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Transcendence and the Solipsistic Retreat

The concept of Time may be regarded as drawing itself originally from two general domains: (1) the internal mental domain of analytic and synthetic cognitions and hence time-perceptions, and (2) the external, empirical domain of the calendar with its roots in the ritualized, commemorated, and studied motions of stars, planets, and other heavenly bodies, and which thus constitutes the earliest formal grounding for human horological practices. The difference between the concept and its phenomenal ground, consists entirely in this. This division might then be regarded as Pure (or Conceptual) Horology and Practical Horology.

Both the pure and the practical facets of horology indicate an existentialle within dasein: his contention with Time. And this shows up in a certain way, as will be shown through a consideration for dasein's social practices, given here as particular moments seen in a conversation. In general when, for the sake of conversation, dasein comes face-to-face with another person (or more simply put, an other) we may note specific distinctive incidences of transcendence. As Levinas works out at length, this face-to-face encounter is the locus of an event of transcendence, the disclosure of a trace pointing toward alterity, or the difference an other makes.

Conversation arises in a normal, everyday context of the various incidences and events provided by schedules, whether these are work calendars, or of planned vacations. They are also part of this calendrical practice, even if their content is merely a "time-filling" or "event-ordering" device, such as an "ice-breaker" or a gentleman's excuse. The contention with time remains alive throughout the conversation, so that in both speaking to and listening to the other, there may arise moments of retreat from external awareness. The other speaks, but no one is listening, because thought interjects and derails the attention, redirecting the mind inward, toward a solipsistic contemplation.

These transcendental movements are herein regarded with respect to the concept of attention and in that light of that general condition called attention span. When speaking of the face as the locus, the where, of the event of transcendence, we speak of the way that the face discloses traces of a solipsistic retreat through the withdrawal of attention from empirical consciousness, a withdrawal that takes its point of departure from the questioning of the meaning of being and draws the mind toward an historical, phenomenological understanding of the concept of time, an understanding that in a sense lay at the end of an understanding of self, and hence as a telos for apperception. The annual calendar is for the most part an indispensable part of our identity. The man is a Catholic by virtue of his participation in the calendrical ritualized event that defines and structures annual Catholic life: Christmas, Easter, Sunday Mass, the Celebrations of the Lives of the Saints. Interspersed may be any number of public, community events, intended to fill the time of the year in festival, or engaged in practical outreach, community service, and so forth.

It is in this situation that our skills as teachers, builders, cooks, drivers, organizers, leaders, employees, parents, and so forth structure our dialectical lives. Conversations fall to these themes and others like them, or with respect to aesthetic concerns, ethical concerns, and questions of ultimate meaning. The practical activity of organizing our lives according to the schedule of a calendar determines this meaningfulness of finite existence just as much as the conceptual life of the for-the-sake-of-which that provides an understanding of that meaning.

In the course of talking in the context of these varied circumstances, there arise non-parities, inequalities. Conversations with certain individuals may expose us to frequent interruptions, or in conversation with others, we may find our minds filled with ideas, and may have to constantly revisit the other's act of speech with renewed attention. The attention which does this undergoes a solipsistic retreat from empirical awareness, the attention span becomes thin and attenuated, or split.

In another case, the form of a talking over, an interruption: the other is disjoined from their own event of disclosure. The other who discloses thought may fall silent in order to listen, the thought may pass incomplete. In interruption, one opens up a disclosure toward the other while closing off disclosure. In the interruption of a condescension, a desire interrupts which valuates one's own time over that of the other. In the interruption, there lay a solipsistic withdraw of the attention from listening to what has been said and what is being said. This is a retreat, or a withdrawal into the first-person perspective. An empirically-minded scientist may be tempted to turn a blind eye to even the possibility of a transcendental content in the mind of the other. The other is reduced in concept from something enigmatic or fathomless to something knowable and known, the thought of the other is designified.

Other than this solipsistic retreat, there is another transcendental movement and which is the flipside of this coin of attention, and this is the return of consciousness to empirical awareness. This movement may become alerted to the fact that the train of attention has become derailed, and may seek to resume through a circumspection of recent moments. The words already passed as the other's speech, are pulled back from the thought of having just heard them. The mind attempts to get itself back up to speed; where did I leave the conversation, and where are we at now? Time travels internally and externally in our thought and in our dialogue, and to follow its every trace is to have our attention divided. Time seems selfish for shares of our attention and in different ways.

These are matters for which we cannot reverse the event, but can only exercise our attention to be more attentive, to derail less, to listen more, and as much for understanding as for response. This concern for understanding the other is thus what overcomes the solipsistic mentality leading the attention to review and resume its empirical awareness. The transcendental motion here derives from the other, from their alterity, from the space of their own speech, their own thought, their own understanding of a matter. 

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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? 

Doctor Who & Tom Tomorrow

On a less/more serious note (depending upon whether you are British), I'm an old fan of both Tom Tomorrow and Dr. Who.

Hence, I'm very happy to share this cartoon.

Astrology & "Dark Arts"

In a recent conversation with my father, he felt pressed to point out that the Holy Roman Church regarded astrology as a "dark art". Of course, I was already aware of this, but it brought to mind a valuable reflection: the very alienation of thought from astrology in Western culture might help us to better appreciate how far it has been underutilized in making sense of Asiatic religion.

One might expect the topic to fare better in the academic study of religion, at least, yet evidence suggests otherwise.  Thus a critical reconstruction of the history of astrology in Asiatic religions pertains to several matters:

1) the roles astrology plays in the history of religions;
2) the roles astrology plays in the construction of traditional myths;
3) the roles astrology plays in the interpretation of an annual ritual calendar;
4) the roles the criticism of astrology plays in the construction of theology;
5) the violence done to a history of religions by means of this criticism;
6) the methods needed to locate and discern astrology's various roles in the above;
7) the roles astrology has yet to play in providing hermeneutical cyphers in the interpretation of astrology-wielding religions and cultures;
8) the philosophical implications of such a reformed reading of history.

A chronological approach to this matter suits the nature of the study less than one which progresses thematically and inter-culturally. The themes themselves may require us to leap forward and backward in history, from cause to result, and across geographies, from ur-form and comparative counterparts to synthetic forms, as with the production of new myths from the elements of older myths. In this way, many chronologies contribute to the disclosing of a larger chronology (though perhaps even here, no universal chronology yet exists, or even should be supposed to be possible).

At the comparative level, we might expect the study to progress best from the examination of two traditions and no more. Yet again, the evidence suggests otherwise, so that astrology is better seen as a thick multiculturalism, enriched and even constituted by numerous diasporic tributaries, even when focused upon a single myth recalled from a single geographic tradition. For example, the evidence for the monkey god Hanuman's latent associations with the constellation Corona Borealis cannot be made entirely clear without drawing evidence from both the Chinese astronomical traditions and Greco-Roman and European art ranging from Antiquity to the Renaissance (in addition to South Asian sources). Indeed, even this requires that we compare astrological traditions internally, so that Corona Borealis must also be compared against Corona Australis. And all of this becomes increasingly concrete whence we have included Hanuman's associations and interactions with other mythical characters, tracing their astrological ur-forms alongside his.

But even before we can consider such puranic-epic characters, we should probably begin with something of a chronological approach, so that we should at least first examine the Rig Vedic materials, if only to demonstrate how remote and pervasive the origins of these horological practices are.

With that, we might first consider the associations of Indra with the Ruddy Bull, or Taurus (whose housing the Sun brings with it the Monsoon. This appears to be among the very oldest myths recorded in the Vedic materials, with the battle against Vṛtra forming an early historical episode of theological reasoning in connection with annual, seasonal events.

The short of it:

Such reasoning through astrological materials gives us the chance to clear up theology of its theo-temporal associations, and brings into question the existential matter of thinking about being within the horizon of Time. Is thinking about being qua Heideggerian phenomenology just a natural extension of that earlier Pagan thought which saw Time as the adi-deva, the first god? Would that make Time the Devil?

Physical Asymmetry & the Arrow of Time

Well, it seems that atomic nuclei are asymmetrical. Too bad for Time Reversal.