Time in Indian philosophy

 

Time for some philosophy

What is TIME?

Is it something REAL? Some ‘thing’ external to us “out there”, outside the human brain, an absolute category inherent in the World of Being which is controlling and guiding the World of Becoming? Human cognition is designed to perceive time as a Real entity. Therefore most literature of philosophy and Science ever written-east or west- assume time is real. In fact we cannot even ‘think’ without assuming the validity of ‘Simultaneity and Succession’ of phenomenon we observe with our sense organs. Which simply means things happening together and things happening one after the other- can things happen any other way? Much of modern science also requires Time to be a real external factor. The thousands of equations of classical physics and QM wont work without ‘T’=time being somewhat real. All this falls under the REALIST view of reality and the universe.

"Lokānām antakṛt kālaḥ kalonyaḥ kalanātmakaḥ "

"The time which destroys is the real time. The other kind of time is only for the purpose of computations."

- Surya Siddhanta.

The famous mathematical text where Trigonometry appears for the first time is taking a very Realist view of time. Most Scientists, Mathematicians and Philosophers cannot reject the empirical validity and fundamentality of time.

But another theory of time comes from the opposite camp. The IDEALISTS. Two main cultures generated this disruptive branch of philosophy called IDEALISM: We have the Indian Idealism and German Idealism. Indian Idealism has three main branches: Madhyamaka, Advaita and Yogacara. What they say is that time is an inbuilt mode of perception generated by the consciousness/neural tissue/mind/Intellect of living organisms, including humans. In simple terms, our brains create paradigms of succession and simultaneity upon which our perceptions can accumulate a mountain of representations (sounds, sights, touch, smells etc). We shall examine German Idealism here. And a bit of Advaita and Yogacara.

“All that is past, present and the future is indeed the Self. Whatever else there is beyond the threefold division of time- that is also truly the Self”.

-Mandukya Upanishad

"The Self that pervades the universe is the Author of time"

-Svetasvatara Upanishad

Which means that in Avyākṛta, the undifferentiated state (where Perceptions of the universe do not exist) there is no conception of Time. This can be extended to imply that it the consciousness (of living beings) that projects Time. Time in Indian Idealism is thus an emergent phenomenon. Not a fundamental reality of the universe. But there is an issue here. Advaitic texts never analyze the Individual consciousness (the human brain), they always speak in terms of the singular universal consciousness, everything else being negated Neti-Neti. But we need to examine the fishy things happening in the Human brain. We cannot ask and answer deeper questions if we simply deny its functional reality and volitional agency. If it is this One Self which emanates time, rather than individual organisms projecting it (i.e aka lets say Neural Tissue), then for all practical purposes, Advaitic Idealism is equivalent to treating time as something extraneous, non-projected by lifeforms and non-dependent on the human observer.

German Idealists take another approach. Immanuel Kant, the founder of German Idealism famously said “TIME is an A priori form of our Intuition”. Kant raised arguments against Issac Newton's and Spinoza's conception of God, Time and space. This latter was near identical (due to obvious reasons) with Advaitic Idealism in which Akasha and Kala are emanations of the Self. Kant- on the other hand stated that Time and Space are pure forms of intuition of living organisms (and NOT belonging to God) in the world of appearances.

In the Critique of Pure Reason (the Bible of German Idealism) Kant explains this rather difficult concept in lucid terms: “Time is not an empirical concept that is somehow drawn from an experience. .. Time is a necessary representation that grounds all intuitions… Time is therefore given a priori. In it alone is all actuality of appearances possible. This a priori necessity also grounds the possibility of apodictic principles of the relations of time. . It has only one dimension: different times are not simultaneous, but succes sive (just as different spaces are not successive, but simultaneous.. Different times are only parts of one and the same time. Further, the proposition that different times cannot be simultaneous cannot be derived from a general concept. The proposition is synthetic, and cannot arise from concepts alone. The original representation, time, must therefore be given as unlimited. Time is nothing other than the form of inner sense, i.e., of the intuition of our self and our inner state.'9 For time cannot be a determination of outer appearances; it belongs neither to a shape or a position, etc., but on the contrary determines the relation of representations in our inner state… .From this it is also apparent that the representation of time is itself an intuition, since all its relations can be expressed in an outer intuition…”

Kant quotes and answers an objection thus:

“insightful men have so unanimously proposed one objection that I conclude that it must naturally occur to every reader: Alterations are real ... Now alterations are possible only in time, therefore time is something real. I admit the entire argument. Time is certainly something real/ namely the real form of inner intuition. It therefore has subjective reality in regard to inner experience, i.e., I really have the representation of time and of my determinations in it. It is therefore to be regarded …as the way of representing myself as object! …Its empirical reality therefore remains as a condition of all our experiences. Only absolute reality cannot be granted to it according to what has been adduced above. It is nothing except the form of our inner intuition”

[Critique of Pure Reason (1781)]

A new form of objection can be raised: PHYSICS. Most physicists won’t agree that time doesn’t have independence from the observer. In fact, they mostly don’t care about the observer. Even in Quantum Mechanics, time is essential. The Copenhagen Interpretation of QM especially retains the Classical Time- an external parameter that is independent of the quantum system being studied. However, the last word on time has not been said by scientists. For instance in the wheeler-dewitt equation, we meet the ‘problem of time’: One of the problems is that it does not have a clear concept of time. In QM time is something that flows and changes, and we can measure it. In general relativity, time is something that bends and stretches, and depends on gravity. In the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, time is something that disappears and becomes meaningless. Some physicists think that time is not a fundamental thing, but an emergent principle- not part of the basic ingredients of the universe, but a result of how those ingredients interact with each other. For example, temperature is not a fundamental thing, but a result of how fast the molecules in a substance move. Such an “emergent time” is very compatible with Philosophical Idealism. In fact, I suggest, such emergent time is closer to Indian Idealism than German Idealism.

The Psychiatrist and writer Iain McGilchrist notes a major fallacy committed by Scientists in this regard- How can you claim to have objectivity when you ignore the fact that YOU are also part of the system you study, that YOU are also effecting it? There is no Birds eye of view of reality possible anywhere at any time. There is no such thing as pure objectivity. This principle must be reckoned when we try to asnwer fundamental questions:

“ The Philosopher Hans Jonas observed, there is an unspoken hierarchical principle involved: the scientist does take man to be determined by causal laws – but not himself while he assumes & exercises his freedom of enquiry and his openness to reason, evidence and truth. His own working assumptions involve free will, deliberation, and evaluation. But those qualities and capacities are stripped away from and denied to the human object or thing that he is inspecting…..

The world cannot be wholly mind-independent, nor wholly mind-dependent. No room for a philosophy of ‘anything goes’. Attentive response to something real and other than ourselves which comes more and more into being through our response to it – if we are truly responsive to it. We nurture it into being; or not. Zen image of the philosopher pointing at the moon, while those around him are focussed on his finger. If I may borrow the words of Fichte: I have sought to avoid a fixed terminology – the easiest way for literalists to deprive a system of life, and make dry bones of it.. will be necessary first to obtain a view of the whole before any single proposition therein can be accurately defined, for it is their interconnection that throws light on the parts; a method which certainly assumes willingness to do the system justice, and not the intention of merely findng fault with it.”

- Iain McGilchrist [The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World]

My own concluding observation: Whatever mysterious process “Out there” generates the emergent Time, may also be happening (in some variety or degree) inside our own brains generating the ‘A Priori intuition’ of this external time. How do the two categories of time (if indeed they are two) interact- if at all they do? This is a dizzying question that won’t interest physicists who studies only QM or the biologist who studies only the neural tissue. But it is a question which Philosophers cannot avoid.

A further Possible criticism I can think of: If time is an A priori form of intuition- WHAT is the meaning of Absolute Dating Methods humanity has developed in recent decades? (Radioisotopes, Thermoluminescence , background radiation etc) Isn't some kind of 'time stamps' being punch-marked in the fabric of reality at a very fundamental subatomic levels which we are now exploiting to date objects this way? I don't have an answer to this question. I am not even sure if I understand the scope of my own question. If any reader can think of some valid reconciliation of these confliciting observations (what do ADMs imply philosophically?), do leave it in the comments!

The cute Quote is from the Lankavatara-foundational text of Zen Philosophy. Written somewhere in South India, probably Andhra Pradesh, it was taken to China and translated. Sadly the text was lost in India. When the ‘mad monk’- the self-exiled Bodhidharma read the Lankavatara, he must have gone even madder. Dude just crossed the Himalayas and created the Zen School in China. He founded the Shaolin temple, Kung fu and Chinese Idealism. The Yogacara texts preserved in China (including perhaps the Lankavatara) eventually made its way to Europe in the 16th century (we have documentary proof of this). It is a certainty that the Great European Idealists (Rene Descartes, George Berkeley, Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte etc) were exposed to the ideas contained in these texts. The great banyan tree of Vijnaptivada (or should we call it Citta-matra-vada?) that sprouted in Upanishadic India eventually dissipated the pollen of Idealism in Japan, China and Europe.