Chapter 6
Time
Time is a philosophically rich topic to discuss with kids – or with anyone else. Plato has some interesting things to say about time. But, unfortunately, he doesn’t present them in a way that can easily engage the philosophical neophyte. Aristotle does much better, in Book IV, Chapters 10 through 14, of his Physics. To be sure, Aristotle’s writing is hardly ever what one might call “user-friendly.” But what he has to say about time can be unpacked and made more inviting for the beginner.
Still, the best classical text for getting a philosophical neophyte engaged in philosophical issues about time is, in my opinion, Book XI of Augustine’s Confessions. In a famous passage there, Augustine says this:
What then is time? If nobody asks me, I know. But if I want to explain [what it is] to someone who had asked me, I don’t know [what to say]. (Confessions 11.14.17)
One can learn a great deal about the nature of philosophy from this brief passage. Philosophical questions are often like ‘What is time?’ They concern something very ordinary, something we usually take for granted. But the philosopher asks a basic question about this ordinary something. When one thinks about how to answer the philosopher’s basic question, one becomes completely perplexed. The classic display of this philosophical perplexity, also sometimes called “Socratic perplexity,” is this speech of Meno’s from the Platonic dialogue, Meno:
Socrates, before I even met you I used to hear that you are always in a state of perplexity and that you bring others to the same state, and now I think you are bewitching and beguiling me, simply putting me under a spell, so that I am quite perplexed. Indeed, if a joke is in order, you seem, in appearance and in every other way. to be like the broad torpedo fish, for it too makes anyone who comes close and touches it feel numb, and you now seem to have had that kind of effect on me, for both my mind and my tongue are numb, and I have no answer to give you. Yet I have made many speeches about virtue [which is what Socrates is questioning him about] before large audiences on a thousand occasions, very good speeches as I thought, but not I cannot even say what it is. (Meno 80ab, Grube trans.)
It is Socratic perplexity about the nature of time that grips Augustine in Book XI of the Confessions. The reflections that this perplexity lead Augustine into are wonderfully engaging. I made some of those reflections the basis for a children’s story I wrote for a group of Norwegian kids I was planning to do a demonstration class with at a conference in Oslo. In making up the story I tried to think of Norwegian names to make the story a little more inviting to the kids I would be working with. Here is what I came up with:
Time
Mother: Hi, Tor, how was school today?
Tor (throwing down his school pack and beginning to take off his jacket): Oh, all right, I guess. But we have this girl in my science class who thinks she knows everything.
She was in Switzerland last year. I think her father is a big scientist or something. He was working in a lab there. Her name is Ingrid. Do you know what she said today?
Mother: I don’t have a very good way to guess from what you’ve told me so far.
Tor: Well, the teacher, Mr. Knudsen, was saying something about space and time and this
Ingrid, she raised her hand and said in this sickly-sweet know-it-all voice of hers, “You know, Mr.Knudsen, there really is no such thing as time.”
Mother: What did Mr. Knudsen say to that?
Tor: Well, you know how he always likes to humor students, especially the smart ones, so he just smiled and said, “What makes you say that, Ingrid?”
Mother: Did Ingrid have a good reply?
Tor: Well, she started off by saying, “You know, Mr. Knudsen, if there really were such things as times, some of them would be long and others would be short.”
Mother: Did Mr. Knudsen agree to that?
Tor: Of course. But then this Ingrid said in her sassy way – I really can’t stand her – “But you know, Mr. Knudsen, the past doesn’t exist anymore. So there is nothing of the past to be either long or short. And the future doesn’t exist yet. So the future isn’t there to be long or short either.”
Mother: That sounds pretty interesting. Did Mr. Knudsen have a good reply?
Tor: Well, he said, “What about the present, Ingrid? That exists, doesn’t it?” And you know what Ingrid said to that?
Mother: No, son, tell me.
Tor: Well she said, “You might think a whole day, or a whole hour, or at least a whole minute could be present. But really,” she went on, “even though it’s now, say, Thursday, some of Thursday is already past and some is future. So some of it doesn’t exist any more and the rest doesn’t exist yet.”
Mother: What did Ingrid say about the present minute? Surely none of the present minute is already past or still future.
Tor: Oh yeah, she had an answer for that, too, She said, “So and so many seconds are already past and the rest are future. All that is really present is something like a knife-edge of time. That’s not either long or short. It’s just a knife-edge. So,” she concluded, “since, if there were such a thing as time, there would have to be long times and short times, and no such things ever exist, there is no such thing as time.”
Mother: I can tell Ingrid is very smart. Did Mr. Knudsen have a good answer for her?
Tor: Well, he said we were all to go home and think about what Ingrid had said.
Tomorrow we are each supposed to come up with the best response we can. I wish I could think of something that would blow her out of the water. She thinks she’s so smart.
Mother: Well, you could go over and talk to Olaf’s big sister. I think she has done a little philosophy at the University.
Tor: No, I want to figure this out for myself. I want to show that Ingrid isn’t really the smartest kid in the class. She just thinks she is.
* * *
As it worked out, the discussion of this story with the kids in Oslo quickly strayed from the issue I had wanted to think about with them. I had expected that the children would already be familiar with a Norwegian translation of my story when I met with them. But somehow that didn’t happen. Then there were linguistic problems. Since I don’t speak Norwegian, I had wanted the English translation of everything the kids said written on the board for me to respond to. But the mechanics of working in the two languages soon became so cumbersome that the main effect of beginning with my story was just to invite these Norwegian kids to think about what time is
In fact the ideas these kids had about time were quite fascinating. The audience was enthralled and the affair got a very nice write-up in an Oslo newspaper. But Ingrid’s argument never got dealt with.
Before I went off to Oslo I had, however, tried out my story one of the fifth-grade classes in Northampton, Massachusetts, I reported on in the last chapter. My aim was to give the story a trial run before I took it “on the road” to Norway. As things turned out and through no fault of the Norwegian kids, it was the Northampton class that fully tackled the issue I had wanted to lay out. I turn now to report on what they had to say.
The discussion in the Northampton class began, I must admit, in a rather slow and uncertain way. Simon commented that “Ingrid was using philosophy.” That was a good comment. I wrote it on the poster board for later discussion. Three of the next four comments, however, focussed on the psychological dynamics of the story. Thus Juliane pointed out, what is surely correct, that “Tor wants to have a response to show that Ingrid wasn’t right.” Maya added that “Tor is jealous of Ingrid,” which is highly plausible. And Andrew expressed the very reasonable thought that “The continuation of the story should show that Ingrid isn’t as smart as she thinks she is.”
In the midst of these comments, Kristhle raised her hand and, with a frown on her face, blurted out, “I don’t get it.” Since I was, at that point, following the Community-of-Inquiry Methodology,i I responded by writing on the board, “I don’t get it,” with her name afterward. Several kids giggled and Kristhle blushed a bit as I wrote her exasperated comment down, but I tried to reassure her that that was a really good thing to say and that we would try to deal with it once we had all the initial comments on the board.
So far there had been two good goads to further discussion, Simon’s “Ingrid was using philosophy” and Kristhle’s “I don’t get it.” The other comments had more to do with what is called “reading comprehension.” Still, I wasn’t completely disappointed, since I had myself built the element of jealousy into the story to help motivate the search for a good reply to what is, after all, a rather abstract, even abstruse, bit of philosophical reasoning. It was good to be assured that the kids had understood the psychological dynamics of the story.
There is a more general issue here. I write story beginnings like this one and ask the kids how the story should go on to try to present philosophical problems as problems they themselves can have. In this case the question is what Tor should say in response to Ingrid. It is important to the enterprise I want to foster that the kids don’t say at the end, “Now tell us what the answer is.” And, in fact, they never do that. They soon take these problems on as their own. They may or may not be able to handle them to their own satisfaction. But the aim is, if possible, for them to take ownership of the problems. The aim is most definitely not to get them to learn some famous solution to the problem under discussion. It is not even to get them to recapitulate the history of philosophy, though that is often what they do. It is rather to help them become self-reliant thinkers who have the ability to address difficult and fascinating philosophical issues and work out articulate and well-argued responses.
But I am jumping ahead of my story. The first five comments did not actually tackle the philosophical issue the story raises. At this point I wondered if I had made a mistake in bringing such a difficult bit of reasoning to these fifth-graders. As I have already mentioned, the argument I had incorporated in the story is found in its most famous form in St. Augustine’s Confessions, Book XI. I might add that the solution Augustine offers is not one that very many people find satisfactory. Something quite like this reasoning appears much earlier in Book IV of Aristotle’s Physics. Many commentators think that Aristotle offers no solution to the problem at all, either in the Physics or elsewhere in his writings. So why should I expect a group of fifth-graders with no previous training in philosophy to be able to figure out an interesting response to a problem Aristotle apparently was not able to solve and Augustine responded to only in a fashion many people find disappointing?
Well, naïve or not, my faith was rewarded. Owen screwed up his face, twisted his body a bit and raised his hand. “If the past doesn’t exist,” he said carefully, weighing each word, “I couldn’t have started this sentence, since I wouldn’t have existed then.” My heart jumped with excitement. While the others were talking, Owen had clearly been working away in his own mind at a response to Ingrid’s argument. And his response was an excellent one. Other kids immediately jumped on it and expanded it. Jason said, “If the past didn’t exist, nothing would exist now.”
Owen’s idea, in its full generality, is this: If the past doesn’t exist, then there is nothing that could have brought anything that now exists into being – this sentence I am writing, the people who are now talking about this philosophical question, the world around us, anything at all that now exists.! I don’t recall running across that attempt to establish the reality of the past anywhere in the history of philosophy. It was a stunning move.
In the discussion that followed, several kids tried to think about the specific kind of reality that the past has. Jaxon was particularly persistent in this effort. “The past sort of exists,” he said at one point, “because we experience it.” He didn’t exactly have Augustine’s idea that the past exists in our memory. His idea seemed to be that the past exists in a way that makes it possible for us to know things about it.
Later on, Jaxon wanted to say more about the “sort of” existence that the past has. His idea at this point seemed to be that the past is settled, determinate, always one way or the other. It couldn’t have the definite character it has, he seemed to be saying, if it didn’t exist at all. His notion that the past is one way or another, and we can’t change it, echoes the traditional notion, to be found in Aristotle, that the past has a kind of necessity; it is the necessity of the unchangeable.
Talk about whether the past could be changed introduced the issue of time travel. Several kids had ideas about time travel, and whether, if you went back in time, you could actually change something that had happened, rather than simply being an ineffectual observer.
Talk about the kind of existence the past has also introduced a question about the kind of existence the future has. Several kids seemed prepared to accept Ingrid’s claim in the story, that the future simply has no existence at all. But some seemed to want to assign it some existence as well. A summary way of putting their point would be this: The future sort of exists, too, because the same thing that is now present, was future.
I should also mention that Kristhle, who first blurted out, “I don’t get it,” came to take an animated part in the discussion. It seems to have been important to the discussion as it developed that she had been fearless enough to say at the beginning that she didn’t get it. But eventually she certainly did get it and she made an important contribution to the class response.
Early on we returned to Simon’s comment that Ingrid was using philosophy. I asked the kids how they knew that Ingrid was using philosophy. Someone who had paid close attention to the story pointed out that the Mother in the story had suggested that Tor go over to someone who had studied philosophy at the University to get his problem solved. That observation was certainly a textually astute comment.
I think it was Simon, however, who picked up on his own comment and explained rather impressively that what Ingrid was doing was philosophy because it was giving reasons for something, not just making a blanket statement. There were then two or three rather eloquent comments from him about how it wasn’t enough just to have an opinion about something; one needs to be able to give reasons.
One of the last comments was very simple, yet, in its own way, also very profound. A kid who hadn’t participated much in the discussion so far, Matt, eyed the clock and commented, “There’s a time when school gets out; so time exists.” In addition, perhaps, to expressing some irritation with the discussion, Matt was making a point very much like one the English philosopher, G.E. Moore, was famous for, early in the 20th century. J.M.E. McTaggart, like Ingrid, had argued that time is unreal. Moore replied that he knew he had had breakfast that morning, so time must exist. Moore went on to say that he had much more certain knowledge that he had had breakfast that morning than he could possibly have that McTaggart’s rather complicated argument for the unreality of time is sound.
Matt’s comment invites a more general observation. Sometimes philosophical insights are born of irritation. That is, sometimes what a participant says in irritation is philosophically interesting, even profound. I think that was the case with Matt’s comment.
I left that Northampton discussion on cloud nine. Although I have discussed Book XI of Augustine’s Confessions with students and colleagues for over forty years, I think that the discussion in Northampton was the most exciting one I have had the privilege of participating in.