Time as Grammar of Texts of the World

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1 Chapter 7 Time as Grammar of Texts of the World Contemporary Concepts of Time vs. Plotinus's On Time and Eternity Whal is Time? Time does 1101 erisr, tinre is a number, time is: rhe ratio of being and non-being. FROM THE ROUGH NOTES OF DOSTOEVSKY TO THE NOVEL CRIME AND PUNISHME~~T Earlier, we compared the probabilistic vision of the world to the tractatus On Numbers by Plotinus (see Chapter 4); now the time has come to compare our conception of Time, through which we try to comprehend the nature of Nothing, to his tractatus On TinreandElernirv found in the Third Ennead (Plotinus. 1956). Recall that Plotinus inherited not only the ideas of theentire Mediterranean, but also those of Persia and India. (See the appendix to this chapter.) We may think he was the first philosopher to comprehend critically and re-integrate the experience of perception of the world by ancient people. This experience could be called religious, since it was opened through a direct contact with the unconscious. We should be aware of the fact that Plotinus's writings are implicit rather than explicit: in order to understand what he was speaking about, one had to ask questions. At his conferences he encouraged such a form of studies. But whom can we ask now? Only ourselves. We are naturally going to speak here not of direct parallels but of the echoes of ideas. The following are excerpts from the tractatus On Time and Eternity:

60 Internal Time Eternity, thus, is of the order of the supremely great; intuition identifies it with God: it may fitly be described as God made manifest.

2 60 Internal Time Eternity, thus, is of the order of the supremely great; intuition identifies it with God: it may fitly be described as God made manifest. as God declaring what He is, as existence without jolt or change. and therefore as also the firmly 226) Thus a close enough definition of Eternity would be that it is a life limitless in the full sense of being all the life there is and a Life which, knowing nothing of past or future to shatter its completeness, possesses itself intact forever. To the notion of a Life (a Living-Principle) all-comprehensive add that it never spends itself, and we have the statement of a Life instantaneously infinite. (p. 227) We must then have, ourselves, some pan or share in Eternity. Still, how is this possible to us who exist in Time? The whole question turns on the distinction between being in Time and being in Eternity, and this will be best realized by probing to the nature of Time. (p. 228) Movement Time cannot be... In a word. Movement must be distinct from the medium in which it takes place. And, with all that has been said or is still said, one consideration is decisive: Movement can come to rest, can be intermittent; Time is continuous. (p. 229) Would it, then, be sound to define Time as the Life of the Soul in movement as it passes from one stagc of act or experience to another? (p. 234) Here I make a break in the quotations and draw the reader's attention to the fact that the last of the above excerpts could be made an epigraph for Chapter 6. Alternatively, this chapter linking psychological Time with Doing can be considered as an explication of this excerpt. But let us return to Plotinus: If, then, the soul withdrew, sinking itself again into its primal unity. Time would disappear: the origin of Time, clearly, is to be traced to the first stir of the soul's tendency towards the production of the sensible Universe with the consecutive act ensuing. This is how "TimeH-as we read-"came into being simultaneously with" this All: the soul begot at once the Universe and Time; in that activity of the Soul this Universe sprang into being; the activity is Time, the Universc is a contcnt of Time. No doubt it will be urged that we read also. of "the orbit of the stars" being Times: but do not forget what follows; "the stars exist," we are told, "for the display and delimitation of Time." and "that there may be a manifest Measure." No indication of Time could be dcrivcd from (observation of) the Soul; no portion of it can be seen or handled, so it could not be measured in itself, especially when there was as yet no knowledge of counting; therefore the Demiurge (in the Timaeus) brings into being night and

3 Time as Grammar of Texts of the World 61 day; in their difference is given Duality-from the concept of Number. (p. 236) which, we read, arises It follows from this text that Time is ascribed a Demiurgic role: The world manifests itself through Time. In other words. Time becomes the synonym for existence. Furthermore, the double-faceted nature of Time is emphasized: it is astronomic Time which is perceived directly; the other kind of Time, which 1 have called psychological, unregistered by devices,.is not felt. Then follows an extremely interesting speculation on the nature of Time: Time itself is not a measure... Time, then, serves towards measurement but is not itself the Measure; the Movement of the All will be measured according to Time, but Time will not, of its own nature, be a Measure of Movement: primarily a Kind to itself, it will incidentally exhibit the magnitudes of that movement. (p. 236) Recall that Plotinus (see Chapter 4) held that the world manifests itself through number, or, in my terms, through the distribution function of probabilities. In his system Time turns out to exist outside the number, i.e., outside measurement; it is only a means through which measuring becomes possible. In other words, this is to say that ontologically Time is outside Existence, though it makes Existence possible. We face Existence as a Text (see the beginning of Chapter 3) whose semantics we wish to learn, to comprehend, and to experience. And if we see the world as a Text, then Time is only its grammar. Grammar is outside the Text; it only arranges it-similarly to Time, which is outside the world Existence; it only rhythmically arranges the Texts of the World through which we contact it. My formation of such a conception of Time has been affected by Plotinus, though he used different words when speaking about Time. The tragical search for the nature of Time which has been going on for twenty centuries stems from the desire to describe Time in terms of Existence, but Time has not the self-sufficiency of Existence: it exists only as an organizing idea. Plotinus has long remained uncomprehended. It was Leibniz who came back to his ideas at the beginning of our scientific era. For Leibniz, Space is but an order of mutual arrangement of a set of bodies which exist independently of one another, and Time is an order of events or states of bodies replacing one another. The idea of Space as an order proves applicable only to a set of bodies, and the idea of Duration, though applicable to an individual phenomenon, is such only because it exists as a link in a single chain of events. The term order introduced by Leibniz can be regarded as a synonym for the term grammar. The latter is more meaningful for us since now we know a lot about the role of grammar as the structure of language.

62 Internal Time 1 would like to quote Leibniz as well Time, strictly speaking, never exists, since it never exists as a whole because its parts do not exist together. (quoted from Mayorov.

4 62 Internal Time 1 would like to quote Leibniz as well Time, strictly speaking, never exists, since it never exists as a whole because its parts do not exist together. (quoted from Mayorov. 1973, P 164) Indeed, if we attempt to consider Time as it is, outsideany events happening within it, we shall not be able to present it as composed of constituents. It is in this sense that Time (not reduced to space) is unmeasurable as it is. In contrast to a physical field, it has no attributes which could be measured. Plotinus understood that Time is outside numerical estimation. Here lies its non-existence. For example, the category of generic case is also something non-existent, not composed of constituents, unmeasurable. If Time is but a grammar of Existence, many related problems disappear. For example, the well-known paradox of McTaggart' is not valid because of the absurdity of speaking about the dynamism of Time: the term "dynamism" is borrowed from the concept of Existence. It is similarly absurd to ask whether Time existed before the original explosion in which our Universe was born. This question, discussed in Chapter 6, is as absurd as it would be to ask what the grammar of our human language was like before the texts of this language appeared. Grammar can emerge only together with the texts and can be perceived by us only through them: the theory of context-free languages (see Ginsburg, 1966) is nothing more than an abstract, purely mathematical discipline close to the theory of finite automata. Leibniz proved to be the first thinker of modern times who opposed the idea of the substantial existence of Time and Space, but his views did not influence natural sciences in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: the ideas which reigned at the time were the naive theories of Newton. and it was only contemporary physics which first started to view Space and Time from a new angle close to that of Leibniz. [It is of interest whether Leibniz, who was briefly a scientific secretary of the Rosicrucians (Mayorov, 1973). introduced into European culture ideas borrowed from ancient esoteric teachings.] The Kantian notion of Time as an inner form of sensual contemplation given a priori can be easily put in accord with the concept of Time as grammar. Kant spoke of an a priori grammar of the language we use to generate texts that reflect our interaction with the world. We see now that there may be many such languages: this possibility is potentially in- ' The paradox emerges when Time is arcribcd a kinematic nacurc. In order la describe the courre or Time, ncw rccond-xdcr Tie rhould bc inmducrd rich rcrpcc~ lo which be course ol ihc first-order Tme will bc nociccabtc. Bur then ihc wmc rhould be done for ihc rccond-order Time and so on to inlinicy (lor more dmilr, uc Gale. lm80, b),

5 Time as Grammar o f Texts of the World 63 herent in the depths of our consciousness. I would like to draw the reader's attention to the search for new formulations of the concept of Time in physics. Below are quoted short fragments from articles on time published in the journal Foundorions of Physics: Time, instead of being a substratum entity which controls all physical phenomena, must now be regarded as a concomitant or measure of physical process. (Schlegel, p. 252) Einstein's choice of a curved space-time on which to plot events is not inevitable, but merely a convention with certain advantages (Browne, p. 458). The general theory of relativity makes use of the "curvature" spacetime denoting the entity which exists independently of anything, though in fact this provides only a convenient mathematical representation of the physical theory. (Roxburgh and Tavakol. 1978) The programme of the spacetime code' has in view a construction of the quantum theory of processes rather than spacetime objects. The problem of space and time is considered operational and is answered as follows: spacetime is macroscopic and statistical (analogy: temperature); it emerges in the limit of many monads and is unacceptable on the level of an individual monad, since on this level there are neither clocks nor rods. (McCollum. 1978) A new relativistic formalism must make use of a hypercomplex number system. Under these postulates the mass of elementary particles is the eigenvalue of a fifth momentum operator component. The fifth dimension is identified with cosmic time.... particles can reverse their time direction only along the ordinary time axis. (Edmonds. 1975) Tachyons-hypothetical objects lravelling at superluminal speed... A coordinate system can be selected in which a tachyon appears and disappears instantaneously, existing for a moment as an endlessly extended spacelike structure. (Duffey. 1975) The above excerpts show that an intensive search for new grammars. for the new language, is going on, necessitated by the fact that physicists have started to face a reality earlier closed for people. It is possible to sketch a succession of internally similar though externally different conceptions of Time: Plotinus, Leibniz, Kant, contemporary physics. Scientists dealing with the history of the Earth seem to face a similar problem in the immediate future. The brilliant book by the paleobotanist Meyen (1981) is written in a critical mode: the author asserts that there is no validly reconstructed past. If an attempt is made to restore it, this brings about the problem of Time: of

6 64 Internal Time Studying the past of the Earth, we practically have no clock. (9. 150) The researcher can determine geological time only by proceeding from the changeability of the objects under study. But then The obscrver notes that the changeability of objects-individuals is different, i.e.. the processes occurring in differcnt objccts arc different. In accordance with the classes of objects. classes of processes and, thcrefore, classes of times can be 151) This seems to account for the difficulties in registering the past. The general impression given by Meyen's book is as follows: events on the cosmic scale, as well as events occurring in the microworld, cannot be described with the familiar concept of Time. Time, as we perceive it, is not a grammatical category of the universal language of the World. In the preceding chapter we discussed personal, psychological Time and introduced the concept of the velocity of the course of this Time. Now, after what has been said here, we may claim psychological Time to be nothing more than a grammar by means of which various states of our consciousness are represented as a comprehensible Text. The idea of the velocity of personal. psychological Time is a measure arranging various states of consciousness. The introduction of such a measure enables us to speak of the control over states of consciousness in a comprehensible language. This is a good illustration of Plotinus: the possibility of measuring psychic states is opened by introducing another kind of Time, namely, psychological time. Varying this measure in meditation experiments, we, as will be shown below. in Part IV, change the grammar of consciousness and obtain new. unfamiliar Texts. Note as well that many authors indicate that mental diseases may be accompanied by violations of natural (for us) ideas of Time (these works are reviewed by Doob, 1971). A disease is represented as a violation of the grammar of our psychic condition. Perhaps psychiatrists' observations are an indirect proof of the validity of the Kantian conception of Time as an a priori given form of our internal contemplation. It is relevant to quote here another fragment from Plotinus: Suppose that Life, then, to revcrt-an impossibility-to perfect unity: Time, whose existence is in that Life, and the Heavens, no longer maintained by that Life, would end at 237) In our experiments (described in detail in Part IV) reincarnation memories-the passage to the impossible-come to the fore when we strive to stop or at least slow down personal Time. And. finally, a quotation from the last page of the tractatus:

7 Time as Grammar of Texrs of the World 65 Simply, that the Soul-Movement has for its Prior (not Time but) Eternity which knows neither its progression nor its extension, The descent towards Time begins with this Soul-Movement; it made Time and harbours Time as a concomitant to its Act. (p. 238) The tractatus finishes with the following lines: And, as with Man's Soul, so with the Soul of the All. Is Time. then, within ourselves as well? Time is in every Soul of the order of the All-Soul, present in like form in all; for all the Souls are the one Soul. And this is why Time can never be broken apart, any more than Eternity which, similarly, under diverse manifestations, has its Being as an integral constituent of all the eternal Existence. (p. 238) It is time to sum up. The idea of the grammar of the world is, probably, the conception of the universal harmony, when the world is represented as a spontaneously developing text. The problem of the world ontology has been reduced within our culture to the problem of Time. But Time as it is does not exist independently. The problem of Time, after its critical consideration. may seem to be a pseudoproblem. But, remaining within the consciousness of a participant of this culture, it is not easy to avoid this problem.

THESIS MIND AND WORLD IN KANT S THEORY OF SENSATION. Submitted by. Jessica Murski. Department of Philosophy

THESIS MIND AND WORLD IN KANT S THEORY OF SENSATION Submitted by Jessica Murski Department of Philosophy In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the Degree of Master of Arts Colorado State University