The paradox of the static concept of time

The modern concept of time assumes that time is relative. Time can be regarded from different points on the linear continuum and it seems different from each point of view. Though flexible in that respect, it’s inflexible in another. A person perceiving time can be aware of either the past or the present, but not both at the same time. We can either reminisce about things gone or plan for the future to come.

For us, the aspects of time are different and separate. The past is gone forever and the future doesn’t exist yet. Present is but a fleeting moment in between, forcing us to orient towards either past or the future.

Our way of thinking would be alien to early modern people. For them, things didn’t change through time or because of it. Change wasn’t an attribute of time. Instead, time was perceived as a space where all its aspects were present at the same time. And all of them could be observed from one point, the present, simultaneously.

Because change wasn’t assumed, it made sense for the early modern people to use the past as advice to the present. And because all aspects of time existed in the same space, it was possible for them to be aware of the past and the future at the same time – a paradox that tends to baffle the historians of renaissance thought.

Modern historians have found it difficult to understand how renaissance humanists could be interested in the past, wish for a golden age to return, and write utopias at the same time. Their solution has most often been to ignore one of these interests and regard the other as the dominant, a very unsatisfactory solution.

Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) is one of the scholars baffling historians. He yearned for the return of a lost golden age of knowledge, wrote a utopia, the New Atlantis, and developed a new system of learning that sealed his fame as an ‘advanced’ thinker. The latter has dominated his reputation and most historians have seen his interest in the golden age as a ‘quaint’ hobby, a remnant of an age that was already passing.

But the confusion disappears when one understands that, for Bacon, time was spatial. The past and the present weren’t mutually exclusive, they were simultaneous. For him, his system of learning was about returning the lost knowledge, not by recreating it or renewing it – updating it to his own time – but by recovering it as it had been for the benefit of his own time. This would bring about the lost golden age and elevate his age to its former glory. He is a prime example of a person who held a spatial concept of time.

New Atlantis, too, is spatial in the manner of the early utopias. It’s not about a familiar place in the future; it’s about a strange place in the present time. Time doesn’t cause the difference but distance. None of the renaissance scholars imagined a future different from the present.

The paradox of the static concept of time is, therefore, such only for modern thinkers who understand time to be relative. For someone who understood time spatially, the ability to consider the past and the present at the same time was self-evident and didn’t give cause to commentary. The renaissance scholars, too, become more understandable when one remembers that they viewed the world – and time – spatially, not temporally.

Titian: Allegory of Time Governed by Prudence c. 1565.

Past is the old man, future the young, and both are 

simultaneous with the middle-aged man who

represents the present.