The Pole denies the actuality of the past and in consequence thereof the ersatz eternity or accidental necessity (necessitas per accidens) of the past.
Quasi-literary Preamble:
What has been, though it needn't have been, always will have been. What time has mothered, no future time can destroy. What you were and that you were stand forever inscribed in the roster of being whether or not anyone ever reads the record. What you have done, good or bad, and what you have left undone, good or bad, cannot be erased by the passage of time. You will die, but your having lived will never die. This is so even if you and your works and days are utterly forgotten. An actual past buried in oblivion remains an actual past. The erasure of memories and memorials is not the erasure of their quondam objects. The being of what was does not depend on their being-known; it does not rest on the spotty memories, flickering and fallible, of fragile mortals or their transient monuments or recording devices.
But how paltry the ersatz eternity of time's progeny! Time has made you and will unmake you. In compensation, she allows your having been to rise above the reach of the flux. Thanks a lot, bitch! You are one mater dolorosa whose consolation is as petty as your penance is hard.
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I posted a precursor of the above on 10 March 2010. It elicited an astute comment from Alan Rhoda. He wrote:
You here express the tense-logical idea that p –>FPp, that if something is the case, then it will thereafter always be the case that it has been the case. In Latin, facta infecta fieri non possunt. [The done cannot be undone.]
Believe it not, this has been denied by the famous Polish logician Lukasiewicz, no less. He seems to have accepted a version of presentism according to which (1) all (contingent) truths depend for their truth on what presently exists, and (2) what presently exists need not include anything that suffices to pick out a unique prior sequence of events as "the" actual past. Accordingly, truths about the past may cease to be true as the passage of time obliterates the traces of past events. Lukasiewicz apparently found this a comforting thought:
"There are hard moments of suffering and still harder ones of guilt in everyone’s life. We should be glad to be able to erase them not only from our memory but also from existence. We may believe that when all the effects of those fateful moments are exhausted, even should that happen only after our death, then their causes too will be effaced from the world of actuality and pass into the realm of possibility. Time calms our cares and brings us forgiveness." (Jan Lukasiewicz, "On Determinism" in Selected Works, ed. L. Borkowski, North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1970, p.128.)
That is to my mind an amazing passage from Lukasiewicz both because of his rejection of the tense-logical principle, p –>FPp, and because of the consolation he derives from its rejection.
I myself find it very hard to believe that there wasn't an actual unique past. I find it impossible to believe that, with the passage of enough time, past events will somehow go from being actual to being merely possible. It seems obvious to me, a plain datum, that there is an important difference between a past event such as Kierkegaard's engagement to Regine Olsen, which actually occurred, and a merely possible (past) event such as his marriage to her which did not occur, but could have occurred, where 'could have' is to be taken ontically and not epistemically. Now that datum tells against presentism — unless you bring God into the picture which is what Rhoda does. For if the present alone exists, then the wholly past does not exist, which implies that there is no difference between a merely possible past event and an actual past event.
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