| Category: | Books | | Genre: | Religion & Spirituality | | Author: | Richard Sorabdji |
Time
Eternity is a time, time is eternity,
if they are otherwise, the difference is thee
Angelus Silesius
1. The Definition of Time
A view for consideration the originally of time it is called teory of time.
To summarise, time for Aristotle, is that which is countable in motion in respect of before and after. The word for motion is kinesis, and it can apply to other kind of change.
What is being counted here? One thing that is being counted is “nows” or instants. for Aristotle, time as continuous as a number. The critism is made by Plotinus among other. Time is continuous, but number is discrete. How then, can time be number? the interpretation just offered is that time is countable aspect of change because we count periods, when we count instantaneous stages in change. What is discrete here is the stages which we choose to count. But time is not it self a discontinuous thing merely because we can divide it by picking out instantaneous stages. On the contrary, it is infinitely divisible, in the sense that we can divide it is stages as close together as we please, and its infinite divisibility is precisely a mark of its continuity.
One suggestion would be that time word like “past” “present” and “future” are all egocentric in a way . in spite of egocentricity, we can intelligibly imagine that there might have been no conscious being throughout the whole of the past and present or future.
What other ancient philosophers made time dependent on consciousness? Plato did so effect, by making time depend on motion, and motion ultimately on soul, although this dependency of times.
There are other philosopher, however might be interpreted as making time depend on conscousness. For example, Epicurus, in certain fragment of his lost work “On Nature”, says that time is an appearance (phantasia), and a concomitant of an appearance. For fist we have an appearance of days and nights and then, in accordance with that, we conceive some length connected with days and nights which is capable of measuring all motion. Sextus Empiricus similarly attributes to the follower of Epicurus and Democritus the view that time as a phantasma ( a mental image, perhaps), resembling day and night.
Returning from the divisions of time it self, we find that its subjectivity continued to be discussed in islam, where certain theologians argued. Like Damascius, that the words ‘was’ and ‘will be’ involved in relation to us. Averroes took them to mean that the past and the future are not real thing in them selves, and do not posses existence outside the soul, but are only constructs of the soul. His own response is to concede that time is something which the soul constructs within change. In this he is perhaps influence by Aristotle’s account of time as the countable aspect of movement.
In Modern philosophy, the view that time is somehow dependent on consciousness still reappears in very diverse forms, for example, in Berkeley, In Kant, and in Bergson.
Regards,
Ferry Djajaprana
Source : Richard Sorabdji,”Time, Creation, And The Continuum”, Cornell University Press, Ithaca-Newyork,1986
| |
