ABSTRACT

This chapter traces the twin self-certainties of reason and faith to certain fundamental conceptions and presuppositions about the nature of time, including especially the temporal situation of human beings seeking to justify the infliction of suffering on other people as a necessary means to the ends of law and justice. The conceptions of linear time and existential time should therefore be viewed as Weberian ideal types, rather than as the discrete brain children of particular historical thinkers. But while the method is quasi-sociological, it must always be remembered that the most important motivation for our being interested in the first place in the relation between time and meaning derives from the phenomenon of ethical distress. The problem of language in relation to time is therefore a consequence of the important distinction between objects that can be described either metaphorically or non-metaphorically, and objects. According to positive religion, God gives people moral laws in the form of holy books.