On Spinozian Timelessness, Triplicity of Time Via Kant, Bergson, Reimann, Makowsky & Einstein, Schopenhauer's Influence on Nietzsche & More!
BARUCH SPINOZA 17TH CENTURY RATIONALIST DUTCH-PHILOSOPHER (1632-1677)
(A) On Spinozian Timelessness, Einstein/Bergson/Reimann/Mankowski etc!
The reason Einstein liked Spinoza was that he considered him to be the first modern philosopher that introduced Monism i.e., a symbiosis of Mind & Body i.e., one substance. Spinoza called it Nature interchangeably with ‘God’, hence, he could surpass as a pantheist. According to Spinoza, there is no Upward or Downward Causation, however, there’s a correlation because they are one and the same thing. His ‘Eternality of Mind’ propagates that it is not a separate substance existing after an individual’s life in time’s duration.
In Spinoza’s book Ethics (1677), the fifth part dictates that there is three kinds of knowledge i.e., a) Sensible Opinion or Empirical Based Knowledge, b) Scientific Knowledge or Rational Logic-Based Knowledge, c) Intuition or Inquiry into the Essence of Substance without Abstraction i.e., thoughts & extension are forms of abstraction. This third kind of knowledge is where the “Intellectual Level of God” culminates.
The essence of time itself is the triplicity of time i.e., Past-Present-Future. The Kantian Noumenon i.e., Time projecting the subjective reality is different from the Hardcore physics principle i.e., the fundamental aspect of time wherein the present is merely absent or is an abstraction of some sort. The Kantian Noumenon is subjective whereas the Relativity of Time i.e., Order of Events is quite objective.
William James called it the Specius Present i.e., the duration of the present moment, while Henri Bergson called it the Rhythm of Duration i.e., the speed of time as a subjective predicament. Einstein had the notion of Time as a Spatial Dimension prior to 1955, while Bernard Riemann presupposed the 3-Dimensional model in addition to adding more dimensions which were later concluded as mathematically incorrect as Physicality resides within the 3-Dimensional Model. It was Mankowski prior to 1895 who propagated the notion that Time might as well be the 4th Spatial Dimension which was quite a controversial take as Space & Time are unidirectional. Later, Einstein & Bergson’s theories proved that the Velocity of Space affects the Speed of Time i.e., Faster the Gravity, Slower the Time.
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER 18TH CENTURY GERMAN PHILOSOPHER
(1788-1860)
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 19TH CENTURY GERMAN PHILOSOPHER
(1844-1900)
(B) On Schopenhauer’s Influence on Nietzsche
For Schopenhauer ‘Will’ was the fundamental essence of all things- something that deeply influenced Nietzsche to theorise his ‘Will to Power’ which was an internal effect form towards power. Hence, for Nietzsche, all force was all power i.e., Matter-Energy and therefore, all causality had immanence i.e., sentience.
Schopenhauer additionally critiqued Kant’s Moral Prescription i.e., ‘you ought to do this’ or/and ‘you ought to do that’. So Schopenhauer’s Ethics together with Kantian Ontology remains fatal to his Moral theory due to the Kantian Categorical Imperative i.e., the proposition such as ‘you ought to not break promises’, which further after application gives rise to the prescriptive moral proposition that Nietzsche was critical of. After learning about Schopenhauer’s critique of Kantian Moral Prescription, Nietzsche was furthermore inspired by Schopenhauer’s Slave-Morality to theorise his Descriptive based Morality and introduce his Master-Slave Morality.
This Descriptive theory however has theological Christian-based imperatives also in relation to the Kantian Noumenon. This is where Nietzsche's famous quote, “God is Dead” comes into the discussion as it implies here that if one doesn’t believe in God as the substantiation of moral facts then one has no right to believe in Christian Morality. From his famous book, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, after Zarathustra’s dialogue with the Saint in the woods is over in the first part of the book, he thought to himself whether the saint had heard the news that ‘God is Dead’ there he was pointing out that the news is in fact ‘God’s destruction’ via the enlightenment era.
-Sanjana Singh/30.11.2021