“Duration and flow are formally one and the same, and yet the lived meaning is reversed from one to the other..” – (Friedrich Kümmel) –

Everything that happens brings about change. Something comes into being at the expense of something else that passes away. Becoming and decay are intertwined like two sides of a coin. One cannot exist without the other.

Change and happenings as such can only be named when, under randomly given circumstances, different states of a before and an after can be distinguished and articulated. The diverse possibilities for expressing this distinction linguistically are culturally shaped, socially transmitted, and individually learned competencies in the course of socialization, which, according to the current state of historical research, human societies gradually acquired approximately three to five thousand years ago in various, often mutually influenced, lines of development.

This temporal interpretation of situational events, as understood today, is neither necessary nor self-evident. There were and still are (?) traditions that understood the perceived, changing appearance of the world as changing aspects or perspectives of holistic circumstances. The one unchanging world then does not slip away in progressive, seasonal change, but rather reveals itself in variable manifestations in the regularly changing guise of seasons.

The distinction between a before and an after is accompanied by the loss of the unity of events. The ambivalent both/and of contingent circumstances is antinomically split into a categorically distinct either/or of arising and passing away: From repeated, varying circumstances, a consumptive fleetingness arises, ceaselessly striving from a no-longer to a not-yet, or conversely, from a not-yet to a no-longer. An impermanent being, flanked by non-being, which, depending on one’s mood and interests, is experienced hopefully as constructive or, resigned to fate, as destructive.

All creation is connected with ruination; every construction is accompanied by destruction; every emergence is accompanied by a passing away, every achievement by a loss. The construction of a temple requires the extraction of materials from the environment and leaves devastation in a natural landscape. Modern humans living in Western societies tend to create an illusion of the controlled planning of their constructive endeavors through the strict temporal structuring of their worldviews. They can maintain this illusion by systematically ignoring the destructive side of their activities or, if necessary, flexibly reinterpreting them in a way that serves their own advantage and integrates them into their constructive endeavors.

See also

Kümmel’s concept of time

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