Tag Archives: time

'The Outskirts of Kyoto throughout the Season', by Ochiai Rofu. A quadripytch depicts the rural outskirts of Kyoto, Japan in the early 20th century across the four seasons.'The Outskirts of Kyoto throughout the Season', Ochiai Rofu

‘Tis The Season

As mentioned elsewhere, this year has been something of an annus horribilis, to borrow the Queen’s apt description. Celebrities are dying, the misdirected backlash against globalisation continues, terrorism and hyperbolic attempts to prevent it are a continuous intrusion, the free-for-all in Syria is ongoing and Russian and Chinese objectives remain sufficiently inscrutable for any change in the balance of power to be uncomfortable.

“May you live in interesting times”, as the Chinese curse has it. Tempestuous epochs have an almost universal characteristic of reducing those who live through them to footnotes and statistics. Radical change threatens those long term objectives of living that Locke or Parfit have suggested are essential to our very nature as persons, and Nagel believes to be the source of the ethical harm that precludes killing.

It is the season of appraisal, of reflection and resolution to improve. Appraisal at the end of this year must include an uncertainty verging on helplessness at this tide of events against which no resolve is possible. Protectionism is no guarantee of the reversal of automation and global competition. Legislation is no protection against the armed and irrational. Humanitarian sentiment is no cure for schismatic wars.

So as you and those around you prepare evaluations of “distance run” in the preceding thirty one and a half million seconds for social media, perhaps it would be wise to reflect on the conceptual core of reflection itself; the unceasing passage of time.

Time is both immaterial and material, at once a synthetic and human construct and the most fundamental and objective constituent of the firmament of everything. It is an irreducible function of space (notwithstanding its strange behaviour at extravagant velocities), expressed in the utterly mundane tick of a clock.

It is also the scorekeeper. How old are you? How old were you when something momentous, personal or historic, occurred? How long has it been since you went somewhere or saw someone important to you? When was the last time you did something mundane, or something outrageous? How was your day, your week, your year, or the hundreds or thousands of millions of seconds of your life so far?

Without recourse to stereotype, then, perhaps the Australian reputation for relentless optimism is born of conducting their national period of relaxation and introspection in high summer. Equivalently, perhaps the Scottish one for sardonic dourness comes from years of taking stock on dark afternoons surrounded by barren hillsides.

Similarly, a small adjustment to the position of this planet, or the rate at which it revolves, would dramatically change the perspective from which we evaluate. So would the adjustment upwards or downwards of an anticipated human lifetime, from the ambivalent to the angst-ridden. So too would changes in the course of history; the calendars of Julius Caesar, Julius I, the Jacobins, the Islamic, Jewish or Chinese could have become the global standard, or Gregory XIII could have selected July as the first month of the year. Older and locally adapted methods for dividing the passage of three rotating bodies could have remained.

As you prepare your retrospective, then, remember that time is an illusory construct, a distorted lens for bringing meaning to the sequence of events, and be grateful the experiment with decimal time was short lived. Happy New Year, whatever that means…

Suggested Reading:

William Shakespeare, “When I do count the clock that tells the time

George Gordon, Lord Byron, “To Time

Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Time

1240208_642109192489508_941271857_nRobin Hill is a final year Philosophy, Politics, & Law student at Swansea University. In addition to Undercurrent Philosophy, he writes for the superb Jack Swan Swansea City fanzine on the Philosophy of the Beautiful Game. He often considers biographies to be a positive inversion of Aristotle’s ad hominem fallacy, and the first step on the road to sophistry.

FacebookTwitterReddit