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We may appreciate Mutton's audacity, and his success in breaking the bonds
of time by a strategy that exalted one central metaphor and excluded the
other. Hutton's theory of the earth is time's cycle triumphant; but can his total
rejection of time's arrow pass without rueful consequence?
Hutton's Paradox: Or, Why the Discoverer
of Deep Time Denied History
The Pure Time's Cycle Theorist
If moments have no distinction, then they have no interest.
I propose this aphorism as a description of Hutton's paradox, or the
problematical situation that pure versions of time's cycle impose upon
history. We saw in Chapter 2 how Burnet insisted, so acutely, that any strict
reading of time's cycle would rob him of his subject. I wish to argue that
Hutton's approach implied such an attitude toward history, and that he at least
had the gumption and consistency to follow his argument to its logical end,
and thereby to deny history itself. Such a claim will appear, particularly to
most geologists, as absurd. After all, Hutton discovered deep time, didn't he?
How could the architect of a proper matrix for history then turn upon his own
implication and deny it? Yet Hutton proceeded just this way—and we have
lost the resulting paradox, both because we know Hutton from Playfair's
different translation (a less rigid version that permitted history), and because
we have not understood the centrality and power of time's cycle in Hutton's
argument.
The paradox is both logical and psychological. As a bare minimum, history
demands a sequence of distinctive events (other issues like directionality and
rates of transition are subjects of endless debate and fascination, but not
sine
quibus non
). Under the metaphor of time's cycle in its pure form, nothing can
be distinctive because everything comes round again—and no event, by
itself, can tell us where we are, for nothing anchors us to any particular
point
in time, but only (at most) to a particular stage of a repeating cycle.
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