New Year's Eve/Day is my favorite holiday. For a lot of people, it's a time to turn over a new leaf, to start fresh, to create new habits, to make resolutions that one probably should have made long ago. It's a time to reflect on one's life, think of the future, and dedicate one's self to becoming a new and better person. That's never been my thing. Now and then, I do set personal goals, resolve to begin new habits, and try to become a better person, but to do so only on one specific, socially selected day of the year never made much sense to me. Mostly, I try to let my life proceed by its own design. (Thank you, John Barlow, for that little bit of wisdom).
I did make something of a New Year's resolution back in 1980/81, when mostly coincidentally, I decided to become a vegetarian. I'd been considering it for a long time. I'm sure I would have done it eventually, but as it turned out, on Dec. 31, 1980, I changed my diet. I've kept to it ever since. I'm sure I'll write about the virtues of a plant-based diet later, but this post isn't about that. It's about time. Time is what makes New Year's Eve/Day my favorite holiday.
I find it interesting that we have a holiday that is (or might be) completely dedicated simply to the passage of time. On New Year's Eve, we count down the hours, then the minutes, and finally the seconds to midnight, whereupon we cheer, set off fireworks, and generally make a foolish noise; kiss the person we love most and drink champagne. Yes, time is passing, as it always does, but at this moment, it's cause for celebration.
My fascination with time dates back to my first semester in college when I wrote a paper for my Philosophy 101 class titled, "On the Unreality of Time." I don't recall the details, but the core idea was that if the present is an infinitesimal moment dividing the past from the future, and if the present is all that's real, then no matter how many present moments we array in a sequence, time has no extension, no duration. I'm proud to say that I received an A+ on my paper. I think this accolade alone determined the course of my entire academic and professional career. My teacher, Diane Blackwell, has a lot to answer for.
And my fascination with time didn't stop there. In my junior year, I designed an experiment for a psychology class which sought to measure our perception of time. My hypothesis was that as we attend to more things in any specific span of time, time seems to fly by. As we attend to fewer things, time drags on. I got an A- on that assignment. I also read Kant's Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics and was introduced to the idea that time, along with space, was a "form of intuition," that is, a fundamental way in which we come to understand the world. Time is the mental framework that structures our experience. Reading Kant combined my skepticism about the objectivity of time with my interest in the perception of time. I went on to read a number of philosophical works about time. Sadly, I don't have a very good recollection of the various ways philosophers think about it. Instead, I'm left with only my own rather naive ruminations.
Broadly speaking, I think of time as being a function of changes in the world and our perception of time as a function of the changes we observe. A world in which no change ever takes place would be a world without time. This then leads me to wonder just what change is anyway. Is it a difference in discrete, sequential states of affairs or is it a continuous blur of becoming? If it's the former, my freshman paper seems relevant. The second century Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna pointed out another problem with this conception. If moments in time are distinct, then it's hard to understand causation. Something about an effect must preexist in its cause or there's no reason that a particular cause would produce a particular effect. Hume made a similar point.
The "blur of becoming" conception of change makes better sense to me, but this would make the present a mere analytical construct, since any momentary state of affairs that we might choose to consider (to reify) would amount to a discrete temporal element in a sequence of other momentary elements. That takes us back to the former problematic conception of time. The present seems real enough. It seems more than an analytical construct, so the blur of becoming is a little puzzling too.
I'm left with the sense that Kant was right. Time and space are simply forms by which we cognize the world, but under close examination, our cognition is not completely intelligible. At least it isn't to me. Our ordinary thinking about time does us well enough to navigate the world on a day to day basis, but it's best not to look look at it too closely -- that is, if you're hoping for a clear picture. Plato worked over these issues in his dialog Parmenides. It's a notoriously difficult and confusing work, which might be a result of the unintelligibility of a close examination of time or, more broadly, the unintelligibility of Plato's forms.
Turning to our perception of time, I have in the course of meditating, noticed that as my thoughts begin to settle and as I focus my attention on an unchanging object, my sense of time seems to change. This is consistent with my college psychology class hypothesis. As I observe the unchanging room around me, the present appears not to be quite so momentary, but in a peculiar way, drawn out. This helps me make sense of the blur of becoming, while still retaining a sense of the present. While the world is in a constant state of becoming, that part I can capture as the present is an ostensibly unchanging circumstance that survives concurrently with changes in my thoughts. If I attend to the unchanging room, my changing thoughts slip into my subconscious, especially if I am silently repeating the same, single phoneme. The present, then, arises out of the blur of becoming into the forefront of my experience. Of course, my mind never becomes so settled as to bring my perception of time to a full stop, but during particularly successful meditation, the present seems to become oddly extended beyond an infinitesimal moment.
Anyway, time is still a puzzle and the perception of time is puzzle within it. Happy New Year?
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