Abstract: Our thinking about time is replete with metaphors, some insightful, others bewildering, and this observation is by no means confined to our ordinary ways. The philosophy of time, too, makes frequent use of figurative speech. In many cultures, we face
the future, while the past is behind us; in others, the orientation is reversed. The future may or may not be open, we are being told, while the past is anyway closed. Temporal reality is sometimes said to consist of a static block, or a block that continues growing, its edge continuously being pushed farther out, or, alternatively, it is reduced to what would be a mere slice or layer of such a block, if such a block existed at all (which, allegedly, it does not).
When thinking things through to their logical conclusion, such metaphors are often hard to shake off, the imagery imposing its own logic. And then it may happen that we end up confused or professing garbled views that, at worst, invite ridicule. Yet, this danger of being led astray not only threatens those who profess ideas couched in metaphor. As we shall see, it likewise threatens their critics.
For a philosopher of time, the hard task is to circle in on the literal content these metaphors convey and take the discussion from there. This has its own pitfalls. For, the more natural the metaphor comes to us in ordinary speak, the more tempting it is to construe the literal content it conveys as a mere commonplace. One thereby risks losing sight of substantive metaphysical debates that we can reasonably engage in only after all imagery has been left behind.
One of the most pervasive metaphors is that of time’s passing. The time of one’s death inevitably gets closer, while the days of one’s youth, regretfully or mercifully, recede into the ever more distant past. Here, we shall revisit an old polemic about temporal passage and show that, while prominent critics succumb to the threat of overstating the metaphor’s implications, getting off on the wrong foot and embroiling us in paradox, prominent proponents tend to understate the metaphysical import of the literal content the metaphor conveys, misconstruing the latter as a mere platitude and thereby also, inevitably, mischaracterising the opposition.
More specifically, we shall argue that, if time passes, its passage is not, as critics would have it, the supposed ‘reeling past’ of an independently given time line composed of instants bearing permanent relations of succession, where such ‘reeling past’ must take place in a higher time dimension. Rather, temporal passage, if such there be, consists of changes in facts that constitute, or ground, the succession of instants in the first placeand thus the line of ordinary time. This grounding claim, originating with McTaggart, far exceeds the observation that it makes perfect sense to say, in the tensed way of ordinary discourse, that some of what used to be the case no longer is the case, and that some of what will be the case is not yet the case. As such, it is a piece of substantive and controversial metaphysics.
