A Temporal Theory of Multipolarization

Aggregation and dispersion, tradition, and historical forgetting

Kazuhiro Hayashida explains multipolarity as a process of aggregation and dispersion, arguing that a civilization survives only by preserving the spatial bonds of community and the temporal bonds of tradition.

To understand multipolarization, it is insufficient to view unipolarity and multipolarity solely as arrangements on a static map of the world. What matters is the scale at which aggregation and dispersion occur, and the length of the temporal axis over which these movements are observed.

When individuals are fragmented to the extreme, the binding energy connecting one human being to another approaches zero. When such bonds as family, locality, religion, vocation, history, memory, and community are lost, human beings approach the condition of mutually independent particles. Local centers cease to form, and social entropy increases. This disorder, however, is highly advantageous to a single enormous center. Even if large numbers of isolated individuals exist, they cannot form a pole capable of opposing this center. As the fragmentation of individuals advances, the poles at lower social levels disappear, making it easier for power to become concentrated in the single enormous center situated above the individuals. The unipolarity of the whole is therefore established through the elimination of poles within the lower levels of society.

In the opposite direction, when human beings reassemble into families, local communities, religious communities, vocational communities, peoples, states, and civilizations, a center forms within each of them. A community gathers values, memories, norms, and authority within itself and therefore acquires its own local unipolarity. The family has a center, the community has a center, the state has a center, and civilization has a center. When multiple local centers are established, multipolarity emerges in the higher-order space. Multipolarization is therefore the multiplication of centers. Global multipolarization is established through the development of local unipolarities.

This produces an apparently paradoxical structure. At the level of the world as a whole, dispersion proceeds from one enormous center towards multiple civilizational centers. Within each civilization, human beings simultaneously aggregate around their respective centers. Dispersion occurs at the global level, while aggregation occurs at the civilizational level. The same movement appears to proceed in opposite directions according to the scale from which it is observed.

When this structure is placed on a temporal axis, an even more important movement appears. A community is formed through aggregation, its internal bonds strengthen, and it becomes a pole. When multiple poles are established, a multipolar world is formed. Thereafter, if one pole expands disproportionately and begins absorbing the surrounding poles, the whole once again aggregates in a unipolar direction. Once concentration around the center passes a certain critical threshold, the conditions for the next dispersion are generated within that order itself. Multiple local centers then form again, and a new process of multipolarization begins. An order established through aggregation expands through the success of that aggregation, and within its own expansion accumulates the conditions for the next dispersion.

This movement corresponds strikingly to the opening words of The Tale of the Heike: “The sound of the bells of the Gion Shōja echoes the impermanence of all things. The color of the sala flowers reveals the truth that those who prosper must inevitably decline.” The principle that those who prosper must decline can be read as a compressed expression of a civilizational movement in which a center is formed through aggregation, prospers, expands, and eventually generates the conditions of dispersion from within itself.

The problem of time now enters the argument. When the direction of movement is measured between two points, A and B, the greater the distance between them, the more accurately the direction can be determined. Assuming the same observational error, the closer A and B are to one another, the greater the influence of that error becomes; the farther apart they are, the clearer the direction of movement becomes. This spatial distance can be converted into time. If only one year of change is observed, there is a high probability of misidentifying whether a society is aggregating or dispersing, and whether it is moving towards unipolarity or multipolarity. If a temporal distance of one hundred, five hundred, or one thousand years is taken, a temporary condition becomes visible as one phase within a much longer movement. Human beings, however, cannot directly observe an entire millennium. Society therefore compresses and preserves long periods of time. What performs this preservation is tradition.

Tradition is the social memory that carries into the present the results of observations accumulated over long temporal distances. Ancestral experience, religion, myth, literature, ritual, history, royal succession, and the customs of local communities make it possible to use a past that people living in the present have never directly experienced as material for present judgment. Distance can therefore be converted into time, and accumulated time can be preserved through tradition. The deeper a tradition reaches into the past, the longer the effective observational distance available to a society becomes. A society that applies the Heike principle—that those who prosper must decline—to the present civilizational order is, in effect, bringing an observation made centuries ago into the present. The past thus continues to serve as a standard by which the present can be judged.

Community and tradition therefore form the same structure in different directions. Community provides the spatial bond, while tradition provides the temporal bond. Families, local communities, religions, peoples, states, and civilizations spatially bind together people living in the present. History, ancestors, literature, ritual, myth, royal succession, and social memory temporally bind the past to the present. Civilization is established at the intersection of these spatial and temporal bonds.

From this perspective, the present condition of Japan can be considered. Japan’s historical materials have not disappeared. Shrines and temples, classical works, era names, and cultural properties continue to exist. If the temporal axis connecting the past to the present is severed, however, these things cease to function as standards for judging the present. The Edo period, the Meiji period, the medieval period, and antiquity become isolated exhibits rather than phases of a continuous historical movement extending into the present. This is far more serious than the mere loss of historical information. Historical forgetting does not mean only that the facts of the past are no longer known. It also means that the past can no longer serve as a standard by which the present is judged.

Once the temporal axis is severed, the line connecting A and B disappears. Only the present point B remains. Society can no longer measure by its own standards where it came from, nor can it determine the direction in which it is moving. Under these conditions, externally supplied standards of evaluation exert increasing power. Words such as “progress,” “modernization,” “democratization,” “internationalization,” “normality,” and “obsolescence” enter as substitute coordinates for the lost temporal axis. A society that has lost its own long-term standard begins to explain itself within coordinates established by an external evaluator.

This destruction of the temporal axis connects directly to the question of who has the authority to assign coordinates. Tradition provides a long-term reference coordinate that prevents a present evaluator from freely rewriting the coordinate system. A society that preserves long historical standards can test present judgments by measuring them against the past. When a society loses its temporal axis, this capacity for judgment weakens. The present evaluator can then determine both the object being evaluated and the reference point from which it is evaluated. This is the structure of a people’s historical forgetting produced by the destruction of its temporal axis.

The severance of the temporal axis described above stands in a mutually complementary relationship with the problem Heidegger presented as the forgetfulness of Being. The two describe the same event from different directions, and each fills what is absent from the other.

Heidegger’s discussion of the forgetfulness of Being rejected the ordinary understanding of time as a homogeneous succession of “nows,” treating it as derivative and leveled. This critique was presented as a phenomenological description, but it did not reveal the structural reason why a succession of present moments cannot provide direction. The argument from the observational baseline supplies a theoretical basis for measuring this problem. When the distance between two points approaches zero, determining direction becomes impossible in principle. A succession of present moments cannot establish direction because a collection of points without a sufficient baseline cannot define one. This is a structural condition rather than a question of attitude or merely a consequence of fallenness. At the same time, the observational-baseline argument alone cannot explain why human society is drawn towards ever shorter baselines. The analysis of leveling and fallenness shows that this tendency is rooted in the everyday mode of Being itself and is therefore more than an accidental phenomenon. Measurement theory explains the structure, while phenomenology explains the tendency.

Within this ontology, human beings acquire authentic historicity by taking up and repeating possibilities inherited from the past. This is expressed as a demand at the level of self-understanding, while the functional reason for its necessity does not come fully to the foreground. The definition of tradition supplies this function. Repetition, prior to being an ethical demand, is the only means by which the results of long-term observation can be carried into the present. Ancestral experience, religion, myth, literature, ritual, royal succession, and custom are mechanisms that compress and preserve temporal distances that cannot be directly observed. Without these mechanisms, a society cannot measure the direction of its own movement. Conversely, the analysis of heritage and repetition supplies what is absent from the argument concerning tradition. Tradition does not function automatically as an accumulation of historical materials. It becomes a criterion for judging the present only through the act of taking it up. The historical materials themselves still exist in Japan. They have ceased to function because this act of taking them up is no longer being performed.

Heidegger states that individual historicity becomes established as the shared historicization of a people, but this structure is not fully developed. The formulation that community is a spatial bond, tradition is a temporal bond, and civilization is established at their intersection gives a concrete structure to this communal destiny. Heidegger’s ontology, in turn, shows that this intersection is more than the overlapping of two axes. It is established through the acts of taking up and resoluteness. Structure and action become mutually complementary at this point.

There remains, however, no explanation of the mechanism through which the forgetfulness of Being occurs. Forgetting is described as a condition, while its cause is left unexamined. Civilization is a long-term social structure constructed to arrange human beings, land, vocation, family, religion, the state, memory, and the temporal axis within a determinate order, thereby restraining disorderly dispersion. When these bonds are severed, social entropy increases, and leveling emerges as one manifestation of that increase. The forgetfulness of Being is therefore no accidental event in intellectual history. It is the necessary consequence of severed bonds. Heidegger’s ontology, in turn, shows that this consequence extends beyond the disintegration of social structure and reaches the loss of the relationship with Being itself. Entropy theory supplies the mechanism, while ontology supplies its depth.

From this follows a proposition that goes beyond complementarity. I present it as the forgetfulness of factual existence. The forgetfulness of Being signifies the loss of the question of Being itself. The forgetfulness of factual existence signifies a condition in which beings continue to be preserved as historical material yet cease to function within social reality because they have lost their connection to the present. Shrines and temples, classical works, era names, and cultural properties continue to exist. They have not been lost. Because the temporal axis has been severed, however, they no longer operate as criteria for judging the present. This occurs on a level distinct from the forgetfulness of Being. The forgetfulness of Being is the loss of the question; the forgetfulness of factual existence is the loss of connection. The former advances through the history of metaphysics, while the latter advances through the transfer of the authority to assign coordinates.

The concepts of parousia and kairos, which Heidegger addressed in his early work through the Pauline epistles, also connect to this problem from another direction. Time is more than a succession of points uniformly divided by a clock. When past experience determines present life and that present possesses a direction towards the future, time becomes a living relationship. Traditional value is the form in which this living temporal relationship is preserved within a community.

Liberal atomization of the individual therefore entails two forms of destruction. When the bonds between human beings are severed, spatial binding energy declines. When the bonds between the past and the present are severed, temporal binding energy declines. At the extreme limit, the individual becomes a point isolated both spatially and temporally. This is the direction in which social entropy is maximized.

When human beings re-form communities, local centers emerge. When communities recover history and tradition, the long temporal axis is reconnected. Through the simultaneous recovery of spatial and temporal bonds, society once again acquires its own center. When each civilization recovers its own center, its own tradition, and its own historical time, multiple local unipolarities are established throughout the world. This is the multipolar world. Multipolarization is the movement through which individuals stripped of any pole are reconnected to communities, severed histories are reconnected through tradition, and each civilization recovers its own time and center.

That multipolar world will not remain fixed forever. Aggregation forms a center; the center prospers; prosperity generates concentration; and concentration eventually generates the conditions for dispersion. Dispersion occurs again, and new centers are born. Civilizational history is the movement that repeatedly passes through aggregation and dispersion along the temporal axis. This is why the impermanence of all things and the inevitable decline of those who prosper are not merely words from the past. They are measurements made across a long temporal distance and preserved by a civilization within the present.

(Translated from the Japanese)