About time: why western philosophy can only teach us so much

All cultures have a sense of past, present and future, and although the West sees time as a linear period, for much of human history this has been underpinned by a more fundamental sense of time as cyclical. A sense that the beginning and the end have always been the same.

Linear time makes us wonder what came before the beginning and why it doesn’t have an end. While a circle lets us visualize going backwards or forwards forever, at no point coming up against an ultimate beginning or end.

Thinking of time cyclically especially made sense in premodern societies, where innovations were few across generations and people lived similar lives to those of their ancestors going back many generations. Without change, progress was unimaginable and meaning could only be found in embracing the cycle of life and playing your part in it well.

Linear progress is a kind of default way of thinking about history in the modern west and this risks blinding us to the ways in which gains can be lost, advances reversed. It also fosters a sense of the superiority of the present age over supposedly less “advanced” times. Finally, it occludes the extent to which history doesn’t repeat itself but does rhyme.

More important than the distinction between linear or cyclical time is if time is separated from or connected to place. Thinking the latter is especially alien to the modern west, where a pursuit of objectivity systematically downplays the particular, the specifically located.

If you’re not conceptually and experimentally separating those dimensions, then they would tend to flow together. Many indigenous people talk less of time or place independently, and more of located events. The when is not as important as how something is related to other events.

Time and space have become theoretical universalist abstractions in modern physics and written Western philosophical traditions, but in human culture they are concrete realities. Realities in which things don’t exist exclusively in space, nor in time, but stand in relation to everything else.

The Maori and Indigenous Australians, have as a cultural principle that the a way of being is specific to the resources and needs of a time and place, and that one’s conduct, is informed by responsibility specific to that place. Rights, duties and values exist only in actual human cultures, and their shape and form will depend on the nature of those situations.

Western philosophy strives for a universality that glosses over differences of time and place. This refusal to accept any practice as a legitimate custom fostered an intolerance for many unjust traditions of the West itself, leading to their eventual abandonment.

The universalist aspiration also legitimized some prejudices by confusing them with universal truths, like cultural or genetic superiority. Misused it becomes an insistence on the uniform that ignores the different needs of different cultures at different times and places, or reduces other ways of thinking to local aberrations. We should not be afraid to ground ourselves in our own traditions, but we should not be bound by them.