A Comment On Time

For all of the things we as thinkers take for granted and about which so many simple thinkers make their over-confident assumptions, time is really the grand idea.

When commonsense thinkers complain that solitary hyper-critical philosophers sit in armchairs and make claims about knowledge that does not match with the limits of knowing, and use scientific examples like gravity, what we really could be talking about is time.

On the hyper-critical end we might have Whitehead who to most people is incomprehensible, and certainly one who seems detached about what it means to experience our world. His theory is called the "Epochal Theory of Time," and the best I say is that it has absolutely no relevance to anyone outside a very strict academic community committed to over-reading him. I cannot honestly try to sum up either Whitehead's or, for that matter, Heidegger's "crucial" definitions because I don't think they translate. The reason I cannot benefit from HC philosophy is because it is does not have any relevance to my life. Does this mean that it isn't deep or that nobody likes it? No, of course not. For three centuries philosophy has been side-tracked by this solipsism which is both interesting and deep. The problem is that it has lost almost all of the serious, well-equipped thinkers who are not indoctrinated into its first principles. In addition, the normal man's potential for learning from social philosophy, the alternative, has been lost.

From the commonsense end we have Thomas Reid. His goal was to reach people and to discuss our real experiences … naturally. It was also to over-turn the way of ideas as it expressed skepticism about what we can perceive about the real world.

What does this have to do with time? It means like all deeper things time has been a concept hijacked by atomistic mostly European hyper-critical writers. So, what did we miss?

We missed the fact that time is an unknown that can be described but not understood. Like consciousness, time is an experience that is so fundamental to us that we can only talk in commonsense ways about our experience of it. We cannot expect to understand it in the way we now call science. This is not absolutely the opposite of what, for example, Whitehead was doing. Heidegger, also, seemed to want to describe the bare experience of being and time, but the way he went about it seems at odds with how humans communicate and learn. Perhaps this is the harshest critique of HC, but it is not the only one. But our strategy and expectations for doing it are the opposite of his. This is the difference between atomistic and social (commonsense) philosophy.

Whether or not it was the intention (of Western Philosophy, and it probably was not) societies which all rely on deep assumptions about deep questions were left with an isolating, off-putting, abstract and academic predisposition regarding knowledge by skeptical empiricists and what I call HC. It was a belief that unanswered questions must be buttoned-up and fully answered and this could be done by one European male if he was smart and confusing enough.

Time is the movement of the real. It moves in only one direction as real. But as memory, as imagination, time is multi-directional. Humans alone seem to be able to travel back in time and forward in ways that simulate the real. We can put in action simulations of the real that have occurred and that may occur. The difference here is between imagination and real, the latter being concrete events constrained by the forward motion of real time. When we think of it in this way, we are no better at understanding what time is. We have opened a cs description of it that others can use and that can grow from social experiences, but we have not encapsulated it. The goal of HC thinkers seems to be to button it up, to finally produce a work that shows us what something is through their solipsism. Once we break from that, we can explore our own thinking about what it means to experience the backward and forward flow of time.

We may ask whether there is a substantive difference between real time, which includes real events, and imaginative time in which we call forth our memory of real things in the past. In this we have to understand that all imagination occurs in real time; all backward and forward imagining also factually occurs in the present - in the real. What do we make of this? And how do we think about time if our goal is to describe (and describe socially and not analytically) and not fully answer the grand question when that cannot be done?

For one, we can temper our egoism and hubris by first committing to our commonsense limits to knowledge. Knowledge does not require that we reach that final destination. It is enough to be able to translate for people and clarify for people, what we all mean by time. And in this, if it is viewed as I suggest, we have arrived at the limit of knowing. We do not need to feel compelled to transcend nature in this way and doing so may confuse and lose people.

I have not said much about time, per se. I get this. But what is important here is to prepare the commonsense discussion as it is different from traditional atomistic expectations. Asking the right question (what is commonsense time?) is the most important change and step. Hopefully I have started that.