Review of Erwin Tegtmeier’s
Zeit und Existenz. Parmenideische Meditationen
(Mohr Siebeck: Tübingen 1997).

(Published in dialectica, Fasc. 2, 2001, pp. 178-181.)

If you are interested in the philosophy of time, take the time to read Erwin Tegtmeier's Zeit und Existenz. It is well written, well structured, and it puts forward an original analysis of time. Although I will use this review to point out some weaknesses in Tegtmeier's position, I find the book well argued. My own views on time are almost diametrically opposed to Tegtmeier's. For instance, I think like Brentano, that everything that exists exists only in "the now" (a view Tegtmeier labels "Solpräsentismus"), and I think, like Kant, that "an empty now" is a logical possibility. These views are wholly rejected by Tegtmeier. He wants to stage a kind of Parmenidean come back in philosophy. According to Tegtmeier, existence in time consists of two parts, existence and being-in-time. Existence is regarded as in itself completely independent of change, "the now", eternity, and time in general. This is the Parmenedian message of the book whose subtitle is "Parmenidean Meditations". However, Tegtmeier is not only defending his hero. "Parmenides improved" would have been an adequate subtitle, too. Unlike Parmenides, Tegtmeier does not reach the conclusion that everything that exists is atemporal and static. It is only existence which is argued to be atemporal, and Tegtmeier claims that some relations are in themselves dynamic.

The book is divided into three parts: I. Becoming and Being, II. Duration and Being, III. Tense and Being. In the first part, Parmenides' view is presented by means of four arguments, the ontological, the logical, the epistemological, and the etiological, respectively. Tegtmeier finds the first two arguments the strongest ones. Leaving some necessary elaborations aside, the ontological argument says that since non-existence cannot exist, neither can coming into being and passing out of being; and according to the logical argument, both coming to be and passing away are contradictory concepts since they ascribe both existence and non-existence to the same entity. Plato and Aristotle are criticized for trying to solve these Parmenedian puzzles by introducing degrees of being, i.e. Plato's conception of the sensible world as a becoming and Aristotle's concept of potentiality. Both are dismissed as postulating impossible "halfexistencies" ("Halbseiendes"). Tegtmeier allows no degrees of being.

Like Tegtmeier, I think that there has to be a concept of existence which does not allow degrees of being, but I find his arguments for a complete denial of potentialities inconclusive. If one makes a distinction between necessary existence, actual existence, and possible existence, one need not regard this distinction as describing degrees of being in Tegtmeier’s sense of being. One may regard these three concepts as denoting three different kinds of being, which all of them exist in the sense in which Tegtmeier speaks of existence. I would have liked a more thorough discussion of the difference between kinds of being and degrees of being.

At the end of the first part (chapter 21), Tegtmeier presents his own analysis of time. According to him, time is wholly relational, the relata being individuals (things or states of affairs) whose existence is logically prior to that of time. Some such individuals must necessarily be related by three different relations belonging to three different groups of relations. Two such individuals are (A) related either by the relation earlier than, the relation simultaneous with, or the relation overlaps temporally with; the same individuals are also (B) related either by the relation lasts longer than or the relation lasts equally long as; thirdly (C), one individual is either a temporal part of the other or not. It should also be added that Tegtmeier thinks that the smallest possible temporal part necessarily has some extension, and that the relation earlier than is in itself dynamic.

The relations mentioned constitute "Tegtmeierian time", and such time is therefore dependent for its existence upon the atemporal individuals between which these relations hold. Individuals which do not bear these relations to each other can exist as well. If one takes it for granted that time is like a line one can, although Tegtmeier does not point it out, by merely substituting the phrase 'two time intervals' for the phrase 'two such individuals' in the exposition above, get the surely true remark that two time intervals are necessarily related by one relation from group A, one from group B, and one from C. Tegtmeier's view is, to repeat, that time is constituted by such relations between atemporally existing individuals, not (as I think) that individuals by being in time inherit these relations from independently existing time intervals.

To my mind, one really crucial point in Tegtmeier's analysis is the view that the relation earlier than (in group A) is a dynamic relation. Tegtmeier does not use Parmenides' distinction between the Way of Truth and the Way of Illusion to say that becoming only belongs to Illusion and in Truth there is no becoming at all. According to Tegtmeier, there is something real which corresponds to becoming, and that is the dynamic character of the relation earlier than. In order to make me change my philosophy of time, Tegtmeier would have had to explain in a lot more detail what kind of property this dynamic character which inheres in a relation really is. He does say that both the relation earlier than and its dynamic character are perceivable in a single now (which, remember, must have a temporal extension), but as he presents this view, it begs my questions. Like Tegtmeier, I think that in some perceptions we do perceive both a relation earlier than and a dynamism, but in such perceptions we do not perceive that the dynamism is a property of the relation earlier than.

At the end of the first part (chapter 23) and at the beginning of the second (chapter 25), Tegtmeier makes clear to the reader his position with regard to universals. He is a kind of immanent or Aristotelian realist. This was not a problem to me, but it may of course be a stumbling block to many a reader.

In the second part of the book, Tegtmeier explains what his analysis means with respect to duration. Of course, duration, just like becoming, is regarded as something which has no intrinsic connection with existence. It is grounded by the two relations in group B, i.e. lasts longer than and lasts just as long as. Tegtmeier uses Kant's and David Lewis's views as foils for his own.

My complaint here is that Tegtmeier regards the two relations mentioned as ontologically self-sufficient relations. To me that is counterintuitive. Just as the relation being taller than seems to presuppose things with the property of having length that ground the relation, the relation lasts longer than seems to me to presuppose things with some property of having duration which grounds that relation. But Tegtmeier says explicitly that duration is only to be analysed in relations. I would like a "bottom-up" approach where properties ground relations, but Tegtmeier has a "top-down" approach where relations ground the property of having duration. As far as I can see, Tegtmeier's relationist analysis of time has the consequence that we cannot ascribe a duration to a thing in a one-thing-world. If there is only one thing, then this thing cannot have any relations such as lasts longer than and lasts equally long as to anything else, and then it cannot, in Tegtmeier’s top-down analysis, have any duration at all.

A thing which has a certain duration is, according to Tegtmeier, exactly the same thing the whole time; even if it is continuously changing. Nonetheless he maintains that such a thing has temporal parts which are individuals, too. There are relations, such as being a temporal part of (group C), between the parts and the whole thing. If I have understood him correctly (I am not quite sure), Tegtmeier tries here in an interesting way to overcome the dichotomy between the so-called endurance and perdurance views of things. He claims that a persisting thing which endures can at the same time contain a manifold of temporal parts.

In the third part, Tegtmeier discusses tense. Presence is of course regarded as something other than existence. Nor does it have, for Tegtmeier, any intrinsic connection with change. Change, he says, can exist within a certain presence, and can therefore not be used to analyse the difference between the past, the present, and the future. In Tegtmeier's view, the different tenses are characterised by their relation to a consciousness (a perceiving consciousness, I guess; see p. 133). All the temporal relations which constitute time can relate mental acts (like perceptions) and non-mental states of affairs.

To my mind, Tegtmeier's analysis of tense gets more of its credibility from his critical remarks on other philosophers' views than from the exposition of his own. He makes fine and interesting comments on quite a number of "Solpräsentismus" philosophers: Aristotle, Augustin, Brentano, Broad, Hartmann, Heidegger, and Prior. There are also comments on McTaggart. Brentano is extensively discussed (five chapters) because he is said to have the most thoroughly worked out theory of an internal relation between presence and existence.

It is tempting to regard Tegtmeier's analysis of time as belonging to the class of tenseless views, or, using McTaggart's famous terminology, as a B-series view. But I am sure that Tegtmeier would object. And in a sense he would be right. In traditional tenseless views, all dynamism is placed within consciousness, but, as I have said, Tegtmeier thinks that the relation earlier than is in itself dynamic and contains directedness. Nonetheless, he is much closer to tenseless views than to tensed views because the former ones are much closer to Parmenides than the tensed views are.

Some of the concluding chapters are concerned with "Lebensphilosophie". Does it make any difference to one's life whether one has a Parmenedian or a Brentanist view of existence? Well, read Tegtmeier and think for yourself. But I can tell you that even the neo-Parmenedian Tegtmeier thinks that, when you die, you will die.