이번에 과제로 낸 Short Essay인데 좋은 평을 받았네요. 개인적으로는 현대철학 셋업이 조금 아쉽긴 합니다. 그래도 나쁘지 않은 것 같기도 하고, 이걸로 따로 작업을 할 거 같지도 않아서 올립니다.
Schopenhauer’s Philosophy of Time
In his World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer argues that future and past are unreal, and only now is real. In this paper, I suggest that Schopenhauer’s philosophy of time can be in dialogue with contemporary philosophy of time.
One view in philosophy of time is presentism. For presentism, only present things exist. Dinosaurs once existed and they don’t any more; what exists is what exists in the present, e.g. human beings. Four-dimensionalism, the rival view, states that objects are extended over time and are constituted by various temporal slices, but, for presentism, whole objects endure over time. When I see this pen, I am not looking at a temporal part of this pen but the pen as a whole. So, presentism is also called an “endurantism.” This view is intuitively appealing, because past things have been and future things are not yet. Although presentism is said to be more “common-sense,” one argument against presentism is the problem of persistence. Consider Alice who has been standing in time t1 and sitting in time t2. So, Alice had a property of being straight-shaped in t1 and bent-shaped in t2. But Leibniz’s Law states that x and y are identical iff x and have the same set of properties. But Alice at t1 and Alice at t2 have different sets of properties, which means that they are not identical. But in the presentist framework, Alice at t1 and Alice at t2 are identical. So, presentism runs into a contradiction. Four-dimensionalism is free from this charge, because Alice at t1 and Alice at t2 are different parts of Alice. Just like Alice’s left and right hand occupy different spatial locations that constitute Alice as a whole, Alice at t1 and Alice at t2 are different temporal slices, i.e. occupy different temporal locations, constituting Alice as a whole. So, the problem of persistence is in favor of four-dimensionalism.
Schopenhauer’s philosophy of time can be in dialogue with this contemporary philosophy of time. On the one hand, Schopenhauer seems to be a presentist: “only the present is always there and fixed immovably in place” (WWR I §54, pg. 305). But Schopenhauer's view differs from presentism. For presentism, past things have been; they no longer are. But Schopenhauer thinks that all spatio-temporal objects are appearances, regardless of them being in the past or present. For Schopenhauer, the world is one, will, and it is manifested as spatio-temporal objects. In other words, spatio-temporal objects are appearances or illusions. What Schopenhauer does mean by that sentence, instead, is that it is only at the present that I can have an immediate access to will, thing-in-itself. If, for example, I cognize objects or remember what I cognized in the past, then I have access only to the manifestations of appearances of will. But in the present, if I act, e.g. raise my hand, I have immediate access to will. As Wicks puts it, “if we focus upon the experience of the present, noting that ‘the present alone is that which is always there and immovably steadfast,’ we can have a more purified perception that is mostly independent from considerations of the future and the past” (Wicks 74). It is in this sense in which Schopenhauer puts priority to present without being a presentist. Now, Schopenhauer’s philosophy of time, on first blush, might not be attractive for contemporary metaphysicians. For Schopenhauer’s commitment that objects are illusions is not widely accepted in contemporary metaphysics. However, note that Schopenhauer is free from the problem of persistence: because objects are appearances, the non-persistence of illusion is not problematic. The fact that illusions change their properties doesn’t mean that the real thing, will, changes. Therefore, Schopenhauer’s philosophy of time can place some priority to the present without having the problem of persistence. Then, Schopenhauer’s philosophy of time can be an attractive alternative for presentism.
Works Cited
Builes, D. 2023. “A Humean Non-Humeanism.” Philosophical Studies 180.3: 1-18
Haslanger, S. 2003. “Persistence through Time” in The Oxford Handbook of Metaphysics, ed.
Michael J. Loux & Dean W. Zimmerman (New York: Oxford University Press), 315-354.
Wicks, Robert. 2008. Schopenhauer (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell).
+) Builes 와 Haslanger은 "그래도 4차원주의는 problem of persistence를 풀긴 하지만 ex nihilo, nihilo fit이나 Hume's dictum 을 어기면서 푸는 것이다. 그렇기 때문에 이렇게 단순한 문제는 아니다"라는 주석을 달면서 인용한 건데, 복붙하면서 주석이 날라갔네요. 원래 이 주석은 두번째 단락 끝에 있었습니다. (주석 원문: I am overly simplifying the case here, of course. Some presentists argue that four-dimensionalism solves the problem of persistence at the cost of violating other doctrines like ex nihilo, nihilo fit or Hume’s dictum. See Haslanger (2003) and Builes (2023))