Here is an easy situation in which people can appreciate the experience of past, present and future rather than use time as something that is measured, as happens in a clock, where time is just something, whatever it is, that “moves” past. Think of a game of rummy. The cardplayer anticipates what card will come up to complete your rummy or to have a few enough cards so you can “knock”. Every time you are about to pick a card is an anticipation that is needed. Those successive picks until the one card you pick are the future. There are multiple possibilities and keep the cardplayer anxious about what the next card will be. People live in or for the future and it is not easy to describe which proposition “in” or “for” is to apply. When the card you need turns up is in the present. It is an event for the instant satisfaction that it lasts as a card player appreciates that a card has changed the situation advantageously. The memory of all of those times when an unsatisfactory card did not turn up is the past, the collection of failed opportunities, that lets a calculating cardplayer increase the chances of getting the card you want because of the failed opportunities of the cards that have been discarded. What applies to card playing as a way to emphasize the appreciation of past, present and future is the aesthetic or metaphysical pleasure of playing cards.
Consider more complicated situations that help people to experience time. Live action television provides a particularly extreme or dramatic version of the experience of the present time. You watch on television live coverage of the Thanksgiving Day Parade. You see if Snoopy the balloon was wafted by a downdraft to nearly scrape on the floor or that one of the bandmembers loses focus for a moment and so does not smile for the audience. I see Yogi Berra jump up to wrap around Don Larsen when Larsen won the first World Series no hitter. I saw Jack Ruby kill Lee Harvey Oswald while I watched it in a living room while it actually happened. What happens to each of us is that this actuality is happening while one is also seeing a presentation of it happening while it is in a frame and at a remote place. Indeed, people will remark that these events are actually happening and so exhibit the wonder of an event while it happens. What is momentous is that those events need not, up until they happened, need not have happened. Yogi could have dropped the last strike or Ruby had his elbow juggled and so missed when he pulled the trigger. A momentary event has so many components that are necessary to be in place for an event to transpire that it is no wonder that paintings or photographs can show the simultaneity while narratives have to provide one event at a time rather than their collaboration. So the image is fixed as a composite event rather than a chain of causation.
Now be one step removed from the frame of an actuality, while remaining self-aware that a moment is taking place. You go on a walk and see the houses on the street slowly moving past you as you take the steps. You feel the waft of a breeze as it ebbs and shifts and the feel of the temperature on your body, not changing perceptively during the course of your walk. Not on sidewalks, but in a wood, you see the ever changing shadows as well as the complexity of leaves and branches as their relationships are ever changing while pausing for a moment so as to fix a moment. So you are aware not only of a moment but of how the concatenation of facts and appearances alters every moment, and it is good. In that way you see the present as it is happening.
Now take self awareness as part of the picture. You have the experience of that walk, whether on a sidewalk or in a wood, and all the same things happen even if you do not name or mention what is happening. Indeed, the pleasure of the walk is partly the experience of time moving past, the walk providing the unself-conscious claim that time is passing rather than that time is past or that it is future, however much a person also knows when they left a house for a walk or knew that a walk would end. But a focus does aid in experiencing that time, as happens dramatically when an unexpected event takes place, like a couple of kids walking past your own walk on their bikes, or when you pause to note that you have come up to and will go past a marker on the road, such as a monument or a bus stop.
What all of these instances have in common, whether vicariously or self consciously or not self aware, is that a moment testifies that something has changed, in the flick of an eye, from what it was before or what it might be. Don Larsen did it; the wind shifted; the light is slightly different because a cloud has moved. So time is not measured as a change because time is correlated with change but time is the experience of change at the moment as the signal and undergoing of the present moment. There are any number of moments that might change and any number of different moments where changes take place. What is singular about the experience of present time is the fact that changes are in the process of changing, though “process” is a bad if inevitable term because that change is instantaneous, clicking again in an instant, rather than something that can endure, like the rotting of a plant, which is an extended change. The wonder is that so many things happen at an instance and that there are so many instances, as if there were no reservoir whereby time could be used up.
Metaphors about time abound because it is so difficult to access the matter. Present time is thought to be on a life edge because it is an instant before the future and after the past. But a sociologist tries to give an exact or non-metaphorical description. It is accurate to say that the present is permanent in that a person is always in the present, never either in the past or the future except that memory or anticipation may try to capture one or the other. As such, a person is capable at the moment of any and all of the presents, engaged in one and many choices, whether to wander in a supermarket or engage in an argument, or read a book, or get yourself fired from a job. The fact that present time is continuous makes it comprehensible in that without it, moments in time could not be connected to one another, and so a person is able to alter a choice, or rescind it, or evade it, or deal with its consequences, because of that. If present time were not recognizable as such, then life would be unrecognizable because the very structure of existence would be different.
That is a Kantian approach to the question in that the world is what it is and therefore the philosopher tries to figure out what obtains in our categories so as to create what is clearly apparent and unavoidable. A sociologist, on the other hand, will look at the usual collection of social arrangements so as to tease out the conditions which make them problematic rather than merely possible. Consider criminal justice, which presumes that there is a continuous present in that a person who murdered someone is subject many years later to be tried for and convicted for an event as if it were the same person who did it years before even if in many ways the lives have changed. A Kantian might say that we posit there is a continuous present because we act as if it existed and therefore does exist. A sociologist, however, will look at discrete actual events whereby people show that people have an impact on the continuous present. That is shown by the fact that lawyers and jurists will try to modify behavior so as to alter the continuous present, and so make it a social reality for themselves when they do claim that a person has so changed since the terrible crime that was committed that a different outcome should be assigned to the criminal. People who are born again appeal to vacating their executions and Leopold was let off after a very long sentence for his heinous murder of Bobby Franks so that he could serve the rest of his remaining life as a medical technician in Puerto Rico. But Sirhan Sirhan is denied parole time after time because his murder of Bobby Kennedy seems so fresh and raw, the time since then not at all discontinuous about that event.
The present is very different from the past in that the past is a very, very large reservoir of events recorded and remaining unrecorded and that digging up the past can arrive at diminishing returns in that you get very little more information from a very difficult archaeological dig while there is elaborate information, too much to process, about what happened in a recent Presidential election, the basic truths about it known to journalists a few days after or even before it happened. The past is experienced and so is a fixed set of events even if there are innumerable ones and people are constantly finding new events that they have discovered. The set of events are complete in that new ones cannot be added and so time cannot be altered even if, in discovering events, or recasting the significance of past events in more recent context, alter the significance of what had happened. But Caesar cannot any longer not cross the Rubicon and George Washington cannot not decide to venture across the Delaware to attack Trenton. The events and the trends and the structures of the times were also facts. There was a perception of a Baby Boom after the end of the Second World War and there was the fact that the Baby Boom happened.
A way to magnify the experience of the past, just as was done with the present, is to consult the sociology of religion because it concerns the deep and therefore exaggerated (or essential) past. Sociologists such as have regarded religion as emerging from the experience of biological spirits, whether of trees or animals, who are transformed into disembodied spirits which nonetheless maintain the feelings of what those things are. Perhaps later down the line, specific places took on auras because of the specialization of places whereby some places were sacred while others weren’t. But it is also to be remembered that dead people also had that aura, and so are active in the present even if they had lived in the past, a weight or a boon to living people, even if the way they work are naturally enough altered by that transition from life to death and so to be attended with by ceremonies and formalistic incantations. The same is true for a group when its past is activated or acts on its present claims, as in the case with the Abrahamic religions, where was invented not the idea that it was beholden to the past because that was already invented, but because it invented the idea that its God was a creature of and reduced to words, something carried in an ark rather than there at a place, and so necessarily invisible rather than invisibility just a limitation of dead people. But the hoary past is not limited to those Abrahamic religions. American Indians who venerate tribal lands are not venerating just the land but the fact that it is where the tribal ancestors lived, and is so a reminder and testament that is as old as can be old, a matter of history rather than of the present.
So what is venerated is the pastness itself, of lore because it is ancient and tablets which were found to have been buried, and therefore significant because they have been revealed, which means transported from the past in an artifact and in a plan to reveal what had been said before, the past enlivened by being transported into the present, weather it is the Five Books of Moses rediscovered in the ruins of Jerusalem by Exra, or the Book of Mormon found and disclosed by Joseph Smith. It is unfortunate for the LDS religion that history is close enough so that letters and other records are discovered which can change what were the historical facts, even as it is unlikely that a record will turn up to the person or persons who had interred the Five Books of Moses into the temple. But even a relatively recent past, as is the cae with the Mormons, has its veneration as a past, and incorporates into it a sequence of events that came before and through the time of the migration of Brigham Young and his followers to the Utah valley. Everything is old and so venerated; that is the point of veneration.
Secularizing veneration means separating the properties of the past from the particulars of veneration and so making them an attribute of or caused by the tense of the past; the past is nothing but its properties. What therefore stands out is that the past is unchanged, that it is alive in the present imagination, and that it is subject to interpretation so that what is past gets associated with what is present. That happens in historical religions, and so the LDS allows, on precedent, that the Mormon President can decide African Americans are full fledged people and that polygamy is abolished. Similarly, Roman Catholicism never changes except when it does because of precedences which allow a legitimate corporate structure to allow the changes to take place. It was not very long ago that Catholicism decided, in Vatican II, to put aside that Jews were not responsible for the death of Jesus, though for close to millenia had been the view that the Jews were just a thorn in the side of the Catholic progress towards the triumphalism of the Church rather than a older “brother” in the joint progress towards an ever deepening experience of how mankind can achieve its holiness.
Among other qualities of the past that are revealed by the consideration of those who venerate the past-- who focus on the experience of the past-- are the following. First, the experience of the past is to repeat the stories of the past whether for the relatively trivial purpose of reminding its lesson, as the one where the Haggadah reminds Jews that once they were slaves in Egypt, and should therefore be mindful of how others are or were slaves, and in the more significant sense that the repetition of the past allow that past to be re experienced and so live again, as if it were present, the seminal moment permanently available, as even it remains a past one, as when the Mass celebrates always and eternally the commemoration of the breaking of the bread and the sipping of the wine as if it were in the Last Supper. In short, the past is never over even while it retains its character as past. Second, the past is operative in that it is a cause and not just the first cause of what has happened to the present. So the past is an origin point of a notion of causes and consequences and so generates the idea of causation even if modern science aborted that project by making the rules of the inclined plane of Galileo to be independent of whenever that enterprise was originally undertaken or everywhere to be replicated. Science aside, the heavy weight of the dead generations are lessons from Burke about the future but also established in the reverence for whatever the past has left the present with, our obligation as well as our wisdom. And third, among others, the past contains the abstracted experience of its familiarity in that it is repeated, however subtly changed, as in “Beowulf” when the great events of having encountered Grendel are recounted, so that the present knows the story and is comforted and fascinated by that, as happens when public events are recounted, even if they are horrendous, as is the assassination of John F. Kennedy, because we all see the motorcade turning the corner into Dealey Square so that the expectation of disaster is anticipated and also already done. That is what it is to be in the past. A fourth characteristic of the past, although it may be an valuation of the past and so is not the past per se, is the idea and the experience that the past is for the best, which means that what has eventuated was the best possible outcome or, more modestly, rendering outcomes so that a person can focus on its advantages and discount its disadvantages, as when a person says that a spouse, all in all, is not so bad. That gets generalized to think that it is inevitable that the past will lead to the present, some believing, for example, that the market system is always right because whatever the stock market happened had to happen, whatever it did, just as there had to be a Civil War in the United States because it did happen, even though sociologists argue for very different reasons that they study actual social structures rather than idealized ones because that is their subject matter when their real reasons had to do with the fact that there is a wisdom to the cumulative efforts of social evolution.
To turn from the past to the future. For its part, the future is not darkness in that it is the vast emptiness of what had not yet happened. To the contrary, the future is illuminated by any number of possibilities that can be either well or badly described and explained. The future, as an experience, is the anticipation of what might happen, people are always full of one or another anticipation, whether to buy a car or get a girl or see a future bleak, or wonder if there is jam to join your peanut butter. Indeed, as Georg Cantor said, there are larger and smaller infinities, and the infinity of the future contains more elements than the infinity of the past. Think of all the publicity photo shots taken of Sophia Loren during a one month period. They show her at all angles, poses and varieties of clothing. Now for any one of them that were taken take the three or four or multitudes of photos that might have slightly altered the pose or the angle but were never taken, never mind that we might argue that the best ones were the ones that were taken. Then eliminate all the actual photos and what is left is another infinite number of imagined photos. So the future photos, the anticipated or possibly anticipated photos are still an infinity, just as there are an infinite number of those between the integers, the integers themselves constituting an infinity.
When does the future begin? The idea of this question is that there will come a time when the events that obtain are so critically different from the ones that have obtained that an observer can say that, yes, we are in the future. Women in the flapper era looked very different from the way they had looked a generation ago, though men did not dress all that differently, not enough so that people had emerged into the future. Such numbers of women presently in the U. S. Congress would make the presence of that number so different from a generation or two ago, that this fact is indicative that the present is now the future that emerged. The same thing would be true of African Americans in Congress, while the few African Americans in the Senate would suggest we are not in the future because the number of them (three) suggests that they are sports or special circumstances rather than a new dispensation.
The overall principle is that what the future is will be as that is imagined tends to be wrong while actual futures are ones that are unexpected. I might think that the invention of flushed toilets would seem the invention of the future, but people had managed for a very long time with chamber pots without requiring the new appliance even if its introduction had considerably improved sanitation and resulted in lower infection rates one of those futures that are not readily apparent though cumulatively significant.
Consider imagined futures of the past. Magazines suggested in the Twenties that the future would include personal helicopters crossing the sky over cities, and that never happened, even if, nowadays, we can think of using corporate drones to land on your lawn (if you have a lawn). Endless amounts of electrical energy was supposed to arise with the development of the Atom Bomb, but only a very small percentage of electrical energy is atomic powered and is quite costly to create or maintain. The future used to be spaceflight, but that ended past Earth orbit after the Apollo landings in the moon in the Seventies and a shift has been made to non-human voyagers as providing more data in a safer way even if there are speculations of human trips to the Moon and to Mars. The current generation sees the future as including artificial intelligence entities as personal companions, but the technology seems insurmountable if for no other reason than how difficult it is to fashion an artificial knee that will work.
Consider, on the other hand, the futures that came about. Many of them had considerable preparation in that there was the slow and steady technical development of what might be, after that, a very different social horizon. The invention of the steam engine took generations but the fact that it led to what Blake called “The Satanic mills” was quickly seen as a blight that destroyed the independent craftsman and separated wives at home from the husbands who went to work at the factories. Similarly, there were generations which tinkered with the internal combustion engine, but the social explosion led to highways, rather than country lanes and to tanks rather than horse cavalry. There was the briefly imagined and short actuality of the suburbs, never mind that the outer boroughs and trolley lines had created suburbs along city streets in the Nineteenth Century. There was supposed to be a new way of looking at things and of having social relations as a result of the housing developments and highways and low mortgage homes available after the Second World War. People would be isolated in their single family homes; there would be extensive social segregation as middle class people mingled with only other middle class people; and women would be even more dependent on their family hearths. John Updike imagined suburban life would lead to licentiousness. But all to nought. People returned to the cities when their children got older. Some of the suburbs became mixed or poor. Suburbs got the amenities of colleges and fancy restaurants. Women moved on to more and more triumphs rather than becoming Stepford Wives. The most recent future of the past few generations is the computer, which science fiction hadn’t projected. Computers transformed everything from word processing to privacy, from making data so available that people don’t have to remember the Presidents or where to find a nice place to dine, but were unprecedented in that few imagined that the world would be so transformed and so quickly. The future is full of surprises.