The schema comprises a highly general, entirely initial, mapping of four basic orders of time; physical time, historical temporality, biotemporality and metaphysical time. At bottom, the concept on offer is this: that it is possible to conceptually delimit basic dimensions which, in their dynamic interrelationships, comprise the structured totality that is Time. {Physical Time / Biotemporality / Historical Temporality/ Metaphysical Time} Each of these is to be considered as implicating, even nesting, the other dimensions, yet each is amenable to highly specific interest and research, and each has unique and irreducible properties of its own. Initial interrogations of the schema might include such questions as: (1) “Does denoting the physical and metaphysical dimensions as “x Time” and the biological and historical as “x-temporality” have any significance? (2) “Is there an implicit order of material antecedence, and/or hierarchy of meaning among these dimensions?” (3) “Surely Metaphysical Time, should simply be disposed of, as you certainly cannot mean that there is a special kind of immaterial time that is outside the material studies of science and history?” It will be useful to answer each of these questions, as doing so will necessarily involve a brief introduction to each of the four dimensions, and an even briefer exploration of their possible relations.

(1) Yes. Time and temporality naturally do mean different things, and one is not wishing to play fast and loose with those meanings here. Physics and metaphysics would be concerned with attempts provide full and fundamental descriptions of time “in itself”, prior to the biological and the historical. Physical time implies a realist conception of time based on the constant increase of entropy — the arrow of time — and surely the second law of thermodynamics was around long before any creature existed with a sense or a concept of time, not to mention the all the events that were necessary for such creatures to come to be. Beings within time, who relate to time sensually and cognitively, are the concern of the temporalities. Their truth is that of the proliferation of different experiences/cognitions of time. Of course, this was already true within physics itself, at least since Einstein. Newton’s universal, homogenous, empty time was suddenly made to bend and warp and remake itself around the interrelations of a host of perspectives and objects. However, when Einstein explained that how much time elapses for a person depends on how they travel through space (especially near the speed of light) as well as the gravitational field (especially if it’s near a black hole), this did not make physics about temporality — rather it simply showed that temporality had a physical basis. If we then shift to a biological perspective, we see the time measured by atomic clocks isn’t as important to us as the time measured by our internal rhythms.

(2) No such hierarchy or antecedence is necessitated by the schema itself, but I nonetheless want to suggest that it can help us clarify the sense in which an order of antecedence, as a progressive series of moments in the emergence of orders of temporality, could actually occur. From physical entropy, to the counterflow to this created by life’s dynamic decrease of entropy within its own systems, to the evolution of time perception, to the socially elaborated development of shared temporal beliefs and orientations, to the scientifico-philosophical interrogation of these beliefs and their underpinnings, and therefore, back again. What is more, holding to the importance of a definite chronology of the emergence of temporalities within Time is vital to the realism to which this schema is the would be midwife.

(3) The weakest part of this schema is doubtlessly the “Metaphysics of Time”. What is there about the nature of Time which is not, ultimately, a question for the physicists? Yes, but in doing so physicists will, all the same, be doing metaphysics. Or: Yes, but physics is still laden with ultimately metaphysical concepts when it discusses the consequences of its image of time’s reality. Not for nothing did Karl Popper label Einstein’s vision of a deterministic reality to time as a fourth dimension — every event, every cause and effect already laid-out in every direction — a “Parmenidean Block Universe”, and argue that it fails the test of true realism in so far as it denies any meaningful reality to the ways we perceive and cognise Time.

Sartre effectively exposed the logical incoherence of both presentism (we’ve covered this one, right?) and eternalism (all events in all directions in time are equally real and equally existen) in Being and Nothingness, but he based his alternative positing of temporality as a structured totality on the transcendental reality of the subject. The structure of temporality seems, in his argument, to be exhausted by that of subjectivity. Here, we are treating the structure of time as transcending and conditioning subjectivity more than the reverse, and ultimately, no matter how much space is given to subjective experience within any dimension of this schema, the schema itself determines that time cannot be treated as a purely subjective phenomenon. This is, crucially, why a category such as “subjective time” does not appear independently in this schema, instead it would be derived from the dynamic interstice of historical temporality and bio-temporality. We do matter, temporally (in some strange way, our consciousness — considered in its social, biological and psychological totality — may just be the material substance of temporality), but this does not mean that time and temporality rely for their existence on the transcendental constitution of our consciousness. The structured totality of time is ultimately real, independent and external to us, and we are more the consequences of its unfolding than the special angels that bear up and bless its revelation. Although I remain somewhat open to the possibility that we may, in a sense at least, be both.

J.M.E. McTaggart’s “B-series”, Augustine of Hippo’s timeless God, the Buddhist philosophers’ concept of the Dharmadhata — these are some of the various eternalist block universes. Eternalist in the sense that the past continues to exist. Nothing ever falls into nothingness. Something may decay in the present, but its past remains undisturbed. Change, really, once again, is denied. If we accept the four-dimensional thesis of time-realism, if we accept the meaningful existence of past, future and present, and if we mean this in an objective instead of merely subjective, transcendental or interpretative, sense, does this really mean we have to also accept eternalism? What if Time itself is a shifting manifold, neither frozen in an eternal past, nor locked to a predestined future? Moving, shifting, growing, dying — tentacle-y shifts occurring at it’s further edges as probabilities coalesce into inevitability and distant causes are superceded by new possibilities. The past is its rate of decay: the breaking of pottery and the bleaching of bones, the losing of a vital moment to indecision, the fading memory of a dead loved one… Any metaphysics which trades in unreal absolutisations and hypostasisations of Time will always be trading in ontologies that are cut off from historical and subjective experience. They will hence render that experience unmoored from any logical basis. They will make participation in political action insignifigant, because temporal reality on which a sense of history depends will be dismissed, from the high heavens of this supposed enlightenment, as an illusion. Eternalism may offer no hope for a philosophical response to the illogic of capitalism, but I hold that, despite its ill-reputation as reputed “castle-building”, metaphysics can, working painstakingly to reconcile the different disciplinary dimensions of this schema, provide clarity on the fundamental questions with which Time presents us — which is to say, logical clarity as to the fundamental nature of time and how we are temporal beings. This is a necessity for any argument against capitalism, or, indeed, any social order, which desires its logic to be rigorous and grounded.

Or, maybe metaphysics is simply the articulated study of how the other dimensions coexist and interact — the discoverer of this space of compossibility I mentioned earlier. The assumption here might be that all these dimensions here are implicit in one another. How, though, could historical time feedback onto physical time? We could answer, plainly, that the play of social forces will determine what material resources are available to physics and the general ideological framework from which their assumptions and interpretations will be deployed; hence, history will affect, inflect and even potentially derail physical time — as an epistemological category. That is a perfectly satisfactory answer, but it is also somewhat boring. It is bread, not roses. The schema is rather more exciting if we use it in both epistemological and ontological ways. Here we can launch into another branch of speculative metaphysics that is generally known as “science fiction”. Why should not history deliver a civilisation advanced enough to alter the course of time itself, in ways yet unimaginable, or build a simulated universe whose physics determine time differently? Time, after all, is long. I see good reasons for metaphysics to be preserved partly as an arena for such speculations, rather than humourlessly dismissing them, even (perhaps especially) if they remain sophisticated games. History, however, is certainly not a game, and if it smiles, it tends to do so with grim irony.