Time and Identity

16 Love Conquers All, Even Time?

“There are several different accounts that we get from philosophy and physics on the nature of time,” he said, starting a substitute lecture in his colleague ’s undergraduate class in metaphysics. Andy had just started a new position in the philosophy department at the University of Portland. His new colleague Wendy was out of the country at a conference in Australia and had asked him to take over a week’s worth of lectures. Though metaphysics was not his specialty, he wanted to make an impression on his new colleagues that he was a good faculty citizen. That, and he knew that since he traveled so much he would need someone to take over his classes in the future too, and so, anticipating a possible tit-for-tat, agreed to step into the breach for Wendy. Looking around the room, though, he was starting to have second thoughts. It was late in the day and the students seemed weary and not very attentive. Nonetheless, he pressed on: “But on almost any view of time there are several puzzles that arise concerning personal identity over time.” Andy felt the fifty minutes left to go, well, really forty-two or so now since he had arrived a bit late and started the class off with some pleasantries and house-keeping of sorts. Essentially, though, he had a whole period to fill up, and as usual he was waiting for a story. It was a strange method of teaching, so far as he knew, but it had evolved over the years and he had convinced himself that it worked well enough, while also providing a ready-made excuse to not overly prepare and write out formal lectures. Lectures. He hated the word. Sounding so much like a thing to be forced on someone rather than listened to with anything like attention. If you want people to listen to you, tell a story. And it had better be a good one. The story method was developed early on in his career in ethics classes, to which he was rapidly realizing it might be uniquely suited. He had 16 Love Conquers All, Even Time? Andrew Light 312 A. Light stumbled across it in his first tenure-track job in Wyoming. As a novice to the teaching game, and in rooms full of students with whom he had little in common, the method snuck up on him. He couldn’t remember the exact topic of the first lecture where he started doing it except that it had something to do with Aristotle’s account of the virtues. In the middle of some exposition of courage or friendship or justice he found himself talking about himself, sharing some story that was entirely inappropriate for a 150-seat lecture hall in Laramie. But suddenly, as if he had finally pushed a sluggish revolving door on its axis, he was through to the other side and the students seemed to be actually listening, pens down, staring up at him from notebooks and looking with a mixture of astonishment, curiosity, and consternation. It wasn’t all of them, to be sure, but there were more than he had seen in a while paying attention. As he continued talking he then started moving, walking back and forth as he hit the rhythm of his story. He started talking with his hands, as he would with friends in a bar, and didn’t for a moment consider avoiding an aside or digression. After that initial success he kept trying to recreate the same conditions. From then on, if the argument to be covered was a utilitarian account of individual welfare, he had a story about the happiness he experienced tormenting his younger brother when they were both children. If it was a duty-based approach to lying, he had a story about cheating on his taxes. And if the point was that the pursuit of understanding the good, the true, and the beautiful only resulted in an imperfect set of concepts that only approximated the world as it was lived by imperfect humans—like himself—he had many, many stories. Most of them involving Internet dating. Though he sometimes repeated the same stories over the years, he never wrote them down in his lecture notes. A rather intense Israeli friend in graduate school had told him once that the best way to teach was simply to enter the classroom and “do philosophy” in front of the students. “Show them how hard it...