Well, it seems that atomic nuclei are asymmetrical. Too bad for Time Reversal.
Tuesday, June 28, 2016
Friday, June 24, 2016
Letters of Love to the Lady Wisdom: Appreciating the Scope of the Horological Project
The thought of wisdom, which at first ignites our curiosities, our youthful desires, our imaginative ponderings, our first questions, our first order ontologies, our investigations into the meaning of being, our methodologies toward knowledge, toward a formal description of existence and non-existence, our historical understanding of being, our originations and their hermeneutical, historical contributions toward human understanding—all of these contribute toward our understanding toward the original contribution, that which comes from the Love of Wisdom itself.
What does the love of Wisdom teach us, who are her ardent students? How does one qualify to be a proper and adequate lover of wisdom? What does she want to teach us? A very controversial question indeed. For why should we regard Wisdom as a lady if not because we ourselves wished to seduce her? But the image of Wisdom as a lady is an idol, a symbolic image of divinity—a way to direct the eye toward-the-heavens.
We ask then about the origins of our calendars: the origins of the concept of Time. To investigate this globally, we need look to the hermeneutical principles which guide the adequate and scholarly interpretation of the history of this concept; for it tells us much about a decisive era in the earlier history of mankind. The great Indo-European civilization, which was to forever impact the course of the history of the world, gave rise to a certain historical part of that question in South Asia. Her contributions to the overall history of the concept of Time do provide us with key cyphers in cultivating a deeper understanding of the history of this concept globally.
The Indian (or South Asian) experience of Time remained, for a time, geographically remote from European history. Yet we see all about us, in their own myths, evidence of the foreigners, which brought with them their stories, their narratives, their heuristic devices (all technologies which could even at that time be shared through the proper channels of understanding; i.e., horology).
The formation of calendars, or cultural chronicles of annual events perhaps even itself gave rise to the closer study of the stars. Calculating the year was a formidable task, at one point in proto-history. Today, it is as if second nature; reduced to the status of mere (or primitive) instinct. But at one time, this was a grand task; and it would behoove us to attend to the question of its historical formation in India, as this provides another, advanced cypher into the greater historical question of the meaning of Time. We could as it were unlock another ur-historical period to greater historical understanding.
To do this we require to understand this history of calendars, by means of relating them to historically early forms of polytheism and the myths that preserved their cultural forms. The knowledge of the stars is a knowledge of this grand civil exchange, a sort of intercultural horology. The travellers, Traders and Businessmen, made it a common practice to take the services of a horologist, or as they were known, astrologers, navigators, metehoroscopoi. Plato himself indicates in his great Republic the secret but central status of the naval navigator. One who knows the stories of the stars and can thereby unlock the mysteries of Time and Space. This image of the astrologer is very often spurned by the pretenses of rigor in the academy, because it would appear to reject the historical accomplishments of the academy—it would seem to reject science in favor of superstition and wild inference. But we are not concerned with reviving into practice this failed prescience; we are only concerned with the resuscitation of an early historical epoch that centers upon the theme of Time by accounting for the role astrology played in early history.
An academic criticism of horology would simply be an adequate accounting for its arising within the greater history of mankind. To take astrology academically serious and methodologically rigorously, is simply to account for it in an academic light, an historical light. But all evidence suggests that astrology also happens to play a key role to the early development of the history of Time; it played no small part in making Time first intelligible to us, and so played a crucial role, a formative role, in human history. As such, we may appear at first to be at a great academic disadvantage, for the rigors of resuscitating to the light of historical scrutiny such an arcane beast would no doubt require greater work than could be accomplished in a single lifetime by a single scholar; much criticism and consideration for this topic is yet to be had.
No doubt, this fear might, had I the foresight of prior experience, have intimidated me into a smaller project (fools rush in where angels fear to tread). Yet my earliest intuitions on this matter remain to all appearances sound: Time remains the key question: what is its meaning, and how do we best approach that question? My intuition suggests we look at a history of horology, a history of the accounting for time and the production of calendars, grounded in annual and seasonal rituals (cf., the monthlong Bengali adoration of Devi while the Sun is in Virgo). The practicality of the matter simply asks us to attend to ancient stories in such a wise that we know what to look for; and this turns out to require very specific things: one needs to find evidence in the charts and stories about them, the evidences of borrowing, of which we have accumulated much.
In the style of Jan Gonda, we have accumulated a sizeable compendium of notes on various constellations across horological cultures and which I should eventually like to publish; approximately half of these notes were taken in the year of my comprehensive exams on Buddhism, Hinduism, and Methodology; the other half were taken in the year of my field research in Northern India and Nepal.
While in Southern Kolkata, I stayed near Jadabpur University, where I spoke with both faculty and students on the topics of Hinduism, history, and astrology. I attended the month long Goddess (Devi) festival in honor of the conjunctions of the Sun with Virgo, visiting many of the city's temporary yet decorous deity installations. The goddess's persistent iconography disclosed the sectors of the sky, when Virgo overtakes the powers of Taurus, who descends beyond the horizon as Virgo reaches the zenith of the day. She stands upon a Lion much as Leo sits directly beneath Virgo. She stabs the bull with a trident, perhaps after the fashion of Cancer or Gemini. Her attendants are all about her. The vision is almost invariably astrological, even though the night sky has long since been lost to fog and smog in the region of Kolkata.
While in Delhi, I met with the chair of the Sanskrit department at the University; I spoke to him about my research interests, and within a week, he assembled the entire Sanskrit department, along with all of the grad students, to listen to an hour-and-a-half Powerpoint presentation I spent the week preparing regarding the question of the history of South Asian horology with respect to the origin of the yuga cycles. The entire department expressed deep appreciation for my work, and the very next year, the University of Delhi held its first open conference on the general topic.
I also spoke with the entire faculty at the University of Rajasthan at Jaipur. I related an early exegetic exercise, in which I suggested how the Kṛṣṇa-mūrti's formality as kāliya-dhāmana, the Chastiser of Kaliya might have taken its form from known constellations. The headmaster was elated when I made the patent suggestion that Kṛṣṇa took his form from the constellations Hercules and Draconus, and demonstrated through a slide show, why I thought so. I also spoke on the substantive probabilities of the earliest period of the 30-section muhūrta, which took many of its names from various and specifically identifiable constellations in the northern sky.
I had the curious fortune of being the only scholar to show up for a Mahābhārata Conference that had been cancelled at the last moment. I spoke to the original organizer, who assembled the two dozen members of the faculty of the school within an hour. I had only wished to attend, and so had to impromptu speak from a compiled slideshow. I took this from a file in which I kept various artifacts of symbology which helped me to build my narrative, while using modern applications such as Stellarium, to show these scholars how one might familiarize oneself quickly with multiple astrological narratives across the globe using a cutting-edge and informative night sky emulation application; one had immediate access to numerous horological narratives across the globe and could quickly compare them across Time and Space.
The impromptu presentation was a watershed for them. I showed just how the metallic form of Kṛṣṇa, the mūrti aligned itself with the cosmic variant, as if pramā and pratimā. I explained how similar patterns can be seen in Greek and Roman variants of horological myth. I've written extensively about this matter in this very blog (as for example, in the near identity of Hanuman and Hercules iconography, or the "esoteric" suggestions of the trapezoid in Vaiṣṇava iconography qua Jagannath et al and a multi-sect Vaiṣṇava tīlaka). The evidence is written in forms that do not speak; unless to the educated mind, the knower of time, the horologist.
I spent a month in the ancient capital of Nepal, Bhaktapūra, learning from locals how to paint the ancient kala-cakra-maṇḍala, and learned from their popular narratives that the image of the Bhava-cakra conformed well as a calendar to the months of the year through the symbolic content of the 12 links in the Buddha's teaching regarding the chain of pratityasamutpada. The six realms too displayed such a tendency, reflecting large sectors of the visible night sky. Indeed, though I learned this art by spending six eight-hour work days per week in the company of local artists and discussing the matter with them as far as language allowed. A local Buddhist monk denied the story, considering it a popular corruption to the original wisdom of the Buddha. This might suggest an earlier synthesis of Hindu horological tropes with Buddhist ethical teachings via some regard for heuristic phronesis, practical wisdom, or upāya.
Overall, the culture of astrology remains a palpable and normative part of Hindu culture; it is metaphysically embedded in the theological abstractions which depart from it toward the transcendental; the temporal historically grounds the eternal in both Hinduism and Buddhism. Reincarnation is itself a way of thinking eternity through sempiternity, never-ending Time.
I am simply trying to decypher the earlier history of this problem of accounting for calendars, which did in time complexify itself and produce greater and greater problems of the production of accuracy and reaccounting for its passing, itself driving the invention and revision of the clock and calendar, and leading to the arising of horology as among the first truly human sciences, until giving rise later and in many respects to technology itself. But what concerns me most is its relation to the concepts of divinity and transcendence.
A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami treats these two religious and ritual categories as ordered in the face of eternity, with transcendence being originary and divinity being derivative. But what if the opposite were true? What if the very vision of the transcendent were derivative of the divinities observed overhead from the down below? This should even go further to suggest much about the historical nature of some of the most popular forms of religious thinking in Indo-European civilization, both early and late.
Yet this is merely one of the roots of the question concerning Technology. Indeed, we won't really know if we can reverse Time until we've gotten clear about what it is. Without getting clear about the meaning and nature of the history of the concept of Time, it will remain in crucial ways difficult to get entirely clear what technology is up to next—or what is more, what its long-game is when we imagine ourselves building time machines.
What does the love of Wisdom teach us, who are her ardent students? How does one qualify to be a proper and adequate lover of wisdom? What does she want to teach us? A very controversial question indeed. For why should we regard Wisdom as a lady if not because we ourselves wished to seduce her? But the image of Wisdom as a lady is an idol, a symbolic image of divinity—a way to direct the eye toward-the-heavens.
We ask then about the origins of our calendars: the origins of the concept of Time. To investigate this globally, we need look to the hermeneutical principles which guide the adequate and scholarly interpretation of the history of this concept; for it tells us much about a decisive era in the earlier history of mankind. The great Indo-European civilization, which was to forever impact the course of the history of the world, gave rise to a certain historical part of that question in South Asia. Her contributions to the overall history of the concept of Time do provide us with key cyphers in cultivating a deeper understanding of the history of this concept globally.
The Indian (or South Asian) experience of Time remained, for a time, geographically remote from European history. Yet we see all about us, in their own myths, evidence of the foreigners, which brought with them their stories, their narratives, their heuristic devices (all technologies which could even at that time be shared through the proper channels of understanding; i.e., horology).
The formation of calendars, or cultural chronicles of annual events perhaps even itself gave rise to the closer study of the stars. Calculating the year was a formidable task, at one point in proto-history. Today, it is as if second nature; reduced to the status of mere (or primitive) instinct. But at one time, this was a grand task; and it would behoove us to attend to the question of its historical formation in India, as this provides another, advanced cypher into the greater historical question of the meaning of Time. We could as it were unlock another ur-historical period to greater historical understanding.
To do this we require to understand this history of calendars, by means of relating them to historically early forms of polytheism and the myths that preserved their cultural forms. The knowledge of the stars is a knowledge of this grand civil exchange, a sort of intercultural horology. The travellers, Traders and Businessmen, made it a common practice to take the services of a horologist, or as they were known, astrologers, navigators, metehoroscopoi. Plato himself indicates in his great Republic the secret but central status of the naval navigator. One who knows the stories of the stars and can thereby unlock the mysteries of Time and Space. This image of the astrologer is very often spurned by the pretenses of rigor in the academy, because it would appear to reject the historical accomplishments of the academy—it would seem to reject science in favor of superstition and wild inference. But we are not concerned with reviving into practice this failed prescience; we are only concerned with the resuscitation of an early historical epoch that centers upon the theme of Time by accounting for the role astrology played in early history.
An academic criticism of horology would simply be an adequate accounting for its arising within the greater history of mankind. To take astrology academically serious and methodologically rigorously, is simply to account for it in an academic light, an historical light. But all evidence suggests that astrology also happens to play a key role to the early development of the history of Time; it played no small part in making Time first intelligible to us, and so played a crucial role, a formative role, in human history. As such, we may appear at first to be at a great academic disadvantage, for the rigors of resuscitating to the light of historical scrutiny such an arcane beast would no doubt require greater work than could be accomplished in a single lifetime by a single scholar; much criticism and consideration for this topic is yet to be had.
No doubt, this fear might, had I the foresight of prior experience, have intimidated me into a smaller project (fools rush in where angels fear to tread). Yet my earliest intuitions on this matter remain to all appearances sound: Time remains the key question: what is its meaning, and how do we best approach that question? My intuition suggests we look at a history of horology, a history of the accounting for time and the production of calendars, grounded in annual and seasonal rituals (cf., the monthlong Bengali adoration of Devi while the Sun is in Virgo). The practicality of the matter simply asks us to attend to ancient stories in such a wise that we know what to look for; and this turns out to require very specific things: one needs to find evidence in the charts and stories about them, the evidences of borrowing, of which we have accumulated much.
In the style of Jan Gonda, we have accumulated a sizeable compendium of notes on various constellations across horological cultures and which I should eventually like to publish; approximately half of these notes were taken in the year of my comprehensive exams on Buddhism, Hinduism, and Methodology; the other half were taken in the year of my field research in Northern India and Nepal.
While in Southern Kolkata, I stayed near Jadabpur University, where I spoke with both faculty and students on the topics of Hinduism, history, and astrology. I attended the month long Goddess (Devi) festival in honor of the conjunctions of the Sun with Virgo, visiting many of the city's temporary yet decorous deity installations. The goddess's persistent iconography disclosed the sectors of the sky, when Virgo overtakes the powers of Taurus, who descends beyond the horizon as Virgo reaches the zenith of the day. She stands upon a Lion much as Leo sits directly beneath Virgo. She stabs the bull with a trident, perhaps after the fashion of Cancer or Gemini. Her attendants are all about her. The vision is almost invariably astrological, even though the night sky has long since been lost to fog and smog in the region of Kolkata.
While in Delhi, I met with the chair of the Sanskrit department at the University; I spoke to him about my research interests, and within a week, he assembled the entire Sanskrit department, along with all of the grad students, to listen to an hour-and-a-half Powerpoint presentation I spent the week preparing regarding the question of the history of South Asian horology with respect to the origin of the yuga cycles. The entire department expressed deep appreciation for my work, and the very next year, the University of Delhi held its first open conference on the general topic.
I also spoke with the entire faculty at the University of Rajasthan at Jaipur. I related an early exegetic exercise, in which I suggested how the Kṛṣṇa-mūrti's formality as kāliya-dhāmana, the Chastiser of Kaliya might have taken its form from known constellations. The headmaster was elated when I made the patent suggestion that Kṛṣṇa took his form from the constellations Hercules and Draconus, and demonstrated through a slide show, why I thought so. I also spoke on the substantive probabilities of the earliest period of the 30-section muhūrta, which took many of its names from various and specifically identifiable constellations in the northern sky.
I had the curious fortune of being the only scholar to show up for a Mahābhārata Conference that had been cancelled at the last moment. I spoke to the original organizer, who assembled the two dozen members of the faculty of the school within an hour. I had only wished to attend, and so had to impromptu speak from a compiled slideshow. I took this from a file in which I kept various artifacts of symbology which helped me to build my narrative, while using modern applications such as Stellarium, to show these scholars how one might familiarize oneself quickly with multiple astrological narratives across the globe using a cutting-edge and informative night sky emulation application; one had immediate access to numerous horological narratives across the globe and could quickly compare them across Time and Space.
The impromptu presentation was a watershed for them. I showed just how the metallic form of Kṛṣṇa, the mūrti aligned itself with the cosmic variant, as if pramā and pratimā. I explained how similar patterns can be seen in Greek and Roman variants of horological myth. I've written extensively about this matter in this very blog (as for example, in the near identity of Hanuman and Hercules iconography, or the "esoteric" suggestions of the trapezoid in Vaiṣṇava iconography qua Jagannath et al and a multi-sect Vaiṣṇava tīlaka). The evidence is written in forms that do not speak; unless to the educated mind, the knower of time, the horologist.
I spent a month in the ancient capital of Nepal, Bhaktapūra, learning from locals how to paint the ancient kala-cakra-maṇḍala, and learned from their popular narratives that the image of the Bhava-cakra conformed well as a calendar to the months of the year through the symbolic content of the 12 links in the Buddha's teaching regarding the chain of pratityasamutpada. The six realms too displayed such a tendency, reflecting large sectors of the visible night sky. Indeed, though I learned this art by spending six eight-hour work days per week in the company of local artists and discussing the matter with them as far as language allowed. A local Buddhist monk denied the story, considering it a popular corruption to the original wisdom of the Buddha. This might suggest an earlier synthesis of Hindu horological tropes with Buddhist ethical teachings via some regard for heuristic phronesis, practical wisdom, or upāya.
Overall, the culture of astrology remains a palpable and normative part of Hindu culture; it is metaphysically embedded in the theological abstractions which depart from it toward the transcendental; the temporal historically grounds the eternal in both Hinduism and Buddhism. Reincarnation is itself a way of thinking eternity through sempiternity, never-ending Time.
I am simply trying to decypher the earlier history of this problem of accounting for calendars, which did in time complexify itself and produce greater and greater problems of the production of accuracy and reaccounting for its passing, itself driving the invention and revision of the clock and calendar, and leading to the arising of horology as among the first truly human sciences, until giving rise later and in many respects to technology itself. But what concerns me most is its relation to the concepts of divinity and transcendence.
A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami treats these two religious and ritual categories as ordered in the face of eternity, with transcendence being originary and divinity being derivative. But what if the opposite were true? What if the very vision of the transcendent were derivative of the divinities observed overhead from the down below? This should even go further to suggest much about the historical nature of some of the most popular forms of religious thinking in Indo-European civilization, both early and late.
Yet this is merely one of the roots of the question concerning Technology. Indeed, we won't really know if we can reverse Time until we've gotten clear about what it is. Without getting clear about the meaning and nature of the history of the concept of Time, it will remain in crucial ways difficult to get entirely clear what technology is up to next—or what is more, what its long-game is when we imagine ourselves building time machines.
Monday, June 20, 2016
Time and Greatness
What we call "Time" (if indeed a "what" can at all be appropriately applied) is in fact a greater background. Consider how Time arises in relation to the face-to-face encounter: the person comes into-and-out-of our lifespace, our personal vantage point. In this arising of appearance, this coming-near or proximity, there lay the clue to our question concerning Time's greatness. When the other person disappears, it is as it were a disappearance into the great background of the world. And so, the other transcends proximity, being-there only in terms of varying degrees of closeness and remoteness, immediacy and mediacy. Abstractly construed, this degree admits of a thinking in which the other is removed from us—not by some mere spatiality, but—by a temporal distance. This temporal distance is itself a background (and as such, a condition) for the dimensions we call space.
Though one studied philosophy, one is not as yet a philosopher, not of the highest rank. But such talk is theological at base. The thinker must think about time. Thinking God as Time is a thinking of life as miraculous, wondrous. Time as Father-of-All. Nature as Mother-of-All. These are pagan thoughts, yet they are too the thoughts of science, so that a deep truth comes to light in consideration of them, one that might even go far to repair theology from the violence of historical conquests carried out in His Name.
Under current standards of scholarship, Time appears within the Hindu Pantheon as if the image of a tripartite deity, Past, Present, Future; so that there is a necessity of critique in light of the monotheological, the idea of a single God over all other gods (deva-deva jagat-pate). The transformation of the many gods into demons (into images of avarice toward the monotheological), flows in many ways from the exigencies of historical consideration concerning the chief human virtues demonstrated in the light of history itself: ye shall know the tree by its fruits. A knowledge of history requires training in rigor and care for the fragile condition under which any such history leads humanity to a greater flourishing by having a greater view of itself in the light given by historical understanding.
South Asian religions of numerous varieties are still called to respond to the question of monotheism. The culture of the Bible, and the culture of the Veda are both great plants, born in the soil of the everyday world. Thinking theologically means caring for these plants, and finding practical, insightful ways of leading them to flourishing.
Considering Time gives us pause to regard the conditions under which South Asian religions respond to contemporary theology. Its own history demonstrates a deep concern for the historical through the envisioning of these tripartite deities, Brahmā, Viṣṇu, Śiva. They are later products of a thinking which perhaps began even from a mere consideration for the diverse annual festivals that populated humanity. Our habits, our practices, our daily ways-of-being; consideration for the gods, for those celestial deities who occupied the deep of the night and marked the passage of Time.
Astrology today is still regarded by Roman Catholics as a dark art, so that a robust possibility of comparative theologies looks dim at first face. And indeed, without a knowledge of the night sky, one would be bereft of the art of understanding time, as it were, in the light of mythology. The mytho-logy, or reasoning which arises from a consideration for myth, belongs to a heuristic device (much like the Antikaithera Mechanism) adopted from pre-history for the sake of importing an understanding of the will of the gods, the seven moving in the twelve houses, the zodiacal ring of the year, The great Giants resting at the whirling peak of the world and the deluge below. As Levinas puts it in Time, Death, and God, the upward image discloses a curiosity which precedes all taboo. Science sees the world, and subjects it to the criticism of a mathematical consideration for the conditions of its being, its physics.
A consideration for Hinduism means not less than a consideration for the marks made by a consideration for Time in Hindu thinking. The calendrical culture of South Asia is one of many histories, one of many ways of being. A consideration for astrology is no plunging oneself into a dark art (no rash judgement!), but rather a plunging oneself into a question for the role and domain of astrology in making intelligible the very meaning of the texts under consideration; it would be rash to judge Great Hindu works without a consideration for the astrological cultures which produced them. The myths open themselves more freely to a reader who has an ear for astrological thinking, and even more so when they are not limited to such astrological thinking! But how rash are we to skip the elementary in order to appear as more advanced!
The elementary stands as the guardian to thinking; when elements of thought are lacking in consideration, one thinks rashly, one acts impulsively. Consideration for the time of the other is a consideration which belongs to an even broader ethical thinking. The neglect of India is the neglect of a growing economy, a new consumer. Capitalism itself then wants a healthy India, an India with a healthy appetite.
But India consumes diversely, it is a marketplace of diverse cultures. And with that, diverse understandings of Time. This diversity in many places and in many ways implicates itself in a process of exchange, a multi-cultural gifting. To seek a monotheology in Indian thought thus abstracts skyward, away from the ground of daily existence, and toward the cultural background, toward the idea of a culture of thinking horo-theo-logically (rather than pan-, panen-, poly- et al).
It is perhaps uncanny to Middle-Eastern monotheologies to find in India a habit for divinizing the diverse ontological groups in the world, and yet for the throngs therein, for thinking oneself monotheologically. Generally, this leads to a thinking of brahman, abstract unity or monism. Yet the mono- in monism is not yet a monotheology.
There does stand before us an important question for consideration, and an important critique, one that aims to reach near the heart of Hindu thought, in order to better bring out the historical course of its monotheological thought, which is even now already well under way. It is perhaps the fate of Vaiṣṇavism to always be preparing the way for the arising of monotheological thought. And this, because it is always thinking horo-theo-logically. In abstraction, kāla stands as the supreme deity of the whole of the Hindu Pantheon.
Kāla, or Time, is the vision of a supreme and absolute deity, a God-over-all-other-gods. Time, as a theological product, as a product of thinking—theologically, ritually, annually, calendrically, horologically—is a thinking which produces a cultural fruit, in many cases, a diverse market-place of cults and rituals. These cultures interact as through the medium of shared calendars, public annual festivals, habits of gifting and exchange, of sacrifice, mercy, and renewal. The sacrificial mind dresses up the pleas of humanity to the hearts of the gods; it seeks a way into their hearts as through their stomachs. Fate is taken to be in the many moving hands of the gods, and with that, a certain fatalism arises which motivates the sacrificer to seek clemency, mercy.
Kāla slays all. None can withstand his approach forever. The thought here merges darkness with finitude, and gives rise to the thinking of death. Immanuel Levinas would have us think of what lay beyond death, so that the finitude of Time's grasp on life would appear as a demonic grip, and one broken by the final, fatal act of death. So that the Grim Reaper seems the constant companion of Time: one of the four horsemen at the advance of the end of history. But what is perhaps an even more frightening thought than the end of history itself: what if instead of pre-occupying thought with consideration for the fate of humanity, given as unavoidable and inevitable, so as to usher it in all the quicker, we had to think of future generations and all those yet to come, all those who are yet to inhabit a lifespace, yet to confront the questions and quests this lifespace opens up to them. What if we stopped preparing the world merely for death, but instead prepared it too for life?
The image of Time as Supreme Deity needs to be understood if Vaiṣṇavism is to uphold the mantle of monotheology. But it appears as if under the weight of a mythical thinking, inspired by a naive consideration for a super-stitious and pre-critical horo-theology (i.e., astrology). The calendar, the culture, their history, and very many of their visions of deities patently belong to such a mode of interpretation, and as such, our question concerns the interpretive principles under which our understanding obtains its object. To teach Hinduism as an elementary subject, so as to produce an Introduction, not merely as useful, but insightful, helpful in clarifying Hinduism beyond misunderstanding. To do this, one needs to broach the question of astrology for the student, not so as to lead them to think superstitiously; rather, mythologically, to help them better understand the abstract and practical roles that myth plays in Hindu culture and thought, in setting its traditional, annual, seasonal patterns.
The facet of South Asian religion I am concerned with is just that one which adores Time as Supreme, roughly defined as the kāla-vādins. The term, kāla-vadin, does implicate a specific if loosely bound historical group (Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavas, Rāma-bhaktas, various Śaivas, and some groups of Śāktas can be said to belong to this group), or it can also simply refer to the group contributing the Atharva-Vedic hymns dedicated to kāla. Perhaps this latter might even include those earlier thinkers who first worked out the length of the year, and who considered its understanding to be a great riddle, as collated by J. Gonda in his work, Prajāpati and the Year. We might roughly view these then as two groups, since there is evident an earlier and a later in terms of the history of the concept of Time in South Asian literature. We do not mean to introduce a new religion where there was not one before; rather, we are using the term kāla-vādin in a formal sense, as an historical category of the understanding, one utilized in Hindu thinking and one we too might adopt for analytical ends (even if thereby doing so, we extend its meaning further).
This facet would be best viewed without reduction to an incomplete reading, but its complexity and enormity evades a singular consideration on my part alone. Its role is increasingly clear to me, insofar as so much of what is thereby recognizable in South Asian religion reflects an intuition or notion of it, insofar as the people set their own life-patterns after it in one form or another. The timing of weddings by consideration for the proper muhūrta, the calculation of the Vedic or Vaiṣṇava calendar, The timing of births and reading of fates in astrology—all of these belong to a broadly elementary "Hindu" intuition of kāla. Even the conflicting paces in the daily grind of both urban and rural life in South Asia still show deep regard for these intuitions.
Time, whether regarded by its "Western Sense" or by its "Asian Sense" is clearly a background condition for the thinking of human history in South Asia, as much as it is for that collective we call the West. Indeed, Time is no less a condition for the world of the mere animal! As such, it is an absolute background condition for being. The thought of Time's greatness refers to the remoteness of its idea as the background for lived spaces. Time is a basic condition. As a basis, it is also a baselessness or what is too remote to give itself in any basic way; i.e., a background. Time considered conceptually might give us such language as before and after, as past, present, and future, and as such, might be subject to J. M. McTaggart's logical critique. But if Time simply and truly shows itself as a basic baselessness, does not this suggest a patent contradiction too? Does not Time here become too absurd even to think?! Is Time no more than a great absurdity?
But such unserious thinking would have us ignore the basic truth of Time's conditional character: as a remote background, it perhaps does not stack up to the Eternal. Perhaps Time is not so Great as Eternity? Or have we simply lost sight of what is similar in them, the sempiternal? Is not the "forever and ever" of Time like that of Eternity? Or do we only regard as Time what is finite in one degree or another?
Though one studied philosophy, one is not as yet a philosopher, not of the highest rank. But such talk is theological at base. The thinker must think about time. Thinking God as Time is a thinking of life as miraculous, wondrous. Time as Father-of-All. Nature as Mother-of-All. These are pagan thoughts, yet they are too the thoughts of science, so that a deep truth comes to light in consideration of them, one that might even go far to repair theology from the violence of historical conquests carried out in His Name.
Under current standards of scholarship, Time appears within the Hindu Pantheon as if the image of a tripartite deity, Past, Present, Future; so that there is a necessity of critique in light of the monotheological, the idea of a single God over all other gods (deva-deva jagat-pate). The transformation of the many gods into demons (into images of avarice toward the monotheological), flows in many ways from the exigencies of historical consideration concerning the chief human virtues demonstrated in the light of history itself: ye shall know the tree by its fruits. A knowledge of history requires training in rigor and care for the fragile condition under which any such history leads humanity to a greater flourishing by having a greater view of itself in the light given by historical understanding.
South Asian religions of numerous varieties are still called to respond to the question of monotheism. The culture of the Bible, and the culture of the Veda are both great plants, born in the soil of the everyday world. Thinking theologically means caring for these plants, and finding practical, insightful ways of leading them to flourishing.
Considering Time gives us pause to regard the conditions under which South Asian religions respond to contemporary theology. Its own history demonstrates a deep concern for the historical through the envisioning of these tripartite deities, Brahmā, Viṣṇu, Śiva. They are later products of a thinking which perhaps began even from a mere consideration for the diverse annual festivals that populated humanity. Our habits, our practices, our daily ways-of-being; consideration for the gods, for those celestial deities who occupied the deep of the night and marked the passage of Time.
Astrology today is still regarded by Roman Catholics as a dark art, so that a robust possibility of comparative theologies looks dim at first face. And indeed, without a knowledge of the night sky, one would be bereft of the art of understanding time, as it were, in the light of mythology. The mytho-logy, or reasoning which arises from a consideration for myth, belongs to a heuristic device (much like the Antikaithera Mechanism) adopted from pre-history for the sake of importing an understanding of the will of the gods, the seven moving in the twelve houses, the zodiacal ring of the year, The great Giants resting at the whirling peak of the world and the deluge below. As Levinas puts it in Time, Death, and God, the upward image discloses a curiosity which precedes all taboo. Science sees the world, and subjects it to the criticism of a mathematical consideration for the conditions of its being, its physics.
A consideration for Hinduism means not less than a consideration for the marks made by a consideration for Time in Hindu thinking. The calendrical culture of South Asia is one of many histories, one of many ways of being. A consideration for astrology is no plunging oneself into a dark art (no rash judgement!), but rather a plunging oneself into a question for the role and domain of astrology in making intelligible the very meaning of the texts under consideration; it would be rash to judge Great Hindu works without a consideration for the astrological cultures which produced them. The myths open themselves more freely to a reader who has an ear for astrological thinking, and even more so when they are not limited to such astrological thinking! But how rash are we to skip the elementary in order to appear as more advanced!
The elementary stands as the guardian to thinking; when elements of thought are lacking in consideration, one thinks rashly, one acts impulsively. Consideration for the time of the other is a consideration which belongs to an even broader ethical thinking. The neglect of India is the neglect of a growing economy, a new consumer. Capitalism itself then wants a healthy India, an India with a healthy appetite.
But India consumes diversely, it is a marketplace of diverse cultures. And with that, diverse understandings of Time. This diversity in many places and in many ways implicates itself in a process of exchange, a multi-cultural gifting. To seek a monotheology in Indian thought thus abstracts skyward, away from the ground of daily existence, and toward the cultural background, toward the idea of a culture of thinking horo-theo-logically (rather than pan-, panen-, poly- et al).
It is perhaps uncanny to Middle-Eastern monotheologies to find in India a habit for divinizing the diverse ontological groups in the world, and yet for the throngs therein, for thinking oneself monotheologically. Generally, this leads to a thinking of brahman, abstract unity or monism. Yet the mono- in monism is not yet a monotheology.
There does stand before us an important question for consideration, and an important critique, one that aims to reach near the heart of Hindu thought, in order to better bring out the historical course of its monotheological thought, which is even now already well under way. It is perhaps the fate of Vaiṣṇavism to always be preparing the way for the arising of monotheological thought. And this, because it is always thinking horo-theo-logically. In abstraction, kāla stands as the supreme deity of the whole of the Hindu Pantheon.
Kāla, or Time, is the vision of a supreme and absolute deity, a God-over-all-other-gods. Time, as a theological product, as a product of thinking—theologically, ritually, annually, calendrically, horologically—is a thinking which produces a cultural fruit, in many cases, a diverse market-place of cults and rituals. These cultures interact as through the medium of shared calendars, public annual festivals, habits of gifting and exchange, of sacrifice, mercy, and renewal. The sacrificial mind dresses up the pleas of humanity to the hearts of the gods; it seeks a way into their hearts as through their stomachs. Fate is taken to be in the many moving hands of the gods, and with that, a certain fatalism arises which motivates the sacrificer to seek clemency, mercy.
Kāla slays all. None can withstand his approach forever. The thought here merges darkness with finitude, and gives rise to the thinking of death. Immanuel Levinas would have us think of what lay beyond death, so that the finitude of Time's grasp on life would appear as a demonic grip, and one broken by the final, fatal act of death. So that the Grim Reaper seems the constant companion of Time: one of the four horsemen at the advance of the end of history. But what is perhaps an even more frightening thought than the end of history itself: what if instead of pre-occupying thought with consideration for the fate of humanity, given as unavoidable and inevitable, so as to usher it in all the quicker, we had to think of future generations and all those yet to come, all those who are yet to inhabit a lifespace, yet to confront the questions and quests this lifespace opens up to them. What if we stopped preparing the world merely for death, but instead prepared it too for life?
The image of Time as Supreme Deity needs to be understood if Vaiṣṇavism is to uphold the mantle of monotheology. But it appears as if under the weight of a mythical thinking, inspired by a naive consideration for a super-stitious and pre-critical horo-theology (i.e., astrology). The calendar, the culture, their history, and very many of their visions of deities patently belong to such a mode of interpretation, and as such, our question concerns the interpretive principles under which our understanding obtains its object. To teach Hinduism as an elementary subject, so as to produce an Introduction, not merely as useful, but insightful, helpful in clarifying Hinduism beyond misunderstanding. To do this, one needs to broach the question of astrology for the student, not so as to lead them to think superstitiously; rather, mythologically, to help them better understand the abstract and practical roles that myth plays in Hindu culture and thought, in setting its traditional, annual, seasonal patterns.
The facet of South Asian religion I am concerned with is just that one which adores Time as Supreme, roughly defined as the kāla-vādins. The term, kāla-vadin, does implicate a specific if loosely bound historical group (Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavas, Rāma-bhaktas, various Śaivas, and some groups of Śāktas can be said to belong to this group), or it can also simply refer to the group contributing the Atharva-Vedic hymns dedicated to kāla. Perhaps this latter might even include those earlier thinkers who first worked out the length of the year, and who considered its understanding to be a great riddle, as collated by J. Gonda in his work, Prajāpati and the Year. We might roughly view these then as two groups, since there is evident an earlier and a later in terms of the history of the concept of Time in South Asian literature. We do not mean to introduce a new religion where there was not one before; rather, we are using the term kāla-vādin in a formal sense, as an historical category of the understanding, one utilized in Hindu thinking and one we too might adopt for analytical ends (even if thereby doing so, we extend its meaning further).
This facet would be best viewed without reduction to an incomplete reading, but its complexity and enormity evades a singular consideration on my part alone. Its role is increasingly clear to me, insofar as so much of what is thereby recognizable in South Asian religion reflects an intuition or notion of it, insofar as the people set their own life-patterns after it in one form or another. The timing of weddings by consideration for the proper muhūrta, the calculation of the Vedic or Vaiṣṇava calendar, The timing of births and reading of fates in astrology—all of these belong to a broadly elementary "Hindu" intuition of kāla. Even the conflicting paces in the daily grind of both urban and rural life in South Asia still show deep regard for these intuitions.
Time, whether regarded by its "Western Sense" or by its "Asian Sense" is clearly a background condition for the thinking of human history in South Asia, as much as it is for that collective we call the West. Indeed, Time is no less a condition for the world of the mere animal! As such, it is an absolute background condition for being. The thought of Time's greatness refers to the remoteness of its idea as the background for lived spaces. Time is a basic condition. As a basis, it is also a baselessness or what is too remote to give itself in any basic way; i.e., a background. Time considered conceptually might give us such language as before and after, as past, present, and future, and as such, might be subject to J. M. McTaggart's logical critique. But if Time simply and truly shows itself as a basic baselessness, does not this suggest a patent contradiction too? Does not Time here become too absurd even to think?! Is Time no more than a great absurdity?
But such unserious thinking would have us ignore the basic truth of Time's conditional character: as a remote background, it perhaps does not stack up to the Eternal. Perhaps Time is not so Great as Eternity? Or have we simply lost sight of what is similar in them, the sempiternal? Is not the "forever and ever" of Time like that of Eternity? Or do we only regard as Time what is finite in one degree or another?
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