[Buddha-l] Time Is Not Real

[Lambert Stepanich]

> One time a young hotshot would-be philosopher 
> tracked down Diogenes ("Socrates gone mad" - as Plato described him) 
> and started explaining to Diogenes how motion was impossible. The 
> young fellow felt that he had finally come up with an airtight case. 
> Diogenes listened for few minutes and then stood up and walked away.

At least, it appeared as if Diogenes stood up and walked away!  But
appearances are not necessarily reality.

I'm rather partial to Kant's argument in the First Antinomy: If time is
something real (transcendentally, absolutely), time would be either
finite or infinite.  But time cannot be either finite or infinite.
Therefore, time is not something real (again, transcendentally, or
absolutely).  

Time cannot be finite because this would require there to be a beginning
to time, a time when time began, which is incoherent.  Equally, time
cannot be infinite, for this would require an infinite period of time to
have actually lapsed for this present moment to occur (or for any
present moment to occur).  However, an infinite series cannot be
completed in time.  

Yes, Kant also makes clear that relative to any possible experience,
time must be taken as something real.  That is, time is "empirically"
real.  But as such, time remains mere appearance, mere form of a
possible finite intuition.  Apart from this condition of cognition, time
is not possible; it is not real.  As Kant puts it in the Dialectic, time
is a "transcendental illusion"; it is a necessary illusion--necessary,
again, from the perspective of an experience of the world.  But time
remains an illusion!

Lambert




-----Original Message-----
From: buddha-l-bounces at mailman.swcp.com
[mailto:buddha-l-bounces at mailman.swcp.com] On Behalf Of Erik Hoogcarspel
Sent: Saturday, February 11, 2006 8:51 AM
To: Buddhist discussion forum
Subject: Re: [Buddha-l] Time Is Not Real

curt schreef:

> The question of whether or not motion is possible was a hot topic back

> in the day in Athens. One time a young hotshot would-be philosopher 
> tracked down Diogenes ("Socrates gone mad" - as Plato described him) 
> and started explaining to Diogenes how motion was impossible. The 
> young fellow felt that he had finally come up with an airtight case. 
> Diogenes listened for few minutes and then stood up and walked away.
> - Curt
> P.S. Several centuries after this alleged event, Diogenes Laertius 
> wrote his "Lives of the Ancient Philosophers". The later Diogenes was 
> an Epicurean, but he seems to have also had an affinity for Cynics 
> like his namesake. Diogenes' Laertius' chapter on Diogenes the Cynic 
> reads like a Zen "recorded sayings of" tract. Diogenes (the Cynics') 
> teacher even carried a big stick and used it to chase away people who 
> wanted to be his student.
>
> Bernie Simon wrote:
>
 Parmenides was the first of course, but Sextus Empiricus (2nd century,
like Naagaarjuna) has similar arguments (Headlines of Pyrrhonism Book 3
XIX). Augustine also believed time to be a part of consciousness and
Schopenhauer used this as proof that the world is just a representation.
But since many people take only materialism to be a serious kind of
philosophy, this kind of observations still hasn't convinced many. 

Erik


www.xs4all.nl/~jehms


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