Abstract
Charles Sanders Peirce is best known as the founder of pragmatism, but the name that he preferred for his overall system of thought was “synechism” because the principle of continuity was its central thesis. He considered time to be the paradigmatic example and often wrote about its various aspects while discussing other topics. This essay draws from many of those widely scattered texts to formulate a distinctively Peircean philosophy of time, incorporating extensive quotations into a comprehensive and coherent synthesis. Time is not an existential subject with past, present, and future as its incompatible predicates, but rather a real law enabling things to possess contrary qualities at its different determinations, and Peirce identifies four classes of such states based on when and how they are realized. Because time is continuous, it is not composed of instants, and even the present is an indefinite lapse during which we are directly aware of constant change. The accomplished past is perpetually growing as the possibilities and conditional necessities of the future are actualized at the present, and the entire universe evolves from being utterly indeterminate toward being absolutely determinate. Nevertheless, time must return into itself even if events are limited to only a portion of it, a paradox that is resolved with the aid of projective geometry. Temporal synechism thus touches on a broad spectrum of philosophical issues including mathematics, phenomenology, logic, and metaphysics.
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Notes
In accordance with standard scholarly practice, published writings by Peirce are cited as follows: CP with volume and paragraph number(s) for (1931–1958), EP with volume and page number(s) for (1992–1998), NEM with volume and page number(s) for (1976), and W with volume and page number(s) for (1982–2009). Most of his writings did not appear in print during his lifetime, and he usually did not write the date of composition on his manuscripts. In such cases, the year given is as assigned by Robin (1967) unless subsequent investigation has produced an updated estimate as documented at http://www.commens.org.
In light of this passage, since Peirce holds that "the concepts of substance and subject are one" (CP 5.448n, EP 2:394, 1906), Hulswit's assertion that "Peircean events are neither changes in substances, no do they presuppose the existence of substances" (2002, p. 191) is plainly incorrect.
Unpublished writings by Peirce (1839–1914) are cited as R or RS with manuscript number in accordance with Robin (1967 or 1971, respectively). Page numbers correspond to the microfilm sequence as reproduced in the scanned images made available online by the Digital Peirce Archive (https://rs.cms.hu-berlin.de/peircearchive) and the Scalable Peirce Interpretation Network (https://fromthepage.com/collection/show?collection_id=16), followed by Peirce's handwritten page numbers [in square brackets] where different.
Richmond (2005) introduced these abbreviations, which are especially useful when diagramming the six possible "vectors" for moving through Peirce's categories: order (1ns → 2ns → 3ns), analysis (3ns → 2ns → 1ns), process (1ns → 3ns → 2ns), aspiration (2ns → 3ns → 1ns), determination (2ns → 1ns → 3ns), and representation (3ns → 1ns → 2ns).
The three categories permeate Peirce's writings, as well as the secondary literature, but it is important not to lose sight of their fundamentally phenomenological nature:
I cannot impart to the reader a correct apprehension of the new categories; that he must achieve by his own efforts. Yet I hope that by the time he has read this paper he will have come to understand them as well as I do myself, perhaps better. At the outset, such a description of these conceptions as I can give may be of some aid. Perhaps it is not right to call these categories conceptions; they are so intangible that they are rather tones or tints upon conceptions. (R 895:29–30, 1885)
Colapietro (2017, p. 435) comments: “It may be the case that not only the categories themselves are tones and tints of conceptions … but also especially effective means for identifying the most subtle tones, tints, and textures of phenomena themselves.” He later adds: “When Peirce’s categories are put to work on the question of time, many of the intricacies of his philosophy are illuminated in surprising and fruitful ways. So, too, are some of the most salient tones, tints, and textures of temporality itself” (p. 452).
The CP editors omitted Peirce's capitalizations of various words, which are restored here in accordance with R 900:64[66].
Colapietro (2017) repeatedly refers to the past, the present, and the future as "dimensions," but Peirce never does so, steadfastly maintaining that time has only one dimension.
Hulswit contends that "our modern worldview is strangely caught between Aristotle's substance ontology and the modern scientific fact ontology" (2002, p. 178), while "Peirce's conception of reality involves an event ontology in the strictest sense of the word" (p. 192), treating these as three irreconcilable alternatives. On the contrary, Peirce's ontology clearly includes both substances (things) and facts (states of things), with events comprising a certain subclass of facts (entire changes).
Helm (1980, p. 381; 1985, p. 29) incorrectly attributes to Peirce the "doctrine" that the present "is at best something like a point instant" that "seems to be nontemporal" and "is outside of time, cut off from the actual and the possible" such that "at the juncture of past and future, there is nothing present".
Helm (1985, p. 33) also misunderstands Peirce as affirming that time "is made up of instants." Peirce indeed states, "The whole content of consciousness is made up of qualities of feeling, as truly as the whole of space is made up of points or the whole of time of instants" (CP 1.317, 1907). However, he goes on to reject all three propositions, averring that "no collection of points, no matter how abnumerable its multitude, can in itself constitute space" (1.319). Likewise, qualities do not constitute consciousness and instants do not constitute time.
This was true in Peirce's day, but carbon's atomic weight of 12 now serves as the standard.
This may be why Peirce declares on the one hand that "atoms swerve … because I conceive they are not absolutely dead" (CP 6.201, 1898), and on the other that "God probably has no consciousness. … A disembodied spirit, or pure mind, has its being out of time, since all that it is destined to think is fully in its being at any and every previous time" (CP 6.489–490, 1908).
Helm (1980, p. 378; 1985, p. 25) makes the dubious claim that such a "discontinuous continuum" is Peirce's own conception, even calling it "Peirce-continuity" or "P-continuity." I have recently provided a very different exposition of his mature theory, proposing five properties as jointly necessary and sufficient for a true Peircean continuum, all of which are exemplified by time: rationality, divisibility, homogeneity, contiguity, and inexhaustibility (Schmidt 2020).
According to Kline (1986, p. 225), it was Bergson "who launched the attack upon the pervasive spatialization of temporal relations" and Whitehead "who continued and deepened it." Ironically, Bergson (1946, pp. 191–193) illustrates what he means by "duration" using several spatial analogies: "the unrolling of a spool," "a continual winding … of thread onto a ball," "a spectrum of a thousand shades," "an elastic being stretched," and "a spring being wound or unwound.".
See note 20.
There are two main alternatives in the current philosophical literature: eternalism, in which the past, the present, and the future all exist; and presentism, in which only the present exists (Miller 2013). While Peirce's mathematical and phenomenological treatments of time are suggestive of eternalism and presentism, respectively, his logical and metaphysical views are clearly most compatible with the growing block.
Never mentioning eternalism by name, Kline (1986, p. 225) raises an insightful objection to it: “The key assumption, that ‘temporal location’ is like ‘spatial location’ and that there is a fundamental symmetry of past and future, tends to generate what I have called ‘the fallacy of the actual future’.” He evidently agrees with Peirce that “great errors of metaphysics are due to looking at the future as something that will have been past” (CP 8.330, 1904) and goes on to point out several troubling ethical, social, and political ramifications (Kline 1986, pp. 228––234). Further echoing Peirce, Kline (p. 227) asserts that a “model or metaphor [for time] of organic growth from bud to blossom to fruit is much more appropriate than any model or metaphor of spatial motion” because it is “cumulative, orderly, and irreversible.”
Peirce explains:
Indeed, so far is the concept of Sequence from being a composite of two Negations, that, on the contrary, the concept of the Negation of any state of things, X, is, precisely, a composite of which one element is the concept of Sequence. Namely, it is the concept of a sequence from X of the essence of falsity. (R 300:52[51], 1908)
This is why, in his system of existential graphs (EGs), he derives a cut for negation from a scroll for implication with its inner close containing the pseudograph (“the essence of falsity”) and reduced to infinitesimal size (CP 4.454–456, 1903; CP 4.454n, c. 1906). Further explaining EGs is beyond the scope of this essay, but I recommend Pietarinen (2015) for a concise introduction. Peirce’s text continues:
The question will here pop up, Why does not this show that the concept of Sequence is a composite of three concepts; that of some antecedent state, that of some consequent state, and between them, that of a state of Heraclitan Flux? It will suggest itself that if a state of motion is sequent upon a state of rest, then before the instant of starting, there is a state of rest; after that instant, there is a state of motion; but at the very start, there is neither rest without motion, nor motion without rest, but equally or indifferently neither rest nor motion, or else, and likewise, both rest and motion. Your question answers itself, since it proposes an analysis that cannot be stated nor distinctly thought, without absurdity. For, to pass over as unspeakable your “or else, and also,” your supposition assumes that there is what we conceive of as Time … (R 300:52–53[51–52], 1908)
The concept of different prolonged states with a gradual state between them presupposes the concept of time, which already involves the concept of sequence.
Peirce mistakenly wrote "quantity" in the manuscript.
De Tienne (2015, p. 33) explores in detail the related questions, "to what extent does the flow of time regulate the flow of signs, and to what extent does the flow of signs influence or determine the flow of time?”
This is a transliteration of the Hebrew expression in Genesis 1:2 that is traditionally rendered in English as "without form and void." Elsewhere Peirce identifies it with "the indeterminate germinal Nothing" (NEM 4:138, 1897–8), "of which nothing whatever affirmative or negative was true universally" (CP 6.490, 1908).
Murphey (1961, pp. 388–389) alleges that Peirce's different pronouncements about the cosmology of time "involve an unavoidable contradiction" and "cannot be made consistent," but evidently did not consider the resolution proposed here.
Peirce mistakenly wrote "finite" in the manuscript.
Peirce mistakenly wrote "not infinite" in the manuscript.
Peirce goes on to discuss three additional diagrams of time, which seem to be the only ones that he ever actually drew: spirals suggesting different ways of conceiving "the character of time as a whole." The equations are included in CP 1.276, but not the graphs, which are among the manuscript fragments in RS 13. In each case, one revolution around the origin corresponds to "the lapse of a year," and the radius corresponds to "the measure of the degree of evolution in the universe."
The first spiral is for a universe that “had an absolute beginning at a point of time in the past immeasurable in years,” and whose “stage of evolution … constantly increases … until its final destruction in the infinitely distant future.” The second is for a universe that also began “in the infinitely distant past,” but whose “evolution does not stop” in the infinitely distant future; instead, it “continues uninterruptedly” for an infinite series of infinite series of years. The third is for a universe that “was created a finite number of years ago … and will go on for an infinite series of years approximating indefinitely to a state … after which it will begin to advance again, and will advance until after another infinite lapse of years it will then in a finite time reach the stage … when it will be suddenly destroyed.” Peirce concludes, “This last spiral is much the most instructive of the three; but all are useful. The reader will do well to study them.”
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Acknowledgements
I wish to express my deep appreciation to Gary Richmond and Gary Fuhrman for engaging with me in extensive e-mail exchanges over the course of several months that enabled me to work out, refine, and ultimately coalesce my thinking on the subject matter of this essay. Their inclination toward and aptitude for phenomenology were especially valuable as a necessary check on my own much more mathematical and logical bent. I am also grateful to Jeff Downard for offering a few provocative questions and comments about hyperbolic cosmology in a discussion on the Peirce-L e-mail list (http://www.iupui.edu/~arisbe/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm).
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Schmidt, J.A. Temporal Synechism: A Peircean Philosophy of Time. Axiomathes 32, 233–269 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-020-09523-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-020-09523-6