I first came across this years ago when listening to a lecture given by Alan Watts, a great popularizer of Eastern philosophy during the middle of the 20th century. He was critical of this linear view of time: we go to school to prepare us for post-secondary, we go to post-secondary to prepare us for a job, we get a job to prepare us for the golden years, and when we are 60 years old we can finally relax. In much of Eastern philosophy such a concept of time is utterly foreign. Reincarnation is the result of a different perspective of time; one which is dominated by cycles. While I am no believer in the reincarnation of souls, I do think that this religious notion has its roots in nature, and there is a book by John Bleibtreu called "The Parable of the Beast" which gives just such an account. Quote:
All prey-predator relations involve competitions in linear time: the kingfisher must be able to cut time into even smaller pieces than the trout in order to catch it in mid-passage. The mongoose must be able to move in for the kill faster than the cobra can recover from its strike. The cheetah must be able to run down the antelope, and so it goes. When we humans think about time, we usually think of it in those linear competitive terms which are the source of anxiety. Regardless of its duration, life is still shortened by each passing moment. Elapsed time will never come again, and the great anxiety of the West is to cram each moment full of - not necessarily perception - but accomplishment.
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However, seen purely as a biological phenomenon - that is taking time out of the environment, not making it extrinsic to the organism, but including it as part of the stuff of life itself - the linear aspect of time is its most frivolous aspect. In biological systems time represents the metabolic process, the absorption and utilization of energy - the heart beats, the respiration goes in and out; time is cyclical.
He then goes on to elaborate the cyclical nature of time: the passage of seasons, the lunar cycle, "the diurnal period, the rotation of the earth, the alternation of night and day." Was it more natural for primitive humans to see time as something that stretches into the future, or as something that repeated itself? What about agricultural societies even today?
Anyway, it is an interesting distinction, and one that I think might be healthy to bear in mind.
Well at the very least time is a fluid thing, as anyone stuck near the event horizon of a black hole might tell you, if they could.
ReplyDeleteI find it interesting that the cyclical nature of time shows itself in the repetitiveness of the Kingfisher and the trout in that the Kingfisher will cycle back around to do the same thing he did before (catch a trout, or food of another sort). Something that clearly depends on apparent linear time, as mentioned, also has a cyclical theme. Re: "...the absorption and utilization of energy...".
ReplyDeleteThe minute transformation from a circle's tangent point to the next point would also seem straight (linear) to an observer, from a calculus standpoint.
I had to go and refresh my memory on tangent points in circles. You raise an interesting point in an interesting way; sometimes we get so caught up in the linearity of day-to-day life that we don't realize how repetitive we actually are.
ReplyDeleteMaybe everything is cyclical, and those things that appear linear are just "point" movements on a much much larger cyclical adventure.
ReplyDeleteI think I have to add something else:
ReplyDeleteWhen I say that time is cyclical I mean only as time is perceived, subjectively; I accept the "arrow of time", that moments in time follow one another, cannot co-exist, and that there is a moment of time that is finite and indivisible. Otherwise every moment would be an eternity.