The Ontology of the Past: Whitehead and Santayana

1. Introduction

The fact that there is something peculiar about a proposition that attempts to judge some event in the past has been long recognized by philosophers. We constantly refer to the pageant of history and its relevance to the events that constitute our present. But what guarantees the truth or falsehood of our judgments about past events, if they are long gone? On this score, it matters little whether we refer to the truth of Caesar's death on the Ides of March, the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789, or Kyle's birthday party on the day before I write this sentence. The fact of the matter is that the past is past irrespective of the span of time that has lapsed up to the present moment. Thus, the question I wish to consider is sharply focused on the ontological basis for our judgments about the past and not the skeptical problem of how we can know things about the past. Ancient relics, memories, and footprints in the sand (however reliable or unreliable they might be) fail to address the issue of how propositions about the past refer to their objects.

Recent discussions on this topic have focused attention on the distinction between the tensed and the tenseless views originating in J. M. E. McTaggart's famous paper, "The Unreality of Time" (1921). ² Tensed theorists accept the intuitive experience of time as a process of becoming and affirm the reality of temporal passage. In accordance with what McTaggart called the "A-series," past, present, and future are fundamentally different with regard to their respective ontological status. Propositions are judged to be true or false because of tensed facts about events, for example, that a birthday party will happen tomorrow, is happening now, or happened yesterday. By contrast, the tenseless theorists contend that our experience of time does not accurately capture the nature of reality and that what is perceived as the flow of time is nothing more than our limited perspective on unchanging temporal facts. As Albert Einstein once expressed the view, "For us believing physicists the past, present and future are an illusion, even if a stubborn one" (qtd. in Hoffman and Dukas 1972, 258). McTaggart's "B-series" places all events in an order of "earlier than" or "later than," but there is no sense in which the present has any kind of ontological status different from the past and the future. In this manner, a proposition that expresses a truth about an event as earlier or later than another event is always true, regardless of when it is asserted, because the position of events in reality is fixed eternally.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the debate between tensed and tenseless theorists was articulated remarkably well by two figures in the history of American philosophy, George Santayana and Alfred North Whitehead. ³ Both Santayana and Whitehead produced metaphysical systems in which the question about time is central, yet, sadly, neither of their solutions have figured in the mainstream of contemporary discussions. In what follows, I explore the cogency of Santayana's tenseless theory, otherwise known as the theory of eternalism, and then critically evaluate his position from the point of view of Whitehead's tensed theory, or his metaphysics of process. In a rather striking way, Santayana and Whitehead agree about the basic solution to the problem, even if they disagree about the location of the past and the ontological status of the present and the future.

2. Santayana's Eternalism

As regards the question about the reference of propositions about the past, Santayana's answer clearly conforms to the tenseless theory. What I take to be Santayana's mature position was worked out most fully in his monumental four-volume work The Realms of Being (1942), including The Realm of Essence (1927), The Realm of Matter (1930...