by Ismail Fajrie Alatas

The concept of time constantly astounds me as a student. In addition, my training as a historian, the so-called guardian of the past, also deals directly with the notion of time. In this short paper, I will present some preliminary sketches in regards to the epistemology of time and its connection to the way we view, order and experience the past.

The problem raised in this paper is stimulated by a truism held by many contributors to historiography ever since Thomas Hobbes, that one’s vision of historical events is conditioned, even shaped by one’s personal experience of time. A number of philosophers have shown how one’s vision of a succession of events is generated by the way he or she judges the continuities, discontinuities, changes and duration of facts and events.

It is at this point when the historian understands and interprets the past, based on the available evidence. And yet, that interpretation bears a direct relationship to the historian’s personal temporal experience. In studying several nineteenth-century thinkers, Hayden White brought forward a manner of historical processes which represented and typified their respective ages. White sees these men as products and progenitors of the mood of the age and its narrative structures that furthered his mood. The mood of these men and the age, however, was occasioned by the events that preceded their explanatory narratives but also sustained by the narrative themselves.[i] In other words, what White is confirming is the role of cognitive style in generating the distinct and different ways of constituting and explaining a state-of-affairs.

The problem then is how do our conception of time and the way we experience time produce our cognitive style, which in turns generate different ways of explaining any state-of-affairs, including the past?

The late Paul Ricoeur did ask the question: “How can one’s personal experience of time in its singularity, that is phenomenological time, be distinguished evidently as distinct from one’s location in and awareness of cosmological time, that is the common time by which one measures personal and public events?”[ii]

Mark Blum attempted to answer this question by using the tools of recurrent logic and grammar of the sentential judgment: a style of expression which allows one to have different personal construction of historical time from the normative public understanding of historical time.[iii] Blum suggests that a “historical logic” is rooted in each perception of life as an experience, or history in which movements and causal relationships happen. It is “a manner of ordering temporal-spatial events, an ordering in each man that gave birth to the concepts of time and history that reflect that order.”

Drawing from Kant and Husserl’s phenomenology, Blum states that logic begins with the division of perception into parts and wholes which establish a quantitative order as well as dependency-independency relations among these parts and wholes, creating a condition of temporality. Temporality is experienced as the moving attention of the conscious mind directed by sequential order of parts and wholes.[iv] This relation and sequence between the parts and the whole (gestalt) is what Edmund Husserl called temporal concretums, or a judgment about state of affairs.[v] Each judgment is “history” in the most immediate sense of the temporal experience. These temporal-spatial relations are the foundation of logic. This order will enable us to establish higher relation such as causality. In the words of Karl Mannheim:

Just as modern psychology shows that the whole is prior to the parts and that our first understanding of the parts comes through the whole, so it is with historical understanding. Here, too, we have the sense of historical time as a meaningful totality which orders events “prior” to the parts, and through this totality we first truly understand the total course of events and our place in it.[vi]

Blum describes what he called as the four foundational historical logic of Western historical thinking as: continuity, continuum, quantum and dialectic.[vii]

Continuity: A historical logic of continuity conceives each moment as an integer in an open-ended, incremental series of events (such as: 1+1+1+1). A judgment of a continuity thinker is to see every entity in a state-of-affairs as an independent whole. Attention travels from one entity to another as a coherent picture is formed and goes on into infinity. This line of thinking is what has been usually termed as a conception of linear time.

Continuum: Assumes that every time which succeeds another may or may not share common properties. In continuum logic, there are no overarching temporalities, only temporal contiguities (closeness or contact). It assumes the greatest freedom to act individually in time because of the absence of either the telos of continuity or dialectical thinking or the pull of quantum collective for each individual gesture. Historical works of “great men”, I think, are expressions of continuum logic.

Quantum: Quantum historical logic focuses upon patterns of history that begin and end and replaced by another pattern. According to Blum, the historical concept of Zeitgeist (ideas or spirit of the time) is a quantum appreciation. Quantum logic focuses on an individual which is the agent in time closely dependent upon the greater whole that is instantiated. Quantum logic does not speak of developmental teleologies, only of immediate time. It gives the society a radical freedom to change based upon visionary voices. Ian Kershaw’s biography of Hitler for instance, can be seen as a historical work based on quantum logic.

Dialectic: This reflects the same continuity emerging from the past into the future as seen by the continuity thinker, but also incorporates the notion of quantum phases which conflict or interrupt the incremental line of change. Ibn Khaldun’s theory of dynastic cycle is among the historical works that utilizes the dialectic logic.

Apart from the four historical logics in Western historical thinking elucidated by Blum, my own interest in Islamic historiography shows another tendency in historical thinking facilitated by the Islamic concept of time.

In incorporating Democritus atomism, Islamic theology has a distinctive concept of time. It describes reality as a composition of simple and unchangeable minute particles called atoms. Each atom and their accidents exist for only an instant. In every instant, God is creating the world anew which renders intermediate causes impotent. Differing from Greek materialistic atomism, Muslim theologians made atomism an instrument of divine providence, which held each moment within time as the direct creation of God. In other words, creation is discontinuous and only appears continuous to us only because of God’s compassionate consistency.[viii]

In the view of atomic theology, the link of causality that appears to rule the world becomes subordinate to God. Natural causes give way to divine will. This historical logic reflects in the Arabic grammar, which lacks genuine verbs of “to be” and “to become”. Arabic grammar also does not employ tenses of past, present and future. Instead it uses verbal aspects of complete and incomplete, which marks the degree to which an action has been realized or is yet to be realized without precise difference between present and future.

The result of this historical logic to historiography is that Islamic historiography stresses very much on Divine wills in the development of history. According to Chase Robinson, what is distinctive about Islamic historiographical tradition is the meaning attached to the way that God was made to work on earth.[ix] Generally, in Islamic historiography, God’s will is the ultimate cause of all events. The tools He preferred, however, were the action of elite individuals and the standard He held his creatures has been made clear in His law.

That is why Historical works in the Islamic tradition had pedagogical aspects. They present history as a record of human choices, from which the readers can draw appropriate lessons. This discussion on Islamic historiography, however, only focuses on the orthodox Sunni school. The Ismaili sect for instance, had different set of cosmology which resulted in different form of historiography related to their cyclical conception of time and its distinctive logic.[x]

To conclude, Sir Geoffrey Elton once remarked that written history is primarily the narrative of events. With narrative, he means, a tracking of change in the sense of recording “the movement from A to B.”[xi] The discussion on different conceptions of time which resulted in the different historical logic has shown that there is no singular way of typifying our judgments of any state-of-affair, be it past or present.

Rather, there exists a number of historical logic, which in turns generates different levels of objectivity in making sense of the past. The five historical logics listed above are by no means the only spatial-temporal logic affecting how human beings perceive events and causality. Other forms of logic not discussed here should also be explored. Chinese and Indian cosmology, their conceptions of time and the ensuing forms of historiography should be subjected to further study. This will results in the polyphony of ways in which human beings try to make sense of time and consequently, how they see the past.

Ismail Fajrie Alatas (Aji) was born in Semarang, Indonesia in 1983. He has a BA (Hons) in History from the University of Melbourne, Australia. He is currently a research scholar, finishing his MA thesis at the Department of History, National University of Singapore. This essay was written in response to a discussion during a seminar on historiography. Aji has published and his latest publication is Sungai tak Bermuara: Risalah Konsep Ilmu Dalam Islam (Jakarta: Diwan, 2006).

[i] Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: John Hopkins University, 1973), pp. 38-42.

[ii] Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, translated by Katleen Blamer and David Pellauer (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983-85), vol. 3, p. 249.

[iii] Mark E. Blum, Continuity, Quantum, Continuum and Dialectic: The Foundational Logics of Western Historical Thinking (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), p. xiii

[iv] Ibid, p, 2.

[v] Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, translated by J.N. Findlay (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), vol. 2, p. 488.

[vi] Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 189.

[vii] The following discussion on the four foundational historical logics of Western historical thinking is based on Blum, chapter 1.

[viii] Gerhard Bowering, “The Concept of Time in Islam’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 14, 1 (1997), p. 60.

[ix] Chase F. Robinson, Islamic Historiography (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 131.

[x] For further information of the Ismaili concept of cyclical time, see: Henry Corbin, Cyclical Time and Ismaili Gnosis (London: Keagan Paul International, 1983). See especially the first lecture entitled “Cyclical Time in Mazdaism and Ismailism”, pp. 1-58.

[xi] G.R. Elton, The Practice of History (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1967), pp. 10-11.

Tags: historical thinking, historiography, understanding the past

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