Back to top: Giorgio Buccellati 2014 Time

Summary of Buccellati 2014 Time

“It was in the Upper Palaeolithic, or late stone age (50,000 10,000 B.C.), that an articulate confrontation with time first became a reality. The general cultural context was that of art and language: they both show how humans could begin to relate to their own brain functions as reified items, through which perception acquired an existence of its own. But the most specific evidence of this wholly new mental process, and the one that is most directly linked to our topic, is found in documents from the same general period that offer explicit notations of time sequences on bone and stone. Building on this documentary evidence, and on that of the more complex calendrical and astronomical texts of early Mesopotamia, I will argue for a fundamental transformation in human mental templates that occurred in those early periods, templates that have remained with us ever since, with profound epistemic implications: the institutionalization of a scalar dimension in perception; the growth of a far-reaching sense of control, based on the predictability of recurrent patterns; the ‘transcendentality’ effect whereby the ‘invented’ time frame came to be seen as ontological time; the definition of a homeostatic system based on a totally self-referential evolutionary scheme. The coherence of time came to be seen as the coherence of the mental frame, the coherence of being as the coherence of thought. Against this background there emerged a contrasting proposal, one aiming for transcendence as opposed to transcendentality. It was the fragile biblical proposal, fragile in its inception because it was not nurtured by the same rich intellectual tradition of Mesopotamia, and fragile in its contextualization, because it remained obstinately consistent in adhering to an ontology that was intrinsically not derivative. The ‘view from Eden’ proposes therefore an altogether different conceptualization of time in terms of its beginning and its becoming. In this perspective, the coherence of time came to be seen as posited from outside the sequence, the coherence of being as independent from the overlaid categorization system. A radical new dimension was ushered in by Christianity. The ‘Christian’ notion of time is a true cultural novelty, that will come as a surprise that can best be appreciated against the background of the previous two ‘inventions’” (author’s abstract).

This paper describes the development of the perception of time and for the relationship between human beings and the absolute, conceived and assimilated in different cultures, throughout many millennia, on the basis of three subsequent steps:

1. the first step implies the development of a 'meta-perception', strictly linked to language, which began in prehistorical times (ca. 60,000 years BP), culminating in the Mesopotamian culture in the 4th millennium BC: this long-spanning period, defined as 'tectonic age' shows the development of human interaction with the outside world, between men themselves, reaching the utmost result in the 'progress' of language and later in the 'invention' of writing, a system that allowed men to 'discover' a sense of 'pattern' (constructed on 'predictable mechanisms' which also affected the perception of time and the 'dialogue' with the absolute, thanks to a process of 'institutionalization';
2. a further step was achieved with the biblical perception of transcendence (i.e. from a mere, empirical perception of something regulated by specific patterns and regular norms to the existence and presence of an absolute embedded onto time). While in previous Mesopotamian culture a kind of 'homeostatic box' implying a static dimension of the absolute (involving the main concept of fate), where “the gods are icons of elements of the natural order (power, knowledge, justice, etc.) that reflect the human ability to dissect and analyse” (p. 77). The biblical narrative provided men with a first novelty, introducing the concept of 'creation', a “stark beginning, outside the box” that rests on what may be called the notion of an 'absolute event'.
3. the third step is represented by the Christian perception of time, moving from the simple notion of Genesis' 'beginning' (ראשׁית, see Gen. 1,1), 'inventing' a new 'Christian horizon' involving the new concept of 'trans-temporality': God manifests in time but exists beyond time, “a trans-temporal dimension to time that pertains directly to history while not being within it. [...] What Christianity proposes is, we might say, an 'apo-theosis'. While the initial invention had been the conceptualization of time, Christian thought announces its exact converse. Time, not as a concept, but as a perceived reality, is now seen as being wholly encased within a non-time dimension, the dimension called 'eternity'. The term used for this is 'the fullness of time'” (pp. 78-79). This novel view implies a 'reverse incarnation', which is explained by, and entangled in the 'event' of the Ascension of Jesus: after this event, everything moves from an 'absolute event' (the creation) to a 'relative absolute event' which reshape the whole history as 'trans-temporal'.

Back to top: Giorgio Buccellati 2014 Time

Excerpts from Buccellati 2014 Time