English · livello B2. Leggi il testo in inglese e allena la comprensione. Il video con audio e sottotitoli sincronizzati è in arrivo sul canale YouTube.
The past is the only thing that cannot be changed. Everything else — the future, the present — is subject to intervention. The past is not. What has happened has happened, and no subsequent action can alter the fact that it occurred. This asymmetry between past and future is among the most fundamental features of time as we experience it, and it has consequences that philosophy has barely begun to work through.
One consequence is the particular quality of regret. Regret is suffering about what cannot be undone — which distinguishes it from worry, which is suffering about what might be prevented, and from grief, which is suffering about what has been lost. The philosopher L.A. Paul has argued that regret is a response to the recognition that one's choices have foreclosed possibilities that can no longer be recovered. This foreclosure is final in a way that few other human experiences are, which gives regret its distinctive, unresolvable character.
Another consequence is the strange comfort available in the permanence of past goods. The moment of happiness, once it has occurred, is permanently true. It can be forgotten, distorted by memory, or overwhelmed by subsequent suffering — but the fact of its having occurred is not thereby cancelled. "The present moment always will have been," as the philosopher wrote — meaning that what is happening now will forever be part of what has happened, and cannot be unmade.
This is not a consolation that works in all circumstances. But it is a feature of time that offers a kind of stability unavailable in the future, which is always uncertain, and in the present, which is always passing. The past has a permanence that nothing in the temporal structure of experience otherwise provides.
Philosophy of time is among the most technically demanding areas of metaphysics, but its questions are not merely technical. They bear on how we understand loss, regret, memory, and the relationship between who we are now and who we have been — questions that are inescapably practical as well as theoretical.
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