Sören Kierkegaard
According to Kierkegaard, temporality is a structural mode of existence; it constitutes the horizon of the existential determination of man. For him, time is an essential constitutive factor for specifically human relationships with the world and with oneself, each with a specific understanding of time, certain existential basic attitudes and different possibilities for giving meaning.
Kierkegaard distinguishes between three forms of existence that can overlap or merge into one another in the concrete reality of life. The aesthetician derives his meaning in life from the manifold stimuli of the world, the ethicist from himself (decision, duty), the religious person from his relationship to God or to the Absolute. Each of these stages is correlated with a corresponding understanding of temporality.
The aesthetician orientates himself towards his own changeable, playful and imaginative sensual pleasure and desire. Kierkegaard distinguishes between the unreflective aesthetician, who is completely filled with the things he desires, and the reflective aesthetician, who distances himself from himself. The former lives from moment to moment, without any inner connection. His temporality is that of a mere series of events. His sense of time is transience. The latter begins to experience succession as duration, as an undesirable recurrence of the same situations over and over again. His sense of time is boredom, which he experiences as emptiness and paralyzing inactivity.
For the bored aesthetician, time stands still; it is not constitutive of his existential state. Time only exists in the succession of individual, disparate moments. Aesthetic temporality is abstract and negative, without self-reference. The transition to the ethical is made possible by turning to oneself, to one’s own interiority (immanence). The transition mode is formed by irony as a negative force that is directed against the aesthetic itself and is accompanied by a profound shock, despair, which suddenly reverses the relationship to oneself.
The ethicist decides on a self-imposed goal in life and gains from this the absolute freedom to determine his own life. The self that chooses itself is a finite, historical self that finds reason and responsibility for its own actions (sense of duty) within itself and must prove itself again and again. To be an ethicist means to become oneself and to confirm oneself in becoming. The choice that must always be made anew equips him with a history. „In repetition, the ethicist assures himself of the past and makes it fruitful for shaping the present and future.“ Repetition does not mean a mere return of what has already been experienced, but a constantly new positing of one’s own self. Wanting repetition requires the courage to approve of the chosen life and thus to want it again and again.
The religious person reaches beyond the immanent self-reference of the ethical to the transcendent when the person is deeply shaken by something „terrible“ that is independent of what is ethically determined, which causes him to „fear and tremble.“ For Kierkegaard, this reveals the Absolute (God), which refers to an actual existential constitution of the subject that is not accessible to any rational explanation because it expresses a paradoxical self-relationship that is connected with a characteristic temporality.
The religious perception of time is characterized by events that break in suddenly, unexpectedly and unplanned. The non-repeatable, discontinuous leap leads to a new irrational relationship to oneself, in which man becomes aware of his inadequacy in escaping a „guilt“ that he did not want and yet is responsible for. Kierkegaard calls the experience of being affected by this kind of guilt, this state of being constantly exposed to unavoidable transgressions, „sin.“ The event-like temporality shows the constant uncontrollability of world events and the consequences of one’s own actions, which humans must nevertheless face up to at all times.
The suddenly occurring, shocking event that initiates the self-reference to the transcendent constitutes (or marks) for Kierkegaard a temporary moment of fear, a moment of fundamental existential uncertainty, filled with the awareness of never being able to do justice to one’s own existence as a wealth of possibilities (awareness of sin). For Kierkegaard, the essence of existence is revealed at this point in the realization of the impossibility of realizing one’s own possibilities: of being able and not being able at the same time.
The concrete, situation-bound self-relationship, the existential dimension of being human, fixes the relationship between body and soul as a temporary possibility under different aspects: as temporality and eternity, necessity and freedom, finitude and infinity (hb: having become and being, determined and indeterminate, limited and unlimited). The relationship of the mind (self) to itself is expressed in the fear of the free choice of the possibility of doing or not doing something in ignorance of the circumstances and the consequences.
The concrete individual experience in the moment of existential uncertainty goes hand in hand with an existentially determined, individual temporality that differs from an abstract understanding of time as a mere succession of irrelevant, interchangeable moments in time. It is a self-related temporality that arises from the concrete relationship between body and soul. The moment of existential uncertainty is not an event in time, but a setting of temporality determined by the self (mind).
The time of sensory experience (of the body in Kierkegaard’s anthropological model) corresponds as „infinite succession to a homogeneous, undifferentiated passing in which no present moment can be identified and held on to. It is empty of content and always in the process of disappearing. The time of eternity (of the soul) represents the idea of a homogeneous, undifferentiated duration, a content-filled present without past and future. In the existentially experienced moment, the self (the spirit) relates time and eternity to one another and interrupts infinite succession and eternal duration by marking a present (now) that is separated from a past and a future.
In the words of Frischmann (p. 71): “The setting of the moment is an achievement of the spirit, which highlights a specific, existentially formative moment from the homogeneous succession of time. In the moment, the existentially significant becomes visible and thus temporality becomes clear as the contours of the self-relationship.” Kierkegaard: “The moment is that ambiguity in which time and eternity touch, and thus the concept of temporality is set, where time constantly cuts off eternity and eternity constantly penetrates time. Only now does the division mentioned take on its meaning: the present time, the past time, the future time.“ (quoted from Frischmann, The Concept of Anxiety, p. 105)
Even the unreflected everyday time distinguishes between yesterday, today and tomorrow. But these determinations are external and affect the subject from the outside. In contrast, temporality structured by the moment arises from a deep interiority of subjective existence. From the instant of existential uncertainty, a horizon of meaning emerges in which the present, future and past are reinterpreted. Looking ahead to an uncertain future full of possibilities opens up a horizon for designing one’s own existence, from which the present and past are retrospectively reassessed. „With every decision, the question remains whether it was the right one, how life would have turned out if one had decided differently.“ (Frischmann, p. 75)
Literature:
Frischmann, Bärbel, Existenz und Zeitlichkeit bei Sören Kierkegaard, in Die Realität der Zeit, Hg. Johann Kreuzer und Georg Mohr, Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2007, S. 59-76
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