Permutations of Cyclicality and Linearity
The View from Oregon — 310: Friday 11 October 2024
In the past couple of newsletters (nos. 308 and 309) I have discussed cyclical history. A few years ago when I wrote about cyclical history someone commented to the effect that I seemed to be stuck in the nineteenth century, and it was time to get with the program. While I can appreciate this perspective, the reason that cyclical history returns with a dependable cyclicality is that the issues the idea raises have never gone away and they have never been given a definitive formulation, and the idea of cyclical history has never been given a definitive formulation because history itself is theoretically impoverished. In order to give a theoretical formulation that could definitively demonstrate or refute cyclical history, a theoretical framework for history must be formulated, and this has not yet been done. There have been brave efforts, but they remain isolated and no scientific research program in theoretical history has emerged. I sound like a broken record on this point, but I must insist that there is no science of history.
In addition to what I wrote about last week about patterns in history — that they don’t repeat precisely, that there is more than one pattern, and that patterns intersect, and in doing so alter each other — I have a couple more ideas relevant to cyclical history. One of these is percolating in the back of my thoughts but I can’t yet express it clearly enough to write it down. Another thought just came to me yesterday while reading Hannah Arendt (not directly relevant, but that was the book I had in my hand when the idea came to me), and that idea I can at least give rough expression.
In several episodes of my Today in Philosophy of History I have discussed the importance of overcoming the disconnect between philosophy of history and philosophy of time. In my recent From Augustine to Machiavelli I suggested the most reductivist conception of the relationship between time and history that I would imagine, and this is the idea that history is nothing but time, so that there are no distinctively historical entities or historical concepts, as all historical entities can be defined in terms of temporal entities and all historical concepts can be defined in terms of temporal concepts.
I don’t endorse this formulation, but I wanted to put it out there as the limiting case of reductivist formulations of the relationship between time and history. I assume that time and history are distinct things, but that they are related. I have suggested that the relationship between the two could take the form of history supervening on time, or history being an emergent property of time. Either of these formulations maintain the distinction between time and history but also demonstrate the relationship between them.
Given both the distinction and the relatedness between time and history, we can cast some light on the problem of cyclical versus linear history in a way that gives greater analytical clarity to these ideas. The two distinctions between time and history and between linear and cyclical history yield four permutations, as follows:
- Both linear time and linear history
- Cyclical time with linear history
- Linear time with cyclical history
- Cyclical time and cyclical history
Laying out these four permutations as above, the first thing that jumps out at me is that the idea of cyclical time, taken on its own, is a metaphysical thesis about the structure of reality, whereas the distinction between linear and cyclical history is not — there is a sense, admittedly, in which linear or cyclical time is the structure of human reality, and I don’t deny this, but this is not as fundamental as the how we understand time. It also follows that the idea of linear time is no less a metaphysical thesis about the structure of reality, so the time component of the distinction between time and history is metaphysical, and the above four permutations combine this fundamental metaphysical feature of the world with a contingent structure of the world.
Nietzsche’s claims about eternal recurrence are presented as though they are metaphysical claims about time, though I believe he asserted them only because of their moral consequences. As with Kant, ethics is central to Nietzsche’s thought, if not more so than in Kant. Kant took his metaphysics seriously; for Nietzsche, metaphysics was a rhetorical strategy. But I don’t mean to be dismissive of rhetorical strategies; they give us an imaginative picture of the world that often informs the entirety of our thought, this is what Nietzsche was after. So for Nietzsche, if I am interpreting him rightly (and there is legitimate room for disagreement on this I realize), only 2 and 4 are live options; time itself is cyclical, and in its cyclicality it drags human history around with it, making history cyclical as well. This dependence of the structure of history on the structure time is an important feature of the fundamental nature of time, and it makes the prospect of 2, above, paradoxical. So Nietzsche ends up at the fourth permutation, with both cyclical time and cyclical history.
The least paradoxical of the above permutations is the first: linear time with linear history. Here a linear history of absolutely unique events falls within a temporal continuum of absolutely unique moments; neither time nor history calls the other into question, and each easily coexists with the other. I would argue that the Nietzschean permutation retains some degree of paradoxicality since the idea of cyclical time doesn’t come naturally to me, but that’s my naturalistic presuppositions talking. I good deal of cognitive archaeology would be in order in any attempt to demonstrate an intrinsic human comprehension of either linear or cyclical time. But certainly Nietzsche expresses this permutation in a way that is intended to shock the reader into considering something unexpected and strange. I will take it in that spirit and say that it is the second least paradoxical of the above formulations.
In my previous newsletter on patterns in history, I was assuming throughout the third permutation: linear time with cyclical history. Merely to be able to pigeonhole one’s thoughts in a category like this is always a gratifying conceptual clarification, as with the earlier observed conceptual clarification that follows from understanding theses on time to be metaphysically foundational. Again, wearing my naturalistic presuppositions on my sleeve, I see time as linear, a continuum in which each and every moment is unique and the continuum of moments as unidirectional, unrepeatable, and infinitely extended into the past and future (this latter claim requires qualification in the light of contemporary cosmology, but I will leave this aside of the moment). However, supervening on this linear and foundational conception of time, the events of history can repeat. They can even repeat themselves infinitely, since the time continuum can be infinitely extended into the past and the future. Thus while each moment of time is unique, self-identical, and distinct from every other moment of time, a given historical event, process, or pattern may not be unique, and may, in a limiting case, be utterly non-unique (except for is relation to the underlying unique time upon which it supervenes).
Since I always see things in terms of degrees and shades, I would argue that repeating events, processes, and patterns may possess degrees of distinctness, or, if you like, degrees of similarity or non-uniqueness (which is the same thing). However, rather than merely assume this, we could make this the basis of distinct sub-permutations of the third permutation, according to which we have the two limiting cases of the events being absolutely identical or absolutely distinct, with all degrees of admixture of the identical and the distinct between these two poles. The second limiting case, in which the supervening events are absolutely distinct corresponds to the first permutation, so we have already accounted for that circumstance of unique time with unique history; therefore we can understand that some formulations of a given permutation coincide with other major permutations. I think this is interesting and possibly important, but I don’t yet know what to make of it. The next logical step here is to see if this holds for the other permutations, and, if it does, then we could show that the permutations are inter-definable.
The most paradoxical of the above four permutations is the second, cyclical time with linear history, and we can argue that this is not merely paradoxical, but in fact contradictory, so that this permutation is null and may be safely ignored. However, it’s worth thinking it through to see if we can discover any unsuspected scenarios that might conform to this paradoxical permutation. Given cyclical time as a metaphysical structure of reality, which repeats each self-same moment precisely with each cycle, if there is one and only one history that supervenes on this temporal cycle, it could be argued that this history is linear and has only one unique structure. However, this single unique structure repeats with each temporal iteration; whether or not we choose to identify this repetition of history on the back on the repetition of time as cyclical history is a matter of interpretation. The history itself (by definition) is not intrinsically repetitive, it only becomes so because time is so. Here we seem to have another instance in which a limiting case coincides with another permutation, viz. 4. If this is the limiting case, what are the cases that approach the limit but do not converge on it?
A more metaphysically challenging case for the intuition (at least, for my intuition) is to consider the possibility that time might be cyclical, and there could be an infinitude of repetitions of this temporal cycle, but one and only one cycle of the repetition of time includes a linear history that unfolds from the origin to the point of return. This makes that history utterly unique, even when the moments of time upon which it supervenes are not unique. This is not unlike the life of an exceptional individual, whose life unfolds in a biological and social context in which very little before and after his time is different, but his life bursts onto the scene as an exception, and so represents a unique history (a similar claim could be made for salvation history as an exception that supervenes on mundane history). Just so, a metaphysical context of the world might be but little different from one temporal cycle to the next, except that during one cycle a unique history bursts forth and endures for the length of the cycle, without precedent, and never to be repeated.
Another detail is highlighted by this scenario: when I think about cyclical history I always assume an infinitude of repetitions, but is there any reason to assume that cyclicality is unending, or is this arbitrary? To my naturalistic intuition, it is the possibility of ending the repetitions that strikes me as arbitrary. Imagine cyclical time that goes for 2, 3, 4, or n repetitions: why would the repetition cease if the temporal structure is identical in each case? But this is an example taken in metaphysical isolation. If we attempt to translate this into some real world application, then it becomes more plausible, even if it is a category mistake to apply a metaphysical idea to a physical scenario. Suppose that the universe is one of several universes, and each universe represents a cycle of time. However, since we are dealing with actual beings and not abstractions, the process of repeating universes runs down over time. This means that the repetitions are not precise, but at a low level of resolution the iterations will look the same. However, this also means that the process will run down until a repetition is no longer possible. The universe cycle repeats a few times, and then runs out after a finite number of repetitions. We have a physical model for this in the supercontinent cycle. Since plate tectonics began on Earth, there have been maybe four supercontinent cycles (accounts vary), and there will probably be several more supercontinent cycles, but eventually Earth’s core will cool and the supercontinent cycle will grind to a halt after a finite number of (imperfect) repetitions.
The intrinsic interest of these four permutations argues for the relevance of the distinctions made; even if this is not the definitive way to break down the problem of cyclical vs. linear history, it is a helpful analytical device with which we can probe stubborn problems of history that have not been settled, and, as a result, are usually neglected. It is easier to say nothing and hope the problem goes away than to grapple with a failure of understand. Bertrand Russell called this the March Hare’s solution, which he encountered after discovering his paradox: “I’m tired of this. Let’s change the subject.” (My Philosophical Development, p. 59) Moreover, any schematic approach to a problem provides us with a framework suggestive of possibilities not previously considered. This is the case here with the possibility of cyclical time and linear history. I find this to be counter-intuitive, and pointing out a counter-intuitive possibility suggested by a schematic analysis presents us with an opportunity to think against the grain and challenge our own intuitions.
