Is Time [a] God?

What Is Time?

The question has been thrown about as if it were already obvious that Time were either some thing or else nothing at all. Of course, a concept can be a thing, though an empty thing at that, insofar as it does not provide us with some corresponding res extensa. 

J. M. McTaggart's account of Time reduces it to an "unreality", a conclusion he arrives at by way of describing a logical absurdity or conflict in the way that we usually talk about it. McTaggart's essay The Unreality of Time did have the novel effect of reorienting my thinking towards Time as a possible theme for exploration and discovery, but it also had the impact of leading me to question the utility and limits of reason with respect to the source of nature. 

Not that I'm an anti-rationalist, no. But my intuitions allow for there to be absurdity in the world without decrying it as falsehood or illusion. And neither do I mean to imply that the world just cannot make sense. But lived experience shows that we very often are able to live and act in the world without having a full understanding of it, without a universal comprehension. 

And so, it is important to recognize that while a person like McTaggart can convey with logical rigor the absurdity of speaking of Time in ways that appear even at cross purposes, this does not in itself demonstrate that Time is any less real than it was when we accepted it as real! 

McTaggart might have himself continued to keep a pocket watch, or to keep schedules, to wake early, to lecture at a certain Time, to celebrate his birthday, and to honor annual holidays. All of these would depend upon his accepting, on some level or another, the realities of Time. 

With this sort of intuition in mind, I set out to explore a richer description of Time, one that spanned not simply a corner somewhere in the ideological mind of a certain analytic philosopher, not the A-type or B-type description, tucked away in some department of a certain university, but the concept of Time as best approached by the historian of concepts. 

You see, at that very time when I first came to know of McTaggart, this problem seemed to me serendipitous. God too was being accused of very similar charges, that He was unreal, that the vision of God is an absurd one, in which we are expected to hold in union concepts which do not tally well with experience as such, that God should be omnibenevolent, omniscient, omnipotent. 

I was already following the history of the problem of evil in relation to ontotheology, so that when I saw how McTaggart treated Time, it struck me as not a mere coincidence, but as something structurally significant. But to appreciate that better, it helps to bring to light that I had already been studying the Bhagavad-Gītā for the better part of a decade. And of all the chapters in that terse and semiotically dense work, the 11th was most curious to me. It is in that chapter that Kṛṣṇa claims identity with Time, and thereby claims supremacy as the God of gods, and as pervading the whole of the world. 

To be sure, such pagan thinking is abstract, but it does mark, whether precisely or through the lens of poesis, a certain foundational era in human history; the beginning of thinking about Time in abstraction.

And certainly Time had already been on the mind of the Indo-Europeans long prior to the Gītā. They founded horology in order to measure Time out. This measuring came in two forms; the calculating of annual events, whether ritual or seasonal, and in the questions of universal origination. Both forms of this horological project found a grounding in the regular passage of heavenly bodies, whether the planets, or that of the stars which appeared stationary with respect to each other. 

But here we see just how closely the problem of the existence of God coincides with the problem of the unreality of Time. For, the first gods were traced through those mythical heuristics of astrology. Astrology was not simply some long forgotten, arcane master science; it was theology before theology had a separate life in relation to reason. 

And I have come to recognize through a close study of the theme of Time in the Rig and later Vedic materials, that the abstractive process which led to Kṛṣṇa's declaration in the Gītā is not random or without historical significance; it reflects precisely this motion, from a henotheistic or polytheistic seasonal worship of multiple zodiacal and/or non-zodiacal astral deities, this accorded to an annual lunisolar calendar to the veneration of the year itself, and from this to the veneration of Time as the first of Gods. This period we see at the close of the Atharva in the 19th Book in the two hymns to Kala-deva. 

The abstraction follows an historiological arc, and provides us a certain source and result. It clears up much about what the Vedas are after, such as in the Rig, I.164 hymn to the Viśvadevas. It suggests that this peculiar but histocially concrete abstractive process is key in making sense of the 11th chapter and the ontotheological claims made therein. 

It also suggests some rather provocative matters for the future of ontotheological thinking, at the very least, among Hindu thinkers, if not for theology on a global scale; though even here, the outcome depends upon whether these same heuristic processes can be traced in other religious histories. And it may be that we will not have the full solution to this problem until we have gotten further along in our comparative studies. But already, one can see suggestive formations in Genesis for example, in the proximity of Ophiuchus, Serpens, Corona Borealis, and Hercules to the myth of Adam and Eve. 

But closer again to the leading question, does the coincidence of God's ontotheological absurdities with those of Time tell us anything about the global history of the concept of Time? And does Time then serve as a useful source for thinking about God? And what does this say for Heidegger's results in attempting to secularize ontology? Has he done so at all? Or has he rather returned ontology to its theological sources in such a light that history might now come to light for the first time since its inception?