Time, world history, or the lack thereof

Many years ago in our old home we came across a book won by the bhArgava-trasadasyau in a contest that had the autobiographies of many a Euro-American figure. At that point we were impressed by certain threads in the German poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke and looked up that book for some biographical information on him. While doing so we stumbled upon another Germanic figure, Oswald Spengler, whose biography was contained in that volume. We became intrigued by this figure and read more of his work. We perused his “The decline of the West: form and actuality”. It was a tedious effort for us; covering it English translation, we re-examined parts of it in the original German upon the inspiration of a German gentleman who was then visiting our city. The German said that Spengler was prescient in many ways and even when wrong his assertions pointed fertile thought-scapes. Hence, we pursued the effort of scaling Spengler – something that was probably just a little less operose than the effort of that German to understand parts of the taittirIya brAhmaNa describing a ritual to which he had no deeper connection. At the end we were not entirely sure of what to make of Spengler but we could sense why he was influential in the West.

Spengler made some peculiar statements; one right in the introduction to his tome that caught our eye (We are revisiting this due to a subliminal signal from a tweet on Twitter):

“Amongst the Western peoples, it was the Germans who discovered the mechanical clock, the dread symbol of the flow of time, and the chimes of countless clock towers that echo day and night over West Europe are perhaps the most wonderful expression of which a historical world-feeling is capable. In the timeless countrysides and cities of the Classical world, we find nothing of the sort. Till the epoch of Pericles, the time of day was estimated merely by the length of shadow, and it was only from that of Aristotle that the word hora received the (Babylonian) significance of “hour”; prior to that there was no exact subdivision of the day. In Babylon and Egypt water-clocks and sun-dials were discovered in the very early stages, yet in Athens it was left to Plato to introduce a practically useful form of clepsydra, and this was merely a minor adjunct of everyday utility which could not have influenced the Classical life-feeling in the smallest degree. It remains still to mention the corresponding difference, which is very deep and has never yet been properly appreciated, between Classical and modern mathematics. The former conceived of things as they are, as magnitudes, timeless and purely present, and so it proceeded to Euclidean geometry and mathematical statics, rounding off its intellectual system with the theory of conic sections. We conceive things as they become and behave, as function, and this brought us to dynamics, analytical geometry and thence to the Differential Calculus. The modern theory of functions is the imposing marshaling of this whole mass of thought. It is a bizarre, but nevertheless psychologically exact, fact that the physics of the Greeks — being statics and not dynamics — neither knew the use nor felt the absence of the time-element, whereas we on the other hand work in thousandths of a second. The one and only evolution-idea that is timeless, ahistoric, is Aristotle’s entelechy. This, then, is our task. We men of the Western Culture are, with our historical sense, an exception and not a rule. World-history is our world picture and not all mankind’s. Indian and Classical man formed no image of a world in progress, and perhaps when in due course the civilization of the West is extinguished, there will never again be a Culture and a human type in which “world-history” is so potent a form of the waking consciousness.”

This assertion by Spengler arrested us at many in levels. As the German had said, even though it was clearly wrong, it did cast a stone in our mental pools setting of trains of thought waves. First, Spengler, unlike many other westerner thinkers closer to our time, did acknowledge the similarities between the Greco-Roman classical and Indian (i.e. Hindu) civilization in opposition to the “modern” western civilization in the Euro-American world with a Germanic epicenter. However, beyond this, he does not have much knowledge nor does he dwell much upon the Hindu civilization. As a result many of his sweeping generalizations are plain wrong or incomplete but still warrant further consideration and evaluation. After all even as a youth we had heard the famous western accusation: “Indian lack a sense of history”. Many years later when we were blithely whiling away our time on internet fora we heard the occasionally insightful malla rAjIva turn this around and make it a virtue: He declared that unlike the Abrahamists we are not “history-centric”. Hence, apparently we are not caught up with the linear thinking and need to adhere to a single messiah or rasool as the pretAcharin-s and marUnmatta-s respectively do. And then, while seeking to enjoy strI-bhoga we instead found ourselves entangled in the notorious debate on the meaning of AnAditvaM of the shruti. Our interlocutor in addition to keeping us away from the yonirati declared that the thought process of the mumukShu Hindu was really time independent because the brahman was eternal and unchanging – time apparently truly belonged in the realm of avidyA which had to be discarded much as a worn out vesture. There was also that outrageous shrIlankan scientist, whom we heard in our youth, who declared that the Indian concept of time did not need one to care much for history because it was anyhow going to happen again – whether one being born or on large scale the whole yuga cycle. Hearing all of this we wondered after all if Spengler was right and there was not much place for temporal dynamics leave alone “world history” in our thought. Perhaps our own interest in such things was merely a grafted fancy, a western influence, much as horoscopic astrology in the past and cricket in our times.

But clearly this was not the case – after all the first, very contemporary-looking, world history to our knowledge was the brainchild of the Mongols which was financed and executed by a multi-ethnic group of scholars employed by them. At that point in time none in the European world even a had smidgen of idea to create such a history. This we see as a natural outgrowth of ideas such as the “histories” of self and neighboring clans which were seen among various Eurasian peoples, including formulations like the dynasties of the pa~nchajanAH and ikShvAku-s among the Arya-s.

But going right to the bottom of it, i.e., the idea of time itself things are rather different from Spengler or our own compatriots think it to be.

Continued…