When one speaks of what Time is, there is always immediately the question of proper articulation, given that historically, Time has been an unwieldy concept. It is as if, the structure of Time is such that it cannot be purely reduced to any one of its phases, past, present, or future, as isolated from the others. So, in asking what Time "is", should we not also ask what it "was", what it "will be"? This does imply some inconstancy of the concept? And does this not itself betray something about our habits of thinking of Time? If we want to know what Time is, we need to understand that we have already favored the present over the past and the future. Furthermore, we need to recognize that we are running up against a conceptual limitation regarding the meaning of Being, and how Being is articulated within the Time-structure. When I say that something is, I mean that it is present. But the Time-structure does not present itself conceptually as reducible to the content of a present. What is appropriate to the articulation of the Time-structure must also include the past, and the future. Or else, we will err in thinking these are an illusion, because language has so far resisted articulating Being in terms other than what is present.
As an example, we may say, "the past was", but this also implies that "the past is no longer". In one sense, these two phrases bear little difference from each other, excepting that one relies upon a past tense form of grammer, while the other relies upon a present tense form of grammar. But we also note that they differ in the form of a tacit verses explicit negation. "was" operates, at least in some circumstances and in some sense, as a grammatical negation.
Still, the explicit negation of "was" is not active in every grammatical construction that employs it; we sometimes see "was" as an open-ended term, like an imperfect. "She was sleeping the last time I checked", allows also that she is now asleep, though even this is a Time-bound allowance of only a few hours in most cases (one does not generally think that "last time I checked" is sufficient for two weeks ago, unless we are speaking of someone in a coma).
But what is the conceptual relation of "was" and "is", then? And what of "will be"? These all point at distinct Time phases, but is it not that they can also be put in terms of the other Time phases? "Will be" can be put in terms of "is not yet", and we have already spoken of "is no more". Here we see that the grammatical sense of presence is given primacy in articulating the Time structure, but doing so by taking a tacit (potentially imperfect) negation and making it explicit (by perfecting it).
By contrast, it might seem that we are not in the habit of reframing the future in a grammatically past tense, nor of reframing the past in a grammatically futural tense. At least, not generally. And of course, these linguistic habits inform our sense of what constitutes a proper ontology, of what exists and does not exist. But is it sufficiently rigorous to rely upon these habits of discourse in thinking through the structure of Time so that we do not fail to note tacit implications brought about by grammatically reframing Time phases? Is "the past is no longer" a universal truth? Or is it better to regard it as true for specific circumstances, when a previously arisen state of affairs has come to its conclusion, as grammatically perfected?
Modeling and the Impossible
There is also something to be said for subaltern modes of speaking, such as the imperative, the hypothetical, the normative, the subjunctive, and so on. These forms rely upon specific conceptual elaborations of the Time structure such that they stand outside the more directly given domains of past, present, and future. For example, a hypothetical may question a possibility, but not necessarily just as given in the future, the most basic domain of the possible. One may speak of past hypotheticals, so that the future is unhinged from the future, and has now come into question as a "was the future, now is the past", a "now no longer will be", an is not yet that is no more! Hypotheticals, in some cases, accomplish the conceptual structure of 'unhinging' the normative Time structure, somewhat like the imaginary number, √-1. They rely upon our ability to play with the concept of Time outside of lived experience. But does this not make them irresponsible to the rigors of thought? Hypotheticals do seem to have this about them, that they encourage speculation: what if x were the case?
As an historian, I am constantly confronted with the problem of modeling. I am handed fragments, or else, have to seek out fragments, and from this, I must construct a model of history. I have systematically restricted my modeling of history to the theme of the concept of Time in South Asian literature, because this theme contains critical properties that will help us to understand the evolution of philosophical thought as it was lived in South Asia. An understanding of how civilizations relate to Time helps us to see their world through their eyes. But why should this matter? If the past is no more, what value is there to be found in reassembling its fragments?
We have taken this theme for our focus on the grounds that the 20th century gave rise to an enormous revolution in thinking, particularly for the Western Academic method, on the basis of Heidegger's magnum opus, Being and Time. What is not clear to me as yet, and what I have thus set out to clarify, is the relation that Being and Time have to each other in the history of South Asian philosophical and theological literature. It should be noted that this difference is of no small consequence, particularly given that the theory of secularity of the 20th century has as one of its major foundations Heidegger's work. Heidegger separates theology out from Ontology by conceptually reframing ontology within the horizon of temporality.
It is not of small consequence that Heidegger's language for circumscribing his new "secular" concept of Being involves a "horizon" of Temporality. Indeed, this cuts much closer to the South Asian notion of Time, which plied close to the sense of Being that was revealed with the rising and setting Sun, and the cycles of the seasons. It seems that, with Heidegger, we might finally be able to bridge that radical difference which constitutes South Asian conceptual history. To model the history of South Asia's elaboration of the concept of Time, and thus, to recognize the essentially South Asian response to Hegel's claim, that South Asia has no pre-colonial history, we must ask about what they saw Time as, and how this produced an experience of history such that it was not recognizable to Hegel, and to the many scholars who followed in his wake in the study of South Asian literature.
To do this, we must model. And this means we will be engaging with hypotheticals, that we will be asking questions, and positing possibilities that must come under eventual scrutiny, be revised, and perhaps some of which must be thrown out altogether. The hypothetical is thus both a necessity for the work of Western scholarship, and a constant problem for modeling. Thus, we come at this research with the sense that each and every positing is provisional, and that modeling only justifies itself by admitting to what it is, and in asking that it be improved upon. History is such that it destroys much of the world's facts. The discipline of History is such that it tries to piece these back together, in order to ensure that understanding and communication between cultures can occur in the best possible light.
Speculation, Gambling, Hypotheticals, and Civilization
To bring this back to a more explicitly Vaiṣṇava theme, we ask about the conceptual habits that arise in the relation that the hypothetical has to the prohibition against gambling. The hypothetical seems to require some degree of mendaciousness, much like the paranoia of the politician in his pre-emptive attacks or the saving face of one embarrassed by a public scandal. In the moment that rigor in thought and transparency of presentation is thrown to the four directions, we are left with the fathomlessness of a conceptually ill-formed, whimsical worldview. We cannot accept whimsical, merely habitual articulations of the Time structure as adequate to the needs of a living, flourishing philosophy; moreover, the founding of a civilization grounded in a Vaiṣṇava concept of History must have an adequate sense of the Time structure to yoke its methods and capacities, and thus to concretize the domain which constitutes its tacit, optimal potential form.
Philosophical Vaiṣṇavism still needs to find its place in history. Its prior relation to the thought of History remains largely unexcavated, so that a systematic philosophical approach to the construction of a Vaiṣṇava culture remains fragmented and partial. The identification of Viṣṇu with the Kālacakra is an ancient theme that can guide this excavation, and thus explicate the heuristic methods sought out by ancient Vaiṣṇavas who were thinking in highly original ways about the relation between humankind and nature, between life and death, between the past and the present, past and future, present and future.
In future posts, I will have much more to say about hypotheticals. This odd, re-imagined Time-structure needs to be addressed within a phenomenological framework. It will also bear critically on the question of the Time-structure as it is regarded from a Philosophical Vaiṣṇava point of view. Perhaps our next blog can focus on the hypothetical, for without it, we cannot get to the question of the normative (the Ought of Ethics!)...
As an example, we may say, "the past was", but this also implies that "the past is no longer". In one sense, these two phrases bear little difference from each other, excepting that one relies upon a past tense form of grammer, while the other relies upon a present tense form of grammar. But we also note that they differ in the form of a tacit verses explicit negation. "was" operates, at least in some circumstances and in some sense, as a grammatical negation.
Still, the explicit negation of "was" is not active in every grammatical construction that employs it; we sometimes see "was" as an open-ended term, like an imperfect. "She was sleeping the last time I checked", allows also that she is now asleep, though even this is a Time-bound allowance of only a few hours in most cases (one does not generally think that "last time I checked" is sufficient for two weeks ago, unless we are speaking of someone in a coma).
But what is the conceptual relation of "was" and "is", then? And what of "will be"? These all point at distinct Time phases, but is it not that they can also be put in terms of the other Time phases? "Will be" can be put in terms of "is not yet", and we have already spoken of "is no more". Here we see that the grammatical sense of presence is given primacy in articulating the Time structure, but doing so by taking a tacit (potentially imperfect) negation and making it explicit (by perfecting it).
By contrast, it might seem that we are not in the habit of reframing the future in a grammatically past tense, nor of reframing the past in a grammatically futural tense. At least, not generally. And of course, these linguistic habits inform our sense of what constitutes a proper ontology, of what exists and does not exist. But is it sufficiently rigorous to rely upon these habits of discourse in thinking through the structure of Time so that we do not fail to note tacit implications brought about by grammatically reframing Time phases? Is "the past is no longer" a universal truth? Or is it better to regard it as true for specific circumstances, when a previously arisen state of affairs has come to its conclusion, as grammatically perfected?
Modeling and the Impossible
There is also something to be said for subaltern modes of speaking, such as the imperative, the hypothetical, the normative, the subjunctive, and so on. These forms rely upon specific conceptual elaborations of the Time structure such that they stand outside the more directly given domains of past, present, and future. For example, a hypothetical may question a possibility, but not necessarily just as given in the future, the most basic domain of the possible. One may speak of past hypotheticals, so that the future is unhinged from the future, and has now come into question as a "was the future, now is the past", a "now no longer will be", an is not yet that is no more! Hypotheticals, in some cases, accomplish the conceptual structure of 'unhinging' the normative Time structure, somewhat like the imaginary number, √-1. They rely upon our ability to play with the concept of Time outside of lived experience. But does this not make them irresponsible to the rigors of thought? Hypotheticals do seem to have this about them, that they encourage speculation: what if x were the case?
As an historian, I am constantly confronted with the problem of modeling. I am handed fragments, or else, have to seek out fragments, and from this, I must construct a model of history. I have systematically restricted my modeling of history to the theme of the concept of Time in South Asian literature, because this theme contains critical properties that will help us to understand the evolution of philosophical thought as it was lived in South Asia. An understanding of how civilizations relate to Time helps us to see their world through their eyes. But why should this matter? If the past is no more, what value is there to be found in reassembling its fragments?
We have taken this theme for our focus on the grounds that the 20th century gave rise to an enormous revolution in thinking, particularly for the Western Academic method, on the basis of Heidegger's magnum opus, Being and Time. What is not clear to me as yet, and what I have thus set out to clarify, is the relation that Being and Time have to each other in the history of South Asian philosophical and theological literature. It should be noted that this difference is of no small consequence, particularly given that the theory of secularity of the 20th century has as one of its major foundations Heidegger's work. Heidegger separates theology out from Ontology by conceptually reframing ontology within the horizon of temporality.
It is not of small consequence that Heidegger's language for circumscribing his new "secular" concept of Being involves a "horizon" of Temporality. Indeed, this cuts much closer to the South Asian notion of Time, which plied close to the sense of Being that was revealed with the rising and setting Sun, and the cycles of the seasons. It seems that, with Heidegger, we might finally be able to bridge that radical difference which constitutes South Asian conceptual history. To model the history of South Asia's elaboration of the concept of Time, and thus, to recognize the essentially South Asian response to Hegel's claim, that South Asia has no pre-colonial history, we must ask about what they saw Time as, and how this produced an experience of history such that it was not recognizable to Hegel, and to the many scholars who followed in his wake in the study of South Asian literature.
To do this, we must model. And this means we will be engaging with hypotheticals, that we will be asking questions, and positing possibilities that must come under eventual scrutiny, be revised, and perhaps some of which must be thrown out altogether. The hypothetical is thus both a necessity for the work of Western scholarship, and a constant problem for modeling. Thus, we come at this research with the sense that each and every positing is provisional, and that modeling only justifies itself by admitting to what it is, and in asking that it be improved upon. History is such that it destroys much of the world's facts. The discipline of History is such that it tries to piece these back together, in order to ensure that understanding and communication between cultures can occur in the best possible light.
Speculation, Gambling, Hypotheticals, and Civilization
To bring this back to a more explicitly Vaiṣṇava theme, we ask about the conceptual habits that arise in the relation that the hypothetical has to the prohibition against gambling. The hypothetical seems to require some degree of mendaciousness, much like the paranoia of the politician in his pre-emptive attacks or the saving face of one embarrassed by a public scandal. In the moment that rigor in thought and transparency of presentation is thrown to the four directions, we are left with the fathomlessness of a conceptually ill-formed, whimsical worldview. We cannot accept whimsical, merely habitual articulations of the Time structure as adequate to the needs of a living, flourishing philosophy; moreover, the founding of a civilization grounded in a Vaiṣṇava concept of History must have an adequate sense of the Time structure to yoke its methods and capacities, and thus to concretize the domain which constitutes its tacit, optimal potential form.
Philosophical Vaiṣṇavism still needs to find its place in history. Its prior relation to the thought of History remains largely unexcavated, so that a systematic philosophical approach to the construction of a Vaiṣṇava culture remains fragmented and partial. The identification of Viṣṇu with the Kālacakra is an ancient theme that can guide this excavation, and thus explicate the heuristic methods sought out by ancient Vaiṣṇavas who were thinking in highly original ways about the relation between humankind and nature, between life and death, between the past and the present, past and future, present and future.
In future posts, I will have much more to say about hypotheticals. This odd, re-imagined Time-structure needs to be addressed within a phenomenological framework. It will also bear critically on the question of the Time-structure as it is regarded from a Philosophical Vaiṣṇava point of view. Perhaps our next blog can focus on the hypothetical, for without it, we cannot get to the question of the normative (the Ought of Ethics!)...
