Fragment on Time

Time is a perennial topic in the history of philosophy, always discussed in one way or another by a significant figure (whether it be Augustine or Walter Benjamin). My task here is to outline a line of inquiry and method for thinking about time.

There are as many conceptions of time as there are distinct human cultures; in fact, one can say that every major culture has a concept of time peculiar to them. Two of them may immediately spring up to one's mind: the linear and the cyclical. The former is primarily associated with European cultures, the latter with Asian cultures; we will focus on the former.

When we say that time is "linear," one often means that events in time move in a sequential manner, with Event A being followed by Event B, which is then followed by Event C, and so on. We think of things via linear time when we consider the lifespan of entities, from the relatively short one of a day's length, to the eons-long one of the Earth. Heidegger called this conception "clock time" (in order to differentiate from the more authentic "existential time"), in reference to the image of the clock that is emblematic of this conception. It is important to quickly recognize here, I think, that linear (or clock) time is one of the most significant inventions in human history, one that has its benefits and downsides, and how it massively structures our experience of everyday life. (One can point out the reliance of linear time to other, tangible inventions, like the clock, which lends credence to the argument that time is reducible to the events that occur in it.) Here, the experience of clock time can be summed up by the pair of words "monotony" and "surprise": "monotony" here refers to the experience of the realization that this day was the same as that of yesterday, and that tomorrow will be the same as that of today; and "surprise" to the sudden intrusion of an unanticipated, and unanticipiable, event, or an event that is said to be a "stroke of luck."

Under the regime of clock time, there are two domains that are demarcated and recognized as "subordinate" to clock time: the human and the cosmic. These two have a myriad of theories that posit their beginnings and hypothetical ends. We will concern ourselves with the human, or societal, domain.

Already, there are two terms ("lifespan" and "ends") whose notion common to both are intuitively recognized and presupposed in our thinking of linear time. It is a simple fact: at some point in time, something is born, flourishes, and dies. This simple fact opens up two questions for us. The first one: does the existence of time precede the existence of entities, or does it only arise with the birth of such entities? (In other words, is time a transcendent container or a substance? If it is a substance, is it separate from, or reducible to, the events that is considered to happen "in" it?) The second one: can time itself die, and if so, how?

The first question is one of the many questions that Kant concerned himself in his project of critical philosophy (and it is a question that is deserving of an extended elaboration). Due to the constraint of brevity, we will, instead, concern ourselves here of the second question, of how time itself can die.

Before we approach this question, let's summarize the path that led us to it: the time that is of concern to us now is a time that hangs over, and defines, our human affairs, such that one can say that time and the course of human history is identical or co-extensive. Of course, flourishings must give way to demise, and there are two ways of articulating such demise.

The first one is that of the fulfillment of a purpose or "telos" (which is Greek for "final cause"): all of human history is but a succession of events that paved the way for a supreme event to occur; this conception underpins both Hegel's assertion that history is the "slaughterbench" of Spirit, and Fukuyama's "end of history" thesis (where it is said that liberal democracy has triumphed over fascism and communism, and, as such, there are no more significant events that need to occur).

The second one is that of a termination, punctuation, or an abrupt cut-off to the flow of events (a final point or "terminus" of time): all of human history leads to oblivion and devastation. This is the conception that guides all apocalyptic scenarios, whether it be the cataclysm that follows during the Christian end-times, or the cascade of environmental disasters that is entailed by climate change.

These two "ends" of time are often designated by two terms in philosophical literature: "teleology" and "eschatology". These two conceptions guides how one thinks of history's trajectory, and of possible actions that can be done. Each conception is paired by an affective aspect one might call "determination": "hope" with teleology, "despair" with eschatology. As these two affects make clear (which are nothing but aspects of a single human faculty), our understanding of time is inseparable from our experience of it. The two may be analytically distinguished from one another, but, sooner or later, the one bleeds into and contaminates the other.