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The Temporal Present

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 March 2013

J.J. Valberg
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Abstract

It is easy to have about the temporal present, the time that is now, thoughts that seem both true and impossible. E.g., ‘Now is the time that matters'. We may reflect that this is not just true but that ‘it is always like that', that is: now is always the time that matters. Yet here we seem to be generalizing the ascription to the temporal present of a property that claims uniqueness, viz., being the time that matters. The present paper explores, in the case of the temporal present, the meaning and implications of this kind of impossible generalisation.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 88 , Issue 3 , July 2013 , pp. 369 - 386
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2013 

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References

1 It should be evident that the concept of meaning employed here is not that of a Fregean sense. Frege's concept applies to expressions – in the present case, to the expression ‘now’. The Fregean sense of ‘now’ would be given by using a synonym of that expression. Our interest lies not in the meaning (sense) of the expression ‘now’, but in the meaning or significance to us of the time to which that expression refers. (C.f. ‘the meaning to the Swedes of summer’, ‘the meaning of Ramadam to Muslims’, etc.)

2 Augustine's words are: ‘Those two times, therefore, past and future, how are they, when even the past now is not, and the future is not as yet?’ We are, note, replacing Augustine's reference to times with reference to events. ‘The Confessions of Saint Augustine’, Book XI, Chapter XIV, The Basic Writings of Saint Augustine vol. 1 (Random House), 191.

3 ‘On Spurious Egocentricity’, in Papers on Time and Tense (Oxford University Press, 1968), 29–30Google Scholar. Prior calls his view a ‘no-present theory’. It might equally be called an ‘only-present theory’.

4 See part II of my ‘The Irrevocability of Being’, Philosophy 87 (2011Google Scholar).

5 Ibid.

6 But how long is this ‘bit’, that is, how much time we mean to include under ‘the temporal present’, ‘now’? (Augustine gets himself in a twist over this.) The problem we are about to raise does not require a general answer to this question. In any case, since the vague kind of answers that are possible in this regard depend our interests at the time of using ‘now’, there is no general answer. (Thus the ‘now’ in ‘We shall have to tighten our belts now’, may refer to a single moment while getting dressed, or to the duration of The Second World War.)

7 A analogous impossibility emerges if we reflect in the right way on the self and solipsism; see my Dream, Death and the Self (Princeton University Press, 2007)Google Scholar, chapter 11.

8 Prior, op. cit., p 21.

9 Hegel, in The Phenomenology of Mind (Part A, Section I), points out that whereas Now and Here – the references of ‘now’ and ‘here’ – regularly change, there is in both cases a ‘Universal’ that remains constant. Hegel's Universal can be identified with the constant rule or, perhaps, with the Fregean sense (see note 1); but in the case of Now versus Here, there a further constant: the constant meaning.

10 If it is shown to someone that what he asserts is false, can he defend himself by saying ‘I do not claim that what I am saying is true, but only that I believe it to be true’?

11 Something very much like this thought is ascribed to McTaggart by Michael Dummet (if I understand him) in his ‘A Defence of McTaggart's Proof of the Unreality of Time’, Philosophical Review 69 (1960)Google Scholar.

12 ‘Persons, character and morality’, in Moral Luck (Cambridge University Press, 1981Google Scholar), 13.

13 At the risk of harping on the obvious, let us note that when in this philosophical context we use (V) or (B), we are not actually referring by ‘now’ to any particular time (that, say, at which I initially composed the paper). With, e.g., a philosophical use of (V), it is as if we said to the reader (including ourselves): ‘Consider any time and you will see that, referring by “now” to that time, i.e., referring to it as temporally present, you can truly assert that it is the time that matters.' The philosophical use of (V) might be contrasted with an engaged use, one to whose possibility the philosophical use draws our attention.

14 As with all remarks of this kind, we must, of course, assume an ‘other things being equal’ rider.

15 The use of double quotes indicates that we are talking not about the expression ‘now’ (for which purpose we are using, as we just did, single quotes), but about one of a plurality of which now, the temporal present, is a particular instance. It will not be lost on the reader that the idea of such a plurality – like many other ideas and explanations we have employed, and will employ, in discussing our problem – itself contains the problem, in this case that we are talking about a plurality each of whose elements claims absolute uniqueness.

16 This seems to be Aristotle's view in the Nichomacean Ethics (I.10). The goodness of a good end to life consists, for Aristotle, in its being essential to the goodness of a good human life considered as a whole.

17 The Nature of Existence, Volume II, Book V, Chapter XXXIII, (Cambridge University Press, 1927)Google Scholar.

18 The ‘contradiction’ is, roughly, that although the members of the past/present/future triad are incompatible, every event is all three. Notice how this differs from our problem. McTaggart's problem might be raised by asking how, given the incompatibility of the triad, an event can be not just temporally present but also past and future; our problem, by asking how, given the meaning of the temporal present, an event can be temporally present.

19 See, for example, Mellor, D.H., Real Time II (Routledge 1998CrossRefGoogle Scholar), chapters 1 and 2.

20 ‘The Thought: A Logical Inquiry’, reprinted in Strawson, P.F. ed. Philosophical Logic (Oxford University Press, 1967)Google Scholar, 35. Hence anyone who, like Mellor, denies that there are A-facts while recognizing that there are true tensed propositions (or sentences), will need an alternative to Frege's conception of a fact. Mellor's conception is that not of a true proposition but a ‘truth-maker’, an entity that makes a true proposition true. See ibid., Chapter 2, section 2.

21 One might reflect: ‘Suppose God eliminated consciousness. Would it not still be true that the sun is now behind a cloud?’ What we overlook here is that our use of ‘now’ owes its possibility to our standpoint in reflection rather than to the standpoint of the possible world on which we reflect.

22 It may be worth remarking that the conception of consciousness in play here is not the conception of something ‘going on’ or ‘occurring’ in us (in our heads or souls), that is, of a phenomenon, but of consciousness as a ‘that from within which’, or what we might regard as a kind of horizon. (See Dream, Death and the Self, op.cit.)