Space and time
Many metaphysicians have argued that neither time nor space can be ultimately real. Temporal and spatial predicates apply only to appearances; reality, or what is real, does not endure through time, nor is it subject to the conditions of space. The roots of this view are to be found in Plato and beyond him in the thought of the Eleatic philosophers Parmenides and Zeno, the propounder of several paradoxes about motion. Plato conceived his Forms as eternal objects whose true location was nowhere. Similarly, Christian philosophers conceived of God as existing from everlasting to everlasting and as present in all parts of the universe. God was not so much in space and time as the source of space and time. Whatever falls within space and time is thereby limited, for one space excludes another and no two times can be simultaneous. God, however, is by definition an infinite being and so must exist timelessly and apart from space.
Reference has already been made to the way in which Kant argued for an intimate connection between time and space and human sensibility: that human beings experience things as being temporally and spatially situated is to be connected with the nature of their minds, and particularly with their sensory equipment. Kant was entirely correct to describe space and time as “intuitions,” by which he meant that they are peculiar sorts of particulars; he was right again to insist on the centrality in sensing of the notions of here and now, which can be indicated but not reduced to conceptual terms. It is highly doubtful, however, whether he had sufficient grounds for claiming a priori insight into the nature of space and still more that of time; his case for thinking that space and time are “pure” intuitions was palpably inadequate. The lesson to draw from his careful discussion of this subject might well be not that there must be a form of reality lying beyond space and time but rather that nothing can be real that does not conform to spatial and temporal requirements. Space and time are bound up with particularity, and only what is particular can be real.
It was only in a weak sense that Kant denied the reality of time and space. Other philosophers have certainly been bolder, though generally on the basis of a less solid grasp than Kant possessed of what it is to experience temporally and spatially. Thus, Bradley argued against the view that space and time are “principles of individuation” by alleging that no specification of spatial or temporal position, whether in terms of here and now or by the use of spatial coordinates or dating systems, could achieve uniqueness. Any descriptions such as “at 12 o’clock precisely on January 4, 1962” or “just 75 yards due north of this spot” might apply to infinitely many times or places in the universe, for there was nothing to prevent there being infinitely many temporal and spatial orders. Bradley forgot that the whole meaning of a spatial or temporal description is not exhausted when attention is given to the connotations of the terms used; what has to be considered is the words as used in their context, which is that of a person who can indicate his position in space and time because of the fact that he is himself situated in space and time. One cannot express uniqueness in words as such, but he can use words to express uniqueness. Bradley’s suggestion that it is possible to conceive of many temporal and spatial orders is by no means free from controversy. In general, men think of all events as happening before, simultaneously with, or after the moment that is called “now,” all spatial positions as relating in some way or other to the point that is called “here.” In circumstances where this cannot be done, as with events or places in a dream, men dismiss them as quite unreal. That there might be events or places with no relation to their own now and here is something they often refuse to take seriously, though there are theories in modern science that suggest that they are wrong to do so.
It was pointed out earlier that to say that something is unreal in a metaphysical context is often to say that it is unintelligible, and it is not surprising to find that arguments about the unreality of space and time have often turned on conceptual considerations. Thus, it is alleged that there is an incoherency in the notion of space because it claims to be a whole that is logically prior to its parts, and nevertheless turns out in practice to be merely an indefinitely extensible aggregate. Everything that occupies space falls within a wider spatial context; the thought of space as such is, as Kant saw, involved in any spatial description. Yet space as such is something that constantly eludes man’s grasp; space, as man knows it, is just one spatial situation after another.
The difficulties found in the notion of time turn on the combination in it of the idea that time is continuous and the idea that it is made up of discrete parts. Henri Bergson, a French philosopher who was concerned with the notions of duration and movement, said that time was experienced as continuous; it was only the “spatialized” time measured by clocks that was taken to have separable parts (minutes, hours, weeks, and so on), and this “public” time was merely conventional. This, however, seems altogether too easy a solution of the problem, for privately experienced time also goes by (one stretch of it follows another), and the thesis that public time is merely conventional is at best highly controversial. It must be allowed that time is commonly thought of as at once flowing and, as it were, subject to arrest. Whether this is, in fact, openly inconsistent may be doubted, but it is on points like this that the metaphysical case in question rests.
Few British or American philosophers discuss these questions now, largely because they have been persuaded by Moore that any attack on such central notions in men’s thought as these must be mistaken in principle. As a result, little attention is given to a question that deserves investigation; namely, what is to take the place of space and time in metaphysical thought. Idealist writers constantly said that space and time qualified appearances, and that nothing that did so could fail to be taken up in the higher experience that was experience of reality. But how is this supposed to be done? Time is perhaps cancelled and yet preserved in the idea of eternity, space in the thought of something that is at once omnipresent yet not in any particular place. But what is there that is positive about these notions? The eternal, it is sometimes said, is not to be identified with what lasts through all time; it is, strictly, outside time altogether. But what does it mean to say this? When it is said, for example, that numbers or truths are eternal, the proper inference is that they have nothing to do with time; to inquire when they came into or will go out of existence is to ask a question that is ill posed. When God, however, is said to be eternal, the impression is often given that he has temporal characteristics, although in some higher form. What this higher form is deserves careful consideration, the result of which might be that it is not the conception of time that is incoherent but the conception of God.