Time
Typology
1. Jennifer Gidley:
“Russian archaeologist L. S. Klejn (2005) has recently identified “twelve concepts of time . . .
These are
- the primordial presentism,
- the cyclic notion of time,
- the genealogical, labeled perception of time (marked time),
- the linear concept (measured time),
- the dynamic time (the notion of the flow of time),
- the concept of general time,
- the vector time,
- the time acceleration,
- the relativist concept,
- the static time,
- and the annihilation of time” (Abstract).
His article discusses how they manifest various archaeological epochs and how they are displayed in archaeology. The full article is only available in Russian.”
2. Palaeos:
- "Cosmological time is logarithmic; it begins with the postulated unimaginably short moments of, and immediately following, the Big Bang, then becomes more sedate as the universe expands and things slow down. Finally it settles down to a leisurely rate of billions of years. Scientists have even postulated trillions upon trillions of future years in which all the stars slowly go out, a rather bleak prospect which does not take into account various other factors such as alternative cosmologies and possible future space-time engineering technology. For now, Cosmic Time is defined as the period from the origin of the known universe (the "Big Bang") to the present, a period of some 13.7 billion years (or 137 geons), and is considered to extend an indefinite but finite number of gigayears into the future.
- Geological Time encompasses four and a half billion years of Earth History, and is divided into eons, eras, periods, epochs, and so on. Five aeons are postulated here: the Chaotian, Hadean, Archean, Proterozoic, and Phanerozoic eons. Of these, the Chaotian was the shortest, but also in a sense the most important, because that's when the Solar System was formed. Then for the next three eons, which make up almost the whole history of the Earth, nothing happened except for microbes swimming around the primordial ocean. Finally, following an extraordinary coincidence of events such as a really big ice age (Snowball Earth), the break-up of a supercontinent (called Rodinia) a rise in oxygen, and change in ocean chemistry, complex life suddenly emerged, the result being the Cambrian explosion and the start of the Phanerozoic. From the Cambrian to now was little more than a tenth of the age of the Earth and Solar System. Yet so much happens that we need finer divisions, and eons, eras and geons are replaced by eras (the famous Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Cenozoic), periods, epochs, ages, -and megayears. Hence the story of the succession of all sorts of amazing plants and animals, documented herein.
- Quaternary Time: Between the megayear expanses of Geological Time, the drift of continents, and the rise and fall of dynasties of life, and the mere centuries of Historical Time, with its own rise and fall of dynasties of nations and civilisations, there is an intermediate region that we don't really cover in great detail here, but is still interesting nevertheless. That is Quaternary Time, which covers the two million or so years of paleoclimatology, paleoanthropology, paleontology, and archeology from the Plio-Pleistocene to the current Holocene, using divisions of time on the scale of millennia and tens of millennia. This timescale is relevant to studies on medium term climate fluctuations and their ecological effects. From our anthropocentric perspective, paleolithic human migrations and the origin and early evolution of human language and culture, all pertain to this timescale.
- Historical Time is, well, about history. Everything from the beginnings of the city-state and civilization in the Chalcolithic through to Bronze Age Near and Middle East, social innovations as commerce, monarchy, the church, and the standing army, the rise and fall of empires, the invention of the printing press, the steam engine and the industrial revolution. As with geological time there seems to be a sort of exponential acceleration, with lots of things happening in the twentieth century, and even more with the information revolution and the global noosphere of the internet. According to transhumanists we're heading for a technological singularity, although we have already passed peak oil. With the way resources are being consumed and species exterminated, it is clear we've reached the end of nature, and perhaps the end of history. Which brings us to...
- Future Time: Although the future is unpredictable and remains to be determined, four possible stylised outcomes are listed here for the near-term, each of which will have implications for the longer term. These are - postapocalypse (out with a bang, equivalent or even worse than the P-T mass extinction), long decline (out with a wimper), ecotopia (the best of all possible worlds from our present knowledge), and singularity (the evolution of radical new "kingdom", totally transcending humanity and current life on Earth). All of which implies very different timescales of course."
(http://palaeos.com/time/index.html)
Jonathan Rowson's Temporics
Jonathan Rowson:
Planetary Time
"Earth is over 4.5 billion years old, and yet it sometimes feels as if we don’t realise we are living on a planet, in a solar system, in outer space, that predates us, that situates us, and should humble us. In his Pensées (1670), Blaise Pascal famously said: “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me”, and with all due respect to Pascal, he lived long before we knew the half of it. And many feel an intellectual shift away from ‘globalisation’ to planetisation, so the next time someone tells you to get things in perspective, you could say: “I am living on a planet. How much more perspective do you want?”
Postglacial Time
At the level of Earth-systems and evolutionary time, the wider organism we are all part of, early hominins arose 6–7 million years ago, and Homo sapiens have been around since c300,000 BCE. Some believe people alive today are nonetheless feeling, at the level of species memory, the shift from the tens of thousands of years of relative Holocene stability since c9700 BCE to the volatility of the Anthropocene today, which has not been officially confirmed by geologists and goes by other names with other meanings, not least the Capitalocene (Moore) Novocene (Lovelock) and Chthulucene (Haraway). But one of the implications of geological awareness is that we are experiencing what might be considered Postglacial Time, described by Ian Christie in a personal communication as follows:
Postglacial conditions generated a variety of human predicaments that generate patterns of behaviour we can see repeated across recorded history, and which are well described in game theory and in social psychology of in/out groups, scapegoating, psychopathy and sociopathy. Zero-sum resource contests elicit violence and breakdowns of cooperation as well as promoting some actors to collaborate and innovate. Such zero-sum contests arise typically in conditions of ecological disruption (famine, plague, extreme weather, climatic shifts). To put it crudely, you don’t get the rise of Trump in positive-sum conditions, and you don’t get the triggering of violent rejection of Others unless a critical mass of people think they are in a zero-sum contest or threatened by one. To put it another way: prehistoric dispositions and pathologies of zero-sum behaviour are only lightly overlaid by post-neolithic social innovations for cooperation and learning.
Cosmological Time
As I discussed in Are we a Cow Standing on One Leg?, according to Vedic cosmology, Kali Yuga began in 3102 BCE, the fourth and worst of the Yuga cycles, marked by a breakdown in cosmic dharma. It is said to last for (just) another 426,875 years (!). This should not be taken literally, as the yugas describe divine time as much as human time, but it speaks to being ‘up against it’. Towards the end of Kali Yuga, it is said that even the concept of truthfulness will become foreign, and that is certainly how it is starting to feel today, though it may be truer(!) to say that we live in a world where the perceived need to signal tribal belonging overrides respect for evidence.
Noetic Time
The Axial Age, spanning roughly 800–200 BCE, remains the closest reference point we have for a truly profound, global shift in human consciousness, one that was co-extensive with major historical change. We may now be in the midst of a new axial age, implying a change in metaphysical orientation and an ontological shift in our relationship with the world through a new experience of time, causality and meaning; often described as a transformation of consciousness. Whether our theorist of choice is Teilhard de Chardin, Sri Aurobindo, Raimon Panikkar, Cynthia Bourgeault, Ken Wilber, Owen Barfield, or Jean Gebser, there is a strong case both that we need a new kind of mind, and that it appears to be arising (would it be rude to ask it to hurry up?). The challenge, highlighted by Sam Mickey in his wonderfully titled Co-existentialism and the Unbearable Intimacy of Ecological Emergency(2016) is that while the last Axial age converged around the arising of monotheism and individuated consciousness, there is no such fulcrum today; we appear to be in a new axial age, but without any obvious axes on which to turn.
Colonial Time
Many are reckoning with unresolved debts of injustice arising from the colonising enclosures that have a contested history and arguably go further back, but can be traced to at least England around 1500 AD and went global, including slavery, imperialism, coercion, extraction, and the enduring privileges, structures, assumptions and expectations they produced. Colonial time endures through institutions, economies, and inherited inequalities. I had a chance to ask Vanessa Andreotti and Sharon Stein about their work in this sphere, and in particular the work that ‘colonialism’ does that ‘capitalism’ does not. (Both colonial time and fossil time (next) co-arise with ‘modernity’, and the major tensions they create are part of the sense of culmination that leads some to believe modernity is dying).
Fossil Time
Humanity’s only viable habitat - Earth - is paying the price for the rapid growth of industrial civilisation enabled by coal, oil, and gas since around 1750, as fossil energy translated civilisational expansion directly into Earth-system disruption and later to the breach of planetary boundaries. We are in a time of deep dependence on fossil fuels alongside a deep need to become less dependent on them (in my first climate report back in 2013, I called this ‘stealth denial’). Almost anyone living a normal Western lifestyle is to some extent complicit in this contradiction, and we live amidst the shared sense of disavowal and dissonance.
Ideological Time
Neoliberal ideology (“the state-led remaking of society on the model of the market” - Will Davies) since around 1980 appears increasingly exhausted. More broadly, liberalism’s difficulty in narrating its own limits or transforming itself has led to increasingly desperate attempts at self-maintenance, contributing to resurgent populism, nationalism, tribalism, and authoritarianism.
Dopamine Time
The widespread adoption of social media since about 2003 and the internet-enabled smartphone becoming popular around 2010 has rapidly fragmented attention and destabilised the infosphere, while destroying the epistemic commons. The root cause of this is arguably neurochemical and addiction-forming technology.
Geocybernetic Time
There is, purportedly, a race between the USA and China to develop artificial general intelligence or otherwise to dominate artificial intelligence, and that race compresses decision cycles and raises the stakes of speed, prediction, and surveillance. We are told the race is on, and it really matters who wins, while not really understanding the stakes or what it means for us.
Astrological Time
(*I have been reading Cosmos and Psyche by Richard Tarnas and learning to see astrology archetypically.) Within astrological frameworks, Neptune (associated with dreams, dissolution, and the oceanic) moved into Aries (initiation, will, assertion) on February 20th, 2026. This transition last occurred 165 years ago and will shape the next 13 years, offering a symbolic lens on shifts in collective mood and archetypal emphasis. Some will consider this irrelevant misinformation; for others it is a really big deal.
Chiastic Time
In the work of mystic Cynthia Bourgeault, this refers to a crossed, non-linear temporality in which time is patterned with meaning, and future fulfilment reaches back to transform the past, with awakening in the present at the point of intersection, rather than at history’s end.
Now Time
In Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History, Jetztzeit names not merely lived or experienced time, but time seized.
History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogenous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now.
This ‘Now Time’ is the present thick with history, an interval in which action interrupts the illusion of neutral continuity. Time is neither simply given nor wholly made; it is taken up, grasped at a moment of intensity, and shaped through decisive intervention. Benjamin’s emphasis falls on historical rupture, not individual volition, and this idea can be considered alongside his famous image of the angel of history:
This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress."
(https://perspecteeva.substack.com/p/the-temporal-sublime?)
Discussion
Jennifer Gidley’s Reflections on Time
Jennifer Gidley:
“To the perspectival age time meant nothing but a system of measurement or relationships between two moments. . . . Time, however, is a much more complex phenomenon than the mere instrumentality or accidence of chronological time.” (Gebser, 1949/1985, p. 285)
My cognizance of the complexity of the discourses on time—cultural, scientific, philosophical, feminist, historical, theological— in tim idates me. Yet, inspired by the criticality of our present planetary moment in time, I feel beckoned into developing a tentative temporal template for my evolution of consciousness research.
The imperative to contextualize the default notion of time is twofold. First, a lack of contextualization may lead to my work being misconstrued as being “just another modernist, linear, (perhaps tacitly) Euro centric narrative”—albeit camouflaged as integral. Second, the macrohistorical nature of my narrative necessitates a careful consideration of time from multiple perspectives. By the default view of time I mean the three phase linear time model of past, present and future that underlies modernist models of development, evolution and progress .
These models are invariably value loaded such that the past is problematized as primitive, while progress, development, evolution are lauded as unilinear paths to civilization. Although these modernist grand narratives have been under siege for decades, theoretical understanding of this taken for granted notion of time is relatively undeveloped.
Over the last two millennia the linear conception of time—which began as the more formal measurement of already recognized cosmic and natural temporal cycles—became rationally conceptualized as the chronological measurement of change. The early development of clocks included astronomical/astrological features, indicating notions of time that were still connected with cosmic cycles—beautifully exemplified by the astrological clock in the tower of the town hall in Prague, built in the early 15th century. Since the Industrial Revolution linear, chronological time has further contracted by association with mechanical time and factory time.
Further scientific and technological developments in the last century have seen temporal partitioning become hyper exaggerated by increasingly sophisticated scientific and digital means, from one extreme in radioactive half life, to the other extreme in nanoseconds.
Linear time has also become dominated by politico-economic features, exemplified by such phrases as “time is money,” “buying time.” This mechanistic and economic colonization of time has increased exponentially in recent decades, contributing to the speed addiction of our present
age—demonstrated in fast foods, internet, instant global text messaging, accelerated learning,
and the three-quick-steps-to-spiritual-enlightenment culture. Just to cope there are drugs to keep
up, such as speed and cocaine; and drugs to slow down, such as alcohol and tranquillizers.
However, in parallel with the accelerating freneticism and time panic of the 20th century
alternative notions have been emerging.
In the early 20 century significant theoretical developments concerning the notion of time occurred in both the natural sciences and the social sciences. In physics, Einstein’s theory of relativity displaced the Newtonian conception of objective time as an unchangeable, permanent ‘place’ upon which the movement or change of things can be measured in discrete, identical fragments (Einstein, 1920/2000; Weik, 2004). Synchronously, the new philosophical phenomenology of Husserl was positing a subjective time—the time of the soul—in contrast to external or objective time (Husserl, 1905/1964). Numerous theoretical attempts have been made to come to terms with these new perspectives on time. Philosophical developments include Heidegger’s phenomenological notion of existential time (Heidegger, 1927/1962); Whitehead’s process view of time (Griffin, 1986a, 1986b; Weik, 2004; Whitehead, 1929/1985); and Bergson’s paradoxical notion of durée — the conscious flow of life—which includes a radical multiplicity of Time (Bergson, 1922/1965; Deleuze, 1966/2006). Significant — albeit lesser known—contributions were also made by Steiner and Gebser and will be explicated in this appendix. More recent attempts have been made to reconcile some of these views, e.g., by Schatzki’s notion of history and Ricoeur’s poetics of narrative (Ricoeur, 1985/1988; Schatzki,2005).
In addition, there has been a recent trend towards diversity in conceptualizations of time (Geissler, 2002). Notions of cyclical time are being reclaimed from non-western (Eliade, 1954/1989; Inayatullah, 1999) and feminist perspectives (Forman & Sowton, 1989; Kristeva, 1986; Leccardi, 1996; Milojevic, 2005b). Initially these two major time perspectives—linear and cyclical—were set up in opposition to each other. However, increasingly, new discourses are emerging that provide a more complex, nuanced perspective.
These include:
• Postmodern philosophical concepts such as repetition and difference (Deleuze & Conley, 1992), complex recursion (Morin, 2005a);
• Complex concepts of time in archaeology (Klejn, 2005)
The emergence of futures studies as an academic field, introducing new concepts of past, present and future, e.g. the 200-year present and the long-now (Boulding, 1990; Slaughter, 1996; Slaughter & Inayatullah, 2000); macrohistory (Galtung & Inayatullah, 1998); long-term and non-Western future-time concepts (Inayatullah, 2000; Inayatullah & Boxwell, 2003);
• Spiral notions of development in worldviews and values reflecting both cyclical and progressive notions (Beck & Cowan, 1996; Cowan & Todorovic, 2005; Inayatullah, 1999; Inayatullah, 2004; Wilber, 1996c);
• Contemporary developments in the “time arts—music and film” (Benedikter, 2005);
• Multiple dimensions of time (Starr & Torbert, 2005);
• Spiritual notions of Eternal Time and the Now (Tolle, 2004);
• The emergent slow time movement, e.g. slow food movement (Parkins, 2004); the slow school movement (McGill, 2005).
While there is unquestionably now a substantial and growing body of literature on the various
notions of time, there is a lack of theoretical coherence. This appendix is primarily an explication
of the time perspectives (temporics) of Steiner, Gebser and Wilber, who frame many of the
above-mentioned notions in a macrohistorical, evolutionary context. It is a work-in-progress, providing additional depth to the main paper and pointing to theoretical possibilities for further Research.”