Illuminator of Jaina Tenets

Author(s): Tulsi Acharya
Publisher: Jain Vishva Bharati

Page 22

INTRODUCTION
separate from time. Observers in relative motion to one another will take their space and time axes at different angles to one another; they will, so to speak, slice space-time at different angles. The special theory of relativity, at least, is quite consistent with either an absolute or a relational philosophical account of space-time, for the fact that spacetime can be sliced at different angles does not imply that it is not something on its own account.
Some philosophers felt that time was incapable of rational discursive treatment and that it was able to be grasped only by intuition.
Augustine was puzzled by how we could measure time. He seems to. have been impressed by the lack of analogy between spatial and temporal measurement.
We commonly think of time as a stream that flows as a sea over which we advance. The two metaphors come to much the same thing, forming part of a whole way of thinking about time which D.C. Williams has called "the myth of passage." If time flies past us or if we advance through time, this would be a motion with respect to a hypertime. The idea of time as passing is connected with the idea of events changing from future to past. We think of events as coming from the future and caught in the spotlight of the present and then receding into the past.
The philosophical notion of duration seems to be heavily infected with the myth of passage. Thus, Locke says that "duration is fleeting extension.” More recently, Bergson has made the notion of duration (durée) central in his philosophy. According to him, physical time is something spatialized and intellectualized, whereas the real thing, with which we are acquainted in intuition (inner experience), is duration. Unlike physical time, which is always measured by comparing discrete spatial positions, for example, of clock hands-duration is the experienced change itself, the directly intuited nonspatial stream of consciousness in which past, present and future flow into one another. Bergson's meaning is unclear, partly because he thinks that duration is something to be intuitively, not intellectually, grasped. It is closely connected in his thought with memory, for in memory, he says, the past survives in the present. Here he would seem to be open to the objection, u against him by Bertrand Russell in his History of Western Philosophy, that he confuses the memory of the past event with the past event itself or the thought with that which is thought about.
The theory of relativity illustrates the advantage of replacing the