We’ve been going over some of the aspects of our current world-view (Weltanschauung) that, in my opinion, have created a disconnected human being, a neurotic mess full of anxiety and depression. We talked about how ever-evolving goals like “achievement” create a “Burnout Society” (Byung-Chul Han) where the construction of meaning is severely compromised, substituted by a pragmatic, teleological, how-much-is-it-worth commercialization of life. Everything is transformed into a product and sold in the digital agora: your social media account is valued by how many followers you have, etc.
In this sense, one of the overarching concepts that structure our ontological approach (what we consider to be something in the world) is the idea of time. Let’s leave aside the prickly topic of time and its implications (is it an external, independent category, or is time something we invent in our minds? How does time work in the physical world?) and look at the function the concept has in our lives (I know this is a big ask from a philosophical point of view, but I’m trying to write a short, comprehensible newsletter, not a philosophical tract on time like Heidegger).
“Time” has evolved through different eras. For the non-philosopher, this is very difficult to see: Time is what a watch measures, it moves forward and is independent of our whims. That’s kind of the rational approach our society uses. Stemming from Cartesian rationalism and homo cogitans’ obsession with “controlling” the world, for us, “time” is just a variable.
Our pseudo-objectivity runs into a wall though, when we look at other cultures and their conception of time. It might come as a surprise, but until very recently, “time” was understood as a cyclical entity. In hinduism, the “wheel of time” evolves in “cycles” (or Yugas) that repeat to infinity; the Egyptians thought life followed the cycles and seasons of the Nile river, and the pre-Socratic Greeks also had a particular view of the concept. Let’s concentrate on the latter.
For the Greeks, different notions of time coexist. Our Western societies have concentrated on “Chronos”: the lineal, quantitative, forward-moving time. Chronos is what a clock measures.
However, Chronos is not the only concept of time used by the Greeks. Arguably, the most important idea is the notion of Kairos, which represents a form of synchronicity with Cosmic Time (Pythagoras).
Kairos means transcending Chronos, being able to jump out of linear time and come into contact with the transcendent cycle of life.
The Greeks, just like everybody else, believed there was a metaphysical structure holding everything together, pushing life forward according to its own laws. Kairos represents that out-of-time feeling: when Chronos ceases to “exist” for the individual and the person is connected to something greater.
How do we experience Kairos? Kairos appears when we feel ecstatic, when we know deeply within ourselves that this is exactly where we need to be. It also appears when we escape Chronos-time through different flow-states where we act without thinking: dancing, for example, might be the easiest case to mention. When you’re really connected to the music, you don’t dance thinking about moving your feet: you’re transported to this special place where Chronos-time is irrelevant and all that matters is your connection to the music. That’s why live music is so important and magical to us: you’re living a transcendent experience that, even years after the concert, you can still feel (I remember watching Radiohead play “True Love Waits” live, and being completely projected outside my body).
For the Greeks, one of the most important aspects of life was living these Kairos moments. They understood these were the moments that count, the ones that smack us alive and reveal our humanity to ourselves. This idea, together with a cyclical, seasonal concept of life (everything returning and evolving through cycles) informed a very different world-view.
As a society, we’ve made a conscious choice of rationalizing, optimizing and quantifying everything, including time. It’s an inevitable process for a rational Man who produced the industrial revolution and created an incredible boost in wealth through capitalism and trade.
This bet has produced unforeseen consequences though, since by privileging Chronos-time over Kairos-time, we’ve produced an anguishing rat-race amongst ourselves. Even worse: while people could find refuge and respite from über-capitalistic pressure via religion and “sacred time”, our societies have decided to secularize, rationalize and quantify everything, taking away time’s last safe space. The loss of “sacred time” is another consequence of Nietzsche’s “Death of God”.
Isn’t our current state of affairs a desperate cry in a meaningless existence? We’re experiencing a “Mindfulness revolution”, where more and more people benefit from the awe and Kairos-inducing state of “being present”. We’re also going through a psychedelic revolution, where people say their experiences with psilocybin and DMT are “one of the most significant of their lives” (Kairos) and that their trips made them “understand” or find sense in their own lives.
Is this not the XXIst century search for Kairos?
Enjoy your weekend, live fully and experience Kairos; we’ll continue exploring these notions in my next post.