We all live through time. We keep track of it. We race against it. It is part of everyday experience of life. Yet we do not fully understand it. We also think with time. We think in time. Does this make our thinking linear? Can we think in a non-linear manner? Perhaps, these are important questions that we need to pose ourselves. What will it take to think backwords? Why thinking has to be always forward? Perhaps, forward moving time makes us think that thinking has to be forward. Forward thinking also sees failure negatively. Life cannot be failure. But failure is so common. But we do not think failure. Failure can teach many things . It can humble us. it can heal us . Thinking in a linear fashion make us think that life is made only to succeed.
Science tells us that time began with the big bang about fourteen billion years ago. But there are somethings about time that we are still not able to explain. Although we can say it began at T=0 yet there is time before T=0. Stephen Hawking calls its imaginary time. One can get an insight into time before T=0 if one looks at the number line. It is clear the universe after the big bang evolved with the passage of time. Time post big bang seems to have a direction. Arthur Edington told us that time has an arrow. The arrow of time seems to exist because the universe is evolving in a certain way. There are several irreversible processes in the universe. Even on earth things happen in one direction. We can break the eggs and make an omlette but we cannot turn it back into an egg. Everywhere in nature, we have sequences, but we cannot reverse those sequences. Everything is following the arrow of time.
Arrow of time is related to the second law of thermodynamics which states that entropy has a tendency to increase. There are more ways to be disorderly than to stay orderly. What we call disorderly may be nothing but another form of order that we cannot grasp . Everything in the universe evolves through increasing disorder. That means if we go back in the history of the universe, we find that there was an higher order in the past. The arrow of time seems to link everything in the universe . It links our birth , life and death. Life follows the arrow of time.
Time is thought to be a coordinate. It assists us to locate things. It assists us to measure the duration lapsed between events. Change seems to move through time. Scientist John Wheeler is said to have defined time as nature’s way of making sure that everything is not happening at the same time. With the coming of the theory of special relativity, time is intertwined with space and cannot be thought simply as coordinate that stands independently without any relation to space and matter.
The arrow of time cannot be questioned in Science. While there is a lot to study about the arrow of time and its relation to the beginning of our known universe. If we posit multiverses, we might be having a symmetrical time, which becomes asymmetrical time with an arrow in our universe that passed through low entropy at big bang. Science will settle the question why time is asymmetrical in the coming days. If we only think that the universe that we live is the only universe that exists then it is difficult to account for the existence of increasing entropy in our universe. There are scientists who posit self organizibilty of the universe. Chaos and complexity Science enable us to posit that the universe will jump to a higher order and thus, overcome the arrow of time that is running the universe to its destruction. This is an instance of reverse thinking in Science.
The question to us is: Why do we have to think Philosophy with the arrow of time? Why can’t we think in a reverse manner. We have films being done creatively contesting the arrow of time. We have ‘the curious case Benjamin Button’ which presents a person born as an old man who progressively grows younger with passing time. We may have literature that run backwords its characters. But can we also do philosophy in a backword manner? Modern Philosophers built philosophy in a forward manner. We think philosophy is a forward thinking. Philosophy as thinking backwords can be profoundly illumining.
Postmodernity challenged us to think from where we are. We do not have to think from some ground zero or arche space. We simply have to begin where we are. We can see this being followed by thinkers like Michel Foucault and Alasdair MacIantyre and several others. We have the challenge to follow their footsteps and think not just in a frontal manner but also embrace a dorsal thinking. In fact, we have the challenge to embrace a symmetric thinking. By symmetric thinking, I mean thinking 360 degrees. We may desire time to be symmetric. But the fact that is has an arrow does not have to limit our thinking. We have to embrace thinking in all its fullness.
