The philosophy of time

The philosophy of time starts from the Socratic debates.

Socrates often said his wisdom was limited to the awareness of his own ignorance. He believed the best way for people to live was to focus on self-development rather than in the pursuit of material wealth. Socrates seems to have been notorious for asking questions but not answering, claiming to lack wisdom. Perhaps his most important contribution to western thought is his dialectic method of inquiry, known as the Socratic Method, which he largely applied to the examination of key moral concepts such as the good and justice.

To solve a problem, one would pose a series of questions and the answer will filter out. The influence of this approach is most strongly felt today in the use of the scientific method, in which hypothesis is the first stage. The development and practice of this method is one of Socrates’ most enduring contributions, and is a key factor in earning his mantle as the father of political philosophy, ethics or moral philosophy, and as a figurehead of all the central themes in Western philosophy. "I know you won’t believe me, but the highest form of human excellence is to question oneself and others," he said. He was put on trial and condemned to die by drinking hemlock, for the expression of his ideas against those of Athens. Jacques Louis David immortalised the event in his 1787 painting ‘The Death of Socrates’.

Contemporary philosophy is about Realism which tends to believe that whatever we believe now is only an approximation. Realism also suggests that every new observation brings us closer to understanding reality. Idealism is about what is in the mind is known more reliably than what is known through the senses. This is the philosophical explanation of the linkage between psychology (mind) with economics (utility). The closest philosophy gets to economics is when it studies morals. Applied philosophy takes philosophical pursuits into modern day fields such as psychology and economics. As areas of intellectual endeavour proliferate and expand, so will the broader philosophical questions that they generate.

The curved philosophy of expression
Applied philosophies like psychology branched into finer studies that had a lot to do with understanding the trends prevalent in a certain time and how it was expressed through art, music and films. Robert Prechter makes an attempt to quantify social mood in popular song lyrics and quantifying pessimistic rumination in popular songs in his book, Pioneering studies in socionomics. He opens up a new area of philosophy suggesting that social mood drives markets. He illustrates this by studying various expressions of social mood. The surge in activity over Michael Jackson’s passing only reemphasises the impact music has on a society and why study of social mood would be incomplete and maybe ineffective if one would not study expressions in art and music.

David C McClelland, an American psychology theorist in his acquired needs theory proposed that an individual’s specific needs are acquired over time and are shaped by one’s life experiences. Analysis of achievement motives in British school readers showed a strong correlation of these themes, a generation later, with the Britain’s industrial growth. McClelland in essence suggests that the level of economic growth of a country is characteristically cyclical. Societies were cyclical. The theory suggests that the stories I read and the sketching I was doing in my art classes at school, three decades back could define me now.

Prechter extended McClelland’s work by focusing on song material rather than stories. The most interesting aspect is the classification of 134 songs. It is done in three heads with a total of nine subheads. Even if by coincidence Prechter was following a classification based on time triads, three subdividing into nine.

Another coincidence is the overlap in what McClelland proposed and the work of cyclists William Strauss and Neil Howe recurrent cycle of generations with similar mention of 30 and 90 year cycles, again a factor of three.

Much has changed over the last 2,500 years. We moved from the earth to the universe, faith to reason, focus from nature to the focus on man, Newtonian to metaphysical, socialism to materialism, realism to rationalism, objects to ideas, senses to the mind, limits in thought to unbounded approximation, ambiguity to space and time structure, philosophy to psychology, psychology to mood, mood to cycles. How far are we from philosophy of time? How much can we really ignore it? Is it really the emotion that keeps us alive as we react to the music or is it the cycle of time, which pulses relentlessly connecting everything around us music, art and emotion, synchronising it in time?

Using the fractal S-curve, Theodore Modis, market guru and physicist can explain Ernest Hemingway’s writing career, number of research papers written by Einstein and how Mozart’s compositions are mathematically fractalled.

Philosophy and cycles
Humans have always felt the need to create and their interests and mentality reflect through their art and philosophy of life. Time was one of the most controversial subjects treated in art, mainly because people can’t understand time and time fascinates them. The question of time was always one of the main concerns of philosophy among other existential problems like knowledge, truth, beauty, justice, mind or language, linearity or cyclicality.

Friedrich Nietzsche was influenced by Heinrich Heine and Arthur Schopenhauer in his theory regarding the "eternal recurrence" which affirms that each individual may or will be born again and live an exact life as the previous, with the same joy and pain and this cyclicality would last forever. T S Eliot, the famous Anglo-American poet called time "the still point of the turning world". The greatest Romanian poet, Eminescu also saw time as being cyclical. He defines his theory clearly in his poem called Glossa. The poet talks about the only true way which leads to happiness: ignorance, because everything is repeating and there is no use for hope or fear.

Saint Augustine’s theory regarding time also inspired the famous German writer, Thomas Mann. He sees time as a mystery, something that cannot be defined clearly in our limited minds. As he states in his novel called The Magic Mountain (1924), “What is time? It is a secret, lacking in substance and yet almighty.” The same aspect of linearity was treated slightly differently by William Faulkner, a North American Nobel Prize winner in his novel called The Sound and the Fury (1929). The author talks about the “mechanical progression” of time, the ticking of clocks which measure time as it moves forward mechanically, pushing it towards the future and annihilation.

Conclusion
Philosophy of time explains how music, economics, psychology, religion, art and sciences are expressions and thoughts connected in time. Music like every other expression of creativity has a low and high cycle highs in terms of quality and quantity. Good music, a cross between accident and invention depends on time for experimentation and time for inspiration. We can always have a philosophy attempting to understand the truth, why people respond to music? Why it chokes us when we hear MJ again? Science can try to work out the why. There is only one problem, beyond the mood and the mind, we will forced to look at connections between history, economics, sciences pushing us back to the Socratic debate, “Is it time?”

The authors represent Orpheus CAPITALS, a global alternative research firm