Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

There are two kinds of perennial philosophies – those of temporality and those of timelessness. Whereas the former take reality to be temporal, the latter either deny the reality of time altogether, as have mystics throughout the ages, or locate true being in something that is timeless, such as Plato's forms, Aristotelian essences, God, or the Absolute of the idealists. Time sometimes is ontologically downgraded to Plato's moving image of eternity, an endless repetition of some timeless pattern or divine archetypes, which is a sophistication of the cyclical views of time and history that were prevalent in all archaic civilizations, or time might be nothing but the unfolding of some Absolute system of categories. Sometimes time is relegated to the junk heap of a mind-dependent appearance, thus having a second-class type of existence. Another form that the ontological downgrading of time takes is to make it nothing but a temporal series of events, completely analogous to a one-dimensional spatial ordering of events, devoid of any dynamic or transitory aspect. The temporalists have a hard row to hoe, since time has been an endless source of perplexity. Part of this perplexity is due to the elusive nature of time. It is too fundamental to admit of verbal definition in terms of anything more basic. Definitions of it, such as “the measure of motion” (Aristotle) or “the advance of the ... log in or subscribe to read full text