McTaggart

John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart

McTaggart is famous for an argument that sounds absurd, that time is unreal, and for a distinction so fundamental that every philosopher of time since has had to speak his language. The A-series and the B-series, past-present-and-future set against earlier-and-later, are his coinage, and the whole modern philosophy of time is in effect a long argument over a claim he made in 1908. Yet the famous argument is only one piece of a vast and strange system, a rigorous, almost geometrical metaphysics that ends by concluding that reality is a timeless community of eternal selves bound together by love.

The corpus and how the chat cites it. This room reads McTaggart's magnum opus, The Nature of Existence (two volumes, 1921 and 1927), public domain by way of the Internet Archive; the celebrated argument about time forms its Book V. His short paper "The Unreality of Time" (in Mind, 1908) is the classic compressed statement, and Some Dogmas of Religion and Studies in Hegelian Cosmology stand behind the discussion. The Nature of Existence is divided into numbered sections, and the chat cites them. Expect citations of the form The Nature of Existence, section 306.

Life. McTaggart was born in 1866 and spent almost his whole career as a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was the leading British Idealist of his generation and the great Cambridge interpreter of Hegel. In their student years Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore sat under his influence, before the two of them turned to launch the realist revolt that would sweep idealism aside. He was an atheist who nonetheless argued for the immortality of the human self, famous for his wit, his eccentric loyalty to his college, and an unswerving devotion to the system he spent his life constructing.

Where to begin. Start with "The Unreality of Time" for the celebrated argument in miniature, then take up The Nature of Existence for the full system, the method and the self in the first volume, time and the community of selves in the second, and turn to Some Dogmas of Religion for his accessible treatment of God and immortality.

The A-series and the B-series. Here is his immortal distinction. The events of time can be ordered in two ways. The B-series orders them by the permanent relations of earlier and later: the Battle of Hastings is earlier than the Battle of Waterloo, always was, and always will be. The A-series orders them as past, present, and future, and this ordering will not hold still, for an event that is now future becomes present and then slips ever further into the past. The B-series is tenseless and fixed; the A-series is tensed and flowing. This single pair of concepts is McTaggart's permanent gift to philosophy, and the modern field divides, along exactly his line, into those who think the passage of time is real and those who think only earlier and later truly are.

The argument that time is unreal. The notorious proof runs in two steps. First, time essentially involves change, and real change requires the A-series, since in the B-series nothing ever alters, Hastings being eternally earlier than Waterloo; only the flow of future into present into past is genuine change, so without the A-series there is no time. But, second, the A-series is contradictory. Every event must be past and present and future, and these characteristics exclude one another. To reply that each event has them in succession rather than at once is to say that an event is present, will be past, and has been future, which simply uses past, present, and future over again and sets off an infinite regress that never lays the contradiction to rest. Since time requires the A-series and the A-series is contradictory, time itself, McTaggart concludes, is unreal.

What the argument really shows. Whatever one makes of the conclusion, and most philosophers reject it, the argument is no curiosity. It forced the philosophy of time to become rigorous, and the question at its core, whether the passage of time is a real feature of the world or only of how we represent it, is still the central question of the field. McTaggart did for time what Zeno did for motion: he produced a paradox that will not go away and that every serious account must answer. Beneath the appearance of time, he held, lies a real but non-temporal ordering he called the C-series, an order without direction or flow, which our minds mistakenly experience as the rushing river of past and future.

The system: selves and love. The strangest and most moving part of McTaggart comes when the same rigor is turned on the whole of reality. The Nature of Existence deduces, from a handful of abstract premises and with a Spinoza-like patience, a complete picture of what there is. Matter is unreal; time is unreal; even sensation is unreal. What is finally real, McTaggart argues, is a community of individual selves, persons, each one eternal and indestructible, and the substance of their existence is their perceptions of one another. And the deepest bond uniting these eternal selves, he concludes, is love, so that reality, beneath the illusion of a material and temporal world, is a timeless harmony of selves who love one another. It is mysticism reached by logic.

Idealism without God. McTaggart was an idealist, holding reality to be spiritual through and through, but he broke with the usual idealism in two ways. He refused to let the many selves be swallowed into a single Absolute: reality is a genuine society of distinct persons, a pluralistic idealism. And he denied God, finding no infinite creator anywhere in his system, even as he held the finite selves to be immortal and eternal. An atheist who proved, to his own satisfaction, the immortality of the soul, he is one of the true originals of modern philosophy.

Reception, and adjacent reading. McTaggart was the last great system-builder of British Idealism, and the irony of his career is that his most famous pupils carried off its defeat: the realism of their revolt kept his demand for rigor and turned it against the idealism he loved. Read now, he is the author of the framework within which all philosophy of time is still conducted and the maker of one of the boldest metaphysical systems of the modern age. He reworked the dialectic of Hegel and stood beside Bradley as a great British Idealist; he built his system in the deductive, a priori manner of Spinoza; his denial of the reality of time renews the ancient argument of Parmenides that change is illusion; and his student Russell, with G. E. Moore, turned his own demand for rigor against the idealism McTaggart had taught them. His A-series and B-series will be used as long as philosophers argue about time.