Note: The intended audience for this paper is a group of students in a sociology class called “Death and Dying” who have never taken a philosophy class before.
Imagine yourself at your college graduation. You look around at the sea of caps and gowns and smiling faces. How does this scene make you feel? You might feel joyful and proud for having reached this milestone. Or you might feel an inexplicable pang of anxiety. Perhaps you haven’t been able to find a job that interests you, or maybe you will soon have to start graduate school in a city where you know nobody. At this point, you may start to think: where did the time go? How did four years pass by so quickly?
Upon confronting our transition from one stage of life to another, we often experience sadness over how much time has passed and regret over the things we were unable to accomplish. These feelings are similar to those associated with death and dying, even if the two situations are entirely different. But why should we feel this way when change is an inevitable part of life?
In his paper entitled “So It Goes,” philosopher David Velleman helps us understand these feelings and offers a way of overcoming them. He argues that though we may not be able to avoid our mortality, we can avoid suffering as a result of it. Doing so requires shedding two illusions: the illusion of the existence of an enduring self (that is, a self that persists through time) and the illusion of the passage of time (that is, that we move through time, like a driver in a car). You may wonder how these two seemingly obvious aspects of life can be illusory. How can the self I was an hour ago be different from the one I am now? And surely an hour has passed since then, since I felt the time go by?
To explain how an enduring self is an illusion, let us return to the image of graduation. As you and your friends receive your diplomas, you all reminisce about the time you first met three years ago. Though your graduating self and your first-year self exist at different points in time, you likely think of them as being one and the same because they both belong to your subjective experience. But Velleman argues that conflating the past self and present self doesn’t make sense because one thing cannot be completely present at two different points in time. Just as your head and feet cannot be in the exact same space at the same time, Velleman believes you cannot be self-identical at different points in time because you acquire more and more temporal parts of yourself as you live.
The illusion of the existence of an enduring self is tied to the illusion of the passage of time. One way to think about time is to view it merely in terms of relations between different events, such as one event occurring earlier or later than another. But this isn’t how we experience time. We feel that time passes, that events unfold in a progression from past to present to future. Relations between different points in time remain the same, and when we experience time passing, we sense that future events draw closer to the present and present events recede into the past. But in reality, the amount of time between events stays the same. Thus, time does not actually move — we simply experience the illusion of time passing by.
The illusion of the existence of an enduring self and the illusion of the passage of time are related because time only seems to pass because we experience it passing by us. Take, for example, the progression from your first year of college to your graduation. If you believe you have an enduring self, then you must accept that your full self exists at every moment from your first year to your graduation. But it seems absurd to suggest that your first-year self is the same self as your graduating self because the latter self has undoubtedly lived more life and had more experiences. It is more accurate, then, to think of those selves as distinct parts of yourself that occupy different points in time but are nonetheless bound together by all belonging to your subjective experience.
If we shed the illusions of an enduring self and the passage of time, says Velleman, we can free ourselves from the suffering that often accompanies the feeling that time is passing by too quickly or too slowly. Thinking of ourselves as plants that grow new parts to fill each moment in time, rather than as unchanging drivers in cars that move through time, can help relieve us from the worry that moments are slipping away. Letting go of the sense that time is constantly running out can aid us in coming to terms with not only our mortality, but also ordinary changes in our lives like graduating from college. The anxiety and pain we may associate with death and change are very much legitimate; indeed, we can’t completely shed the feeling that we are enduring selves passing through time. But we can cope with these feelings by thinking of them as being “of the moment.” That sea of caps and gowns and smiling faces might not seem so intimidating after all.