Contemplative Practices and Temporality

It has occurred to me that the nature of my research on the history of the concept of Time sounds quite abstract to a large number of the people I talk with, so that it may not be evident how my studies relate to human flourishing. And yet, there are few things in this world as valuable to the clarification of our understanding as a clear understanding of Time. But let's break this down into a short list of valuable insights which derive from the contemplation of the nature of Time.

1) Better functional understanding of grammar: "tense", as we call it, belongs to virtually every grammatically correct sentence we can utter in any of the Indo-European languages, and probably in a few others as well. That of course includes any of the Sanskritic, Latinate, or Germanic languages, among others. Having a rich sense of temporality thus enables one to use language more powerfully.

2) Finitude and the Infinite: The world is a complicated place. And that means that it is hard for us to see the world as a "whole". When one speaks of "worldviews", it is very often the case that much of what is contained in that perspective is finite and limitedly accurate. It is for this reason that I often speak of hermeneutical myopia, which is to say, that our understanding of the world requires to perpetually undergo a kind of clarification, by which the residue of ignorance and naivete can be removed from our understanding. As we undergo this process of mental clarification, so too does our ability to stand in awareness of the infinite increase in scope and clarity. Only by having a strong sense of our temporality can we reign in our egoistic assumptions, and retain that youthful openness to the Infinite beyond all of our experiences and imaginations.

3) Clarity on Cause and Effect: For those who are interested in seeing the world in a scientific perspective, a clear understanding of cause and effect is indispensible. David Hume famously causes a revolution in our thinking about Time, as much of our ideas about Cause and Effect flows from our understanding of the continuity of Time.

4) An Historical Way of Thinking: Along with that grammatical way of speaking, we also have to appreciate the larger picture of language as an historical phenomenon. When, for example, we have a stronger sense of linguistic etymologies (i.e., the histories of words and sayings), we are able to use language in a more nuanced and relevant way. Isaac Newton once said, "If I have seen so far, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants." This historical way of seeing and thinking allows us to have a genuinely forward-looking perspective on the world, as it allows us to overcome the errors of the past. Considering the past thus plays into our ability to think about the future and fate of humanity and life itself.

5) Existential significance: Martin Heidegger famously argued that we energize our existence with significance by embracing our temporality. Many people become paralysed by the fear of death, but few have adequately understood how to overcome this fear. When we face the basic fact of no longer being here, we at the same time free ourselves for those possibilities which remain to us in our dwindling lives. When we conteplate death, we do not do so as a kind of morbidity, but so that we can better appreciate the grand scale of the infinite, and so that we can better appreciate the rare and precious gift which is our life.


As I already said, this is a "short list". There are numerous other values to be gleaned from the contemplation of temporality. Indeed, there are so many goods to be gained from it, that I could hardly be expected to provide an exhaustive list. Many of the values to be gained are yet to be seen. And yet, perhaps you will be the first to see some of these clearly yourself.

Animated Introduction to Spacetime

Back in my undergrad, I got to take a whole course explaining the strange physical dynamics of the Lorentz transformation and the history of the philosophy of Spacetime. It was very enlightening, and I would recommend anyone interested in the topic to check out Lawrence Sklar's "Space, Time, and Spacetime".

But if you just wanna get the essence of the matter, these two animations do the job pretty well. 

Contextualizing Viṣṇu

I produced this for a video presentation at a European conference of Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava scholars. It contains a summary of many of the thematic elements I have covered in past blogs. Check it out!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScPAJogerW4

The Big Bang and the Plufutural

The idea of a Time before Time, of a set of initial natural conditions which preceded the advent of Time is a complicated monster of conception. For, in speaking of the "before", the "preceded", we speak of Time in an etiolated, abstracted sense. We mean to use Time like a splinter, to pick out a splinter.

There is one way we can think of Time even now which does not run into such contradictions, but which requires us to consider instead the natural limits of our knowledge and understanding. The term, "plufutural", is my own coin, and grammatically based upon the pluperfect, the "past past". When we think of the initial conditions, we must consider a Time which is pure futurity, devoid even of presence. This is possible if we think of this plufutural time as a kind of pure potentiality, a reservoir, as it were, of power which has yet to form any structures of concrete existence. It would by necessity be non-extended, because any structure would imply a concrete form, a kind of existence, which fails the test of the plufutural nature of the initial conditions. A singularity is as close as we have today come to thinking imagistically of this "state", but the plufutural gives us something conceptual which is not necessarily self-evident in the concept of the singularity.

In the plufutural, which remains at the limits of our thinking today, we have a kind of Time which is not even yet intelligible. The future which we apprehend—and to a limited degree, comprehend—such as the one which promises to bring about the technological singularity, is not identical to the plufutural in all of its detail, and yet, the plufutural, the unknown future, the future which as yet even to be conceived or considered, to be imagined or reckoned, has its impact upon all of that future which we can and do anticipate with some degree of rational rigor. The future-future, the "future that will be the future" comes to mind, perhaps most readily, in the sense of those concerns which our descendents will need to confront in their own Time to come. These would include children not yet born, not yet conceived, but even moreso, their children, and their children's children, so that in thinking of the plufutural, we are confronted with questions we cannot be expected even to ask, for those questions do not belong to us, but to them.

In this sort of thinking, in which we thematically highlight the possibility of questions that we will never get to pose, we also sight a kind of future which never comes to the light of our individual awareness. Inasmuch as we are us and not them, we consider the future in different terms, in terms of the predictable and the unpredictable. This unpredictable remains even in the spare few moments before an event arises in its concrete presence. As the last vestiges of the plufutural unfurls and gives way to concrete presence, the event horizon at last exposes what had remained hidden, and thereby continually conceals the plufutural, as something amorphous, as something too new to even be called "new" for it has yet even to be conceived.

This sort of thinking is necessary if we are to understand what is being said when we speak of initial conditions, when we speak of a Time without Presence, of a Future without a Past. This odd idea is like that of infinite youth, a fathomless wellspring from which all being arises, and yet, in the face of which no being has yet to arise. It is perhaps in the conception of this source as an infinite one that we can retain the intelligibility of the "beginning of Time". Time is only placed in contrast with this infinite source by virtue of its finitude. Time as a "beginning of all beginnings", save what began It Itself.

What is so very odd then, is that in trying to conceive the beginning of all beginnings, we are indeed led to contemplate the end of all ends.

Time-Travel Movie Reviews: "Project Almanac" (2014)

Blurb from IMDB: "A group of teens discover secret plans of a time machine, and construct one. However, things start to get out of control."

Apparently, as long as you stand real close, you get to come along for the ride. 

(Spoiler alert)

So, this flick was pretty light on any serious time-travel (TT) science (there is a mention of using hydrogen as a fuel, and other gimmicky natural laws, but the device already exists, and just needs to be assembled). But even if while the film does nothing to further our understanding of TT science, it still has some notable features, just on the paradox of TT.

Rules-based travel: There is a tendency in a lot of TT films to wrestle with time travel as the possibility of altering past events so that one in effect tailors later effects. This film is no exception. But what is important here is that the rules are composed early on, and only when they are broken does trouble arise; as if the kids could have anticipated every mishap before doing anything of significance. The author thus steps into the screen when he signals that once the rules are broken (which we knew they would be), this change of events turns out to come with grave consequences.

I still enjoyed much of the narrative, even though nothing about the breaking of the rules is an obvious cause of the consequences later traced back to the travel (except that the travellers know that their world has been changed, and that this is impacting the lives of those people around them in increasingly negative ways). For example, David Raskin breaks a "cardinal rule" (which he himself composed) to return to a concert and kiss the girl he almost lost. The result? A major plane crash, forest fires in Brazil, and the school's team loses the big game. To be honest, the cause-effect relation seems to be handled pretty loosely.

At times, very Groundhog's Day.

They also toy with the whole doppelganger paradox, questioning whether or not it is possible for two copies of the same person can exist in the same Timespace continuum. Sadly, the author does not give us anything other than a cliche "it's ok as long as they don't see each other" scenario, which suggests that somehow, human psyches are elemental and cancel each other out if conscious awareness of this fact arises.

The movie manages to remain interesting all the same, suggesting that repeat of an event inexorable alters things, so that there is never any genuine "going back". The past, even in time-travel, somehow remains the past. There is also a constant exhilarating fear of meddling with time, and at once an irresistible urge to do so anyways. If this film did anything to break the mold, it has to be in the final scene, where it becomes evident that all the damage done isn't enough to stop the mad scientist from trying once again to change the world. This film seems fairly critical of the usual "once burned, twice shy," lesson about time travel.

"I keep thinking I can just go back by myself, and fix everything, I don't have to worry about anyone else."
~David Raskin

Just in case you time travel...

"What Year Is It?"

Space and the Surface of Time [updated and revised, April 12, 2015]

It is easy enough to pose the question: What is Time?

The trouble comes in answering it.

For some folks, Time is a pure concept, an abstraction, akin to things like justice, the good, eternity, the infinite, and God. But it can be little doubted that as facts go, Time is among the brutest, the most ineluctable realities we face. Were it not for Time, we might anticipate being able to live forever. Time, to put it in Heidegger's words, is a 'not to be outstripped' fact about our very existence; it is not the kind of thing we can hope to evade by means of some purely analytical, deconstructive process, and this suggests that treating Time as a pure concept would lead us to some thoroughly unsatisfying conceptual consequences; it would make us blind, as it were, to the most basic fact of life, to the approach of our own death.

On the other hand, calling Time a brute fact does at the same time call to mind its conceptual facet, for who can imagine a single non-conceptual fact? Perhaps we can refer to unknown facts, cosmic constants which science has yet to unveil. These may belong to that class of non-conceptual facts, but by virtue of such—as Dingen-an-Sich, as "things as such" (here in opposition to things as appearance)—they are immediately inaccessible to us. And they only come to light insofar as they have been brought under the heading of some concrete concept, of which temporality is the foremost (at least, such was Hegel's opinion of the matter). Facts, even having a concrete character, also at the same time have an abstract character. Facts, it seems, link the world of concepts to the world of physical things. Whatever is eternally true of temporality governs cause and effect, change, decay, order, chaos, and nature itself. So, in some respects, a knowledge of Time provides us crucial clarity in interpreting the proper domain and objects of physics and indeed, of all sciences.

Metaphysically speaking, we can occupy our attention with change, which is at least visible, if only by means of synthesizing a manifold of experiences (to use a Kantian language). That is, if we think of experiences of events as synthesized from a series of snapshots, we can bring those snapshots together in our understanding as a single flow, as an event proper.

At the same time, it seems somewhat unreasonable to think of events as "originally manifold", so that we have to do some further work of retroactively putting everything together. Of course, events "unfold" or "unfurl", so that events come together from manifold sources before our eyes. And in this respect, the emergence of an event does add to experience manifold elements which in seeing coherently, we take up altogether into a unity of sorts. Kant seemed to think that this manifold would remain disunified if it were not for the apperceptive self, the self-aware kind of being that we are. Memories and anticipations or plans do not appear as a unity without the being for whom life is itself conceived as a whole, i.e., in which I am someone individual. It seems that synthesis is not some pure abstraction, but something that belongs to lived, embodied experience as such. Even the understanding itself, construed broadly, seems to be meaningless without reference to embodied sensuality. What then is change to this synthetic understanding, prior to interpreting its coherence by accounting for it calendrically?

Change does imply measurable "rates", so that common endergonic and exergonic reactions both take place with reference to regularly repeatable physical paces, to seconds and hours, days and years, and so that change can be also tabulated according to various relative metrics, but this is not what I am attempting to indicate by change. What I rather mean will come to light better if we follow a certain imaginative experiment.

Let's begin by imagining the whole world as a 1-dimensional stream of particles. In such a constrained environment, every subatomic particle is locked into a specific order. Nothing "gets around" anything else. As such, light could not penetrate into this universe, except to say that there might be some two particles between which a photon would be able to bounce back and forth. These would be the natural spatial limits of every photon.

Also, particles would be unable to form into atoms. This should be evident from the fact that particles could not orbit each other! Everything would remain locked into the most basic elementary forms. One has to wonder if there would even be the possibility of forces trying to break this locked quantum state.

Also, we have to try and think of this universe from the inside, which may be quite difficult, since we are so much accustomed to seeing it in four dimensions, with change taken alongside length, width, and height. It is even difficult to discern whether a particle would even see horizonally, in the sense that particles closer to it would appear larger than particles hidden behind them! Indeed, perhaps the only horizons in that unidimensional universe would consist of the two particles that fell prior and posterior!

And we should wonder whether this linear world were itself capable of being bent! could the cosmically long line be folded into a knot? Could it be made to pass through itself at various points? And what would be that suspiciously dimension-like background which made possible this very bending? Have we not already violated the terms of a unidimensional universe in supposing such a possibility?

And what of the patterns of particulate motion? What forces would there be? Gravity? At least this would seem to remain intact, though one wonders if particles would be able to escape its grasp, or whether this whole unidimensional universe would be prone to collapse back into a singularity. Such questions are difficult to answer, but perhaps we can suppose the force of individual impacts between particles sufficient to ensure that at least some of them escape massive singularities.

And yet, it does seem that we must question whether gravity can exist in a world incapable of spatial flex! Would space be flexible in a unidimensional world? We often refer to gravity as the curvature of space. However, in our hypothetical world, space would seem somewhat rigid! Perhaps the most we can say is that in some places, particles would be prone clump close together and in other places would be more dispersed (though this too starts to sound like additive waves and such, and hence, to operate under higher dimensional physics). This fictive world of ours seems to have some very strange properties indeed!

But granting at least that particles are capable of coming close or drawing far from other particles, is it not a little odd that we should note that, in fact, photons do behave in this very way, that they bounce back and forth, as it were, between troughs and peaks? Of course we tend to imagine photons in a three or four dimensional framework, as moving along a vector as waves in an electromagnetic spectrum.

Still, in our one dimensional framework, they would simply bounce between two poles, their particle horizons. And if matter can move, even in this highly constrained environment, then perhaps all matter moves, if only toward the infinite ends of the unidimensional space which constrains it: an infinitely long line of infinitesimal particles bouncing off of each other, non able to get around each other, all forming a line that grows with Time. And what drives this "growing" at all, if not the energized photons, full of charge, bouncing back and forth between the other particles? does this not, as a whole net effect, press the whole line to become longer and longer over time?

If we were to suppose that we could begin with a very short line, in which every particle were packed as closely together as possible, i.e., as much as gravity would allow for—would not the energetic force of those oscillating particles press for more room? and in so doing, would they not become the very force of the unfurling of Time?

It has now become possible for us to ask the question we initially wanted to consider: where in this unidimensional universe would be the present? It would be in the change between the positions of the particles, would it not? But then we would have a two-dimensional universe, because we would need to map the changes of the unidimensional universe over Time. And this is why perhaps we have had a tendency from the start to regard Time as conceptual, because it plays an intrinsic role in our metrical accounting for Spatial change. Perhaps then, if we wished to stick to the unidimensional account, we would never even be able to escape the initial singularity which preceded our unidimensional big bang! If this world were to come into being at all, it would only be able to do so by virtue of a prior, higher dimensional Time which preceded it!

So then, we have come to an important realization: Time has to already be in place for the world to come into being. Time, as it were, sets the stage for creation. If there is any dimension which is fundamental, it is the Time dimension. This is the one dimension that can be taken as fundamentally really, as the sine qua non of the world. If that is so, then the so-called particles of the unidimensional world we have been so far imagining would be not unlike quantum particles, which pop in and out of existence; their very becoming and unbecoming would simply be their distance in Time from each other. And this would suggest that, unlike the treatment of Time as a pure concept, Time has a concrete function as a real dimension; indeed, the most real of dimensions, even if this has been indicated by 'virtual particles'!

We have been concerned as far as possible to avoid reducing Time to a merely "metrical-conceptual" account, like that of number and other mathematical entities. We have wanted instead to focus on what energizes us to think of Time, what first gives rise to its significations in experience.

But we have also been compelled to introduce Time as a second dimension in our highly constrained universe, having no other means of representing a present in opposition to a past or future when we treated this dimension as spatial. This is quite telling, and brings to the surface of our investigation just how much the force of thinking Time as a concept has hold of our every understanding of it.  

If Time would be a "mere concept", and one that relies upon the concrete-visible world of interacting particles for its most basic intelligibility, then it is nonetheless still a kind of "endurance", insofar as we admit that, behind change, there are prior conditions, prior questions of "existence" that inform the very possibility of visualizing and mapping change.

We have been concerned to visualize Time, to visualize change, to visualize the present as a certain sort of surface of change. We do not stand alongside the universe as outside observers who could watch change without being impacted by it. We are "in it", and change is something that we are very much a part of. But we are able to imagine this "being alongside" or "being outside" of the universe, much as God would be outside all of Time in Eternity. And when we imagine this unidimensional universe, do we not then impose the changes when we abstract away from what it "is" to what it "was" and what it "will be"? This transition between the transformations that we are immediately exposed to, versus those remote suggests that our immersion in temporality also has a "depth". The present is not unlike the surface of an almost unfathomably deep ocean, and one that is getting deeper all the Time.

We are rising further and further to the infinite sky of space upon the surface of this ocean which is filling the world with Time. Space, as all that is present, is just the surface of this ocean, just the "thickness of the now". And yet, we also see that light, which penetrates through this ocean, from the very edge of our understanding of creation, red-shifted and diluted in its energies, oscillating for eternity in the vast and asymptotically empty void retains the past as a certain kind of depth. We can see below us, into the waters of the past.

Time gives Space a surface, a proximity in the form of the Now, a distance in the form of the Past and Future, a surface in the sense of finitude, of birth and death. Time imposes this upon existence, so that in an important respect, the judgment of Time as a mere concept misconstrues it. Certainly, it is a condition for life and death. Certainly, it imposes existence upon those of us who are present. Time, in this light, is not simply a concept, but the most brutal and imposing of facts.

Always floating upon the surface of the now,
Yet lights below blossom from hoary antiquity,
Reminding us of where we have been.

Waters fathomless,

A storm above us,

Filling the world with presence,

Till at last,

Soaked and sea-logged,


The waters filling our every pore,


The air of life escapes us,




We drown.

What then?