Time, Species, and Culture. Did Ancient Civilizations Relate to Time the Same Way As the West Does?
“The timeless in you is aware of life’s timelessness. And knows that yesterday is but today’s memory and tomorrow is today’s dream.” ― Khalil Gibran
Introduction
Time is an elusive concept. It passes, yet we can’t touch it. We feel it, although we don’t understand it. We count minutes, seconds, or years, yet they are only symptoms of its presence, not its essence.
What is time, disregarding the clock? According to Oswald Spengler, the concept of “time” arises from and as a counter-concept to the word “space,” similarly like “birth” arises out of “death” and vice-versa. In the 4th chapter of his book Decline of the West, he wrote:
It has long been presumed — and rightly, beyond a doubt — that all root-words, whether they express things or properties, have come into being by pairs; but even later, even today, the connotation that every new word receives is a reflection of some other. And so, guided by language, the understanding, incapable of fitting a sure inward subjective certainty of Destiny into its form-world, created “time” out of space as its opposite. But for this we should possess neither the word nor its connotation. And so far is this process of word-formation carried that the particular style of extension possessed by the Classical world led to a specifically Classical notion of time, differing from the time-notions of India, China and the West exactly as Classical space differs from the space of these Cultures.
Thus, in this sense, cultures, species and even individuals relate to time not in the same way.
How do animals perceive time?
According to Benn Jordan and his research, various species of animals (and maybe even those of plants and fungi) have evolved to perceive time on a different scale, speed, and resolution than we do.
A human brain cannot keep up with more than 60 flashes per second, that is why when we look at the a flashlight that is “on” we see an illusion of a continuous light instead of it flickering. In neurology this measure is called a Critical Flicker Fusion Frequency, or CFF for short. By measuring the CFF of different animals, we can see whether they perceive reality faster or slower than human beings do. As an example, the CFF of a typical dog is 80, which means that they see reality ~33% slower than we do. In comparison, the CFF of a cat is 50, which means that their reality is a bit more sped up to ours, giving them less time to process their surroundings before they act.
On a more extreme note, the CFF of an elephant is much slower than ours, which benefits their herbivore lifestyle. They have no natural predators and benefit from a sped up reality. This helps them to perceive weather-formation, blooming of plants and other natural phenomena at a faster pace. Flies on the other hand a CFF of around 270, which means that they perceive reality ~3.5 times faster than we do. For this reason, they can evade our attempt to catch them as for them our hand moves in slow motion. On the flipside, perceiving time so quickly is costly to one’s metabolism, and maybe that is one of the reason why house flies live so short in comparison to other animals.
To learn more about this topic, check out Benn Jordan’s video on How the world sounds to animals.
Cultures and time perception
Talking about the time perception of species is one thing, but to talk about different cultural relationship’s to this elusive phenomenon is another task altogether.
The steam engine and the mechanical clock are probably two symbols that describe the spirit of Western civilization the best. We clock-in and clock-out a hundred times a day. Being concerned about the future and ways of predicting it we are also intrigued by the past, thus explaining our intense interest in archeology, history and preservation. In this way we appear to be quite similar to the people of Ancient Egypt, Mycenae, and China, but world’s apart from the people of Ancient Greece or India. Explained by Oswald Spengler:
“Classical man managed to do without the clock, and his abstention was more or less deliberate. To the Augustan period, and far beyond it, the time of day was estimated by the length of one’s shadow, although sun-dials and water-clocks, designed in conformity with a strict time-reckoning and imposed by a deep sense of past and future, had been in regular use in both the older Cultures of Egypt and Babylonia.
Classical man’s existence — Euclidean, relationless, point-formed — was wholly contained in the instant. Nothing must remind him of past or future. For the true Classical, archaeology did not exist, nor did its spiritual inversion astrology. The Oracle and the Sibyl, like the Etruscan-Roman “haruspices” and “augurs,” did not foretell any distant future but merely gave indications on particular questions of immediate bearing.”
Thus, a Classical man’s relationship to time is much different from ours. As a written a bit further in the same chapter:
In Classical cities nothing suggested duration, or old times or times to come — there was no pious preservation of ruins, no work conceived for the benefit of future generations; in them we do not find that durable material was deliberately chosen. The Dorian Greek ignored the Mycenaean stone-technique and built in wood or clay, though Mycenaean and Egyptian work was before him and the country produced first-class building-stone. The Doric style is a timber style — even in Pausanias’s day some wooden columns still lingered in the Heraeum of Olympia.
Thinking about the perception of time in Ancient India, Spengler notes that:
The Indians also have no sort of time-reckoning (the absence of it in their case expressing their Nirvana) and no clocks, and therefore no history, no life memories, no care .What the conspicuously historical West calls “Indian history” achieved itself without the smallest consciousness of what it was doing. The millennium of the Indian Culture between the Vedas and Buddha seems like the stirrings of a sleeper; here life was actually a dream.
According to Oswald Spengler, no other civilization known to man (maybe with a possible exception of The Ancient Egyptians) has been so aware, sensible and concerned with “time” as the West. As said by the historian:
“Without exact time measurement, without a chronology of becoming to correspond with imperative need of archeology (the preservation, excavation and collection of things-become), Western man is unthinkable.”
In conclusion
When thinking about cultural differences it is also important to take into account not just external customs (clothes, rituals, gestures), bus also the people’s cognition, perceptions, inward beliefs, and relationships to time and space. Everyone experiences the world differently, but one’s cultural context can exacerbate these differences in such a way that without taking them into consideration the parties involved will not reach any mutual understanding or agreement. That is why anthropology, ethnography, and philosophy of history are still important fields for those who want to dive under the exterior and attempt to experience the world through the eyes of another as much as one’s own deep-rooted and sometimes unconscious cultural notions will allow him to do so.
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