Time–As Understood in East and West

Abstract

The importance of time has always been there in the mind of Man from the very beginning. Even Greeks and after them Muslim philosophers belonging to pre-scientific period tried to understand the reality of time. The Ikhwan rejected the Aristotelian notion of time as being nothing but a measure of movement. They considered that time is related to the motion of heavenly bodies in the physical world. But at the same time they maintained that from metaphysical point of view time is a pure form, an abstract notion, simple and intelligible, elaborated in the soul by the faculties of the spirit. To them it is an abstract simple and intelligible idea, a form abstracted from matter and existing  only in consciousness. Kant concludes, “I can also say from the principle of inner sense, that all appearances whatsoever, that is, all objects of the senses, are in time, and necessarily stand in time-relation.” Novikov remarks that Time is a uniform ‘river’ without beginning or end, without ‘source’ or ‘sink’, and all events are ‘carried’ by the river’s flow. Time has no other property except the only property which is ‘of always being of the same duration. To him the ‘absolute time’ is identical throughout the universe.’ Henry Bergson writes that Plato expresses in his magnificent language when he says that God, unable to make the world eternal, gave it Time, “a moving image of eternity.” Bergson offers a practical example of the real Time: “If I want to mix  glass of sugar and water, I must, willy-nilly, wait until the sugar melts. Iqbal relates the issue of time with human self. He says that ‘on the analogy of our inner experience, then, the conscious existence means life in time. A keener insight into the nature of conscious experience, however reveals that the self in its inner life moves from centre outwards. It has, so to speak, two sides which may be described appreciative and efficient.’ Elaborating both the sides of human self Iqbal tells us that the efficient self is the subject of ‘associationist psychology’ and this is the practical self of our daily life ‘in its dealing with external order of things which determine our passing states of consciousness and stamp on these states their own spatial feature of mutual isolation.