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The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 15.1 (2001) 50-56



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Review Essay

Time, Conflict, and Human Values


Time, Conflict, and Human Values. J. T. Fraser. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999. Pp. 306. ISBN 0-252-02476-1 hard cover, $34.95

Framing an interdisciplinary synthesis of the many scientific and literary studies of time cannot be an easy task, but achieving such a synthesis has captured the attention and energies of J.T. Fraser across a decades-long series of studies, set out in both monographs and edited volumes, and presented in his most recent publication, Time, Conflict, and Human Values (hereinafter referred to as Time.) With ascetic patience, he shows that he is at home in the literatures of time and change in such fields of inquiry as physics, biology, neurophysiology, psychology, drama, myth, and philosophy. He is a polymath in the best sense of the term, seeking consilience across fields of inquiry at those junctures where the processual features of reality are most tellingly revealed, but all the while developing joint enterprises with experts who analyze temporal dimensions in their own special fields. He has sifted through their otherwise discordant disciplinary voices to find a theoretically concordant classification of the main types and levels of temporality.

For Fraser, change and passage are massively real features of the world. They are twisted into every sort of entity, and thread the interstices between things. These various kinds of things make up the different domains in nature. Because nature's domains have evolved during the several billion years of this universe, the kinds of temporal change that are domain-specific have also evolved. At a certain level, time proper has evolved and is continuing to evolve. The main values Fraser examines in this book are those specific to the time-vexed terrain of self-conscious humans, and reflect our efforts to smooth the passage of our lives. The values he consults are beauty, goodness, and truth. Their office is to guide and make endurable our passage through conflicted human time. [End Page 50]

Fraser's style is to proceed with exacting etymologies and definitions of his main terms, with judgments on factual issues grounded in authoritative sources in the several sciences, and with a whole stable of finely structured, nicely illustrated arguments. He appears to work with quite small tolerances (in the engineer's sense) of error. It is thus unlikely that his decades of inquiry into time's ways could be fruitless, but also unlikely that, when we learn more about nature, his sometimes-hieratic statements could all be true. Aristotle addressed this kind of issue, saying "the search for truth is in one way hard and in another way easy. For it is evident that no one can master it fully nor miss it wholly. But each adds a little to our knowledge of nature and from all the facts assembled there arises a certain grandeur." As a phase of Fraser's entire work, Time partakes of that distinguishing grandeur, as a feature that is progressively revealed.

In 1950, in a piece of juvenilia entitled "A Short Essay on Time," Fraser disclosed the bent of a twig. There, his descriptions play off the shortfall between a growing technical power in Western culture and our waning awareness of life's goals. We emphasize the temporal over the eternal, with the consequence of focusing human reflections on the tragic present. Our relations to past and future are foreshortened and confused within the present, and are construed subjectively as mere relations within the sequence of events. He then lays out a theme that is prophetic of a single-minded, scientific, academic, and international career, saying, "Time forms a convenient common denominator of the sciences" (2). With such éclat is a metaphysical commitment selected from a general ontology.

Some sort of selection, to be sure, is a prologue to anyone's critical metaphysics, not just Fraser's. For when we take up the task of explaining both what is given in experience and what is configured by experience, we do make...

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