The scientific developments of the Renaissance culminate in a radical abstraction of temporality under Newtonian mechanics. Time is now conceived as absolute, flowing uniformly and independently of objects or observers. This construal represents a decisive shift: temporality is disentangled from embodied cycles, ritualised practice, and perspectival observation, establishing a universal backdrop against which all motion and change can be measured. Temporality becomes a field of determinacy, wherein relational possibilities are constrained by immutable laws.
In Newton’s framework, temporal sequence underpins the very intelligibility of the cosmos. The uniform passage of time allows for the precise articulation of cause and effect, the prediction of motion, and the formalisation of mechanics. Potentialities are no longer merely contingent upon observation or cyclical recurrence; they are structured within a linear, deterministic temporal continuum. The relational field of possibility is now encoded in absolute intervals: actualisation follows law, and what may occur is rigorously delimited by preceding states.
Leibniz’s relational critiques highlight the contingent nature of Newton’s abstraction. For Leibniz, time is not a self-subsisting entity but emerges from relational order: temporal distinction derives from the relative configuration of entities rather than from a uniform flow. Possibility, in this view, is co-constituted by the relations between objects; temporal progression is a reflection of relational differentiation. Newtonian absolutism, while operationally powerful, obscures the contingent and perspectival nature of temporal actualisation, privileging determinacy over relational emergence.
The Newtonian temporal field thus embodies both promise and limitation. It enables unprecedented precision in astronomy, mechanics, and engineering, rendering previously intractable potentialities tractable through law-like predictability. Simultaneously, it suppresses alternative temporalities — cyclical, ritual, or perspectival — reducing the field of possibility to a deterministic horizon. Temporality is universalised, yet relational nuances remain latent, waiting to be resurgent in later frameworks that reintegrate contingency, observation, and relational alignment.
Modulatory voices: Even within Newtonian physics, the seeds of relational reconsideration persist. Leibnizian critiques, along with early explorations of elasticity, gravity, and non-uniform motion, suggest that absolute time may be a methodological convenience rather than an ontological necessity. Furthermore, human and symbolic systems continue to enact cyclic, ritual, and perspectival temporalities alongside Newtonian frameworks, demonstrating that the construal of possibility cannot be fully captured by universalised determinacy. The relational field of temporal potential thus persists beneath the surface of formal law, anticipating the transformations of Romantic, relativistic, and quantum thought.
With Post 5, we have now traversed from Renaissance operational time into the abstraction of universal, deterministic temporality under Newton, while keeping relational contingency in view.
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