Abstract
Zurvanism was an ancient variant of Zoroastrianism. According to Zurvanism, the great powers of good and evil, Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu, were the sons of a greater god Zurvan, associated with time. According to Eudemus of Rhodes, some Persian thinkers, presumably Zurvanists, took there to be three great principles underlying the world: light, darkness, and greatest of all time (or perhaps, according to Eudemus, space). This paper explores what metaphysics might underlie these doctrines, and what contemporary options we have for making sense of a metaphysics where time is the ultimate principle. Among the options explored is the option that despite appearance many of the entities of the concrete world are identical to stretches of time, or are somehow aspects of stretches of time; that they include times as parts, or are included in times as parts; that they are somehow properties of time; or hylomorphic compounds of which time is the matter; that the world is somehow a mixture of time, light, and dark; or that somehow the ends or teloi of everyday objects and processes are to be found among good, evil, and time.
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Notes
de Blois suggests that Damascius’s report misrepresents Eudemus, and “the Zurvanite content of the passage goes back, I think, not to Eudemus but to Damascius” (de Blois 2000 p 5 ftnt 12). de Blois seems to favour dates for the development of Zurvanism in Persia that are much later than the time of Eudemus, but I think his interpretation does not receive any support from Damascius's text itself. Boyce 1982 pp 239–241 discusses a wide range of other evidence that Zurvanism had arisen by the time of Eudemus’s writing, and while none of it is conclusive, it does suggest that we need not discount Damascius’s report of what Eudemus said.
As Boyce points out, others in the Zoroastrian tradition interpret this passage as being about Spenta Mainyu and Angra Mainyu (pp 232–3, and ftnt 106). We need not resolve this question of interpretation, since whatever the original meaning of this Yasna, it is plausible that Zurvanists, at least, took it to be Gathic support for taking Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu as being offspring of a common parent.
Our evidence from Greek reports also suggests that Mazdaism was also alive and well at the time of Eudemus of Rhodes: Theopompus, writing at roughly the same time as Eudemus, reports that Zoroaster taught Mazdean doctrine, with no apparent mention by Theopompus of Zurvan: see Plutarch, Isis and Osiris s 47, citing Theopompuus.
An even more intruiging parallel is between Zurvanism and ancient Chinese cosmology. From at least the fourth century BCE, some Chinese thinkers have conceived the world in terms of three principles: two represented by darkness and light (Yin and Yang), somehow arising from an ultimate Taiji, sometimes associated with time, or with infinite being. (Some daoist traditions derive Yin and Yang from the Dao, or the Way: see ch 42 of the Dao de Jing for one puzzling derivation.) It is hard to know if this is anything more than coincidence. Thanks to Graham Priest for discussion.
Lehmkuhl 2018 reserves “supersubstantivalism” for a weaker view, according to which spacetime is the only (kind of) substance, and material objects somehow ontologically depend on it (Lehmkuhl 2018 p 27). According to Lehmkul’s useage, what I am calling supersubstantivalism about spacetime is the “identity view,” which is only one variant of supersubstantivalism. On Lehmkuhl’s more generous usage, many more of the views canvassed in this paper would count as supersubstantivalism about time, since there are various options for taking time to be fundamental and other things in the world to be derivative besides treating everything as identical to some stretch of time or other.
I will tend to talk of events or processes interchangably, since I see little fundmental ontological difference, though some of course do. I leave it to them to decide which better fits the Zurvanist motivation.
Note that on one way of developing a Kim-style theory of events, times are constituents of events, along with objects and properties/relations. See Kim 1976, even though there he only adopts the weaker view that events are one-to-one correlated with certain triples of objects, properties and times. Thanks to Mike Rea for discussion.
A different kind of argument against supersubstantivalism, of any sort, is offered in Leonard 2022. There, Leonard argues that supersubstantivalism cannot handle cases of vague location (e.g., when it is vague which region I am). Leonard’s argument generalizes in an obvious way to identification of objects (or ordinary events) with stretches of time. Effingham 2009 and Nolan 2014 have both offered consistent, and to my mind attractive, pictures of vague location in the context of supersubstantivalism, and these can both be adapted to the case of temporal supersubstantivalism. Leonard, in effect, includes as a premise a strong and controversial principle about the interaction of determinacy and identity (Leonard 2022 p 3478-3479). It is a principle similar to the one Evans 1978 appears to defend, but even Evans was not defending that principle, if we follow Lewis 1988’s interpetation of Evans. See Barnes 2009 for another approach for allowing indeterminate identities that illustrates how the position offered in Leonard 2022 can be resisted.
It is curious of course that light is supposed to be one of the (proper) parts of light. My guess is that light and dark are intended to be more fundamental principles of which, e.g., dry or cold are meant to be derivative manifestations. There is much more that we would like to know about the details of this doctrine.
One referee suggested that it may be possible to translate spacetime supersubstantivalism into a form of temporal substantivalism via the identification of times themselves with regions of spacetime, and then a reduction of objects and events to those regions. This would require an unusual characterisation of times, or of objects and events, or both. The typical candidates to be “instants” of time in a spacetime theory are hypersurfaces that themselves include all spacetime points that are classed together by a suitable foliation of spacetime (in special relativity, a suitable foliation might be given by the relation of simultenaity relative to a reference frame). The typical candidates to be stretches of time in these theories are regions bounded by such hypersurfaces. Those “instants” or “stretches of time,” or spacetime regions like them, are usually not very good candidates to be cats or cabbages or battles or football matches. Perhaps a suitably ingenous identification of times would yield times as spatiotemporal regions with the sizes and shapes that would better fit these objects and events. If that can be plausibly done, then I should restrict my claim about novelty: identifying concrete objects and events with times is novel in the contemporary literature unless spatiotemporal supersubstantivalism, twinned with an ingenous enough definition of times, counts as identifying these objects with times.
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Thanks to Sara Bernstein, Graham Priest, Michael Rea, Emily Thomas and several referees for discussion.
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Nolan, D. Zurvanist Supersubstantivalism. AJPH 2, 38 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s44204-023-00090-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s44204-023-00090-2