ABSTRACT
The Redemption of Time In this section I offer a very brief sketch of how time has been understood in Western thought. 1 I begin with the Greeks, for whom time was unending and therefore eternal, with no conception of an absolute beginning or end to time. We have already seen how the early Greeks saw existence as an agonistic movement of strife emerging out of a "negative" force. The tragic implications of time's course are dramatically expressed by Sophocles: "Strangely the long and countless drift of time brings all things forth from darkness into light, then covers them once more" (Ajax 645-47).2 Early Greek philosophy can be seen as conceptualizing this tragic model as a continual construction/destruction of forms, which must always recede back to formlessness to perpetuate an ongoing flux. Anaximander associates time with a "fateful necessity" (chreon), the ceaseless coming-to-be and passing-away of all things out of and back to an "indefinite nature" (phusin apeiron).3 Heraclitus articulates a similar view with his concept of the logos, an ordered exchange between opposite conditions that never comes to rest in a fixed state. In this respect the course of time is an unending governance of world activity, which is why Heraclitus associates time with a "kingship:'4
An interesting summation of the ancient view of time for our purposes can be found in the Stoics. The ancient world understood time in cyclic terms, at least compared with later views of time as a linear path between an absolute beginning and end. There are some references in Heraclitus, Empedocles, and Plato to the idea of cosmic periods, where world conditions wind down and reconfigure themselves in endless cycles of return. Some Stoic thinkers, following a rationalized model of the cosmos, gathered and concentrated the ancient predilection for cycles into a full-fledged theory of cosmic repetition that went beyond generalized notions of return to insist on the identical character of each cycle, down to every specific detail. 5 Such a recurrence scheme was based on a strict causal determinism and the notion of an immanent divine providence.
