History's a Mystery

When the editor of Historically Speaking asked me to report on this book, I jumped at the chance, for I have a long-standing interest in the philosophy of history. But as an advisory editor of the magazine, I also told Don Yerxa that a review might not serve him well. I don't believe that the philosophy of history gives much help to historians in the trenches, and I have found that the opaque subject does not much appeal to them. Don mildly persisted, and I have spent some time chewing on this short but thickly written monograph. Have an aid to digestion handy.

Poidevin elucidates the various ways in which we conceive of time and its passing. He wants, for instance, to inquire how memory works because memory fundamentally acknowledges that time has gone by. But the author also looks at how visual artists depict time. While I have a limited knowledge of painting, I take in Poidevin's analysis of Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Stair Case. Eadweard Muybridge's successive photographs of a galloping horse capture this notion even better for me. You look at a series of pictures, and see temporal change. If you consider film a visual art, watch the Robert Redford-Barbra Streisand movie, The Way We Were or the beginning of Saving Private Ryan. Poidevin scrutinizes how drama and fiction show such change. Take J.B. Priestley's play, Time and the Conways. In Act I we meet the young and hopeful Conways. In Act II we see them disappointed and disillusioned twenty years later. In Act III we return to the time of Act I. Although Acts I and III display the Conways in the same light, in Act III the same hopeful Conways lose a bit of their hope. We note that they are somehow headed for what they will be like in the future, because we know what will happen in the future.

In these and other illustrations Poidevin delves into what he calls the representation of time. He wants to learn about how we envision or imagine the transformations that time brings. But Poidevin is also looking for a bigger fish. The University of Leeds has titled him a professor of metaphysics, that is, the study of the ultimate nature of reality. Thus he inspects how we represent changing time as a way of figuring out the nature of time itself. How we understand time should shed light on its reality. And if we think about what time really is, we can perhaps puzzle out why it comes across the way it does in our representations. We separate what we know about something and what it is in itself, and then reason that getting a handle on the one will tell us something about the other.

Here we have to chomp on some even denser material to get a purchase on Poidevin's investigation. Once upon a time we had a group of philosophers called the Anglo Hegelians. Although not all English, this prepossessing bunch wrote in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They were most committed to making clear the historical dimensions of life about which the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel speculated. One of the most formidable of these Anglo Hegelians was John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart. In 1908 McTaggart published an essay called "The Unreality of Time."

McTaggart distinguished between two ways of meditating over time. We can contemplate events as past, present, and future. In this A-series we have real change, the experience of time passing. Or we can think of time as ordered events, each one before or after another. Here we have an earlier or a later, but no idea of a now that was once coming and will soon be receding. This is the B-series. If the B-series reflects the true nature of things, we have no change. A crucial arrangement exists to the series but no future that turns into the present only to become past. Anglo Hegelians like McTaggart loved to...