Philosophers are divided on the question of whether temporal movement is real or illusory, but it is significant that those who assert the latter tend to represent reality as a formal structure of objects describable from no point of view, whereas those who affirm the reality of temporal passage appeal to the inescapable sense of moving through time and try to show that this sense is veridical. Here it is again relevant to reflect on Tony Foster’s artistic practice and experiences. Like the English artists Hamish Fulton and Richard Long, he has made walking integral to his art practice. Tony sets off on a journey, treks through changing landscapes, observes the passing of clouds, feels the force and direction of the wind, the falling rain, the drying sun; and along the way sketches and paints, closely attending to changing shapes and colors, looking up looking down, recalling, anticipating, and all the while imbuing his images with the sense of skies, mountains, waterfalls, trees, and plants having been formed and changed through the course of geological, biological and human-historical time. Set alongside these activities, as presupposed rather than represented, is the fact of his own life as a journey through time. All of this must really be as it appears, that is as genuinely temporal, because it involves a series of events and processes occurring not in some abstract configuration but in temporal succession. Thus, the artist proves by deed what the philosopher seeks to show by argument: the reality of time. In trying to understand time and the sense of it as passing, it is important to recognize that neither time nor space are things, but rather dimensions in which things may be related to one another — spatially: above, below, to the right or left, closer or further away; and temporally: before, after, simultaneous with, proximate or distant etc. Unlike spatial relations, however, temporal ones seem to be subject to an overarching and irreversible direction: forward to the future. The source of this apparent directionality, however, is not time but change. The Tregrehan Cornish oak, with its twisting and turning limbs depicted in Tony’s painting, developed from a sapling that itself grew from an acorn — a sequence of organic changes, phases and stages that is unidirectional. That process is not directly represented in the image, but we know it has been gone through and that the reverse sequence is impossible. The line of a dozen small studies of oak leaves arranged beneath the main image could be viewed and described from right to left, beginning with a shrivelled brown leaf and ending with an open bright green one. That, however, would run counter to the course of nature that the sequence records through the charting of changing contours and colours: the natural and irreversible process of dying. A main reason, then, why we conceive of time as having a direction is that the natural processes that occur through time themselves run only one way. There is, though, something more: not just directionality which could be found in a static pattern, but movement. The future approaches, the past recedes, or again to avoid treating time as itself a ‘thing,’ we would do better to say that the temporal character of things change as they pass from the present into the past. In winter we wait for the approach of spring which in turn gives way to summer, during which we may recall the previous winter and anticipate the coming autumn, and so on as the seasons approach, are present and pass by, each receding ever further into the past. future. So, what we do with our time affects other people’s time in a really meaningful way. I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to talk a little bit about this Journey and thankful to Tony for the opportunity to see this beautiful work and comment on it. The Artist Illustrates the Reality of Time John Haldane PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY ST ANDREWS UNIVERSITY We have become accustomed, through popular television presentations of cosmology, earth science, and biological evolution, to a contrast between what might be termed ‘scientific time,’ which deals with events and processes on a scale that runs to millions and even billions of years, and ‘human time,’ referring to what falls within the experi- ence and memory of individuals and by extension those of prior generations, and which is documented in various forms and media including Tony Foster’s Exploring Time watercolor diaries. In a further sense, ‘human time’ can also refer to the human awareness of the passage of time: the sense, sometimes encouraging, sometimes saddening, but always inescapable, of continuously moving forward into the future and leaving the past irrevocably behind. From a philosophical point of view, however, the idea of the passage of time is puzzling. Depending on one’s attitude to things, ranging from absorbed engagement to uninterested passivity, time may seem to move at slower or faster rates. But that is a matter of our subjective experience. 101
