Reframing the Question of God's Existence as "Prime Mover" within the Question of Kṛṣṇa as the Personality of Time (Part I): The Debate over Ontology and Ethics

Europe's Traditional Understanding of Judgment as Pertaining to The Question of God (the Name Whose Original and Final Meaning is Up for Debate): Kant and Hegel, Architects of Modernity 

In Western philosophy, there have been a number of parochial philosophical scandals; a number of doctrines that appear coherent at the surface for some, but which for others produce counter intuitions and thus give rise to conflicting accounts (these may be thought as mutually exclusive, though such an intuition may itself turn out to be an error of prejudgment, of passing judgment before sympathetic understanding has been accomplished). We have Kant and Hegel to thank for bringing this concern to the center stage, and for thereby determining that the European history of philosophical debate was really always about bringing these conflicts to a certain end, thereby bringing about certain, or apodictic, knowledge, i.e., Truth with a Capital-T. In their account, "intuition" and "counter-intuition" (or "thesis" and "antithesis") gives rise to a dialectical question of the possibility of a "superficial, egocentric, merely-subjective assessment of facts." Alongside--or else, inside--this dialectical question arises the perception of a need for an authoritative judgment between the ultimate origins of authority and error, or knowledge and ignorance, take and mistake. And inside the domain defined by this concern, we first see the arising of value-differences, and their role in disagreements of any variety. I take it that the tradition would say that all of this follows from the question of whose judgments are founded in the real, in the common fact, in the "True world of things, of facts." "Facts," in this trial, are the jury members, the final arbiters of truth and falsity, of the innocence or righteous (cor-rectly-founded) authority of authentic knowledge, and the guilt (the culpability, justification for being-cor-rected) of error.* 

So it is, for many, concerning the question of God's existence, though of late I have been more comfortable with framing the historically prior intuition as "the question of God" or "the question of God's Personality" (Hegel, though he might have changed his mind by now, had he only lived long enough and retained his senility, at least agrees with me in his 1827 Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion in supposing that religions of mystery or enigma are prior to the Christian concept of religion). But the phrase "the question of God" might be taken by some as "God's question," wherein we are to investigate what sort of question God would ask, if only we could know His mind and will (and again, from my rather rough reading of Hegel's speculative historiology of "second stage anithetical religions," I take it that he saw the rather implicit thread relating mystery religions with monism, whereby one takes a further step from the initial question to imagining that one is justified in claiming to know God's mind in full, oneself being fully One-with-God, in every sense of that phrase).** But what I mean by this phrase, "the question of God," is previously in the sense of the name, "God" (though perhaps God would know how better to ask this question than I); yet, at least with the name, God, we have a concrete phenomenon, whether or not we know just how best to fulfill it intuitively. Certainly, we don't question that the name, God, exists, at least as being-within the domain of sounds or texts. People of varying languages or doctrinal persuasions may prefer other terms, such as Viṣṇu, Kṛṣṇa, Śiva, Brahman, Allah, Jehovah, Jesus Christ, or what have you--or else, may shy away from vocalizing the term, hence keeping it separate from the domain of sounds--but "God" is a fair conventional term for the most part, that, at least in the textual tradition, gives us a phenomenon as such to remark upon. This name's primary value is perhaps in its nearly universal use, as this keeps alive the intuition of the universal (though I have notably hereby excluded non-theistic traditions; c'est la vive). By "God" then, I mean the God of monotheism, in however many flavors that may come, but in each case, in the way that the believer oneself takes that meaning; I do not pretend to know the full variety of types, but I have at least been attentive to investigating the range for a while now. Yet it is clear to me that the God of monotheism looks as much like the Gods of monotheism, which is to say, there is along with this general topic, the oft-posed sectarian question of "Who knows God best?" or else, "Who's God knows best?". 

The direction for our investigation has now been set. We are at least on the primary concerns to look for in the history of philosophical discourse. Not least, we have determined that the question of the meaning of the name God may be determined as "Personal", "Existent", or "Mystical." And this does help us to establish the Vedic understanding of the God of monotheism, as originally named Time.   

Intuitions, Objectivity, the Universal, Evidence, and the Ought

I have given the reader quite a bit to chew on already. But we are just getting started. There are other matters here which must come into play before we can make clear sense of the original relation between the Prime Mover and Time, though the intuition may already be sensible to some just from seeing the two terms juxtaposed in this way. 

But before any sort of purportedly sectarian inquisition can be allowed to proceed with clear and unerring jurisprudence, in which we are supposed to determine who is the sapient-most authority and who the parties guilty of greater rational or spiritual error, the question of the sense common to both defendant and prosecutor is foremost the crucial aim of any holistically meaningful dialogue. God is big enough a concept that we shouldn't expect any one person's perspective to be comprehensive (save perhaps for that which comes directly from God's own lips); what is more generally the case, we have specific persons who are more and less familiar with the character of the question of God. But this allows for a certain kind of objectivity, in that the debate is a common, public one, and the revealed sources are both legible for the literate, though familiarity will vary. In the intuition of the objective, we at the same time have a demonstration of an intuition, an ideation given as God. This is to say, in the case of the question of the objectivity of God, the intuition of the universal is already a movement that draws toward "God" in the monotheistic sense, insofar as we have there an intuition of a single originary cause; perhaps Aquinas' so-called prime mover? If we make the case for a monotheism, we at least need to assume that a monotheism, as generally understood today by the popular imagination, signals God as if prior to all that is. But this notion of "first" or "prime" is perhaps not made any clearer by assuming that there is a "nothing" prior to this "first", a "zero" prior to a "One." As a "beginning," or "cause," we have only arrived at the intuition of God as the sine qua non of existence, the without-which-would-not-be; the faithful take it that whatever is, is be-cause of God.

Yet this does not give us priority in the sense of "first A, then B,"--where God is A, and all that is is B and these occur as by a temporal, and hence, causal, sequence. Close attention to the basic pre-dogmatic, pre-traditional intuitions of our concept of God and this concept's rendering through our intuitive orientation toward Time, shows that all we have arrived at is the sense that there exists a Universal situation of God as opposed to a Particular situation of God as historically interpreted, so that we have a concept of God, here understood as Such, God as God: Got-an-sich.*** This understanding does not give us any justification for concluding God as "what is prior to causation as such" or a "prior to the manifest as signaled in the possible." God is not, in this "priority," merely a promise of the possibility of being. God Himself already stands as a "prior condition for being", so that one must think of God, as in this respect Being-Eternal. This Being-Eternal is an intuition about Being that derives from a cosmogenetic reflection. In saying that God is "prior to" Time, there is a tendency to then think of Time as "after" God; but how can this concept "after" no less in this very special case be made sensible when "after" is itself a concept that Time mediates! 

Hence, in this unique case, of this interpretation of meaning which takes together the identity of God and Time, is not akin to another idolatry, like that of Golden-Calf-worship or Sun-worship. It does not amount to one more face of the amorphous, polytheistic, animistic cult. It is in itself a new and crucial order of religious reflection, even if comprised from a ritual language utilized previously as the polytheistic, the henotheistic, the pantheistic, or panentheistic. Contra-Hegal, I take this moment in history, wherein Time announces Itself as the first of Gods in South Asian sacred literature as quite plausibly the first to give rise to monotheistic conversions, to the burgeoning transcendental intuition of an authentic universal. Yet there is still a highly confused matter here, which might not appear as obvious to those whose current intuitions are built up from foundations first laid in antiquity via Greco-Roman myths; for, Time as a Deity is not just one constellation of heavenly factors, as if at war with other heavenly factors, or "taking turns" at dominance, as with the panentheistic concept of divinity; there is no diety in the panentheon adequate to the power of Time, as if according to the generational myth of Titans and Olympians; however late Time is born into the specific scene (if such a phrase ought even to pass as well-reasoned and fully intelligible), there can be no doubt that Time itself was also prior to that; Time is the priority of the prior! What would be prior to Time, were such possible, would be entirely insensible and even counter-intuitive to careful and clear reasoning.  Time is itself always and already the outmost circumscribing domain of the possibility of generations! Indeed, Time is the very Possibility of possibility as its first, intermediate, and final forms! 

We invoke Time in the very act of thinking as contemplating the possible or, what is more, the character that is possibility.**** The intuition of Time alone gives the intelligibility of existential and epistemic possibilities in their full originality! In this case, the existentially possible is prior to the epistemically possible (i.e., what known to be actualizable, or else not known to be not actualizable, to be impossible), as living toward a future is prior to the demonstrated future, akin to founding and founded acts. Here, death is a factor, particularly in the intuition of judgment, the choosing between possible futures, and only here can responsibility be posed. Hence, the ethical ought parses out what is from the possible, the ought orients us toward a heightening and lowering in the feeling of possibility, as the immanentizing moment of choosing between the high-ground or the low-ground, having reached a fork in the road, and being pressed forward by Time. 

So far in our discussion, we have opened a question regarding the "Who?" of God's Person. We have therein introduced the view of Kṛṣṇa as the Original Personality of Time for discussion, and have first noted how the identification of an historical Person with the original God produces critical issues for claiming Kṛṣṇa's historicity, and that these sorts of issues must be offered a reasonable response as part of a systematic consideration of Vaiṣṇava theological and scholarly work, and this in response crucially to Hegel's views on the metaphysical character of World-History.  We have also signaled the several potential advantages of this identification in the context of an historical debate over the "existence of God," and have arrived at the site of the ethical, as showing up in the parallax between the is and the possible as a sudden emergency in the domain of the judgment. (to be continued)

Next Time...

In our next blog, we will take a closer look at the image of the ethical as a convention of disparate personal-situational considerations, and begin to examine the polemic against "caste consciousness" in the West. By doing so, we aim to bring further out the specific modalities of historicity that belong to the Hegelian philosophical attitude, and to thereby better ground a comparative discussion on the Gītā's own ethical significance.ॐ

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Endnotes

*: cor-rect: In essence, the term has to do with being "right-handed." That is to say, just as "awkward" means "left-ward" (on the semantic analogy of "to-ward," "back-ward," and the rest), so being "right-handed" is "sitting at the right-hand of the Father" and thus, "Being-occidented" as opposed to "Being-oriented. Westernization and Correction, are both images of criticism, of cultural modifications which seek to dominate the ethical-habitual patterns of humanity and lifestyle--all this justified by the ideation of Universal (i.e. "Catholic", from Greek kata-holis "concerning the whole") Truth. Consider the legal vow of a witness in court: Do you swear to tell the Truth, the Whole Truth, and nothing but the Truth?"  Vows are thus as much a part of this game of Truth as any other element. To avow in this case is to submit to domination by a higher power: Universal Truth. In this case, Truth itself supplies the correction, and aligns the witness with the right-handed culture. But if I should only ask: "Why does the left-hand receive so much scorn?" the answer will not be too far behind, "Well, someone must wipe the excrement from the anus." In this case, is not Truth the God who judges those whose life is "pure" and whose life is "shit"?

But for a more extensive and illuminating analysis on the ancient and religious world's value-appropriation of "left-and-right-handedness," I recommend that the reader check out Kim Knott's The Location of Religion: A Spatial Analysis. a href=<http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Location_Of_Religion.html?id=7fYPDxs0rxUC>.

**: One-with-God: it is important to note the polyvalence here again; am I supposed to be "One, in possession of a relation to God," or else am I supposed to be "One in Identity with God." Such polyvalence is bound to occasionally slip by the discussant unnoted. Thus, I suspect we can fruitfully review works on the topic where we can destabilize supposed semantically static, or "literal" meanings.  We can do this simply by noting where they fail to keep this distinction clear, or else where they, knowingly or unknowingly, build upon the ambiguity, so as to produce and maintain a doctrine more complex than what can be adequately or consistently reduced to a mere Monism or Dualism; here we are looking for an inclusion of a middle term that would allow us to read the author as at once both a Monist and a Dualist. 

For Vaiṣṇavas interested in this particular topic, I recommend careful contemplation of the inherent ambiguities of ātman and paramātman, as read through either "literal" paradigm, and then through the doctrine of acintya-bhedābheda-tattva. In the Monistic paradigm, the paramātman is oneself, in potentia, which is to say, when one has reached the highest levels of self-realization. In the Dualist paradigm, the paramātman is the "Other-self", the Transcendental One who stands on the other side of this self who am designated by "I." In the last paradigm, of inconceivable-simultaneous-division-and-nondivision, the tattva or "that-ness" designates the situation in which the Monistic/Dualistic debate cannot reach any final resolution by way of a "literal" interpretation, that takes them against each other as "True" and "False", "knowledge" and "ignorance." The "middle term" becomes another option, though in Western thought, this is usually taken as "unknown" or "unknowable," hence, "inconceivable," or acintya. 

The term, acintya is of crucial value here, so that it is valuable to trace its etymology and technical sense, and to relate these again back to the Continental tradition of philosophy. From this, we can begin to think about a Vaiṣṇava-cum-Academic method. the term is grammatically a gerund, indicating an verb-act to be performed, excepting that it is negated here by the prefix a-. Thus √cint is "not to be enacted". √cint, as translated by Sir Monier-Williams, means "to think about, reflect upon, direct thought at, to tax the understanding, to care for." Howard Resnick, aka Hridayananda dāsa Gosvāmin Śrīla Ācāryadeva, has pointed out that this verb is often used to imply anxious contemplation. Thus, it seems to be quite valuable for considering the phenomenology of Heidegger, who takes "care" to be the core organizing structure of dasein. Dasein, in turn, would perhaps be closest rendered into Sanskrit as jīva-bhūta, or the "living being." Of course, Heidegger only means that dasein who has taken upon itself the question of the meaning of life, or the meaning of Being as such: "why should I exist?" and its correlary framings. The anxious concern for finding meaning in existence is thus shown to be closely connected to this question of a possible, different kind of fate, whether as non-existent in death (cf., nirvana), as merged in the identity of the Universe (Monism), as bound to the miseries of eternal rebirth (a pure Dualism whereby the finite and the infinite are fundamentally two, and "never the 'twain shall meet").

Thus the doctrine acintya-bhedābheda-tattva implies that one cannot come to enlightenment or the fulfillment of meaningful existence simply by a solipsistic contemplation of "why me?", "why must I suffer life and decay?" "to what end?", but rather, that we need to dedicate our lives to taking action, yet without expecting results or hoping for an end to the labors. And we need to do this purely for the  sake of optimally fulfilling the duties that fall to us in our bodily, situational nature. This throwing oneself at one's natural work--given to us in Time and by some dispositional, vocational nature--we engage the body in its own maintainance, and free our thoughts for higher contemplations, for higher recognitions. This "recognition" is a "revision", a "renewal" of older habits of thought, but not merely in a conditional light; rather, it is a "revising" of our understanding, an allowance that lets the capacities of Judgment mature beyond the fanatical possessiveness that itself stresses and wearies the ātman's unaging aspect. This aspect we call sat, or Being. But this sat is not identical to Heidegger's being-in-the-world, where worldhood is determinate as by this one now. The sat of ātman communes with all possible worlds, itself being the originary structure of the possibility of worldhood. It thus journeys, as bhakta, as One who shares self with an other. This other is both determinate and indeterminate at once, so that paramātman, and ātman are both encountered simulateneously in every face-to-face encounter, as the Situation and the Person. 

Consider that there is no formal ethic which can tell us in every situation how to respond to the presence of a homeless man. We might give him money, yet he might spurn it, thinking himself above charity. We might ask him if he needs money, but he might spend it on narcotics. We might buy him a meal, but he might be full already. In every case, we are confronted by an indecision, an undecidability between the Person and the Situation; it is because of this unknowable Time-structure that we experience everyone as enigmatic. We are always arriving "late on the scene," as it were. We come to the other, not with knowledge, but with intrigue. In French, the term "intrigue" is employed in Drama, as meaning "the plot." Here, the life-story of the other (or in the case of God, the Other) is the primary mode of access to their Person. It is for this reason that a benevolent jurisprudence must take an account of mitigating factors, situational issues that keep the Spirit of Dharma above the Letter of the law, what we call āpad-dharma. In the same way, we are called to authenticity in that every encounter with the other calls us to a consideration, as relating the Person and their Situation (kāla-deśa-pātra, "Time, place, and circumstance"). Injustice is signaled by those life-stories, those situations, whereby the Person has acted innocently (i.e., within the freedoms circumscribed by the domain of dharma) or generally in the interest of Goodness (cf., sat-tva), and yet has thereby come to some situational misfortune. This is why we speak of "āpaddharmas" as justifying a departure from the normative standards of conventional dharma. 

In one respect, then, the Person and their Situation are inseparable. In another, they are never to be regarded as equivalent, lest one forget that the future of a Person is not in identity with their past. Every Person is handed over to the question of determining their fates, whether by embracing or fleeing their dispositional actions. We see sometimes that people reject the guṇa-karma doctrine of "natural duties" as a product of superstition such that people are supposed to be slaves of unconscious urges, and thereby arrive at the opposite extreme, a doctrine that takes them to be tabulae rasae, blank slates. This is simply an artifice however, as it supposes that a Person is something that has no prior situation, no history, and indeed, not even internal dispositions like psychological or conditioned strategies. 

Yet one may, if one so chooses, resist such internal dispositions, or else act against them when confronted by a situation that calls for them to adopt different habits than they are previously accustomed to, as when immigrants to a foreign land begin to adapt themselves to the customs of those people with whom they are now community. And we see this with South Asians who immigrate to America. We also see something akin to this when we note the cultural influx of Western commercialism into the Indian Subcontinent, as elsewhere. In all these cases, the doctrine of guṇa-karma must be accomodated at least to a limited extent, to the exigencies of communal participation. 

But to bring this back home to our original issue, being One-with-God: We note that this "with-ness" is a sort of invariant to the situationality of worldly changes. What remains constant is that presence of God, whether we are alone, among others, among the familiar, or else, among strangers. The feelings of  communal participation are thus also feelings of "communion with God," or intuitions of "God's Personal character"; for, it is with-and-through the other that the name of God comes into relief, and simultaneously takes on that enigmatic quality of approximation. We are thus left with a two-part question, or two interrelated questions: (1) "Who is God?" and (2)"With-whom shall I come to know God?". These questions admit of some separation, but in fact, they have historically co-constructed each other. The question of God's Person has for the most part historically been worked out through communal participation, and almost invariably by the response of individuals to prior traditions. Thus we see that the question of sectarian affiliation is largely one of the rights of participation in the further advancement of that question. Thus, the community of participation is among the primary locations for the variable determines whereby the questions of being one-with-God are worked out. 

***: God as God: A polyvalence (or, if the reader prefers, "ambiguity") is once again notable; for here, we have a question of the semiotic identity that looms between the name, God, and the Source, God as Such. But This also implies a sort of "God as apart from subjective predications," or "God as Such." So, an apophasis emerges at the moment of the meaning of the name. God as name comes forward or "sounds out," "appears in script," while God as Such recedes toward the transcendental, the radically unknowable. 

There is a great deal of Vaiṣṇava literature on the names of God as sonic avatāras. This phenomenality shows how the Vaiṣṇava traditions have positively embraced the cataphatic moment in the question of the identity of God. They make a judgment about the "Who?" by virtue of a name: Śrī Kṛṣṇa. In this way, they seek to advance themselves and others along a path to approximation, a coming-into-the-proximity of the Personality of God. That they do this by the name is telling, since it is by language that so many of our feelings and dispositions are brought into relief and made the subject of judgments. The Name of God as dancing upon the tongues of God's People is itself a kind of Worldly Heaven, a transcendental site, where the miraculous occurs. 

This miracle is first felt in the mode of the arising of awe and reverence, of ponderous wonder, and thereby the sense of meaningfulness co-occurs in the invocation of the Name, Śrī Kṛṣṇa. This name is not exactly a generic name for God, akin to that of "the Good," or "the Eternal," in the sense that it offers a determination of God's genus or species. Rather, it is historically specific, and as such, speaks to historicity as its source. Śrī Kṛṣṇa, by most Vaiṣṇava accounts, was, is, and ever shall remain a Person. In their accounts, Kṛṣṇa once passed through this world some 5 millennia ago as an avatāra. But this avatāra was not mere flesh, not equivalent to the term, incarnation, whereby God takes on a mortal frame, subject to production and decay. The Personality of God is said to have retained the freshness of a youth throughout his entire life; as the Personality of God, he suspended the natural course of decay. This image of a fixed youth has more connotations than we are likely to be able to convey in full clarity here. But we will mention the one most immediately pertinent to our discussion: aside from the question of historicity, Kṛṣṇa is the axis of Time itself (udāsina-vad āsino, kuṭa-sthā). As such, Time would be merely the interim between meeting with him and finding oneself separated from his company. This is the life-view of the fully enlightened Vaiṣṇava, and it carries that devotee throughout beginningless and endless eternity. But as this Time axis is approached in the Name of God and approached as the Name, so too does the devotee overcome this awaiting by pronouncing it. The devotee thus transcends Time in one respect, for he has thereby overcome the awaiting. All that remains for the devotee after this first overcoming is the repetition. 

This repetition in itself or as such is not adequate to taking the Name in vain. Rather, the devotee, by hearing the name, has the choice of ignoring it or of hearing it, of listening to the sound and encountering its meaning, or of parroting the sounds as if by some onerous obligation. Certainly, if the devotee is of little or pliable faith, the name may not unveil this inner signification, and the devotee may even develop pernicious habits of absent-minded parroting (still, it has been adequately demonstrated that even parrots can have a limited grasp of the words they use). The problem of vanity, whereby one places one's own Person before the Person of God given by the name, is in the vanity, not in taking God's name. As such, a prohibition against pronouncing the name of God at all may manage to prevent a possible transgression of a teaching, at least in the legalistic sense, but such a prohibition barely avails itself of the given Spirit of the law. God as God, understood in the sense of the identity of God and the name, is a matter of speech accomplishing a relationship. Taken as a question of God as apart from any possible experience, we all know by now that it leads to deism, and therein, to the secular world. Of course, this also opened up the possibility of religious freedom among the Europeans, so that this development is no merely adequation to a life of atheistic, impersonalistic aims. What remains, however, is a decentralized activity, so that when we look at the Catholic and Protestant versions of Christianity, we see a two very distinctive attitudes: one which holds to the image of a coherent, all-encompassing World-Religion replete with its historical sense of manifest destiny, and one which holds to a localized ideation of community and the privacy of faith. The only place for name is the name of Jesus Christ, and this, during communal gatherings, and during times of prayer. But with the name of Jesus, we do see something akin to the sense of the name of Kṛṣṇa as employed by Vaiṣṇavas; for, in both cases, the religious Spirit of a community is summed up in a one-word-reference to a single, historical Person. 

Yet in that same way, we note that the name God can be said to differ from these two names, as it is more or less a generic name; it names a category, even if that category is supposed to be occupied by only one person. However, devotees are prone to offer mystical etymologies to the name, Kṛṣṇa. One can imagine Jesus-followers doing much the same, but it is not an activity that today would necessarily enhance the feeling of the historicity of the person so being described. The problem of historicity appears then to also come down to the texture of a personality leaving its imprint on the form of a religion. This is a very difficult matter to judge, but we can note at least here that offering a poetic interpretation of Kṛṣṇa's name (as, for example, by stating that it means "All-Attractive," because God is necessarily infinitely, transcendentally, mystifyingly beautiful) doesn't necessarily enhance one's case, if one were attempting to make an argument that Kṛṣṇa was without doubt a genuine, historical Person. Of course, the claim might be made from the side of Vaiṣṇavas, that Westerners simply lack the piety or imaginations to appreciate such a possible historical Person as Śrī Kṛṣṇa. And here, we have a knotted complex of intuitions. How to resolve this matter further then? Perhaps all that can be expected is that the West will continue on in its developmental process, and that Vaiṣṇavism will have to chart out its own territory without expecting the West to give it too much credence. Its popularity may increase or decrease from time to time, but its understanding of Time is among that matters that are primary and important for it; as Vaiṣṇavism examines its own concept of Time in detail, and thereby, its understanding will become profoundly enabled to think historically and theologically, even at once.

ॐ: The importance of addressing the ethical dimension of Western theology cannot be over-estimated, if the aim is to perform a rigorous or thorough comparison. A mere focus on ontological differences or similarities will almost entirely pass over what Christians and Jews take to be the core of their understanding of a living religion. This becomes more clear when one notes how Kant was quite content to dethrone metaphysics as long as he could pose a belief in God on the basis of the objectivity of ethical determinations. Hegel, likewise, was content to call all of history prior to him a struggle against superstition and ignorance, as long as the Spiritual ethos of Christianity came to appreciate ethics as the summum bonum of History, the overcoming of evil and tyranny, and the enhancement of the human spirit, given as freedom. And again, the Jewish metaphysician Levinas led the charge into the Postmodern understanding of religion by emphasizing a phenomenology of ethics, even while berating ontology as basically Luciferian. In every case, what has remained both influential has been the tendency to lean on ethics as the original battleground of the soul; a study of Kṛṣṇa's mode of Ethical Justice is thus of great importance to future conversations with Western religious traditions. 

My aim in bringing ethics into the question of Kṛṣṇa as the Personality of Time is to show how ethics also shows up in an historical-Time structure, and how Vaiṣṇava ontology is thereby equipped to relate to it and relate it to others who lack prior familiarity with the tradition's understanding of Time.