Abstract
“What is time?” That is, what is its nature or essence? “Is it a real thing or not real?” Aristotle raises these ontological questions in Physics (217b).1 He endeavors to provide answers intended to grasp as firmly as possible the elusive entity of chronos (time), which constitutes one of his ten categories, or generic modes of being, in the sense of something “being in time” or “the when” (pote), the “at what time” an event takes place.2 He maintains that natural beings are distinguished from artificial and man-made things by having “within themselves the capacity to move” and to change in various ways. These are determined by the categories involved: e.g. substance in the case of generation and destruction, quantity in the case of increase and decrease, quality in the case of alteration, and place in the case of locomotion. Time, like motion, with which it is ontologically and psychologically connected, as we will see, is a “continuous quantity” (syneches poson) or “magnitude” (megethos). This means that, like all continua, time is characterized by divisibility ad infinitum and, therefore, by the fact that there is not a minimum of time, although time has a limit, the point-like “now” (nun) which divides past from future time.
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References
Unless stated otherwise, I will use the translation of Wicksteed, P.H. and Cornford, F.M. (1968) of Aristotle’s Physics, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Mass.).
The commentators on Aristotle had much to say about the legitimacy of the category of pote as is evident from, e.g., Symplicius’ commentary on the Categories. See in C. Kalbfleisch (ed.), Aristotelis Categorias Commentarium, G. Reimerus Press, Berlin, 1007, pp. 341–355; also Simplicius: Corrolaries on Place and Time, J.O. Urmson (tr.), Cornell University Press, Ithaca (NY), 1992, pp. 85-124; and my (1996) Aristotle’s Categories and Porphyry, E.J. Brill, Leiden (2nd edition), in particular pp. 73-79 and 143-163.
Arithmos (number) normally applies to discrete quantities, which are counted, and mctron (measure) applies to continuous quantities, which are measured. The fact that Aristotle uses both terms in his description of time clearly indicates the ambiguities surrounding the ontological status of time. Its elusive nature appears inseparable from the perpetual process of its “coming into being” or its becoming that generates time. Whereas traditionally time has been conceived as a continuous quantity contributive to the extensive continuum of space-time, recently the concept of time as discrete quantity, like the Aristotelian arithmos, has been revived. See Jaroszkiewicz, G. (2000) Discrete space-time: classical causality, prediction, retro-diction and the mathematical arrow of time,” in R. Buccheri, V. Di Gesù and M. Saniga, (eds.), Studies on the Structure of Time: From Physics to Psycho(patho)logy, Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, pp. 167–189.
The ontological connection of time to “Dasein” and to “Being” is captured by Martin Heidegger in the title of Part One of his Being and Time: “The Interpretation of Dasein in Terms of Temporality, and the Explication of Time as the Transcendental Horizon for the Question of Being.” John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (tr.), Harder and Row, New York, 1962, p. 65. On pages 479ff, he mentions Aristotle, together with Augustine, Kant and Hegel, to support the view that even the “ordinary experience of time” gives it a “distinctive relationship” to’ soul’ and’ spirit.’ Of these thinkers, Hegel, receives special attention and his formulations of time as “intuited becoming” and as “the negation of a negation (that is, of puncuality)” are discussed there extensively and approvingly by him.
Metaphysics, 1072b 14-29. See also my (1997) comments in The Hellenic Philosophy: Between Europe, Asia, and Africa, Global Publications, Binghamton (NY), pp. 47–94.
As he put it: “Wherefore he [God] resolved to have a moving image of eternity, and when he set in order the heavens, he made this image eternal but moving according to number, while eternity itself rests in unity, and this image we call time.” Timaeus 37e. Echoing this point the author of Hermetica elaborates thus: “God makes eternity; eternity makes the cosmos; the cosmos makes time; time makes becoming… Eternity, therefore, is in God, the cosmos in eternity, time in the cosmos, and becoming in time. And while eternity has stood still in god’s presence, the cosmos moves in eternity, time passes in the cosmos, and becoming comes to be in time.” B. Copenhaver (tr.), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997, p. 37.
Plotinus, commenting on Plato’s metaphor, asserts the following: “So the spreading out of life involves time; life’s continual progress involves continuity of time, and life which is passed involves past time. So would it make sense to say that time is the life of soul in a movement of passage from one way of life to another? Yes, for eternity is life at rest, unchanging and identical and already unbounded, and time must exist as an image of eternity (in the same relation as that in which this All stands to the intelligible All), then we must say that there is, instead of the life There, another life having, in a way of speaking, the same name as this power of the soul and instead of intelligible motion that there is the motion of a part of the Soul; and, instead of sameness and self-identity and abiding, that which does not abide in the same but does one act after another, and, instead of that which is one without distance or separat ion, an image of unity, that which is one in continuity; and instead of a complete unbounded whole, a continuous unbounded succession, and instead of a whole all together a whole which is, and always will be, going to come into being part by part.” /Plotinus (1980) Enneads, III. 7, 11, pp. 42-58, A.H. Armstrong (tr.), Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Mass.)/. See also my (2001) “Plotinus’ Set of Categories for Cosmos Aesthetos,” in M. Wagner (ed.), Neoplatonism and Nature: Studies in Plotinus’ Enneads, SUNY Press, Albany (NY).
To the question “What, then, is time?” Augustine confessed humbly: “I know well enough what it is, provided that nobody asks me; but if I am asked what it is and try to explain, 1 am baffled.” Then he proceeded to doubt the existence of past and future time, in an Aristotelian way, and to limit time to the present as perceived by the human mind. “From what we have said it is abundantly clear that neither the future nor the past exist, and therefore it is not strictly correct to say that there are three times, past, present, and future. It might be correct to say that there are three times, a present of past things, a present of present things, and a present of future things. Some such different times do exist in the mind, but nowhere else that I can see. The present of past things is memory; the present of present things is direct perception; and the present of future things is expectation. If we may speak in these terms, I can see three times and I admit that they do exist.” /Augustine, St. (1961) Confessions, xi, xiv and xx, R.S. Pine-Coffin (tr.), Dorset Press, New York, pp. 264-269/. Kant agrees with Augustine on this point: “Time is nothing but the form of inner sense, that is, of the intuition of ourselves and our inner state. It cannot be a determination of outer appearances; it has to do neither with shape nor position, but with the relation of representations in our inner state.” /Kant, I. (1965) Critique of Pure Reason, N.K. Smith (tr.), St. Martin’s Press, New York, p. 77. Aristotle would not have agreed.
For a recent and insightful discussion of Zeno’s paradoxes and Bergson’s response, see Yamakawa, H., (1998) Greek Philosophy and the Modern World, in the series Studies in Greek Philosophy, Editions Ionia, Athens, pp. 73–107.
The former view is considered as Platonic and the latter as Pythagorean. Aristotle rejected both of them with good reason, but gave more serious consideration to the Platonic view. His own view relates time to the cyclical motion of the sphere of outer heaven, but does not identify the two continuous quantities.
Einstein, A. (1961) Relativity: The Special and the General Theory, Crown Publishers, New York, p. 150.
Einstein, A. (1961) Relativity: The Special and the General Theory, Crown Publishers, New York, pp. 154–155. On this last statement Aristotle would have agreed with Einstein, with the reservation that, in the case of time, the fullness of its reality depends also on the perceiving human mind, which experiences the passing of ordinary or “real” time and counts it in terms of numbers of days and years. But for advanced theorists of time, such as Hawking, for instance, it makes no sense to even ask: “What is real, ‘real’ or ‘imaginary’ time? It is simply a matter of which is the more useful description.” /Hawking, S. (1988) A Brief History of Time: From the Dig Bang to Black Holes, Matman Books, Toronto, p. 139/. For the influence of the theory of relativity on the scientific understanding of time in the twentieth century, see Davies, P. (1995) About, Time: Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution, Simon and Schuster, New York.
For detailed expositions of Aristotle’s doctrine of time, see Solmsen, F. (1960) Aristotle’s System of the Physical World: A Comparison with his Predecessors, Cornell University Press, Ithaca (NY), pp. 144–159; Callachan, J. (1948) Four Views of Time in Ancient Philosophy, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Mass.), pp. 38-87; and Watcrficlf, R. (1996) Aristotle: Physics, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. vii-lxxiii.
Motion, qua continuous quantity, is measurable by units of measure which themselves are continua, but also countable precisely because they are repeatable units. As Sorabji put it, “the really interesting modal term here is the countable’ as opposed to the counted. And the interesting thing about it is the claim that countability requires the existence of beings to do the counting.” /Sorabji, R. (1986) Time, Creation, and the Continuum: Theories in Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, Cornell University Press, Ithaca (NY), p. 90/.
The ‘now’ is so closely tied with time that, for Aristotle, the one cannot be conceived without the other, just as the movement cannot be conceived apart from the moving body. So that, if it is proper to define time as the “arithmos kineseos” (the number of motion), then the ‘now’ may take the place of the “monas arilhmou” (the monad of number). As he put it: “It is evident, too, that neither would time be if there were no ‘now,’ nor would ‘now’ be if there were no time; for they belong to each other as the moving thing and the motion do, so whatever ticks off the position of the one ticks off the other. For time is the dimension proper to movement, and the ‘now’ corresponds to the moving object as the numerical monad” (220a).
This dynamic conception of time is lost in modern theories of time, which conceive it statically. In this respect, Shallis’ criticism of modernity is justified: “If time has any quality or qualities of its own they are masked or even destroyed by time portrayed as space. The qualities of time make no sense in the framework of space/time. Time as space is de-temporalized in a way analogous to the de-humanization that occurs when human qualities are denied in a quantification of personality.” /Shallis, M. (1983) On Time: An Introduction into Scientific Knowledge and Human Experience, Schocken Books, New York, p. 109/. Compare this critique to the observation of Schroedinger: “We must not be discouraged by the difficulty of interpreting life by the ordinary laws of physics. For this is just what is to be expected from the knowledge we have gained of the structure of living matter. We must be prepared to find a new type of physical law prevailing in it. Or are we to term it a non-physical, not, to say super-physical, law?” /Schroedinger, E. (2000) What is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell, The Folio Society, London, p. 100/; or to Capek’s remark: “Hence Whitehead’s conclusion that in analyzing time an ultimate appeal must be made to intuition, that is, to our direct awareness of time.” /Capek, M. (1961) The Philosophical Impact of Contemporary Physics, Van Nostrand Reihold Company, New York, pp. 372-3/. This is what Aristotle had advised long ago.
This characteristic of chronos or Kronos captures the traditional or poetic Greek view of time as the “all-conquering, destroying and devouring being” (pandamator chronos!)
For more on this interesting point, see Cleary, J. (1995) Aristotle and Mathematics, E. J. Brill, Leiden, pp. 375ff; and Salmon, W.C. (1980) Space, Time, and Motion: A Philosophical Introduction, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, p. 42.
Consider, for example, in this connection the apt remark of Yourgrau: “What Goedel found, however, in Relativity Theory, was an account of time where the mathematicalformal element completely dominated the intuitive or analogical, an account in which the Einstein-Minkowski geometry of time is now no longer only metaphorically a geometry… Precisely those features at the heart of the analogies of time of Aristotle and Kant disappear in Einstein’s ‘geometrization’ of the temporal.” /Yourgrau, P. (1991) The Disappearance of Time: Kurt Goedel and the Idealistic Tradition in Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, p. 10/. A defense of traditional or “Aristotelian view” of time, understood as having a determined past but an open future, is offered by Lucas, J. (1990) The open future, in R. Flood and M. Lockwood (eds.), The Nature of Time, Basil Blackwell, Cambridge (Mass.), pp. 125–134.
For an imaginative discussion of the ambiguities of “closed time,” see Sorabji, R. (1988) Mater, Space and Motion; Theories in Antiquity and Their Sequel, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, pp. 160–185.
Whitehead, A.N. (1919) Concept of Nature, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, p. 73. See also Coveney, P. and Highfield, R. (1990) The Arrow of Time: A Voyage Through Science to Solve Time’s Greatest Mystery, Fawcett Columbine, New York, pp. 260-297; and Prigogine. I. (1996) La Fin des Certitudes: Temps, Chaos et les Lois de la Nature, Editions Odile Jacob, Paris. 23 On this see my The Hellenic Philosophy: Between Europe, Asia, and Africa, pp. 20-26.
E.g. Saniga, M. (1998) Unveiling the nature of time: altered states of consciousness and pencil-generated space-times,” Internat. J. Transdisciplinary Studies 2, 8–17; Jaroszkiewicz, C. (2000) Discrete spacetime: classical causality, prediction, retro-diction and the mathematical arrow of time, in R. Buccheri, V. Di Gesù, and M. Saniga (eds.), Studies on the Structure of Time: From Physics to Psycho(patho)logy, Kluwer Academic / Plenum Publishers, pp. 167-189; and Smolin, L. (2001) Three Roads to Quantum Gravity, Basic Books, New York.
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Evangeliou, C.C. (2003). The Aristotelian Relation of Time to Motion and to the Human Soul. In: Buccheri, R., Saniga, M., Stuckey, W.M. (eds) The Nature of Time: Geometry, Physics and Perception. NATO Science Series, vol 95. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0155-7_38
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