I raise these points because in 1941 I attempted to carry out a project of Wittgenstein’s and to show how all the so-called problems of Time arose out of a strange misunderstanding of the flexible ways of our language, so that we asked questions which could not be answered simply because they violated logical grammar. The concept of the Now of the Present is in ordinary usage infinitely flexible: it can be stretched to cover a decade or a century, or narrowed down to cover what is over in a flas…
Read moreI raise these points because in 1941 I attempted to carry out a project of Wittgenstein’s and to show how all the so-called problems of Time arose out of a strange misunderstanding of the flexible ways of our language, so that we asked questions which could not be answered simply because they violated logical grammar. The concept of the Now of the Present is in ordinary usage infinitely flexible: it can be stretched to cover a decade or a century, or narrowed down to cover what is over in a flash. We are, therefore, inclined to extend it till it covers the whole history of the universe, or to narrow it down till it becomes a mere limit, no sooner arrived at than departed from, and in which it is not significant to posit either a state or a change. In the latter case, we have, then, the problem of constituting Time out of such momentary nothings, which are, even qua nothings, not there all together or, alternatively, of wondering how anything can happen if, before it happens, something else must first happen, and before that again something else, and so on ad infinitum. We have, in short, all the difficulties with which Augustine and Zeno plagued the ancients, to which we may now add the difficulties with which McTaggart has worried the moderns, asking how the same event can be future, present, and past, when it must be these incompatible things at different successive times, and these times, in their turn, must be future, present, and past at different times, and so on ad infinitum. To all these celebrated difficulties the line that I took was plain: that they arose out of imposing a wrong exactness and a wrong generality on the flexible ways of our speech. Augustine and Zeno perplexed us since we failed to see that the present, though never of zero or infinite length, could be just as long or as short as we liked to make it, and McTaggart confused us since we failed to see that there were two distinct ways of talking about events and states, one which remained invariant wherever one was stationed in history, and one which changed according as one changed one’s historical position, and that there was nothing self-contradictory in either form of speech but only in the attempt to combine them.
