1.

There is a well-known model of rational agency according to which a rational person's reasons for doing X will be such that doing X is either his end, or is something he takes to be a means to his end (or one of his ends). According to this model, a person has as end or goal some achievable state of affairs, such as feeling pleasure, and this goal renders certain courses of action prima facie suitable, namely those courses which would bring about the state of affairs, or would raise the likelihood of its coming to be. The person may have false beliefs about which courses of action are thus suitable for him, but this merely indicates the need for a distinction, between what he has ‘objective’ reason to do, and what he has ‘subjective’ reason to do. His practical rationality will not as such be impugned if he does something which is only ‘subjectively’ rational, though his theoretical rationality may be impugned, if it is the explanation for why the relevant belief of his is false.

This sketch will be familiar, as describing a model of rational choice which is standard among economists and decision theorists, its key notion being that of ‘expected value’, or alternatively ‘expected utility’. It is a sketch only, and more detail could be added. But for present purposes, we need only look at a class of reasons for action which are inexplicable on this model of agency – namely, backward-looking reasons.

An example of a backward-looking motive is the motive of gratitude for a service done. Reasons and motives are alike elicited by the question ‘Why?’, as in ‘Why are you doing that?’, and if I ask you why you are sending flowers to Emily, let us suppose you reply, ‘Because she drove me to hospital when I broke my arm’. On the face of it, your reason mentions a past fact, a fact of recent history. But the philosopher who adheres to the expected utility model will look for a way of describing your action that makes it appear to be aiming at bringing something about, and will thus reject ‘Because she drove me to hospital’ as a statement of the ‘real’ reason. What aim or goal could be alleged in this case? Two kinds of answer suggest themselves. The first kind makes use of the key word, here ‘gratitude’, and inserts it into the means-end format, thus yielding the putative reason for action: ‘In order to show my gratitude’. The second kind of answer relies on the notion of pleasure, as a state that is produceable by actions; we then either have the egoistic reason, ‘In order to derive pleasure from my own action’, or the more altruistic ‘In order to give pleasure to Emily’.

Both these accounts can be shown to be mistaken, and for similar reasons. Your sending flowers to Emily may in a sense be called a means to your end, that of expressing gratitude, insofar as it is a way of expressing gratitude. But we have to ask, ‘What is gratitude?’ And any adequate answer will allude to what sort of reason for an action makes it a grateful action – namely, such a reason as ‘Because she drove me to hospital’. The force of ‘In order to show gratitude’, in other words, here rests on the prior force of a backward-looking reason. It is no good treating the sending of flowers to Emily as your goal or desired outcome, to which means-end deliberation is indeed relevant; for this ‘goal’ does not in fact give your ultimate reason for action. For you can informatively answer the question, ‘Why are you sending flowers to Emily?’, and it is your answer to this that gives your ultimate reason. The decision theorist may allege that the reason you thus give has the function of ascribing a ‘value’ to the outcome of Emily's receiving your flowers, in this way insisting that your goal is after all this outcome. But this ‘value’ is evidently not intrinsic to the state of affairs in question, since it would lack that value if Emily had never taken you to hospital. How might one explain to someone what this ‘value’ consists in? Answer: by employing or invoking the statement, ‘Because she drove me to hospital’. The other person would understand your explanation of the value of sending flowers if and only if they were familiar with the force of such a statement as a reason for action.Footnote ²

I said just now that the so-called value of sending flowers to Emily would not be intrinsic to the act; but some philosophers do speak of such actions as grateful acts and promise-keepings as having intrinsic value, as also such actions as ungrateful acts and promise-breakings, these latter having intrinsic negative value. Thus John Broome writes, ‘If you break a promise, one consequence will be that you have broken a promise, and the wrongness of promise breaking can be taken as a bad feature of this consequence…In this way, the intrinsic value of acts can be absorbed into teleology.’Footnote ³ (‘Teleology’ is the form of utilitarianism Broome is defending.) If I keep a promise, then presumably it is under the description keeping a promise that my action is to be made out as having intrinsic value – for it probably won't have any intrinsic value, except accidentally, under some such description as bringing Smith a book. But one could argue analogously that under the description providing for my descendants the action of investing my money in a certain way has intrinsic value. This latter way of talking would usually be ruled out by distinguishing the value an act has in itself from the value it has on account of what happens subsequently (especially what happens as a result of the act); and similarly, one ought to distinguish the value an act has in itself from the value it has on account of what happened earlier. The crucial point to make concerning your sending flowers to Emily is just that, if we are to speak of the action's having a certain value, then that value depends on past facts, and as far as rational choice goes, it is these past facts that the agent must mention in giving his reasons for his action.

Once it is recognised that the ultimate reason for a grateful action is not given by mentioning the action itself (under some description), the inapplicability of the expected utility model can be seen in the fact that there is no place for an assignment of probability in connection with the agent's ultimate reason. If sending flowers to Emily were my ultimate end, then to be sure I could assign some probability to my achieving that end, given my adoption of certain means, such as phoning Interflora. But I cannot sensibly ask, ‘If I send flowers to Emily, what is the probability of my achieving my end, that of showing gratitude?’ In sending the flowers I thereby show my gratitude. One seems forced to say that the probability of my showing gratitude is 1 – which indicates, not a delightful source of epistemic certainty, but the pointlessness of this way of talking. (Compare the answer to ‘If time flows, how fast does it flow?’ – ‘At a rate of 1 second per second’.) It is essential to the expected utility model that a rational agent both assign some value to a given outcome, and also assign some probability to it (given the adoption of certain means). So the expected utility model is inapplicable to actions, such as grateful ones, whose ultimate reasons are backward-looking.

What of the second sort of account I mentioned (four paragraphs back), the sort that relies on the notion of pleasure as a state produceable by one's actions? It can be asked what sort of pleasure it is that is allegedly being aimed at. Presumably any pleasure felt by the sender is meant to be pleasure in the fact of the recipient's pleasure. And Emily will feel pleasure on receiving flowers because flowers are lovely things; but why do you want to bring her this pleasure? If the reply is, ‘Because she drove me to hospital’, the backward-looking reason has resurfaced. If the reply is, ‘To feel pleasure myself’, then why choose Emily, as opposed to any other susceptible individual? Again, the obvious answer is, and must be if what we have here is gratitude, ‘Because she drove me to hospital’.

A rather desperate move is now sometimes made, that of bringing in induction, in the following sort of way: ‘I have found in the past that the pleasure I get when I give pleasure to people who have helped me is greater than if I were giving pleasure to other kinds of people; so I now calculate that if I send flowers, etc. etc.’Footnote ⁴ Now the idea that a type of intentional action should be found to produce the thing that constitutes its own rationale is clearly a bit peculiar. This is especially true of actions not of the sort that you were trained to do in childhood: for it could be alleged that actions of the sort that you were trained to do in childhood were initially motivated by something different, namely a desire for parental approval (or perhaps indeed these early actions were cases of mere imitation, not yet fully intentional). But consider the person who for the first time in her life performs an act of vengeance, this not being the sort of thing inculcated by Mummy and Daddy. What can the aim of such an action be, on this first occasion? There is, after all, no experiential basis for predicting any particular outcome, e.g. a ‘pleasure state’ – so it seems as if the action must be pointless, according to the ‘expected utility’ model. (We might now postulate some reason like, ‘I have noticed that other people get pleasure from vengeful acts, so on the assumption that I am like them, I calculate…’ – evidently ludicrous.) Apart from all this, there are in any case backward-looking motives which it is quite implausible to reduce to forms of pleasure-seeking, such as motives of fidelity or loyalty that result in self-sacrifice.

All in all, then, the case for the existence of genuinely backward-looking reasons looks rather strong.Footnote ⁵ Such reasons appear to falsify the expected utility model of rational agency, or indeed any model which insists that rational agents always look either to the future effects of their actions or to those actions’ intrinsic value. But it may now be claimed that although we do give and accept facts about the past as reasons for our actions, this very fact shows our irrationality. Maybe certain tribes have given and accepted as a reason for not doing X that X is ‘taboo’; but can't we criticise that practice as irrational? Mightn't it be the same with backward-looking reasons?

When we criticise the notion of ‘taboo’, used as I am imagining it being used, we do so on account of the fact that the term ‘taboo’ fails to link up to human good or ill, in the sort of way which might make its prohibitive force intelligible. ‘Why should I avoid eating that?’ ‘You'll be sick if you do.’ This answer is quite intelligible; and the further question, ‘Why should I avoid being sick?’, points to an imagined need for a reason where there is none. By contrast, if the answer to ‘Why should I avoid eating that?’ were ‘Because eating it would be taboo’, then no reason would yet have been given, unless the activities listed as taboo can be made out as harmful, or bad in some way.

The intelligibility, as a reason for grateful action, of ‘Because she drove me to hospital’ is connected to what is good or bad for human beings, just as is the intelligibility of ‘Because you'll be sick’. And this is because the phenomenon of gratitude, or returning good for good, is normal and natural for human beings (like loving your offspring and resenting injury), but additionally because a prevalence of habits of gratitude is conducive to social harmony, and this fact makes a reason for action which is expressive of gratitude fitted as a reason, in the context of the social language-game of asking for and giving reasons. Our concepts of what a good person is, and of what is good for human beings, are not purely naturalistic: their shape is partly determined by the social and empirical nature of the human practice of reason-giving. Giving reasons for what you do is giving an account of yourself, especially to others.

I spoke just now of the habit of gratitude as being conducive to social harmony; and this may seem to suggest that we do, after all, have a forward-looking rationale or justification for the human practice of accepting backward-looking reasons, at any rate of the kind associated with gratitude and the like. The statement ‘This practice is a good idea because it will (continue to) achieve social harmony’ surely invokes a forward-looking reason? But, firstly, we did not decide to institute the practice of having backward-looking reasons, nor are we continuing with this practice for any reason – any more than we speak a language because of the expected benefits of doing so; secondly, even if we did have forward-looking reasons for going in for the practice, this would not show that the moves within the practice, i.e. the giving and accepting of backward-looking reasons, were after all not what they appeared.

One could perhaps argue that facts about social harmony help to explain the survival and spread of this practice among human beings; but this would not reduce the force of backward-looking reasons to that of a forward-looking one, nor would it provide a ‘justification’ for the practice, any more than an empirical explanation for the success and spread of an empire with its customs ipso facto provides a justification, either of the empire or of its customs.

I said above that habits of gratitude, and similar habits, are normal and natural for human beings, a fact that helps to explain why the associated backward-looking reasons count as compelling within the language-game of asking for and giving reasons for action. However, the human phenomenon under discussion is richer than the phrase ‘normal and natural’ would suggest, all on its own; for part of what is at issue is our way of perceiving the world, and ourselves and our actions. This ‘way of perceiving’ necessarily involves the past, in ways to which I now turn.

2.

Understanding the significance of something often involves seeing it against the background of a larger context, a bigger picture. One instance of this truth is Frege's Context Principle, as enunciated in the Introduction to The Foundations of Arithmetic, where Frege enjoins us ‘never to ask for the meaning [Bedeutung] of a word in isolation, but only in the context of a proposition’. Another instance can be found within human institutions and rule-governed practices: a piece of paper only counts as a ten pound note against a background containing banks, activities of buying and selling, etc. etc. And many events and phenomena have the significance they do because of what led up to them, or came before them. For the ‘background’ to an event, insofar as it is something we can know about, talk about, agree or disagree about, will typically be in the past.

Take an event within a piece of music. A cadence, a climax, a broadening out, and numerous other kinds of musical event, are what they are because of what has led up to them. You only hear those two chords as constituting a modulation, and so as being a harbinger of peace, or a cloud moving across the sun, or whatever, on account of what has just preceded them. Now this is not to say that what happens after a musical event doesn't also help determine the character of the event. Thus the point of a gradual build-up is evidently in what it builds up to. But even here there is a certain priority of past over future: for the characterisation of the passage as a build-up relies on the perspective of the listener who finally hears the apotheosis, in the light of what has already happened – even though past musical experience may on occasion incline you to guess that what you're presently hearing is bound to be a build-up of some sort. (Rossini.) You can, after all, be cheated, and hence proven wrong, by a mischievous or incompetent composer; whereas a certain pair of chords cannot help constituting a modulation as they occur, given what has happened. What is written is written.

Analogous remarks can be made about the events of human life. Your sending flowers to Emily is a case in point: it is what it is because of what Emily has done for you in the past. Again, this is not to deny that a historical event will often assume a certain significance on account of what came after it – as with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914. But here too it is the perspective of those who recall the event which is crucial. For it is in effect they who give it its significance, which is thus a retrospective significance.

A possible partial diagnosis of why people are attracted to the expected utility model of agency suggests itself. Perhaps such people are imagining states of affairs as necessarily having some sort of intrinsic value, intrinsic significance. If they were right it would follow that the significance of a present action and a past state of affairs must be mutually independent, so that only the prospect of affecting ‘overall significance’ would seem to supply any reason for or against performing an action – which is to say, only the significance of the action itself, and/or the possible significance of future states of affairs, would seem to supply such a reason. But if I am right that there are species of significance that involve the broader context, and hence (in the case of events in time) that involve the past, then this notion of ‘intrinsic significance’ cannot be universally applicable.

It is even doubtful if it is ever applicable; for an investigation of those concepts that have, in the traditional accounts, been particularly associated with ‘intrinsic value’ shows, I think, that the traditional accounts have got things wrong. I am thinking especially of the concept of pleasure, which is of course the key concept for classical utilitarians, for whom the prospects of producing pleasurable states of affairs are what supply reasons for rational action. The idea that pleasure has intrinsic (positive) value goes with a picture of it as a sort of sensation or quasi-sensation, or in other words as a self-intimating episode of consciousness, with a certain duration, typically having a certain intensity, and with an intrinsic ‘character’ knowable authoritatively by the subject. But pleasure is no such thing; moreover, even a bona fide sensation, like physical pain, doesn't have intrinsic (e.g. negative) value, for much will depend on context. Hence the perfectly comprehensible talk from athletes of ‘good pain’.Footnote ⁶

As regards the intelligibility of the reasons people give for their actions (past, present, or proposed), it seems clear that one source of this intelligibility will be how their actions fit into a bigger picture, involving other people, other actions, other times and places – all of which contribute to an action's ‘significance’, as I have been calling it. This term is not meant to denote some single intuitible property à la G.E. Moore. Rather, ‘significance’ is a portmanteau term covering a family of ordinary but crucial action-concepts, such as gratitude, fidelity, temerity, tact, aimlessness, solidarity…And an important sub-class of these action-concepts relate to backward-looking motives.

That the background to an event in time is (or is typically) a matter of what has come before it is one of those facts which lend substance to the idea that the past has a reality lacked by the future. But this very feature of the past can lead people to regard it as futile to take what has happened into serious consideration, except either (i) as a source of pleasing memories, etc., or (ii) as a source of evidence, useful when it comes to working out what is likely to follow what in the future. For one cannot affect the past – and if that's what is meant by calling it more real than the future, then why bother with it?

Of course, (ii) is very important, and would already justify the study of history. As Santayana said, ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’Footnote ⁷. But it would be wrong to assign a merely instrumental value to history. To start with, there is a psychological fact – that if you're not interested in history, except as a source of pointers for what to plan and do, then you're not likely to get sufficiently immersed in the subject even to garner adequate pointers. But this observation doesn't go far enough, for it is still compatible with the thought that the point of historical study is ultimately instrumental (even if human nature is perverse enough to require us to love it for its own sake if we are to benefit fully from it). We also need to recognise that the significance of what we do and will do is not independent of what has already happened, in ways I have been sketching, so that it is often necessary to view our present or proposed actions through the lens of history. But further than this, part of the answer to ‘How shall I live?’ relates, not to deliberative reasoning of any kind, but to the activity or activities of contemplation of what is.

After all, if there are reasons for changing the world, then whatever world it is that is proposed for us to inhabit should surely offer us something over and above more possibilities of changing the world. Or in other words, there must be something worthwhile for human beings to do after tackling and sorting out problems, making bigger and better bathrooms, and so on – at the end of the day, as it wereFootnote ⁸. Modern answers to the question what this worthwhile thing could be have often been subjectivist and/or hedonist in spirit, invoking notions of ‘lifestyle’ and the idea that you make your own meaning, etc. But Aristotle's idea of contemplation as the highest human activity has much to be said for it. Even if we forgo talking of a ‘highest’ activity here, it seems certain that knowledge and understanding are intrinsically capable of deepening and broadening a person's outlook and mindset, in ways obviously relevant to human happiness (eudaimonia). Knowledge and understanding are the goals of contemplation; and the past is a possible object of contemplation in a way in which the future is not. As was said above, the past has a reality which is lacked by the future.

Travel broadens the mind, but so does reading or otherwise finding out about foreign places. The same goes for the past, that past which is (in L.P. Hartley's words) another country; no matter that you cannot literally travel there. To ignore the past or belittle it shows parochialism of just the same sort as we find in people who ignore or belittle foreign countries. And yet who would admit that in calling something ‘outdated’ they are joining hands with those who scoff at foreigners for being foreign?

One main difference, of course, is that the dead can't answer back. They thus fall into the same category as various other groups incapable of answering back, such as the very young, the very old, and the insane. There were in former times perhaps more such groups – depending on what exactly is meant by ‘answering back’. It is, I think, a sign of being civilised that you are not impressed only by those who can make life difficult for you in some way, e.g. by answering back – and indeed that you lend a hearing ear more to those who cannot do so. Now lending an ear to those still living clearly does have a point not shared with lending an ear to the dead: we can help, protect, and generally respond to the living in ways we can't the dead. But it is not true that we cannot wrong the dead. Only if the notion of wronging is tied to that of causing suffering will it seem paradoxical to say this, but the notion of wronging has a wider range. If you break a promise that you made to someone when she was alive, you do wrong her; and if you calumniate someone dead, you likewise wrong that person.

So to take advantage of the dead because they cannot answer back has something base about it, while to regard them as ‘irrelevant’ on that account is just narrow-minded. A broader mind will be drawn to contemplation of history, and of the lives of those who have gone before us, a kind of contemplation which belongs to that form of eudaimonia which is independent of, and in a sense presupposed by, practices of rational deliberation about the future.

G.K. Chesterton characterised tradition as ‘the democracy of the dead’; and he went on: ‘Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death.’Footnote ⁹ Chesterton is surely right to point out that regarding the words and thoughts of the dead as less weighty than those of our own time is a form of arrogance, akin to that of regarding the words and thoughts of Yorkshiremen as less weighty. Indeed, the attitude to the dead is arguably more arrogant than the corresponding attitude to Yorkshiremen, or at any rate, if not more arrogant, then more foolish. For it is commonplace for human beings from a given time and place to share their beliefs, ideology, fashions, and so on, and it is possible (even in 21st century Yorkshire) for those beliefs, etc. to be misguided in various ways; whereas the countless dead do not and could not share a voice. Those of our ancestors who by their words and actions contribute to a particular tradition do thereby constitute themselves a sort of temporal Yorkshire, and may thus all fall foul of certain shared errors; but this is more of a problem for Chesterton's views than it is for the view I am defending. Clearly, a reflective person should be comparing the views and outlooks of different traditions. But this is only possible if they make the past their object of study.

3.

I have been talking of the past as having a reality which is lacked by the future. As the use of the indefinite article is meant to indicate (‘a reality’), I take there to be different possible senses conveyable by the assertion ‘The past is real’, and this concession may seem to allow that what has been argued above has no direct bearing on those well-known debates in the philosophy of time, between adherents of the so-called ‘tensed’ and ‘tenseless’ views of time.

An adherent of the ‘tenseless’ view of time will typically argue that future events are no less real than past events, and additionally, that to call an event past or future is simply to situate it as either earlier than or later than one's own utterance (or thought). Time itself, so the saying goes, is without tense: past, present and future are not ‘objective features of reality’. As far as temporal reality goes, events are before, after, or simultaneous with other events – that is all.

Arthur Prior famously discussed the exclamation ‘Thank goodness that's over!’, presenting it as a problem case for any tenseless view of time.Footnote ¹⁰ For, he asked, what is one thanking goodness for when one utters this exclamation, e.g. upon the cessation of a bad migraine? Surely not for the (‘tenseless’) fact that one's utterance is later than the migraine's cessation – after all, as he put it, why should one thank goodness for that? No, one is thanking goodness that the pain is over, i.e. that it is past; and if we are to speak of ‘facts’ here, the fact for which one thanks goodness is evidently a fact involving the present and the past, or involving a present fact (no migraine) together with a past fact (migraine).

Hugh MellorFootnote ¹¹ tried to deal with this example by parsing the exclamation so that it has two components, a factual statement (‘That's over’) and an expression of relief (‘Thank goodness!’). The former, he maintained, could be given the usual tenseless treatment, by which it turns out to correspond to the fact that a headache is before an utterance – while the latter was to be regarded as a mere expression of emotion, without any propositional object, such as a past fact. (‘Object’ is here used roughly as in ‘The object of my desire is that I be rescued from this dungeon’.) The relationship between the emotion and the cessation of the migraine Mellor took be an external, not an internal, relation. Specifically, he took the emotion of relief to be simply caused by the migraine's cessation, much as a migraine might itself be caused by eating bananas, or whatever.

Relief from pain is not the only emotion which appears to have a propositional object involving the past. Other emotions of this sort include those to which backward-looking reasons are appropriate. It becomes clear that a view such as Mellor's does, after all, come into conflict with some of the claims made earlier in this essay. Gratitude is typically an emotion with a putative past fact as its object, that fact for which the person is gratefulFootnote ¹²; and gratitude (often) counts as reasonable insofar as it can be backed up by a reason alluding to that fact – e.g. ‘Because she drove me to the hospital’, to be distinguished, of course, from the non-reason, ‘Because what I'm doing is temporally later than her driving me to the hospital’.Footnote ¹³ A grateful person manifests a view of the significance of a past event qua past event, and of the significance of her present response to it – and these forms of significance are not reducible to any intrinsic significance attaching to the two events taken separately, nor yet to any causal relationship between them. Were one to give an account of gratitude analogous to Mellor's account of relief, one would have to cast gratitude as something akin to a sensation, caused by this or by that, and the idea of its being an appropriate response to some event would be lost.

For what could such appropriateness amount to, on Mellor's theory? If there is such a thing as the appropriateness of an emotional response, then it is something that supplies a reason for feeling the emotion, and a reason for expressing it, in word or deed. So it seems as if the reply to the question just asked will have to relate to some sort of expected utility – for it cannot relate to an irreducibly past-tensed statement's telling us something true and relevant. (On a tenseless theory, there is no such thing as a truth uniquely conveyed by an irreducibly past-tensed statement.) The alleged utility would attach either to the present emotion itself, or to the habit of feeling such an emotion, or perhaps to our having a practice whereby the relevant backward-looking reasons count as good ones. We would then have the sort of view I adumbrated and criticised earlier on.

Writing about these issues, David Cockburn says:

As this last remark brings home, the central mistake here is that of failing to recognise that emotions lie within the space of reasons. Indeed, it seems likely that the tenseless theorist will have to end up saying that the so-called appropriateness of an emotional response is really just a matter of its being humanly normal or typical, or even just a matter of its being the sort of emotional response of which we ‘approve’ (approbation itself being another mere emotional response, presumably). But this sort of line faces impossible difficulties vis à vis the identity of a given emotion. For how are we to distinguish gratitude from, say, pride, or joy? The correct answer is that we distinguish these things above all by their different objects, that is to say by the different kinds of reason a person gives or can give for feeling or exhibiting the emotion in question. This answer is not available to the tenseless theorist, however, since it brings in essentially tensed propositions; but any alternative criteria of identity are hopeless – e.g. ‘how gratitude feels’, or ‘the behaviour which gratitude produces’. Gratitude does not feel a certain way, and sending flowers to Emily could be a manifestation of any number of emotions, or of none.

Unsurprisingly, all this does in fact cast doubt on the tenseless view of time. Cockburn quotes Thomas Nagel as saying, ‘what can be asserted significantly of the present can be asserted significantly of other times also…the sense of an assertion about what is the case at a certain time does not change with the tense of the assertion’;Footnote ¹⁵ and he points out that the notions Nagel is using, of ‘that which is asserted’ and of ‘sense of an assertion’, will likely be cashed out in terms of truth-conditions – though there is a danger of begging the question when a tenseless theorist helps himself to the idea of a future-tensed statement's having truth-conditions (of the sort that can make it true when uttered). But were we to tie propositional sense instead to the use of a sentence, things would look different: for, given that the tense of a statement can make all the difference to whether it can be used as an intelligible reason for an emotion or its expression, ‘this [would show] that what can be asserted of the present – ‘I am in pain’ – cannot be asserted in the same sense, cannot be true or false in the same sense, of other times’.Footnote ¹⁶

The issue here is not merely the verbal-sounding one of how best to define ‘sense of an assertion’, in terms of truth-conditions or in terms of use – though it may well have relevance to the debate as to which is of more importance in an adequate account of assertion, truth-conditions or use.Footnote ¹⁷ Nor is the issue that of how broadly we should understand the term ‘use’, though that too is of interest. Rather, what Cockburn is drawing attention to is how the tenseless theory of time goes with a picture of events and states of affairs as ‘intrinsically the same whenever they happen’, a picture which among other things is bound to make the grounds for and expression of many of our emotions appear incomprehensible. If the tenseless theorist responds by saying that our acceptance of such grounds for and expression of emotions just shows our irrationality, he owes us a non-question-begging account of rationality and of proper reasoning.Footnote ¹⁸ Otherwise, he will be excluding counterexamples to his theory by fiat, not by argument.

There does, then, appear after all to be a connection between the topic of my discussion and that of debates between proponents of the tensed and tenseless theories of time. Tenseless theories, or those on offer, are committed to descriptions and explanations of human emotion that are inadequate. And the term ‘emotion’ is being used here in a pretty wide sense: the relevant notion links up with that human capacity for perceiving certain kinds of significance which was described in sec. 2 – it is a notion that overlaps with the notions of thought and of experience. Attempts are sometimes made to allow that our thought and experience are somehow tensed, leaving Reality to get along with being tense-free; but this way of thinking goes with a philosophical account of true thought and of what is true as being independent, in a way that is ultimately untenable. A proper treatment of this last issue would take us too far from our present topic, so I leave the matter there.

4.

Philosophy is a seamless whole, so it is not so surprising that there are, as we have seen, connecting corridors between the philosophy of mind and action and the philosophy of time. And the fact of these corridors perhaps provides one of the consolations of philosophy. For if the significance of things depends upon the past in the way or ways I have been alleging, and if the past must be seen on that account as having a reality lacking from the future, then these are surely facts capable of influencing a person's attitude to death, and also more generally to our place in the Universe. The feeling that may assail the reflective non-religious person, that our existence as mere specks in this cosmos is somehow futile or senseless, is typically a feeling of vertigo before the chasm of the infinite future. We have but to turn our heads around to behold the eternal fact of our own life, and of human life on this planet. Human beings hanker after immortality, but there is a sense in which you could be said to be immortal already, insofar as your having lived will be an unerasable fact. You cannot pass utterly away, even in the event of the heat death of the Universe. And the Past which thus cannot be erased is also the Past from which much of what is and will be humanly significant draws its significance, so that a contemplation of the Past is a contemplation of an eternal source of significance.

It may be that our culture teaches us to regard the past as water under the bridge, history as bunk, the future and the present as the only repositories of value and significance, and similar things. If such teachings were true, then only religion or some type of Stoicism could offer us solace; but they are not true.