Time in History: Views of Time From Prehistory to the Present Day
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Time in History
Views of time from prehistory to the present day
G. J. WHITROW
Oxford NewYork
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
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Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP
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© G. J. Whitrow 1988
First published 1988 by Oxford University Press First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback 1989
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
Whitrow, G. J. Time in history: the evolution of our general awareness of time and temporal perspective/ G. J. Whitrow. p. cm. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. World History. 2. Time--Social aspects. 3. Time perception. 4. Chronology. I. Title. 909--dc19 D21.3.W47 1989 88-4245 ISBN 0-19-285211-6
7 9 10 8
Printed in Great Britain by Mackays of Chatham plc Chatham, Kent
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To Magda
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Preface
Most of us are so accustomed to the ideas of time, history, and evolution that we are inclined to forget that these concepts have not always been accorded the importance which we now assign to them. If, however, we are to understand why it is that time tends to dominate our way of life and thought, we must acquire some knowledge of how this has come about. In other words, we must put time itself into temporal perspective. The purpose of this book is to present the main features of the evolution of our general awareness of time and its significance in a form suitable for all who are interested in the subject.
The present volume can be regarded as supplementing my book The Natural Philosophy of Time,1 the second edition of which was published by the Clarendon Press in 1980. The publication of the first edition in 1961 gave rise to a considerable increase in interest in the general scientific study of time (as distinct from that of temporal logic, on the one hand, and horology, on the other--topics which my book did not cover), and led, on the initiative of J.T. Fraser, to the formation of the International Society for the Study of Time, the first Conference of which was held under my Presidency, with Dr Fraser as Hon. Secretary, at Oberwolfach, West Germany, in 1969. Nevertheless, only two books have so far been devoted to the history of our awareness of time and its significance, namely The Discovery of Time, by Stephen Toulmin and June Goodfield,2 and the more comprehensive Zeit und Kultur: Geschichte des Zeitbewusstseins in Europa, by Rudolf Wendorff;3 the contribution of Howard Trivers should also be mentioned.4 Moreover, these books, admirable as they are, have been written from the point of view of general intellectual history, whereas I have taken more account of the developments that have occurred in chronology and chronometry and their social and ideological consequences.
Besides discussing the general influence of time on the mental outlook and way of life in different ages and civilizations, I have directed particular attention to the history of the measurement of time. The crucial stage in this development was the invention of the mechanical clock in Western Europe towards the end of the thirteenth century. For, despite the mystery which still surrounds the event, its consequences
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were far-reaching and ultimately led to the dominating role of time in contemporary civilization.
I should like to thank the publishers Thames & Hudson, of London, and the Plenum Press, New York, respectively, for kindly allowing the present book to overlap, in a few passages, with my book What is Time? ( 1972) and my chapter "'The Role of Time in Cosmology'" in the book edited by W. Yourgrau and A. D. Breck, Cosmology, History and Theology ( 1977).
I am grateful to Imperial College for appointing me to a Senior Research Fellowship on my retirement and renewing it at regular intervals, thereby enabling me to continue to make full use of the facilities of the College. I owe a great debt to my wife, Magda Whitrow, who not only read the manuscript but also produced both the typescript and the Index with her customary skill.
May 1996 G. J. W.
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Contents
Prefacevii
Part I Introduction1 1 Awareness of Time3 Time and civil life3
Our sense of time4
Time and mankind7
2 Describing Time11 Time, language, and number11
Time and natural bases of measurement14
Time in contemporary society17
Part II Time in Antiquity and the Middle Ages19 3 Time at the Drawn of History21 Prehistory21
Ancient Egypt24
Sumeria and Babylonia29
Ancient Iran33
4 Time in Classical Antiquity37 Classical Greece and Hellenistic civilization37
Ancient Israel51
Imperial Rome and early Christendom56
5 Time in the Middle Ages71 The Medieval Europe71
The Islamic world77
The periodization of history and millenarianism80
The measurement of time82
6 Time in the Far East and Mesoamerica87 India87
China89
The Maya92
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Part III Time in the Modern World97 7 The Advent of the Mechanical Clock99 The invention of the verge escapement99
The social influence of the mechanical clock107
8 Time and History in the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution115 Reform of the calendar115
The pendulum clock and the clocklike universe120
Attitudes to time and history in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries132
9 Time and History in the Eighteenth Century139 The invention of the marine chronometer139
The discovery of historical perspective146
10 Evolution and the Industrial Revolution152 The evolutionary universe152
The role of time in modern industrial society157
11 Rival Concepts of Time170 Instant and duration170
Relativistic and cosmic time172
12 Time, History and Progess177 Time and belief in progress177
Time, history, and the computerized society181
Appendices 1 Leap Years187
2 The Metonic Calendrical Cycle189
3 The Calculation of Easter190
References194
/> Index207
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Man, in a word, has no nature; what he has is . . . history.
J. Ortega y Gasset ( "'History as a System'". In Philosophy and History: the Ernst Cassirer Festschrift)
To ingenious attempts at explaining by the light of reason things which want the light of history to show their meaning, much of the learned nonsense of the world has indeed been due.
Edward B. Tylor ( Primitive Culture)
Perhaps the most important way the urban bourgeoisie spread its culture was the revolution it effected in the mental categories of medieval man. The most spectacular of these revolutions, without a doubt, was the one that concerned the concept and measurement of time.
J. Le Goff ( The Fontana Economic History of Europe: the Middle Ages)
And he that will not apply New Remedies, must expect New Evils: for Time is the greatest Innovateur.
Francis Bacon ( Essay XXIII: 'Of Innovations')
The point is that in the past the time-span of important change was considerably longer than that of a single human life. Thus mankind was trained to adapt itself to fixed conditions.
To-day the time-span is considerably shorter than that of human life, and accordingly our training must prepare individuals to face a novelty of conditions.
A. N. Whitehead ( Adventures of Ideas)
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Part I
Introduction
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1. Awareness of Time
Time and civil life
Most of us feel intuitively that time goes on forever of its own accord, completely unaffected by anything else, so that if all activity were suddenly to cease time would still continue without any interruption. For many people the way in which we measure time by the clock and the calendar is absolute, and by some it has even been thought that to tamper with either was to court disaster. When, in 1916, Summer Time was first introduced in the United Kingdom by advancing the clock one hour, there were many who objected to interfering with what the popular novelist Marie Corelli called 'God's own time'. Similarly, in 1752, when the British government decided to alter the calendar, so as to bring it into line with that previously adopted by most other countries of Western Europe, and decreed that the day following 2 September should by styled 14 September, many people thought that their lives were being shortened thereby. Some workers actually believed that they were going to lose eleven days' pay. So they rioted and demanded 'Give us back our eleven days!' (The Act of Parliament had, in fact, been carefully worded so as to prevent any injustice in the payment of rents, interest, etc.) The rioting was worst in Bristol, in those days the second larges city in England, where several people were killed.
Even today, when we are all familiar with the idea of altering the time on the clock so as to suit our general convenience, it still comes to many of us as something of a shock when we are first made to realize that there is, for example, a five-hour difference between London and New York, so that when it is ten o'clock in the evening--nearly bedtime, in London--it is only five o'clock in the afternoon in New York. Moreover, even the most experienced and sophisticated among us can suffer the peculiar, and often unpleasant, effects of 'jet-lag' when we fly a long way in an easterly or westerly direction. No less strange, although unaccompanied by any peculiar physiological symptoms, is the effect of crossing the International Date Line, which has been drawn in a zigzag fashion down the Pacific from one pole to the other. For, when a ship or
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plane on its way from, say, San Francisco to Hong Kong crosses this line it loses a whole day of the calendar because of the time difference of twenty-four hours between any position immediately to the east of the line and any position to the west of it. Although, in this case, there is no need to adjust our watches, we have to discard a day from the week concerned. On the other hand, when we cross the line in the opposite direction we appear to experience an eight-day week, so that if the crossing is made precisely at midnight we live through two Fridays, say, in succession. This means that in going round the world eastwards the number of days occupied on the journey will be one more than the number of days reckoned at the point where the journey begins and ends, each day on the journey being less than twenty-four hours, but if the journey is made westwards the number of days taken will be one less than the number reckoned at the point of commencement, each day on the journey being longer than twenty-four hours. This phenomenon was made the basis of the story Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne , in which after the hero had completed his journey eastwards he thought he had taken over eighty days, but since he omitted to put his calendar back when crossing the Date Line he found on his return that he was one day ahead of the calendar and so he had, after all, completed his journey in the prescribed time.
All these experiences seem strange because they appear to conflict with our intuitive feeling that time is something universal and absolute. What gives rise to these phenomena is the way we choose to measure time and relate it to the way we live. The time kept by us in civil life is based on the rotation of the earth, which gives us our day. Similarly, the earth's motion around the sun gives us our year. If, however, we lived on the moon, we should then find that, since the moon spins on its axis so much more slowly than does the earth, each day as determined by the moon's rotation would in fact be equal to a month. The way in which the terrestrial day is divided up into hours, minutes, and seconds is purely conventional. Similarly the decision whether a given day begins at dawn, sunrise, midday, sunset, or midnight is also a matter of arbitrary choice or social convenience.
Our sense of time
Granted, then, that the time of civil life is measured in a way that happens to suit us on earth but has no absolute or universal significance, what about our inner feeling of time? Is it this that provides us with our intuition of the absolute nature of time? Time certainly is a fundamental
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characteristic of human experience, but there is no evidence that we have. a special sense of time, as we have of sight, hearing, touch, taste, or smell. Our direct experience of time is always of the present, and our idea of time comes from reflecting on this experience. Nevertheless, so long as our attention is concentrated on the present we tend to be unaware of time. A 'sense of time' involves some feeling or awareness of duration, but this depends on our interests and the way in which we focus our attention. If what we are doing interests us, then time seems short, but the more attention we pay to time itself, that is to its duration, the longer it seems. Never does a minute seem so long as when we look at the seconds hand moving round the face of a watch or clock. Clearly, then, our belief in the absolute nature of temporal duration is not an immediate consequence of our experience, but as I have just said comes from reflecting on this experience. Our sense of duration is affected not only by the degree to which we concentrate our attention on what we are doing but by our general physical condition. In particular, it can be distorted by drugs or by our being confined for long periods to cold, dark environments and being deprived of clocks and watches. But the most widely experienced factor that influences our sense of duration is our age, for it is generally recognized that, as we get older, time as registered by the clock and the calendar appears to pass ever more rapidly.
We experience a feeling of duration whenever the present situation is related by us either to our past experiences or to our future expectations and desires. There is no evidence that we are born with any sense of temporal awareness, but our sense of expectation develops before our consciousness of memory. When a very young child cries with hunger he has his first experience of duration, but these temporal experiences are isolated. It has been suggested that the relatively long delay experienced by the young child in acquiring the ability to walk has an important influence on the development of our sense of time, since the child's
eagerness to grasp what he cannot reach gives rise to the first primitive notion of time, associated with a space that cannot be crossed.1 Even when the child begins to walk, to reach is also still to wait and hence enhances the feeling of delay associated with expectation. The first intuition of duration appears as an interval which stands between the child and the fulfilment of his desires.
The child's gradual acquisition of temporal concepts can be closely correlated with the development of his use of language. For, although our awareness of time is a product of human evolution, our ideas of time are neither innate nor automatically learned but are intellectual
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constructions that result from experience and action.2 Up to the age of 18 months or more children appear to live only in the present, and by that age the meaning of 'now' has usually been acquired. Between then and 30 months, although most of the time-related words that children learn to use deal only with the present, they tend to acquire a few words relating to the future, such as soon', but almost none that concern the past. Consequently, the use of 'tomorrow' precedes that of 'yesterday', although at first both are likely to be interpreted as meaning 'not today'. As the child grows older, the relative proportion of present- oriented statements tends to decrease but still predominates, future- oriented statements increase somewhat, but past-oriented statements increase more slowly. Nevertheless, young children have difficulty in acquiring a unified concept of time, for even when the child begins to recognize temporal sequences time remains dependent on his own activities. The gradual acquisition of language, however, not only increases the child's ability to understand and communicate but also enables him to grasp temporal relationships and to extend his ability for temporal conceptualization. For, although awareness of temporal phenomena may seem to be inherent in our personal experience, it involves an abstract conceptual framework which we only gradually learn to construct.3 Even when the child begins to associate time with particular external movements, he is not truly conscious of time until he begins to realize that things bear a relationship not only to each other but also to himself, and this only becomes possible with the development of memory. The child's sense of memory involves not only events in his own experience but, in due course, some in the memory of his parents and eventually events in the history of his social group. It is not until about the age of 8 or later that the relations of temporal order (before and after) are associated with duration so as to lead to the idea of a single common time in which all events happen. It has been found that at the age of 10 only one child in four regards time as an abstract concept independent of actual clocks. Not surprisingly, the ability to grasp this idea depends on the rate of development of the child's intelligence. An experiment performed on children between the ages of 10 and 15, to test whether they thought they had become older when clocks were advanced one hour to 'Summer Time', revealed that at the younger age only one child in four believed that this change of time had had no effect on his age. Only when they are 13 or 14 do most children begin to realize that the time indicated on a clock is a convention.4