2, when the object is at P2. Because all three positions are co-present in my gaze, I can see the past and future locations of the object as well as its present position. By virtue of being the past position of the object, P1 stands for its past when the object reaches P2. And by virtue of already being in place when the object is at P2, P3 represents the future of the object. More generally, we can say that places typically outlast the events (such as the transit of an object) that have occurred in them; they provide a constant background against which a succession of events can be bound together into the event of succession and the object, which can occupy only one point at one time, can nevertheless trace a trajectory that has both spatial extensity and temporal depth. The position – which is the surviving relatum of the relationship between the object and a position, or of the complex object-in-a-position – curates the past of the object.³

1.2 THE HEGEMONY OF VISION IN EXPLICIT TIME SENSE

It hardly needs saying that vision is not the exclusive domain of explicit time sense. Sound can also yield temporal depth. If I am listening to a sequence of notes, is it not true that I retain the earlier notes while I am listening to the later ones? If this were not the case, how could I ever hear a melody or, indeed, a whole note that occupies more than a notional instant? And speech would not make sense if we did not both hold together and keep apart the beginning and end of utterances.

All of this is true; but it does not challenge the pre-eminent (but not exclusive) role of vision in establishing explicit time because the earlier and later notes of a melody or first and last words of a spoken sentence do not co-exist in the way that the visible successive positions of a moving object do. There is nothing corresponding to P1 and its successors which would be occupied by the notes and outlast them. These positions – unlike successive notes – are side by side and simultaneous, even though the object can occupy only one of them at a time. In other words, the status of a succession of states or events as a succession, marking out a span of time, depends not simply on the retention of the past events or states as memories (as in the case of the successive notes of a melody) or future ones as anticipations. It requires something more and vision supplies this: the still-visible position occupied by the object. This past position is not merely an inner, private memory but an outer, visible, public steward of the past. This is even more striking in the case of the visible positions of our own bodies in relation to other objects. Consider my walking away from a car I have just parked. The parked car gives my occupation of it a posthumous existence after I have vacated it. We may of course imagine sounds (say, of a car coming closer) occupying successive positions, but the translation of this into space and the co-presence of side-by-side past, present, and future, is on the basis of borrowing, or parasitizing a spatial field opened up by vision.⁴ So while hearing (music, utterances, and natural sounds such as the babbling of a brook) is manifestly temporal, it does not make time itself as explicit as does vision by co-locating the contents of successive moments in space.

There is a possible objection to the notion that sight has a privileged (though not exclusive) role in delivering explicit time. It goes as follows: Surely, to say that we see time in the way I have described it is simply to state the obvious: we see the past (e.g. view P1 from P2) because we remember it and the future (e.g. view P3 from P2) because we anticipate it. And that is of course true; but, to reiterate the point that I made in relation to hearing a succession of notes, it is only in vision that memory and anticipation are given an external (public) location. Past and future are out there, underwriting memory and anticipation, and providing a springboard for deeper forays into pasts and futures no longer based on direct observation. We have to see the past and future literally in order to conceive of (public, shared) pasts and futures in which we situate memories and anticipations. What is more, our concern here is not with the difference between past and future or between memory and anticipation but their translation into explicit time which includes before-and-after.

Other senses can clearly reach outside of the present. We think we can smell the past in the scent of a musty building, or in a room where a perfumed someone has been; or taste the future in the first mouthful of many to come. But these pasts and futures are not actually present in themselves, side by side with the present. The invisible past and future grows ultimately out of a visible past and future. What about touch? We might be inclined to dismiss this as a source of explicit time – of time out there, untethered from the implicit corporeal time of heartbeats and coordinated motor activity such as complex manipulations or ambulation, because it is inseparable from the body. It is, however, worth addressing this question because doing so reveals, by contrast, another feature of vision that is central to its key role in the genesis of the sense of explicit time.

When I explore an object entirely by touch, my moving finger and palpating hand pass over unmoving locations that outlive contact with the finger, of the hand but my hands are clearly not experiencing the present, the near-past, and the future locations at the same time. My finger is where it is and not where it has been or it will be: it is confined to its present position and does not retain the previous position or fore-touch its next position. Admittedly, blind palpation may build up the idea of a three-dimensional object, or indeed a three-dimensional space which that object occupies, that exceeds the surface in contact with the finger pads and even more obviously that part of the surface that is being touched at any one instant. Touch may therefore seem to hold or retain successive positions touched by the fingers. More strikingly, active manipulations may be impregnated with an idea of a future yet to be achieved and a past of what has been completed so far – something that we shall discuss in Chapter 12. Perhaps an even more persuasive example of the co-presence of the past and the future is provided by scratching, where the after-sensation associated with the beginning of the scratch are co-present with those associated with subsequent points on the scratch and, in addition, with the itch in the as yet unscratched part of the body. However, this co-presence is distributed over a severely restricted area. Admittedly, there are larger tactile areas than those available to our fingers; for example the surfaces of our trunk and limbs. Even so, the space that is revealed all at once by, say, the buttocks feeling the pressure of the chair, legs aware of trousers, or torso aware of a shower, is severely constricted compared with that afforded to vision.⁵

Size, however, is not the only issue, or even the most salient one. There are two other important differences – one very straightforward and readily dealt with; the other more complex.

Firstly, vision sees objects at a distance: to use the technical term, the eyes are telereceptors. Sight is not fastened to or contiguous with its object as touch is. It is this that underpins the contrast we have just addressed – that touch is confined to the area defined by the surface of the touching organ. This is just as true when the touching organ is a spread of fingers or, indeed, both hands: there is no touching beyond the actual, that is to say present tense, area of contact of the touching organ. In the case of vision, there is no question of a space of experience being defined by the size of the sensitive surface – in this case the orb or the retina. That is why there is nothing in touch comparable to panning round an array of co-present, indeed co-presented, but still distinct items, whose co-presence is given immediately.

But there is another more important difference: continuity. The tactual area is patchy, as is any space we may imagine as being marked out by hearing (and even more so by smell or taste). We may capture this difference saying that vision is the only sense that has a fully developed field. The continuum of the visual field is the progenitor of our idea of space, which is continuous. While a succession of glimpses or peerings may seem like a series of distinct probes, the eye – being at a distance from what it sees – retains what it scans, and has both a centre and a peripheral field and the non-foveal penumbra is co-present with the foveal centre of attention.⁶ The co-presence of the past, present, and future of a particular movement is thus secured. The privileged connection between vision and explicit time is not therefore surprising. It is rooted in the fact that the visual field is a space.

The least we should ask of a space is that it should be continuous and that all its occupants are related to one another. Let us now turn our attention to this continuity.

1.3 THE VISIBLY HIDDEN

What is the basis of the continuity that makes it appropriate to speak of a visual field but not of an auditory, tactile, olfactory or proprioceptive field? It is that our gaze sees not only what is visible, but also that there are things or parts of things that are invisible.⁷ Indeed, invisibility is inseparable from visibility. An object that hid nothing, either its own interior or other objects behind it, because it was absolutely transparent, would be invisible. The visual field is dappled, and necessarily dappled, with explicit, indeed visible, invisibility. It even has visible limits that indirectly reveal the invisible: things whose surfaces conceal their depths, their interiors, or which are folded over themselves. Beyond this, the curtained window, the bend in the road, the outline of the hill, all visually display that which is not, but might be, seen. The seen without the hidden would be a flat plane of exposure.

Objects, events, processes are therefore visible in virtue of being opaque, revealed through concealment – not only of other objects but of other aspects of themselves – the back, the underside, and the interior. In the field of sight, the visible and the visibly invisibly, the overt and the hidden, are inextricably intermingled. We see surfaces, and see that we see only surfaces, and yet see objects whose surfaces that they are. We look past what we see. That which is as it were visually implied underwrites the continuity of visibility. This is essential to the character of the seen as a scene which is continuous and connected.⁸

There is nothing comparable to this in the other senses. Although we sometimes talk of an audible, even a loud, or deafening, silence, this is not meant literally. We do not hear the inaudible as we see the invisible: masking sounds have to be audible to do their work. And while music without silence between the notes would not be music, the silence does not have a primary presence. The untouched is not tangibly untouched. Our hands do not reach into a field of mixed tangibility and feel intangibility. Gloves or numbness may modify touch sensation but they do not deliver a perception of the untouched beyond our fingers. We cannot foretouch what we are going to touch or indeed foretouch what is going to happen. In contrast, we may foresee it, as we observe two cars heading towards one another and anticipate a collision. Nor can we hind-touch what we are no longer touching. The continuation of a tactile sensation of something we are no longer holding is a property of our body and not the presence of something out there.

Hitherto, I have focused on observed movement as the basis for explicit time. The visibly invisible expands the sense of the past and future beyond that which is yielded by objects moving from one enduring position to another. The past is present in, say, a half-concealed object that was just now entirely visible. The future lies in the possibility of revelation of that which is concealed. When we move or are transported from place to place, we are treated to a visual ballet of revelation and concealment, the sliding panels, informal coordinates, of foreground, middle ground, and background, of the hidden future being revealed and the revealed present becoming a hidden past. The invisible also contains the unexpected, the as-yet-undetermined: the bend in the path not only conceals the future towards which we are travelling but also reveals a place from which the future might come towards us – neither sought out nor, indeed in some cases, yet in place.

The visibly invisible is essential to the continuity and unity of the visual field and of the myriad of distinct items we see at any time connected in a single network of relations, encompassing (say) an object and the successive positions it occupies. It is on this basis that vision gives us a viewpoint: a view is an over-view; opsis is synopsis. There is no comparable unified auditory or tactile field, in which the audible or tangible are glued together by, respectively, the inaudible and the intangible. Hearing does not give us a hear-point, touch a touch-point, smell a smell-point, or taste a taste-point, commanding a corresponding space. There is no tactile equivalent, for example, of finding a better viewpoint, as when we climb a tree to command more territory. And while there are active and passive modes of both touch and vision, the varieties of active touching – squeezing, groping, palpating – are not equivalent to active seeing – attentive watchfulness, staring, peering, scrutinizing, scanning, instrument-assisted looking.

The visibly invisible takes many forms: the object seen from an angle, the partly clothed body, the half-concealed animal in a thicket, the closed drawer, the unopened envelope. These are just the beginning; but they represent an essential step in our liberation from the prison of the present, from a succession of nows that is confined to that which is before us and currently being experienced. Seeing that which is no longer or not yet, and (more importantly) that it is no longer or not yet, is the vestibule of a larger past and future: a past which ultimately includes those things that cannot be visited and so will always be unseen (most obviously in the case of the historical past); and a future which may or may not transpire and so for that reason must also always lie beyond the reach of vision.

The special status of the eye among the sense organs is reflected in the manner in which intentionality – or aboutness – is most explicit or most developed in visual experience. The experiencer and that which he or she experiences – the object of experience – are most clearly separated in the case of vision. Sight, as we have already noted, is a distance sense and we are aware of its objects as being visibly distinct from us, and consequently as being explicitly other than us, as being over there with respect to ourselves who are over here; as being in themselves other than ourselves.⁹ The obverse of the sense of the objectivity of objects is our awareness of being offset from the place where we are, where we find ourselves. We confront the world rather than being dissolved in it. To use the expressive verb – we face it.

This has many consequences. For example, we not only see objects but we also see that we see them from a certain angle, from a certain distance, in a certain light. We can therefore envisage other angles, other distances, other lights – and viewpoints other than our present one; our own future viewpoints and the viewpoints of others. At a very basic level, we see the object but also see that our view of the object is restricted: we see that we cannot see the inside of the object or the object as it looks from another viewpoint. This is another aspect of the visibility of the invisible in our visual field; of the presence of the not yet and no longer of vision. The temporal depth of the visual field, in other words, is underlined by the sense of past and future viewpoints.

The notion that there are other viewpoints, in particular those assumed by eyes other than our own, is a further visual evidence that there is more to see. This is highlighted when I not only see you seeing but also see that you can see what I cannot see and cannot see what I can see. Looking at you, located in a position I may have occupied in the past or may occupy in the future, correspondingly extends my sense of possible – future and past – visual experience. When you point to something that I cannot see, and I follow your implicit instruction by climbing a tree or going upstairs to get a better view, I express my awareness of the objectivity of the world beyond my experience of it and my sense of the future through seeking future experiences; in short of a world pregnant with possibilities.

Vision is the most public of all our senses and closest to a shared awareness. We lookers are located in a pooled space that we can also see, not the least because we can see each other seeing; or at least looking. We cannot, by contrast, hear each other hearing, though we may infer that sounds are audible to others. And touch is even more private. In the absence of vision, we can be aware only of that which is touching ourself. In a world in which all were blind there would be no compensating public tactual sphere, underpinning a present moment with individual and shared pasts and futures. Explicit time made available through vision is thus open to being shared, to being objectivized and ultimately measured.

Vision, in summary, is of all the senses, the least fastened to a present carnal reality and most liberated from the solitude of the organism. It reveals not only that which is experienced through the senses but also, through this, that which is not, or not yet, or no longer, experienced. The sense of the hidden, of the concealment and possible revelation of the visibly invisible, makes the world of sight more than a temporally flat exposed surface. It is the ground floor of the sense of an objective reality checked against sense experience but transcending it. The name for that transcendent awareness is knowledge. And so this sense is ripe to open our temporal awareness to minutes, hours, and years.¹⁰

Our gaze as it were reaches out to the object and alights on it in anticipation of our future direct encounter with it through touch, pressure, grasp and manipulation. This is one of the many respects in which the visible object is the site of future possibilities; of a temporal side-by-side – in this case the present and the future – that gives the visual field temporal, as well as spatial, depth. Sight is fore-sight in virtue of being fore-touch, or the promise of some other direct or indirect engagement.

Vision has other characteristics that assist the embodied subject in extricating time from the immediately experienced rhythms of the body, such as the heartbeat and breathing. We see our body in action – our moving limbs, which we experience directly, are also visible to us.¹¹ We see ourselves in reflective surfaces. And we see our shadows that are, and are not, ourselves – animated by our movements and yet distinct from our bodies. We are items located in the same space as are the items we encounter and engage with at every moment of our lives, though we are not located in the same way, since our relationship to them is asymmetrical: I am related to them but they are not related to me.¹²

1.4 CONCLUSION

The key thought in this chapter is that the sense which makes space explicit is also that which makes time explicit. The coherent unity of the visual field in which everything is manifestly related to everything else makes it a space in the most literal sense; indeed, it is the seeming direct revelation of space. We have examined how this is connected with our sense of temporal depth. The special relationship between the origin of our explicit time sense in the most spatial of senses prepares the ground for the notion of time as a quasi-spatial sense.

What I have advanced in this chapter is not a misconceived a priori argument about matters of empirical fact. My thesis does not depend on vision being the exclusive source of our explicit time sense, of our sense of time as something in itself. Clearly, successive sounds, successive positions of our body in coordinated activity, also make time explicit. However, there is a particularly profound connection between on the one hand vision and on the other explicit time, time out there, time in itself, that sets us on a path towards a spatialization of time. The key point is that when time becomes objectified, externalized, and explicit as something distinct from the time implicit in the unfolding of the world and our experience of our bodies, ripe to be measured and clocked, it is prone to be spatialized. Increasingly, we are persuaded that the reality of time is to be found, on the far side of visualization, as a quasi-spatial entity.

This is crucial to the argument of this book because spatialization is the first step towards losing time, not simply (though importantly) because it places what is considered to be the truth of time outside of ourselves, privileging measured over lived time. Time, as perceived through the most discarnate of senses, starts to be conceived in ways which are ever more remote from our lives as they are lived. Vision abets our alienation from time because it opens the path to seeing the contents of the world as forms. Such forms – foreshadowed in shadows – are amenable to being reduced to pure shapes and magnitudes leading ultimately to the quantitative, numerical world picture that physical science deals in. The spatialization of time, which has its roots in vision, is reinforced by measures of time that use spatial intervals. Seen time becomes clocked time and clocked time takes over our life. While bringing immeasurable benefits, this places over those lives the stranglehold of an ever more constricting matrix of the time table.¹³

And it is to this that we now turn our attention.

Addendum

Human and animal vision and temporal depth

The privileged relationship between our vision and explicit temporality raises a question. Many animals have vision and, in some cases, and in some respects, it is superior to ours. Do they too have a sense of temporal depth? Do they too have a shared history and look forward to a future had in common? If not, why not?

I have elsewhere argued that animal worlds – even those of our nearest primate kin such as chimpanzees – are without past and future or even an explicit present as something located between past and future. I will not rehearse these arguments in detail here, as I have dealt with them in extenso in several places.¹⁴ You are, however, entitled to a brief account of some of the reasons for believing this; at the very least some indication of what is special about human vision that makes it uniquely the basis of explicit time.

While the first inkling of the sense of the no-longer and the not-yet is rooted in the observation of moving objects that occupy successive positions that outlast their being occupied by those objects, the transformation of that into a developed sense of no-longer and not-yet must depend upon awareness of a world in which the visible conceals the invisible and reveals it as invisible. This is most clearly evident in our apprehension that things out there have a definite and explicit existence independent of our experience. Our human world is populated by such items – entities that transcend that which we currently perceive of them. This does not appear to be true of other animals – even of other primates. There is therefore no holding bay for the not-yet and the no-longer.

The best evidence (summarized in my Michelangelo’s Finger) is that the visual field of our nearest primate kin is one in which consciousness of objects is confined to the experiences that are being had of them. Out of sight is not merely out of mind but out of existence, whereas for us, out of sight may be into mind. The notion of an enduring object that is the subject of change is not part of what Daniel Povinelli has called the folk physics of apes. What is more, chimpanzees do not have a sense of the invisible world: what is visibly invisible to us is invisible tout court, and hence non-existent, to them.¹⁵

This difference between our folk physics and that of chimpanzees – expressed in many ways, notably a lack of causal sense – has momentous consequences.¹⁶ If the object exists independently of my experiences, as human experience tells me, then (a) behind its appearance is an underlying stuff, with intrinsic properties that are quite different from my consciousness of it; (b) it has aspects additional to those which are exposed to my present viewpoint; and (c) the object, and its aspects, belong to a domain that transcends me – a public domain shared with others. This realm of shared vision, coordinated by joint attention and a sense of others’ viewpoints links the past and future of the items in the visual field with my past and my future and, beyond this, my past and future with the past and future of others. In the absence of these intuitions, the vision of non-human animals fails to deliver the temporal depth that opens up in us into the great realms of memory, anticipation, The Past and The Future.

So while animals may have eyesight and perception of movement that is superior to ours, their consciousness does not have the temporal depth that characterizes our consciousness. Their visual sense is placed on an entirely different existential platform, is part of an unimaginably alien umwelt. The origin of the ontologically richer human gaze is complex and here is not the place to discuss it – I have done so elsewhere.¹⁷ Essentially, it is rooted in the fact that we are embodied subjects and not just organisms; embodied in the way that material objects are not. A pebble is not empebbled. We relate to our bodies as that which we am but also in other ways: we possess, use, care for, judge and objectively know, our bodies in a manner that is unique in the animal kingdom.¹⁸ This mode of embodiment underwrites the sustained self-consciousness of the human subject which in turn makes of the seeing eye an I that is aware of being located in his or her visual field. This sense of being an enduring self that is more than a succession of experiences is projected into the objects that are revealed in the visual field. We are able to intuit or envisage the objects as enduring beneath their changes (including changes of position). The past and future that are held in the fleeting passage of the object through a succession of positions that remain in place is reinforced by the sense of one’s own future: the future position of the objects is the future for me; its past participates in my past.

Our uniquely complex relationship to our bodies – in which, as already noted, we identify with them as something we am and yet are also distant from them, as items we possess, utilize, judge, know and so on – maintains the distance opened up between the time in here that we experience through the rhythms of the body – our heartbeat, our breathing, our footsteps – and time as something out there. It must not be inferred from this that our experience of temporal depth in the world is entirely a product of our sense of our own temporal depth. The relationship is a dialectical one. The initial inkling of temporal depth is based on the synthesis of the successive positions – and hence the successive moments – of the object. This reinforces the sense of our own temporal depth, as embodied subjects, which will in turn deepen our sense of the temporal depth of the world around us. The iterative process is, of course, not enacted simply within the individual but in the evolving community of minds that is the human world.

CHAPTER 2

Time as the fourth dimension

Western scientific tradition takes for granted since Aristotle that Time is closely related to motion, and therefore to space. As a consequence of this view, we have inherited the idea of an isomorphism between time and one-dimensional space.

Prigogine, The Rediscovery of Time

The world we see around us is saturated with marks of time. The mossed log, the characterful face, the crumbling wall, the worn shoes and the well-thumbed book, are rich with intimations of the past, with effects broadcasting recent or ancient causes. The baby, the sapling, the dawning day, turn our thoughts to the future, or futures, pregnant with possibilities that beckon us. And the inner world is correspondingly charged with the mementos of time past and time future. Now, unlike the empty, unextended instants of mathematical time, is informed with an inexpressibly complex past, recalled at will or arriving without summons, bringing regret, nostalgia, satisfaction or joy – or, more practically, information and guidance that take us through projected futures, that are already active, seeming to await us, making us hurried and harried, hopeful and fearful, impatient or resigned, reflective or busy. The humble knotted handkerchief is a present reminder, laid down in a past when this present was future, of a duty whose time has now arrived.

The origins of these pasts and futures are associated, as I have argued, intimately – but of course by no means exclusively – with the most mysterious of our mysterious senses: vision. Without vision, the most spatial of our senses, we would have had a less explicit or immediate sense of being located between a known (though, of necessity, largely forgotten) past and an unknown (but of necessity patchily anticipated) future. But the domination of vision in the immediate presentation of experienced time leads ultimately to a mode of awareness of explicit time that both alienates time from us and yet also makes us able to draw on a deeper and more complex past and reach further into an evermore controlled future, in the service of a present that, while it is enriched in its material possibilities, is, along with the rest of time, conceptually impoverished by the very science that extends our powers.

Time according to this rival sense is spatialized. While it is expanded, it is also reduced – ultimately to a dimension, a pure extensity or magnitude. It is eventually shrivelled to a number, a quantitative variable signified by a letter – t – conceived as a one-dimensional topological space that maps on to a line of real numbers. It is this reduction of time to a numerical skeleton that we shall examine in the next three chapters. That this scientific image of time is built on our visual sense and that science itself is one of the most potent agents of our freedom are two connected facts about us. The visual sense, a revelation of the world from a distance, is one of the keys to our collective ability – extended of course to those who (to reiterate) take the world largely off the shelf, including those who are blind from birth – to develop as relatively free subjects in the natural world of which we are a part and from which we are also apart.

It would be of course ridiculous to dismiss the practical value of seeing time as a quasi-spatial dimension, and ultimately as a pure quantity, for the purposes of developing a potent scientific account of the material world. No; my target is the widespread belief, or unspoken assumption, that this portrait of time, most fully developed in physics, reveals its ultimate reality. The spatialization of time will be examined in this chapter. In the next chapter I shall investigate the reduction of space (and hence space-like time) to pure quantity: I regard time and space as being equally traduced when they are seen as dimensions reducible ultimately to pure quantities. In Chapter 4, I shall explore the most obvious manifestation of the reduction of time to a pure quantity: clocking that makes of time the value of a variable. This will be connected with a larger inquiry into the nature of physical science and its central conviction that (to quote Galileo’s famous aphorism), the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics.¹ Although clocking time is the theme of Chapter 4, I will glance briefly at early clocks in the present chapter because they firmed up and elaborated spatialized conceptions of time originating out of vision.

2.1 FROM MOVING SHADOWS TO THE SCIENCE OF MECHANICS: THE SEDUCTIVE IDEA OF TIME AS SPACE

Objects cast shadows, a visible darkness that presents them as their abstract forms, a half-way house (as we shall see in Chapter 3) to reducing them to numbers. It is an inescapable observation that shadows lengthen towards evening before they unite in the universal shadow that is night, the great hyphen between the days, when, before the invention of artificial light, all were impeded by darkness: work had to stop, and wakefulness was replaced by sleep – a wise move given that dangers were more dangerous for being invisible. Dawn is the image of the primordial beginning. According to Genesis, the universe began with the command that there should be light, so that the void became the world and Chaos was shaped into Cosmos. And nightfall is the primordial image of ending. The cycling of light and darkness marks the most basic division of our lives into units of time.

There are shadows more portable than the universalized shadow of night or the celestial orchestration of daytime shadows by the apparent movement of the sun. The most portable and handy – indeed it is inescapable – is that which is cast by one’s own body. It forms the basis of the peasant’s clock and it is calibrated for each one of us. Your shadow is longer than my shadow but the length of my shadow compared with the length of my body will be the same for each of us at a particular time of day, assuming our separation is on a local rather than a global scale. We can therefore arrange to meet when (say) our shadows are as long as our own bodies: by this means, our activities are coordinated. It is extraordinary to think how we exploit the opacity of our own bodies to coordinate our shared lives but this is but one manifestation of our astonishing self-consciousness as embodied subjects. Our shadows, synchronized in their waxing and waning to the apparent motion of the sun, orchestrate the ballet of our shared lives: they are co-ordered and our paths intersect according to our plans.² We converge at appointed times.

Exploitation of our shadows was a significant advance in rendering time as something explicit, out there, shared and objective: shadows are used to highlight and collectivize explicit time and ultimately to transform time into times at which events are deemed to have happened and to create a network in which they are located and interconnected. The passage from visible object to visible silhouette and from visible silhouette to the length (another abstraction) of the shadow compared with that of our bodies is an early step in the journey from visible time to time as a dimension, as a quantity, as a number.

The peasant’s clock gives only locations in time – morning, noon, afternoon, evening – and not quantities of time. Enter the obelisk. An obelisk is a tall, four-sided pillar whose shadow indicates the time of day. Markers round the base of the monument divide the day into equal parts. The obelisk not only separates time-keeping further from the body, and displays it in a public space, but also measures quantities of time. Separated time is broken into units and counted. The obelisk is a kind of maypole around which the activities of the citizens are coordinated: a dance to the shadow of time. Fluffy periods such as evening or forenoon acquire hard edges.

The principle of the obelisk was transferred to a (relatively) pocket device: the sundial which tracks the apparent movement of the sun round the earth by casting the shadow of its style or gnomon on to a surface etched with time divisions. By this means, public or objective time is imported further into the interstices of human life. The sundial’s hour hand depends on the earth’s rotation round its axis, perceived as the movement of the sun. And its year-hand is based upon the earth’s orbit, sweeping out 150 million kilometres a year. We use the earth’s gigantic journeying to orchestrate our little movements. What delicious cheek to exploit the relative motion of the earth and the sun to tell us when to have our tea! And human cheek will be extended even further when (as we shall see) the universe itself will be described as giant clockwork mechanism. But clockwork lies ahead. The tick of the sundial is soundless, though it makes time itself visible as the passage of shadows, extracting, so it seems, time itself from the evolution of the day.

Early chronometers – peasant’s clocks, obelisks and sundials –reinforce the sense of time as a kind of (visible) space. This remains true when other methods of measuring time are introduced. The water clock represents time as the height of a volume of water and mechanical clocks give intervals of time as distance moved by fingers on a dial and actual times as spatial locations. The hour glass exhibits time as a flow of sand and a growing past and a shrinking future as an accumulation of sand in one chamber and its depletion from another. The transferred epithet the sands of time is an augury of the future conflation of time with the method of measuring it. It is only comparatively recently that clocks have lost their intimate relationship with space and come to represent time purely as numbers – a development that encompasses space as well and whose roots we shall explore in the next chapter.

We seem destined, then, to think of time in spatial terms. Even before time is represented as a quasi-spatial line on graphs (the abscission of time), we speak, and presumably think, of stretches of time, of long times and short times, near and distant times, of times for events getting close or being a long way off, of looking forward (with foresight) to the future that comes close and looms ever large in our thoughts and looking backwards (with hindsight) to the receding past getting smaller as it is more distant. (Or vice versa in other cultures, as we discussed in the previous chapter.) Years ago seems analogous to miles away. We talk of a certain space of time. Clocks reinforce this way of thinking by representing the division of time into equal quantities as equal intervals of space. And the circularity of time as represented on the clock can be unfolded when we think of successive circuits as being like a rolling hoop that traces out a straight line.³

Clocked time, like space, has both locations and distances; a when and a how much corresponding to a where and a how big. Duration seems analogous to size or distance between a beginning and an end: for example, the two hour stretch between 2 o’clock and 4 o’clock on the same day. And the temporal at can seem like a spatial at: it is (at) 2 o’clock when the fingers of the clock are at the place marked 2 (o’clock). And an interval of time corresponds to the spatial gap between two spatial-temporal ats. This everyday manner of seeing, talking and thinking about, and marking time prepares the way for the eventual fusion of timelines and space-lines in space–timelines or world-lines; for the marriage of time with one, two, or three dimensions of space, so that they together form a single (spatio-temporal) location or interval.

The notion of time as a quasi-spatial dimension is also implicit in the pre-scientific notions of time passing (and passing at subjective different speeds – from flashing by to almost standing still), as a line that grows at a tip that is the present, into the future, adding to the past, or as an expanding block, or as moving spotlight (corresponding to now) playing successively over different locations, so that they move from the future to the past. One of the simplest and most potent manifestations of spatialization of our conception of time is the image of successive events located on what is called a timeline, like beads on a string.

The understanding of time as the fourth dimension, alongside the three of space, was already conventional before it became inescapable through the special theory of relativity which led, via Hermann Minkowski, to the fusion of time and space in a four-dimensional space–time. Though Einstein’s revolutionary ideas were at first seen to be counter-intuitive, several millennia of quasi-spatial thought about time lay behind them. The everyday propensity to think of time spatially, however, has been greatly reinforced by the gradual domination of mathematical physics over our conception of the natural world. We may think of several connected processes: (a) making time something in itself, lifted out of the order of things; (b) representing time spatially; and (c) (via the reduction of space to numerical magnitudes – the theme of Chapter 3) the reduction of time to a number, the value of the variable little t.

These processes were irreversibly entrenched in scientific thought when the Galilean–Newtonian revolution of the seventeenth century foregrounded time as a measurable quantity. Galileo was one of the first to represent time by a line and this was supported by Newton’s presentation of mathematical time as a continuous straight line. The construction of reliable clocks, representing time spatially, as a result of which time was measured to increasingly high level of agreement between observers, reinforced the sense that it was an independent quasi-spatial quantity. While, as we shall discuss in Chapter 4, there are problems with the simple idea that clocks measure time, or the passage of time, the notion that they captured time itself, gradually took root in our way of thinking. That quantifiable something was confirmed in its status as a dimension.

The introduction of time as a quantitative variable (little) "t", which has characterized post-Galilean mechanics, prepared the way, therefore, for placing time on all fours with the three spatial dimensions. The use of graphs to represent motion, in which time assumes coordinate values very similar to those of space, makes spatial and temporal locations and intervals seem deeply analogous. What is more the analogy is one way: a graph is a spatial representation: the spatial representation of time is not complemented by a temporal representation of space (whatever that might be). This asymmetry is at least in part a consequence of the fact that the measurements of time are measurements of space, typified in the movement of the fingers on a clock face but present even in the earliest clocks such as obelisks and sundials as already noted.

The inspiration of Newton’s Principia Mathematica, which showed that the movement of the planets and the movements on earth that fill our daily lives were subject to the same laws made it seem possible, as Pierre-Simon Laplace argued, to understand the universe in terms of the laws of motion: the world we live in is a giant mechanism encompassed by the science of mechanics in which time is simply a dimension alongside those of space. Behind this is the widespread assumption that to understand nature is to understand motion; that the science of mechanics is the key to the real world.

The idea of time as The Fourth Dimension received its classic popular exposition in H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (which also contains everything one needs to refute the idea of time as a dimension analogous to space):

Clearly, the Time Traveller proceeded, "any real body must have extension in four directions: it must have Length, Breadth, Thickness, and – Duration … There are really four dimensions, three, which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time … There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it."⁴

There are, of course, many reasons for resisting the idea that time is space-like. I will come to these presently, but it is worth first pausing to head off a misunderstanding. It would be naïve to suggest that contemporary physics – notably that which builds on relativity theory – inevitably spatializes time in the sense of turning time into space, although there is much in the literature to suggest that some physicists think it does.⁵ What it does is to break down a fundamental difference between space and time and to deny their independence of one another.

To take the most obvious example, relativity theory places time and space on all fours as part of a four-dimensional frame, so much so that separations between events can be described as time-like or space-like mathematical relations. What is more, time is captured in coordinate systems as a line and moments in time as positions in space. When an event is located in fused space–time its location is presented as values of four variables – x, y, z, and t – and they are treated as deeply comparable. Where only two dimensions can be shown, it is natural to present the relationship between (say) x and t as a line, analogous to that between x and y when mapping a trajectory. As we shall discuss in Chapter 3, when space and time are fused into space–time they are similarly victimized. The denial of the separateness of space and time is the result of reducing all change to measurement of movement and the structure of reality to whatever conserves the laws of motion. Time is a fourth dimension in an unchanging structure.

2.2 AGAINST SPACE-LIKE NOTIONS OF TIME

The disanalogies between space and time are numerous, but these are some of the most obvious:

A. Space has three dimensions, time only one. We could express this difference in another way, suggesting that it is even more profound: that, while space has three dimensions, time is a single dimension.

B. There are constraints on the way we move in time that are not evident in space. The obverse of this is that time (apparently) has a directionality that space does not. ⁶

C. There is a prescribed ordering of temporal locations but nothing comparable in the case of space; there is a temporal ordering of visits to the same point in space but not a spatial order of times of visits.

D. There is a propensity to think of time, but not of space, as flowing or (more broadly) dynamic.

Let’s look at each of these differences in turn.

2.2.1 A single dimension

There is no way of reducing the three spatial dimensions to a master-dimension that would encompass up–down, side-to-side, and back-to-front. It may be argued that the three dimensions of space are only artefacts resulting from the way we specify locations in space and the intervals between them. That response should cut no ice. Firstly, these three coordinates seem to be indispensable for the physical description of the world – they are not simply the product of mathematics. Space seems intrinsically voluminous and volumes three-dimensional. Secondly, the trend in recent physics, which attempts to unify its account of the world towards a Theory of Everything, has been to multiply, not reduce the number of spatial dimensions.⁷

The use of a single notion – dimension – to encompass height, breadth, length and time should make us suspicious for several reasons. First of all, height, breadth, and length are clearly related to each other in the way that the dimension of time is not related to them. Before–after (never mind past, present, future) does not sit easily in the company of up–down, front–back and left–right. The three dimensions of space do seem like a genuine trio whose components are inseparable. Indeed, we can rotate an axis through 90 degrees to change it from being a measure of one to a measure of the other. The same ruler, or kind of rule, is used to measure all three. Trying to use a ruler to record how long it takes me to run 100 yards or a clock to measure the length of a table, on the other hand, would be absurd. And of course we can turn the breadth of an object into its height by rotating it through 90 degrees whereas we cannot change any of its spatial dimensions into time – say height into duration – by a simple manoeuvre.⁸

We could highlight this disanalogy between space and time by asking this question: What could possibly correspond in the realm of time to the 90° angles by which up–down and side-to-side define each other; or to the difference between this 90° angle and the dimensions – up–down and side-to-side – themselves? Nothing. Nor could there be anything in time corresponding to the reference field that makes one spatial dimension (up–down) and defined by gravity and inertia and the other two that are defined by inertia alone.

Time seems to be more substantial than the individual dimensions of space, such as length. Whether or not time exists by or in itself, it is clear that length does not, except as an abstraction that has to be represented by a concrete line; and the latter of course has to have three dimensions to be visible, even though it gives the impression of representing pure length because its length far exceeds its width and depth. (For more on this see §3.4.2). Time seems more the peer of three-dimensional space than of any of the three individual spatial dimensions.⁹

That time does not fit easily into the company of the other three, that it is something of an add-on, is betrayed by our calling it the fourth dimension. It is never referred to as the first dimension or the second dimension. Length, breadth, height – and time is a natural way of ordering the characters, and height, length, breadth and time would be equally natural. Height, time, length and breadth would seem less natural – a rather clumsy attempt at inclusiveness, at a policy designed to make time feel at home as one of a group of four equals. The natural place of time is, at best, a D’Artagnan to the Three Musketeers of space. We can order x, y, z (the three spatial dimensions) as we wish but t is always an add-on.

It might be argued that time is analogous to space in that it, too, has two aspects: location and quantity; or where and how much. Location in both space and time involve at phrases: It is two o’clock on 12 July 2011 and We are at 5 Valley Road, Bramhall. Quantity of time and space seem even more closely analogous: we can say of two events that they were three miles or three seconds apart. There is a third apparent analogy: the duration of an event seems equivalent to the spatial size of an object. We can also say that an event occupied 10 seconds or filled 10 seconds or that an object occupied or filled 2 cubic metres. In short, time seems to have all the qualifications for being, or having, a (single) dimension. However, at least two of these seeming analogies wilt on closer inspection.

Firstly, the idea of location. The notion of a something taking place at a particular time does not mean occupying that piece of time, whereas at of space is space occupancy. This is because that which takes place in time is typically an event – something which occurs; whereas that which takes its place in space is typically an object.¹⁰ The difference may be expressed by saying that an object (at any given time) has exclusive occupancy of a patch of space whereas an event does not have exclusive occupancy of the stretch of time in which it takes place.¹¹

And how seriously shall we take the analogy between duration (of an object or an event) and the size (of an object or event)? Firstly, it is stretching it a bit to speak of an object having a duration in the way that an event does. We have to decide somewhat arbitrarily when it became itself and when it ceased to be itself. Events