According to conventional wisdom, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity showed that the flow of time is an illusion, and that reality is a fixed block. And philosophers from Augustine to McTaggart have found the idea of time’s passage to be incoherent. However, argues James Sares, the idea that time’s flow is an illusion is itself incoherent. He uses Hegel’s dialectical logic to prove that time is real, since any denial of its reality must fall into self-contradiction.

1. The denial of time’s passing

From Zeno to McTaggart, the history of philosophy contains a number of arguments against the reality of time. Even philosophers who think time is real have admitted the difficulty of making sense of it. Augustine asks how time exists if past and future do not, while the present takes no time. Kant asks how time can have a beginning if a beginning implies a change, hence a prior time. And yet how can time have no beginning – hence be actually infinite – if particular, finite moments of time’s passing can never add up to this infinity?

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You might think your experience is the authority on the truth of the world, but you might be too trapped in it to see it for the illusion it is.

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 Today, many scientists and philosophers of time accept the “B-theory” of time, the view that time is just a static series of tenseless moments and relations, against the view that time actually flows from past to future, especially given problems introduced by Einstein’s theory of relativity. In science and philosophy alike, the denial of time’s passing remains a popular position to do away with the conceptual difficulties it implies.

2. Our experience of time’s passing

It may seem the height of philosophical hubris to declare the unreality of our basic form of experience. Indeed, if time—by which I mean time’s passing—is unreal, our experience of the world must be illusory. What right do philosophers have to declare themselves the authority over your experience? Are you not the one who is doing the experiencing, thus demonstrating time’s reality?

Yet, it is not sufficient to appeal to experience as its own justification. One lesson of philosophy is that we think we are the experts of our own experience, but upon further scrutiny, we see that we often have misunderstandings about it and its significance for conceiving reality. You might think your experience is the authority on the truth of the world, but you might be too trapped in it to see it for the illusion it is. A mere pointing to experience does not resist the force of reasoned argument. It begs the question by reasserting the truth of what has been demonstrated as untrue.

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Time is real precisely because it appears.

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It is another question whether we can rationally prove that time must be real. We might begin by challenging arguments against time’s reality based on its supposedly contradictory nature. However, this route would not provide a positive argument for time. In addition, even as someone who does believe that time’s passing is contradictory, which implies it cannot be real, I think such an argument for time’s reality is possible. And as someone trained in Hegel’s dialectical philosophy, I believe such an argument should be made by turning the denial of experience on its head. It is not that time is unreal appearance, as those who deny the reality of time claim. Rather, time is real precisely because it appears.

3. How to avoid begging the question