We ordinarily speak as if time were a kind of invisible landscape through which events travel. We say that events happen in time. We place memories behind us and possibilities ahead of us. We imagine ourselves moving from one moment to another as though we were passengers crossing a terrain that already exists.
The image is so familiar that it rarely appears as an image at all. It presents itself as simple common sense.
Time appears to be a container.
Events are placed within it. Lives unfold inside it. History stretches across it.
But common sense often conceals metaphysics.
The inherited construal
The inherited picture usually assumes something like the following:
- time exists independently of events
- moments are locations within time
- events occupy those locations
- time flows uniformly from past to future
The picture feels natural because it borrows its structure from space.
We know how objects occupy positions in space. The same logic is then quietly projected onto time. Moments become places. Events become objects. History becomes a line.
Once this construal settles into place, it becomes difficult to imagine alternatives.
Yet there is something peculiar about it.
The hidden assumptions
If time is a container, then what sort of thing is it?
Where exactly is the present?
The past is said to have gone; the future has not yet arrived. Yet the present seems to vanish the moment one attempts to identify it.
If it possesses duration, then it can be divided again. If it possesses no duration, then it appears incapable of containing anything at all.
The point is not merely that the present is difficult to define. The difficulty may indicate something deeper.
Perhaps the problem lies in assuming that moments are things.
A further problem emerges from the familiar idea that time flows.
What does this mean?
Movement itself normally presupposes time. An object moves by occupying different positions at different times.
But if time itself moves, then a strange question appears:
Relative to what?
Does time move through another time?
If so, then that second time would seem to require a third.
The regress has no obvious endpoint.
The metaphor that once appeared self-evident begins to destabilise.
The fracture
The difficulty is not simply that the picture is incomplete.
The difficulty may be that the picture transforms relations into objects.
Events become things positioned within moments.
Moments become things positioned within time.
Time itself becomes a kind of hidden object that supports all the others.
But once these assumptions are exposed, the apparent solidity of time begins to soften.
Perhaps events are not contained within time at all.
The inversion
Suppose that change is primary.
Suppose that relations among actualisations come first, and that what we call time is a construal emerging from those relations.
On such a view, events do not occupy locations in a pre-existing temporal landscape.
Rather, temporal order emerges from the organisation of relations among phenomena.
Time would not be a container in which change occurs.
Time would be a way of construing changing relations.
The inversion appears small.
Yet its implications are substantial.
Consequences
If time is not primary, then continuity is no longer a backdrop waiting for events to occupy it.
Continuity becomes an achievement.
History no longer appears as a sequence of objects distributed across a line. It becomes an organisation of meanings through which relations are construed.
Past and future cease to be places.
They become orientations within construal.
Even the present changes character.
The present is not a location separating two regions of time.
It is the ongoing edge at which potential becomes actualised.
The world begins to look slightly different.
Not because time disappears.
Clocks still tick. Calendars still function. Days still arrive.
But clocks may not measure the movement of time at all.
Perhaps they coordinate relations among changing phenomena.
And perhaps the invisible container through which we imagined ourselves moving was never there to begin with.
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