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Social science
The manifold definitions of time
Christian Oestreicher, PhD

Introduction

What, then, is time?

If no one asks me, I know what it is.
If I wish to explain it to him who asks me, I do not
know.
Saint Augustine1

We are unable, using our five senses, to feel time, nor,

using our intelligence, to define it, because we stand inex-
orably within time. We achieve a representation of time
through evaluation of changes in ourselves and in our
environment. This is made possible by memory functions.
A n initial issue regarding time is that, in our
Western mode of thinking, we have retained Heracleitus’
metaphor of time being a river which we never can enter
What if time only existed as a construct in our minds, and twice, because it never remains the same. This is one the
what if the absence of this construct made our mode of main assertions or principles attributed to Heracleitus
thinking uncomfortable to us? If our two major tools for (~510–~450 BC): “all things flow and nothing stands.”2
constructing our world, feeling and reasoning, are of lit- Marcus Aurelius (121–180) completed the metaphor
tle help, then the study of time, ie, chronology, might exist when he wrote: “Time is like a river made up of the
as a list of scientific hypotheses, and remain, to some events which happen, and a violent stream.”3 And
extent, a philosophical question—an enigma that has Salvador Dali (1904–1989) more recently expressed the
been approached by thinkers for more than two millenia. same idea in his famous painting of soft melting pocket
In this review, various fields of knowledge are discussed in watches. The idea of the passage of time is indeed
relation to time, from philosophy and physics to psychol- strongly embedded in our culture.
ogy and biology. We discuss the differences between The message of Heracleitus is that everything passes,
Chronos and Tempus, respectively the time of physicists therefore not only time, but we ourselves, also pass.
and that of psychologists. Everything changes constantly, and it is the world that
© 2012, LLS SAS Dialogues Clin Neurosci. 2012;14:433-439. flows. The term “the past” in itself contains the idea of
flow. In the case of the river, we know (and have done

Keywords: time; duration; temporal phenomenon; philosophy; psychology; Address for correspondence: Christian Oestreicher, 11, rue Verte, CH-1205
physics Geneva, Switzerland
(e-mail: Christian.oestreicher@bluewin.ch)
Author affiliations: Department of Public Education, Geneva, Switzerland

Copyright © 2012 LLS SAS. All rights reserved 433 www.dialogues-cns.org

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Social science
since Galileo’s time) that gravity makes it flow. The use that it is a succession, or that it is represented in its
of this river metaphor to describe time leads to the illog- essence.
ical idea that the past might be be located at a higher In the first meaning, time is a duration; it can then be
position than the future. indeterminate and continuous; it can also be a fragment
A second issue regarding time is its unicity, ie, whether of a given duration, itself limited by the activity of a per-
there is only one time or a variety of times. E. T. Hall son, or by the nature of a biological process. In many
(1914–2009),4 studying various cultures, created the con- cases, duration can be objectively measured, as finite
cepts of monochrony versus polychrony, which he illus- phenomena within complex ensembles. For example,
trated with examples of waiting in line: in Northern part of a step in dancing, a beat in music, time-sharing in
countries, everybody patiently waits in line, while in data processing, etc.
more Mediterranean areas one sees several people being In the second meaning, time is a succession: it is a
served simultaneously in the markets. For thinkers and moment in a series of states, of single events; one speaks
researchers in general physics, from Galileo to Einstein, of the time of ancient culture, of a person’s period in life,
monochrony rather than polychrony is the accepted etc.
principle. They critize polychrony, seeing it as a The third meaning, time considered in its essence, refers
metaphor, because it includes versions of time that can- to several definitions. Time is associated, depending on
not be measured. However, as of the last few years, sci- historical period and literary genre, with precariousness,
entists in particle physics imagine several simultaneous with the fleeting nature of life, with the end of all human
times. All of them, except time as we know it, would be achievements. Through personification, time is described
wound or rolled up on themselves, ie, they would be as the allegory of an old man holding a scythe. In reli-
cyclical.5 These new ideas suggest that polychrony might gion, for example Christianity, the coming of Jesus
also concern physics. inserts human time into the eternity of God. In philoso-
A third issue is the question of causality, as defined in phy, time is a recurrent theme.
philosophy and physics: if the principle is to be It is a daily observation that there is an opposition
respected, there is no possibility of any beginning, either between the time of physics and the psychological time,
with linear nor with cyclical time. between Chronos and Tempus.
When one turns toward dictionaries, with their usual
charming circularity, one reads that time is a duration, Philosophical distinctions are defined in Box 1.

Box 1

Guide to philosophical concepts cited in this review

Materialism: matter constructs reality; all things are composed of material and all phenomena (including con-
sciousness) are the result of material interactions; opposed to any kind of transcendence (superstition, mythol-
ogy, supernatural, spiritualism, theology, religion, deism, idealism). Authors: Democrites, Lucretius, Nietzsche,
Bertrand Russell.“Matter is the substratum of mind (soul, spirit…).”

Empirism: knowledge comes only or primarily from sensory experience; Authors: Aristotle, Okham, Bacon,
Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Einstein. Opposed to innatism (innate ideas) or knowledge a priori. Authors: Plato,
Descartes, Leibniz.

Idealism: the nature of reality rests on the mind, on abstract forms or mental representations. Authors: For ide-
alism: Plato, Plotinus, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Poincaré. “Mind (soul, spirit…) is the substratum of matter.”
Opposed to realism, which asserts that the external world has an independent existence of human consciousness
or human knowledge; it may consist in refusing all reality to phenomens, it may assert that thought is the only
certain reality, it may derive reality from a spiritual principle. Authors: Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas.

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Chronos, from empirism to idealism (measured) and what numbers (measures). In contrast
to Aristotle, he argued that time existed before number
Chronos, time according to physics, is objective (does not was applied to it.12
depend on us), is uniform (shows no acceleration), is lin- One should remember that, at the time of Plotinus,
ear, and we know how to measure it. As of October 13, Christianity strongly influenced philosophy and science:
1967, a second is the duration of about 9 billion periods Adam had committed a sin, and since then the soul of
of the electromagnetic wave emitted by a Cesium 133 man was separated from God and thrown out of eternity
atom, when it changes from one level of energy to into temporality.
another. Astronomic clocks were the first to be used by Saint Augustine (354–430) says that there is no time out-
man. Before clepsydra and hourglasses (egg timers), we side of the soul. Here is the quotation that follows the
counted the days, taking advantage of the colossal clock epigraph:
that is the sun. But, then, how is it that there are the two times, past
There have been methodological difficulties in calculat- and future, when even the past is now no longer and
ing the mean solar day, because one has to assume that the future is now not yet? But if the present were
the sun moves at a constant speed, or to calculate the always present, and did not pass into past time, it obvi-
mean sidereal day, because one has to assume that stars ously would not be time but eternity. If, then, time pre-
keep the same relative position with respect to each sent—if it be time—comes into existence only because
other. it passes into time past, how can we say that even this
In precision clocks, the regularity of movement comes is, since the cause of its being is that it will cease to be?
from a pendulum that oscillates under the influence of Thus, can we not truly say that time is only as it tends
gravity: the duration of a half-cycle depends on two ele- toward nonbeing?13
ments, the length of the pendulum and the intensity of This quotation follows the idealistic philosophy that,
gravity (which is not uniform at different earth loca- from Parmenides (~520–~455 BC) to Plato (~428–~348
tions). The unit of time is thus defined using a measure BC), stands in opposition to the empiricism of Aristotle.
of length. As another illustration, Plato wrote that time is a mov-
According to Aristotle (384–322 BC), time is just this— ing image of eternity.14
a degree of motion with respect to “before” and “after.” 6 If time only exists by and for the soul, then what does
And “hence time is not movement, but only movement one measure when speaking of time? Saint Augustine
in so far as it admits of enumeration.”7 Moreover, time gives a clear answer: “I measure something in my mem-
is continous8 and is the same everywhere and simulta- ory which remains fixed.”15 He was the first to relate
neously.9 What Aristotle includes in the term movement time to memory; much later, Dali did the same when he
concerns the place (moving, shifting) as well as the qual- entitled his 1931 painting of soft watches, mentioned
ity (change in shape or state), the quantity (increment, above, The Persistence of Memory; currently, the role of
decrement), and the essence (appearance/disappearance, memory functions in relation to time is the theme of
birth/death). There are ties between time and movement, much research in neuroscience.
but time is not movement: movement varies, and is poly- The opposition between the phenomenological descrip-
morphous, while time does not change. tion of time using memory by Saint Augustine and the
But time, which is a number, does not exist without the mechanistic explanation of Aristotle of time being the
soul (nowadays we would say the mind), outside of the number of movement has never fully been solved in
soul.10 “The instant, the “now,” that separates between Western philosophy.
“before” and “after,” is an abstraction that exists only in
the mind. It is a boundary conceived to delimitate, not a The beginning of modern physics
part of time.”11
The measure of time determines what separates the The materialist tradition also favors eternity in relation
beginning and the end of a movement. Plotinus (205– to time: atoms and the emptiness of the universe are infi-
270), a neo-platonician philosopher, raised the issue of nite, uncreated, and imperishable. Time represents an
self-reference in a definition of time based on time, and illusion due to the appearance in consciousness of events
said that this was a confusion between what is numbered that, in themselves, are accidental, according to Lucretius

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(~98–~55 BC).16 Until the 17th century, one did not The representation of space cannot, therefore, be
make the distinctions between three versions of time: empirically obtained from the relations of outer
time as an abstract number, time as it is measured in appearance. On the contrary, this outer experience is
physics, and duration (a version of time as felt in our itself possible at all only through that representation.19
consciousness). Time is, therefore, given a priori. In it alone is actuality
Galileo (1564–1642), the founder of modern physics, of appearances possible at all. Appearances may, one
considered the universe to be written in the language of and all, vanish; but time (as the universal condition of
mathematics—an idealistic idea opposite to Aristotle’s their possibility) cannot itself be removed.20
empirism—and saw the world as expressing an eternal
order of things, that we can conceive, although we can- The principle of causality
not feel them. Galileo’s idea of an eternal and undiffer-
entiated time replaced the concept of a time consecutive Physicists chose the linear version of time on the basis
to movement. From Galileo to Einstein, separating rest of the principle of causality, which was first introduced
from uniform movement became a matter of frame of by Leibniz. There are several descriptions of this prin-
reference, or, put differently, a matter of position of the ciple,21 ie, the relationships between causes and effects.
observer. A popular example of the role of the First, a cause necessarily precedes its effects (this pre-
observer’s position is when we are seated in an immo- cludes a cyclical time). Second, the same causes induce
bile train, and the departure of another train gives us the the same effects (and the repetition of a cause leads to
impression that our train is moving. the repetition of the effects, sometimes leading to cycles.
Galileo also invented thought experiments: if one makes I emphasize that cyclical time is not synonymous with
the hypothesis that a theory is true and one demon- repetition of cycles). Third, there is a mandatory
strates that reasoning based on this hypothesis leads to chronology between the effect and the cause, and the
dead ends, then the theory is false. Performing such a effect of a cause cannot act retrospectively on the cause.
thought experiment, he concluded that the speed of fall In cyclical time, a cause A leads to an effect B, and in
of an object is proportional to the duration of the fall the future of B one could come back to the past of A:
and independent of the mass of the object. This was the while growing older, one could enter one’s parents’ past
first historical occurrence of a physical law being and prevent them from meeting one another! Cyclical
expressed using the parameter of time. time is not time, since there are then no distinctions
Later on, Newton (1643–1727) asserted the reality of an between past and future. And fourth, the past cannot be
absolute space and of an absolute time: “Absolute, true, modified (it will always be that what occurred in the
and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, past did occur).
flows equably without relation to anything external, and As of the 19th century, the definition of what is a cause
by another name is called duration.”17 He defined time became more complex as the science of thermody-
as a succession of mathematical instants (an entity with namics developed: mathematical distribution functions
no length). Thus, with respect to his own definition, using were used to describe gas molecules in terms of prob-
the name of duration is inadequate. Time according to abilities, a rather new concept. More recently, at the
Newton is a mathematical variable having one dimen- beginning of the 20th century, a form of causality prin-
sion, continuous. Only two topological objects have this ciple without cause arose from quantum physics: with
characteristic, a line and a circle. It thus follows that time certain types of phenomena, which are causally related,
is either infinite or cyclic. a chronology is mandatory, but one cannot establish
Leibniz (1646–1716) was as idealistic as Plato, when he that the first phenomenon causes the second. Despite
stated: “I hold space to be something merely relative, as these new ideas about the nature of causes, physicists
time is, taking space to be an order of coexistences, as kept the principle of causality as a valid axiom for their
time is an order of successions.”18 work.
Conversely, wrote Kant (1724–1804), one can neglect all In conclusion, in the terms of physics, the principle of
information coming from our senses (sensitive data), but causality makes it such that time cannot be cyclical
never can one leave out time and space, which are indis- (repeating itself indefinitely), but that cycles in time can
pensable for any representation. exist (phenomena can repeat themselves).

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Tempus other temporal physiological functions are distributed in

other brain areas, independent of the suprachiasmatic
The other time, Tempus, is time as we experience it sub- nucleus. They are the temporal coordination of spatially
jectively. It does not flow uniformly, it depends on our distributed neuronal networks, as well as brain structures
emotional status, in the broad sense of activation, vigi- that relate to Tempus, ie, the prediction and evaluation
lance, and mood: time is elastic, and the phenomenology of durations.
of this characteristic has been the theme of many stud- Many observations and experiments have confirmed
ies. Tempus, the subjective or psychological time can not that living species are able to measure durations. The
be measured with Chronos, but nevertheless can be com- measurement of short durations, of less than a second,
pared with it. Tempus rarely flows as we would wish it to: are probably less dependent on attention or emotion,
a minute being bored or an hour of passion cannot be although these can modulate even the measurement of
measured using the tools of physics. This is why we carry short durations. The evaluation of longer durations, from
watches, so that we do not lose track of time. seconds to hours or weeks, involves cognitive functions
Aristotle had already observed the subjective nature of such as attention, emotion, and memory. More than 100
time: “but neither does time exist without change; for years ago, the Swiss psychiatrist Auguste Forel (1848–
when the state of our own minds does not change at all, 1931), known for his work in psychiatry, neurohistology
or we have not noticed its changing, we do not realize and for his extensive studies on ants, noticed that bees
that time has elapsed.”22 came to his breakfast table regularly at the same time,
In myths, time is considered as what will occur, the future. even when no breakfast was being served.26 He coined
Many myths speak of a world before time, a world in which the term Zeitgedächniss, or memory of time. Indeed,
time had yet to come into existence. Amusingly, astro- bees can be conditioned to go at a given moment of the
physicists have a similar argument when they describe the day to a given location where food was previously pro-
origin of the universe. Recall that in the Bible, after Adam vided.
ate the apple, God said: “behold, the man has become like A theoretical model on how biological systems could
one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, lest he put forth measure duration, ie, how a brain system might generate
his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live a continuous metric, was proposed by Treisman in
for ever.”23 Adam was punished for wanting to archieve 1963.27,28 The model proposed by Treisman provides the
eternity and he was thrown into temporality. organism with a centralized system of time measure-
Etienne Klein (1958-)24 reinterpreted a Greek myth about ment. This has been criticized on the following basis: it
the birth of time as follows: At the beginning of all things, could be that each biological function has an inbuilt
Gaia arose from Chaos and gave birth to her son Ouranos duration measuring system, for example, a different one
while she was sleeping—out of time. Gaia was in the cen- for motor action, for vision or for audition. Moreover,
ter, Ouranos all around, and there was no space between there might even be independent duration measuring
them. Gaia became pregnant and the Titans, children of systems for subfunctions in each motor or perceptive
Ouranos, could not be born because of the lack of space. system. David M. Eagleman summarized issues raised
One of the Titans, Kronos, made it possible to chase away by the handling of time by the brain:
Ouranos, and this enabled space to be created. Gaia was A challenge for the brain is that afferent signals from
able to give birth to the Titans. They later procreated, and the different sensory modalities are processed at dif-
this succession of births created time, Chronos. ferent speeds. When receiving signals from several
According to Klein, a confusion we make between time modalities, how does the brain determine the timing
and future dates back to that myth. A major contribu- correspondence? The answer seems to be that the brain
tion from this author is the notion that time has never dynamically recalibrates its expectations.29
been thought of as what produces duration.24 The requirements of such coordination leave room for
illusions to occur. For example, with short durations,
Time and biology when the event occurs in the immediate proximity or
during an eye saccade, there is compression of time.30
Biological clocks such as the suprachiasmatic nucleus An experiment by Stetson31 illustrates this recalibration
deal with the generation of circadian rhythms.25 Many of duration, in the case of the visual modality. When a

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delay of 100 ms is artificially introduced between the When thinking about time, we remain under the influ-
moment of pressing a button and the occurrence of a ence of old analogies and metaphors. We hesitate
flash of light, the subject rapidly adapts to this delay, between two pillars of Greek philosophy, Parmenides
which seems progressively shorter. When the presence and the concept of immobility, and Heracleitus and
of this delay is abruptly interrupted, the subject can have the concept of a future. Heracleitus has shaped our
the impression that the flash occurred before he or she discourse about time for the last two millennia, and
pressed the button. These adaptations of duration judg- still today, we cannot consider other metaphors than
ments are independent of one another, in the sense that that of time analogous to a river and the flow of
if duration compression or dilation occurs in one per- water.
ceptive aspect or system, eg, vision, it generally does not Space remains, while time passes: could this be a manner
occur in other modalities, eg, audition. These observa- to differentiate them? But if we define time as a
tions speak in favor of more than one neuronal networks machine that produces instants, then we have to con-
that judges duration, since the temporal outputs of these clude that it is not time that passes, but that all these
networks can become desynchronized. instants are fabricated by time. We should learn not to
confuse time with duration, time with future, or time
Conclusion with temporal phenomena.
A stimulating but radical view about time was proposed
When thinking and speaking about time, we confuse a by Wittgenstein (1889–1951): “…there is no such thing”32
series of terms. Imprecision, ambivalence, and contra- and it is just a form of objects.33 The solution of the rid-
diction are often how we speak of time, and this influ- dle of life in space and time lies outside space and time.34
ences how we think about it. A major imprecision is that We stand inexorably in time and space, and our chal-
we do not set apart time and temporal phenomena: with- lenge is to live with time as an object that we remain
out noticing it, we attribute to time properties that are unable to define.
those of the temporal phenomena that we observe. For And I confess to thee, O Lord, that I am still ignorant
example, succession of days and nights, or the repetitive as to what time is. And again I confess to thee, O Lord,
obligation to fill out tax declarations, will lead us to say that I know that I am speaking all these things in time,
that time repeats itself, and thus that is is cyclical. and that I have already spoken of time a long time, and
Defining time is a challenge. Indeed, defining a concept that “very long” is not long except when measured by
is feasible when the concept is referred to something the duration of time. How, then, do I know this, when I
more fundamental. And nothing has been found that do not know what time is? Or, is it possible that I do
could be considered to be more fundamental than time. not know how I can express what I do know? Alas for
Thus, definitions of time are circular; they are tautolog- me! I do not even know the extent of my own igno-
ical, as found by Aristotle, who saw time as the amount rance.
of movement with respect to before and after. Saint Augustine35 ❏

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Las múltiples definiciones del tiempo Les diverses définitions du temps

¿Qué es el tiempo ? Qu’est-ce donc que le temps ?

Si nadie me lo pregunta, lo sé, Si personne ne me pose la question, je sais ;
Si alguien me lo pregunta y que yo quiera expli- Si quelqu’un pose la question et que je veuille l’ex-
carlo, ya no lo sé. pliquer, je ne sais plus.
San Agustín Saint Augustin

Nosotros no somos capaces de experimentar el Nous avons conscience du temps comme change-
tiempo utilizando nuestros cinco sentidos, ni de defi- ment, grâce à la mémoire essentiellement, mais
nirlo empleando nuestra inteligencia, ya que inevi- nous ne pouvons ni sentir (par nos cinq sens), ni
tablemente estamos dentro del tiempo. Logramos définir (par notre intelligence), le temps : nous
una representación del tiempo a través de los cam- sommes inexorablement dedans. Le concept de
bios en nosotros y en el ambiente. Esto resulta posi- temps est riche de sens et d’histoire. Et si le temps
ble por las funciones de la memoria. ¿Qué ocurriría n’existait que pour et dans notre esprit ? Si la per-
si el tiempo sólo existiera como un constructo de ception comme la raison sont tenues en échec, il
nuestra mente, o si la ausencia de este constructo s’ensuit que la chronologie (science du temps) ne
nos resultara incómoda a nuestra forma de pensar? peut exister que comme une liste d’hypothèses
Si nuestras dos principales herramientas para cons- scientifiques et reste ainsi en quelque sorte une
truir el mundo -el sentimiento y la razón- fueran de question de philosophie, une énigme que des pen-
poca ayuda, entonces el estudio del tiempo, es decir seurs ont tenté d’approcher pendant plus de deux
la cronología, podría existir como un listado de hipó- mille ans. Dans cet article, plusieurs champs du
tesis científicas y permanecería en alguna medida savoir en relation avec le temps sont abordés, de la
como una pregunta filosófica (un enigma que ha philosophie et de la physique à la psychologie et à
sido abordado por los pensadores por más de dos la biologie : en particulier, quelles sont les diffé-
milenios). En esta revisión se discuten varios campos rences entre Chronos et Tempus, le temps des phy-
del conocimiento en relación con el tiempo, desde siciens et celui des psychologues, respectivement.
la filosofía y la física hasta la psicología y la biología.
Se revisan las diferencias entre Chronos y Tempus,
que corresponden respectivamente al tiempo de los
físicos y de los psicólogos.

17. Newton I. Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. Definitiones. 27. Treisman M. Laws of sensory magnitude. Nature. 1963;198:914-
Scholium, I, 1686. New York, NY: Daniel Adee; 1846. 915.
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Collection of Papers, which passed between the late Learned Mr. Leibnitz, and Dr. Implications for a model of the "internal clock". Psychol Monogr. 1963;77:1-
Clarke, In the Years 1715 and 1716. London, UK: James Knapton; 1717. 31.
19. Kant I. Critique of Pure Reason, Transcendental Aesthetic. §2.1. 1781. Smith 29. Eagleman DM. Human time perception and its illusions. Curr Opin
NK, trans. London, UK: Macmillan; 1929. Neurobiol. 2008;18:131-136.
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21. Klein E. Le temps existe-t-il?. Lecture of April 5, 2004, Université Pierre et
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Marie Curie.
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