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Circular Time, Rectilinear Time
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 July 2024
Extract
Writing history, in the humblest sense of the word, is above all a process of dating events, inscribing them in a chronology. Yet this framework, empty and elementary though it may appear, possesses nonetheless properties of its own, somewhat as real extension, the domain of orientation and weight, differs from pure geometrical space. Concrete time, too, has certain qualities, qualities which are not necessarily everywhere the same, and which take their configuration from the conception of the world particular to each civilization. These local cosmologies remain implicit for the most part, even though they frequently give rise to doctrines which can be highly complex. Philosophers and theologians have framed such constructions, basing them to a certain extent on the body of astronomical knowledge which they found at their disposal. But these scholarly interpretations do not limit themselves to a mere translation of the factual data that an observation of the stars could provide. The astronomical data serve as simple points of orientation for the elaboration of vast graphs, on whose empty expanses the vicissitudes of history would trace their paths. These constructions are like niches erected in advance, awaiting the events to come, an immutable order of vintages to which the individual is so thoroughly accustomed that he finds it impossible even to conceive of a different disposition.
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- Copyright © 1963 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)
References
1 Cf. P. Duhem, Le système du monde, I (Paris 1913), pp. 65-85, 159-169, 275-296.
2 In a recent article, P. Vidal-Naquet emphasizes that Greek inscriptions, historians, politicians and orators and even poets and tragedians recognize only rectilinear time. "Temps des dieux et Temps des hommes. Essai sur quelques aspects de l'expérience temporelle chez les Grecs," Revue de l'Histoire des Re ligions, CLVII, 1960, pp. 55-80.
3 Origen, Peri Archon, II, III, 4, 5. Cited in P. Duhem, Le système du monde, v. II (Paris, 1914), p. 449. Cf. ibid., pp. 452-453. One can always reply to the theologian of Alexandria that then the second world would no longer be identical to the first since the actors are free in one case and determined in the other. But this only proves that they were necessarily already determined in the first.
4 "Eade causa qui nunc sunt in usu ritus, centies millies fuerunt, totiesque renascentur quoties occiderunt, nihilque est quod similis non fuerit et cui simile non erit aliquando: denique nihil est, aut erit, quod non fuit, nihil fuit quod non erit."
5 "Ita enim necessarium est earum discursu et circumvolutione saepe eadem evenire et emergere in lucem quae evenerant." Vanini, op. cit., (Paris, 1616), ch. LII, p. 388.
6 It is significant that this was the formula retained from the instruction of Heraclitus and not that which ordains that the bather finds himself in the same river, in the same place, at the same moment every 18,000 years, the figure which was, for Heraclitus, the measure of the Great Year. The context of time considered as circular prohibits only that one bathe twice in the same river within the same cycle. Thus Plotinus: "All is alike between two periods; nothing is alike within the same period." Enn. v, vii, 2.
7 A. Piganiol, "Les Etrusques, peuple d'Orient," in Cahiers d'histoire mon diale, I, II, oct. 1953, p. 345.
8 Journal asiatique, v. CCXIV, 1929, p. 214.
9 Cf. P. Vidal-Naquet, art. cit., pp. 30 et 68.
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