An Inconsistent and Illogical Meteorology

This chapter explores the consequences of both Pyrrho’s tetralemma and Aenesidemus’ time is air. By making such unusual statements about reality and time, both Pyrrho and Aenesidemus suggest not an ontology but a meteorology in the sense of a groundless theory of the ceaseless. It is a meteorology because reality and time are, like meteors themselves, sporadic and never determinable in advance. With such a view in mind, reality and time can no longer be approached from the perspective of a neat partitioning based on onto-logical predicates (letters or numbers) or from the determinations of a single inner-experience. Without axial or pivotal interpretation, reality and time reveal themselves as obeying a logic of instability—a meteorology—that accords with difficulty to human logic with its fixed earth-bound states. With regard to time alone, this unusual understanding has the advantage of freeing it from (a) the shackling constraints of measurement, (b) the punctual and causal confines of both “now times” and/or durations, and (c) the always questionable arrow of time.