{"id":149716,"date":"2020-12-30T13:00:54","date_gmt":"2020-12-30T18:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=149716"},"modified":"2020-12-11T17:00:19","modified_gmt":"2020-12-11T22:00:19","slug":"the-unreality-of-time-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/12\/30\/the-unreality-of-time-2\/","title":{"rendered":"The Unreality of Time"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>We\u2019re away until January 4, but we\u2019re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2020. Enjoy your holiday!<\/em><\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_146783\" style=\"width: 1010px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/08\/jetty.jpeg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-146783\" class=\"size-full wp-image-146783\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/08\/jetty.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1000\" height=\"667\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/08\/jetty.jpeg 1000w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/08\/jetty-300x200.jpeg 300w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/08\/jetty-768x512.jpeg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-146783\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">\u00a9 Allen \/ Adobe Stock.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>I was listening to an episode of the BBC podcast <em>In Our Time<\/em>, on which a group of English scholars was discuss\u00ading the French philosopher Henri Bergson, when one of them mentioned an essay called \u201cThe Unreality of Time,\u201d originally published in 1908, by a philosopher named John McTaggart. The phrase startled me\u2014I was writing a book called <em>The Unreality of Memory<\/em>. It\u2019s possible I\u2019d heard the title before and forgotten I knew it\u2014as the scholars note, it is a famous essay. (\u201cIs forgotten knowledge knowledge all the same?\u201d is the kind of question we asked in my col\u00adlege philosophy classes.) In any case, I had never read it. I paused the podcast and found the essay online, curious what I\u2019d been referencing.<\/p>\n<p>McTaggart does not use \u201cunreality\u201d in the same way I do, to describe a quality of <em>seeming<\/em> unrealness in some\u00adthing I assume to be real. Instead, his paper sets out to prove that time literally does not exist. \u201cI believe that time is unreal,\u201d he writes. The paper is interesting (\u201cTime only belongs to the existent\u201d \u2026 \u201cThe only way in which time can be real is by existing\u201d) but not convincing.<\/p>\n<p>McTaggart\u2019s argument hinges in part on his claim that perception is \u201cqualitatively different\u201d from either memory or anticipation\u2014this is the difference between past, pres\u00adent, and future, the way we apprehend events in time. Direct perceptions are those that fall within the \u201cspecious present,\u201d a term coined by E.\u2009R. Clay and further devel\u00adoped by William James (a fan of Bergson\u2019s). \u201cEverything is observed in a specious present,\u201d McTaggart writes, \u201cbut nothing, not even the observations themselves, can ever be in a specious present.\u201d It\u2019s illusory\u2014the events are fixed, and there is nothing magically different about \u201cthe pres\u00adent\u201d as a point on a timeline. This leads to an irresolvable contradiction, to his mind.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/08\/11\/the-unreality-of-time\/\">Read more &gt;&gt;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On Henri Bergson, disasters, and the human perception of time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1241,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[68282],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-149716","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-of-2020"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>The Unreality of Time by Elisa Gabbert<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"On Henri Bergson, disasters, and the human perception of time.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" 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