timelets

Tim Snyder's lectures on history titled "Hitler and Stalin Today" are excellent and his reading list for it is even better. I wish I listened to the course before reading Kotkin's biography of Stalin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQA9sYBSkTc

During the last lecture (#10) he summarizes a couple of concepts I find particularly interesting and useful: politics of memory and politics of time.

Fundamentally, he emphasizes that history is a humanity, i.e. something we understand because we are humans, not machines. History is not something inevitable. Rather it's something that touches you and makes you take responsibility.

Something to consider. In general, developing "extreme" scenarios helps understand the new range of opportunities.

Watch on YouTube

“a collection of essays called The Hall of Uselessness by the Belgian sinologist Simon Leys. In one of these essays, “The Chinese Attitude Towards the Past,” Leys considers the construction techniques of Chinese builders.

Builders everywhere have attempted to overcome the erosion of time. Ancient Egypt and medieval Europe built great pyramids and cathedrals out of stone. The approach in China, as Leys points out, is for builders to yield to the onrush of time by using eminently perishable, and indeed fragile, materials. By building temples out of wood with paneling sometimes made of paper, Chinese architecture has built-in obsolescence, demanding frequent renewal. “Eternity should not inhabit the building,” Leys writes. “It should inhabit the builder.” Rather than using the strongest materials, Chinese builders have embraced transience to ensure the eternity of spiritual designs.

--- Daniel Wang. “Breakneck: Chinas Quest to Engineer the Future.”

"Every new theory of physics has invented a new concept of time"

Watch on YouTube

The only intelligible doctrine of causation is founded on the doctrine of immanence. Each occasion presupposes the antecedent world as active in its own nature. This is the reason why events have a determinate status relatively to each other. ( Read more... )

-- AF Whitehead, Modes of Thought, Lecture 8.
https://brocku.ca/MeadProject/Whitehead/Whitehead_1938/1938_08.html

the characteristics of life are absolute self-enjoyment, creative activity, aim. Here 'aim' evidently involves the entertainment of the purely ideal so as to be directive of the creative process. Also the enjoyment belongs to the process and is not a characteristic of any static result. The aim is at the enjoyment belonging to the process.

...
It is nonsense to conceive of nature as a static fact, even for an instant devoid of duration. There is no nature apart from transition, and there is no transition apart from temporal duration. This is the reason why the notion of an instant of time, conceived as a primary simple fact, is nonsense.
( Read more... )

Whitehead. Nature Alive, 1938. Lecture 8.
https://brocku.ca/MeadProject/Whitehead/Whitehead_1938/1938_08.html

In all discussions of nature we must remember the differences of scale, and in particular the differences of time-span. We are apt to take modes of observable functioning of the human body as setting an absolute scale. It is extremely rash to extend conclusions derived from observation far beyond the scale of magnitude to which observation was confined. For example, to exhibit apparent absence of change within a second of time tells nothing as to the change within a thousand years. Also no apparent change within a thousand years tells anything as to a million years; and no apparent change within a million years tells anything about a million million years. We can extend this progression indefinitely. There is no absolute standard of magnitude. Any term in this progression is large compared to its predecessor and is small compared to its successor.
...
The danger of all these fundamental notions is that we are apt to assume them unconsciously. When we ask ourselves any question we will usually find that we are assuming certain types of entities involved, that we are assuming certain modes of togetherness of these entities, and that we are even assuming certain widely spread generalities of pattern. Our attention is concerned with details of pattern, and measurement, and proportionate magnitude. Thus the laws of nature are merely all-pervading patterns of behaviour, of which the shift and discontinuance lie beyond our ken.
...
Nature is full-blooded. Real facts are happening. Physical Nature, as studied in Science, is to be looked upon as a complex of the more stable interrelations between the real facts of the real universe.

-- Whitehead. https://brocku.ca/MeadProject/Whitehead/Whitehead_1938/1938_07.html

=========
pattern, measurement, proportional magnitude.

...space-time cannot in reality be
considered as a self-subsistent entity. It is an abstraction, and its
explanation requires reference to that from which it has been extracted.
Space-time is the specification of certain general characters of events
and of their mutual ordering. This recurrence to concrete fact brings me
back to the eighteenth century, and indeed to Francis Bacon in the
seventeenth century.
...
in order to
understand the difficulties of modern scientific thought and also its
reactions on the modern world, we should have in our minds some
conception of a wider field of abstraction, a more concrete analysis,
which shall stand nearer to the complete concreteness of our intuitive
experience.

whitehead. Science..., 1925

Following our previous collaborations, it had been our intention from the start to make a connected image that would permit us to visual- ize the previously disconnected sequence of changes in topology all at once. This is completely unlike making an animated movie from a sequence of stills, because the movie still unfolds in time, whereas our image is timeless. ‘The whole is no longer subjected to time but rather possesses time within itself’ (Wellmann 2017: 83).

Quoted from Drawing Processes of Life, 2024.

Here, the intent to include time into the whole is articulated so succinctly that I'm going to steal it in its entirety. From now on, all categories should include time by default (see e.g. Lawvere's take on Hegel.)

He[Ricoeur] derives this initial ethical understanding of institution from Arendt’s concept of “power in common” that is contrasted with domination (“power over”) and that is realised by a plurality of people acting in concert. ...

Because acting in concert with unknown third parties needs time to unfold, institutions are needed. Institutions thereby provide the neces- sary temporal dimension for the power in common to endure, which lies at the basis of any political community. ( Read more... )

--- Reijers, Coeckelbergh. Narrative and Technology Ethics.

In this respect, good institutions bridge time, i.e. form social infrastructure the same water reservoirs form physical infrastructure. Need to find a related quote from Hegel that good judges/courts represent infinity.

Schopenhauer ventures into math and concludes that space begets geometry, while time begets algebra. He also trashes Euclides theoretical approach; i'll update the post with some quotes later.

18. In everything always observe what the thing is which produces for thee an appearance, and resolve it by dividing it into the formal, the material, the purpose, and the time within which it must end.

Marcus Aurelius. The Meditations, Book 12.
https://www.bartleby.com/lit-hub/hc/the-meditations-of-marcus-aurelius/xii-15

cf Aristotle's four causes: formal, material, final, efficient.

( Read more... )

"you don't need time to understand change."

[4] The Master said: “At fifteen, I was bent on study; at thirty, I could stand; at forty, doubts ceased; at fifty, I understood the laws of Heaven; at sixty, my ears obeyed me; at seventy, I could do as my heart lusted, and never swerve from right.”

--- The Sayings of Confucius.

( Read more... )

Is time irreversible? Would that it were! On the contrary, it is reversible-so reversible that it is possible not to have made any progress since the time of the Romans. Now if things stagnate, we can hardly make a distinction between 1871 and 1875, except on the calendar, which does not amount to very much.

--- Bruno Latour. TPoF, 1993.

upd. Compare this to Lawvere's point about being vs becoming. Specifically, space serves as аn arena for becoming, which requires at least two points to be noticeable. Stagnation implies maintaining a given state in a space of states, i.e. just one point, despite changes in calendar time, which is a different space. We can express stagnation vs change as the difference in intensive quantity, e.g. states per an interval of time. Движуха!

Space and time are a frame, an ordering realm, with the help of which we
establish and indicate the place and time point of the
particular things. It might be, therefore, that each thing,
if it is determined with respect to place and time, is now
just this (je dieses ), not mistakable for any other.

-- Heidegger, What is a thing?. 1967.
( Read more... )

Hillary Putnam on Kant's insight into the connection between time, space and causality.

https://youtu.be/DPQZfsAHgSg?t=812

Here's a great example of long-term thinking:

The Chinese have a legend that a demon once offered to teach an alchemist how to turn base metal into gold. "But will it remain gold?" the alchemist asked.
"Will it not return to its original elements?" "Certainly," replied the demon, "but that need not trouble you, for no such change will take place until ten thousand ages have
passed." The alchemist refused the gift. "I should rather live in poverty," he said, "than bring a loss upon my fellow men, even after ten thousand ages have passed."

--- The world's story; a history of the world in story, song and art, ed. by Eva March Tappan. Published in 1914.
https://archive.org/stream/worldsstoryhisto01tapp/worldsstoryhisto01tapp_djvu.txt

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