The Scent of Time (eBook)

A Philosophical Essay on the Art of Lingering

Byung-Chul Han (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2017
148 Seiten
John Wiley & Sons (Verlag)
978-1-5095-1608-7 (ISBN)

Infos

In his philosophical reflections on the art of lingering, acclaimed cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han argues that the value we attach today to the vita activa is producing a crisis in our sense of time.  Our attachment to the vita activa creates an imperative to work which degrades the human being into a labouring animal, an animal laborans. At the same time, the hyperactivity which characterizes our daily routines robs human beings of the capacity to linger and the faculty of contemplation.  It therefore becomes impossible to experience time as fulfilling.

Drawing on a range of thinkers including Heidegger, Nietzsche and Arendt, Han argues that we can overcome this temporal crisis only by revitalizing the vita contemplativa and relearning the art of lingering. For what distinguishes humans from other animals is the capacity for reflection and contemplation, and when life regains this capacity, this art of lingering, it gains in time and space, in duration and vastness.


Byung-Chul Han is a Korean-born Professor of Philosophy and Cultural Studies who teaches at the University of the Arts (UdK) in Berlin. He is the author of more than 20 books including The Transparency Society and The Burnout Society.

Inhalt

Preface

1. Non-Time

2. Time without a Scent

3. The Speed of History

4. From the Age of Marching to the Age of Whizzing

5. The Paradox of the Present

6. Fragrant Crystal of Time

7. The Time of the Angel

8. Fragrant Clock: An Short Excursus on Ancient China

9. The Round Dance of the World

10. The Scent of Oak Wood

11. Profound Boredom

12. Vita Contemplativa

Notes

Rezensionen

"The Scent of Time describes what may be the condition of Byung-Chul Han's unique international success among philosophers writing today. Starting out with the concept of 'dyschronicity,' he analyzes a new, centrifugal form of time as a premise of existence which no longer allows for marked contours, beginnings, or endings - but to those lively duration we can react with fresh modes of contemplative life."
--Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Stanford University

Textauszug

2
Time without a Scent

Because nowhere now

An immortal is to be seen in the skies …1

Friedrich Hölderlin

The mythical world is full of meaning. Gods are nothing but eternal bearers of meaning. They make the world meaningful and significant, let it make sense. They tell us about the way things and events are related to each other, and these narrated connections create sense. Out of nothing, narration makes world. Full of gods means full of meaning, full of narration. The world becomes readable, like a picture. You need only let your gaze move here, move there, in order to read the sense, the meaningful order, off it. Everything has its place – that is, its meaning – within a firmly set order (the cosmos). If anything moves from its proper place, it is put right again. Time sets it right.2 Time is order. Time is justice. If a human individual shifts things arbitrarily, this is an offence, and time will atone for it, thus restoring the eternal order. Time is just (diké). Events take place in fixed relations with each other; they form meaningful chains. No event is allowed to step out of line. Every event reflects the eternal, unchanging substance of the world. Here, there are no movements that modify the valid order. In this world of eternal recurrence, acceleration would make no sense at all. Only the eternal repetition of the same, even the reproduction of what was, of eternal truth, makes sense. Thus, prehistoric man lives in a lasting present.

The historical world is altogether different. It is not simply given as a completed picture that reveals an eternal substance, an unchanging order, to the onlooker. Events are no longer arranged on a static plane, but on a progressive line. The time which links events, and thereby releases meanings, passes in a linear fashion, and it is not the return of the same but the possibility of change that makes it meaningful. Everything takes place as a process, which means either progress or decay. Historical time releases meaning in the sense that it is directed. The temporal line has a direction, a syntax.

Historical time knows no lasting present. Things do not remain arranged in an immutable order. Time is not leading back but leading forwards; it is not bringing back but collecting.3 The past and the future drift apart. What makes time meaningful is not its sameness but its difference. Time is change, process, development. The present has no substance of its own; it is only a transitional point. Nothing is. Everything becomes. Everything changes. The repetition of the same gives way to the event. Movements and changes do not create chaos, but another, a new kind of order. Temporal meaningfulness is based in the future. This orientation towards the future produces a forward temporal pull that may also have accelerating effects.

Historical time is a linear time which can, however, pass or appear in very different forms. The time of eschatology differs greatly from the kind of historical time that promises progress. Eschatological time, as the final time, refers to the end of the world. The eschaton marks the beginning of the end of time, the end of history itself. And a thrownness characterizes the human being’s relationship with the future. Eschatological time does not allow for any action, any projection. The human individual is not free; it is subjected to God. It does not project itself into the future. It does not project its time. Rather, it is thrown into the end, into the final end of world and time. It is not the subject of history. Rather, it is God who judges.

Originally, the concept of ‘revolution’ also had an entirely different meaning from the one associated with it now. Although it signified a process, it was not free from connotations of return and repetition. Originally, revolutio referred to the orbits of the stars. Applied to history, it signifies the fact that the forms of domination, which are limited in number, reoccur in cyclical fashion. The changes which take place in the course of history are integrated into a cycle. It is not progress but repetition that characterizes the historical process. Neither is the human being a free subject of history. Not freedom, but thrownness continues to determine the human relationship to time. It is not humans who make revolutions; rather, they are subjected to them, just as they are subjected to the laws of the stars. Time is characterized by natural constants. Time is facticity.4

During the time of the Enlightenment, a particular idea of historical time emerged. As opposed to the eschatological idea of time it assumes an open-ended future. Here, temporality is not dominated by its being towards an end, but by the departure into the new. And temporality acquires a significance, a weight of its own. There is no helpless, headlong rush towards the apocalyptic end. And no facticity and no natural constants force temporality to take the form of circular repetition. This gives an altogether different meaning to the concept of revolution, one free from the association with stellar orbits. The linear, progressive course of events now determines the temporality of revolution, rather than circular orbits.

The notion of temporality that developed during the Enlightenment freed itself of thrownness and facticity. Time was rendered non-factual as well as being de-naturalized; it is now freedom which determines the human relationship to time. The human being is neither thrown into the end of time, nor into the natural circulation of things. What animates history is the idea of freedom, the idea of the ‘progress of human reason’.5 The subject of time is no longer a judging God, but a free human being that projects itself towards the future. Time is not fate but projection. The human relation with the future is determined not by thrownness but by feasibility. The human being is the one that makes (produire) the revolution. Thus, concepts like revolutionizing and revolutionary, which point towards feasibility, become possible. But the idea of feasibility de-stabilizes the world, and even de-stabilizes time itself. That God which, as the source of an eternal present, had long had a stabilizing effect, now slowly takes its leave from time.

The remarkable burst of innovation in the natural sciences that began in the sixteenth century was triggered by a belief in feasibility. Technological improvements are made at ever-shorter intervals. Bacon’s dictum ‘knowledge is power’ precisely reflects the belief that the world can be made. The political revolution and the Industrial Revolution are connected, both being animated and advanced by the same belief. An entry on railways in the Brockhaus encyclopedia of 1838 conjoins the two in heroic tones: the railway is transfigured into a ‘Dampftriumphwagen’ [steam-powered triumph engine] of the revolution.6

Revolution in the age of the Enlightenment is based on a time rendered non-factual. Freed of all thrownness and of all natural or theological coercion, time, like that colossal engine, is unleashed towards the future, which is expected to bring salvation. This time inherits the teleological character of the eschatological idea of time. History remains the history of salvation. Given the fact that the goal is in the future, the acceleration of the historical process now makes sense. Thus, at the constitutional ceremony in 1793, Robespierre said: ‘Les progrès de la raison humaine ont preparé cette grande revolution, et c’est à vous qu’est specialement imposé le devoir de l’accélérer.’ [The progress of human reason prepared this great revolution, and you especially are charged with the duty of accelerating it.]7

Not God but the free human being is the master of time. Having been freed of its thrownness, the human being projects what is to come. But this regime change from God to human is not without consequences. It de-stabilizes time because God is the authority which confers finality and the seal of eternal truth upon the prevailing order. God stands for a lasting present. With the regime change, time loses this hold, which had created a resistance to change. Büchner’s drama on the French Revolution, Danton’s Death, gives expression to this experience when Camille proclaims: ‘The ordinary delusions that people call “sanity” are all so unbearably boring. The luckiest man of them all was the one that imagined he was God the father, God the son and God the Holy Ghost.’8

Historical time can rush ahead because it does not rest in itself, because its centre of gravity is not in the present. It does permit any genuine lingering. Any lingering only delays the progressive process. No duration comports time. Time is meaningful insofar as it moves towards a goal. Hence, acceleration makes sense. However, due to the meaningfulness of time, it is not perceived as such. What is noticed most of all is the meaning of history. Acceleration is felt as such only where time loses its historical meaningfulness, its sense. Acceleration becomes topical or problematic as such precisely at the moment when time is torn away into a meaningless future.

Mythical time is restful, like a picture. Historical time, by contrast, has the form of a line which runs or rushes towards a goal. If this line loses its narrative or...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 25.9.2017
• Übersetzer: Daniel Steuer
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Allgemeines / Lexika
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Metaphysik / Ontologie
• Schlagworte: Continental Philosophy • Cultural Studies • Cultural Studies Special Topics • hyperactivity, contemplation, philosophical reflection • Kontemplation • Kontinentalphilosophie • Kulturwissenschaften • Philosophie • Philosophy • Spezialthemen Kulturwissenschaften
• ISBN-10: 1-5095-1608-5 / 1509516085
• ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1608-7 / 9781509516087