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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
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.
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Notes
1. Non-Time
Notes
2. Time without a Scent
Notes
3. The Speed of History
Notes
4. From the Age of Marching to the Age of Whizzing
Notes
5. The Paradox of the Present
Notes
6. Fragrant Crystal of Time
Notes
7. The Time of the Angel
Notes
8. Fragrant Clock: A Short Excursus on Ancient China
Notes
9. The Round Dance of the World
Notes
10. The Scent of Oak Wood
Notes
11. Profound Boredom
Notes
12. Vita Contemplativa
I. A BRIEF HISTORY OF LEISURE [ MUSSE ]
II. THE MASTER–SLAVE DIALECTIC
III. VITA ACTIVA OR ON ACTIVE LIFE
IV. VITA CONTEMPLATIVA , OR OF REFLECTIVE LIFE
Notes
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Byung-Chul Han
The Scent of Time
A Philosophical Essay on the Art of Lingering
Translated by Daniel Steuer
polity
First published in German as Duft der Zeit. Ein philosophischer Essay zur Kunst des Verweilens © transcript Verlag, Bielefeld, 2009
This translation is published by arrangement with transcript Verlag, Germany.
This English edition © Polity Press, 2017
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station Landing, Suite 300,Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1608-7
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
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PREFACE
Today’s temporal crisis is not a crisis of acceleration. The age of acceleration is already over. What we experience today as acceleration is only one of the symptoms of temporal dispersal. Today’s temporal crisis is caused by a dyschronicity which leads to various temporal disturbances and irritations. Time is lacking a rhythm that would provide order, and thus it falls out of step. Dyschronicity lets time whizz, so to speak. The feeling that life is accelerating is really the experience of a time that is whizzing without a direction.
Dyschronicity is not the result of a push for further acceleration. In the first place, it is the atomization of time which is responsible for dyschronicity. It is also the reason for the feeling that time passes much more quickly than it used to. Due to the temporal dispersal, no experience of duration is possible. Nothing comports time.1 Life is no longer embedded in any ordering structures or coordinates that would found duration. Even things with which we identify are fleeting and ephemeral. Thus, we become radically transient ourselves. The atomization of life goes hand in hand with an atomization of identity. All we have is our self, our little ego. We are subject to a radical loss of space and time, even of world, of being-with. Poverty of world is a phenomenon of dyschronicity. It reduces the human being to a tiny body that is kept healthy at all costs. Otherwise, what would we have? The health of one’s fragile body is a substitute for world and God. Nothing outlasts death. Thus, dying is particularly difficult today. And we age, without becoming old.
This book investigates the causes and symptoms of dyschronicity in historical as well as systematic terms. But it also offers reflections on possibilities for recovery. While these touch upon heterochronic or uchronic moments, the present study is not limited to finding and rehabilitating these exceptional, extraordinary places of duration. Rather, its retrospection draws attention to the prospective need for life to take on a different form, down to its everyday details, so that the temporal crisis can be averted. It will not mourn the passing of the time of storytelling. The end of narration, the end of history, does not need to bring about a temporal emptiness. Rather, it opens up the possibility of a life-time that can do without theology and teleology, but which possesses a scent of its own. But this presupposes a revitalization of the vita contemplativa.
Not the least cause for today’s temporal crisis is the absolute value attached to the vita activa. This leads to an imperative to work, which degrades the human being into an animal laborans. The hyperkinesia of everyday life deprives human existence of all contemplative elements and of any capacity for lingering. It leads to a loss of world and time. So-called strategies of deceleration do not overcome this temporal crisis; they even cover up the actual problem. What is necessary is a revitalization of the vita contemplativa. The temporal crisis will only be overcome once the vita activa, in the midst of its crisis, again incorporates the vita contemplativa.
Notes
1.
Transl. note: ‘
Nichts
verhält
die Zeit.
’ – This unusual form of expression is an allusion to Heidegger’s use of ‘comportment’.
1Non-Time1
… so that in the wavering moment …
there should be something, at least, that endures.
Friedrich Hölderlin2
Nietzsche’s ‘ultimate man’ is remarkably relevant to our present times.3 ‘Health’, which is nowadays considered an absolute value – almost a religion – was already ‘respect[ed]’ by the ultimate man.4 At the same time, he was also a hedonist. He had his ‘little pleasure for the day’ and his ‘little pleasure for the night’. In him, sense and longing have given way to pleasure and delight: ‘What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star? thus asks the Ultimate Man and blinks.’5 His long, healthy, yet uneventful life finally becomes unbearable to him, and so he turns to drugs, and in the end is killed by drugs: ‘A little poison now and then: that produces pleasant dreams. And a lot of poison at last, for a pleasant death.’6 He seeks to extend his life to infinity through a rigorous politics of health, yet it is paradoxically cut short even before his time has come. Instead of dying, he comes to an end in non-time.
Whoever cannot die at the right time must perish in non-time. Dying implies that a life comes to its proper end; it is a life’s conclusion. If life is deprived of every form of meaningful closure, it will be ended in non-time. Dying is difficult in a world in which ending or completion has given way to a passing without end or direction, to a permanent state of being unfinished and beginning anew – in a world, that is, in which individual lives do not terminate in a concrete form or totality, but in which the course of life ends abruptly in non-time.
A general inability to end and to conclude is also the cause of today’s acceleration. Time is running off because it cannot find an end or conclusion, because it is not restrained by any temporal gravitational forces. Acceleration is an expression of the bursting of the temporal dam. There are no longer any dams that regulate, articulate or give a rhythm to the flow of time. There are no dams to hold or halt time by giving it something to hold on to – ‘hold’ in its exquisite double meaning. When time loses all rhythm, when it dissipates into the open without any hold or direction, then all right or good time also disappears.
Against perishing in non-time, Zarathustra invokes an altogether different kind of death: ‘Many die too late and some die too early. Still the doctrine sounds strange: “Die at the right time.”/ Die at the right time: thus Zarathustra teaches./ To be sure, he who never lived at the right time could hardly die at the right time!’7 We humans have altogether lost the sense of the right time. The right time gives way to non-time. Death, too, comes in non-time, like a thief: ‘But equally hateful to the fighter as to the victor is your grinning death, which comes creeping up like a thief – and yet comes as a master.’8 It is not possible to fit a freedom unto death within life itself. As opposed to death as a perishing in non-time, what Nietzsche has in mind is a ‘consummating death’ which actively shapes life itself. Against those ‘rope-makers’9 weaving their long lives, Zarathustra expounds his doctrine of a free death: ‘I shall show you the consummating death, which shall be a spur and a promise to the living.’ This is also precisely Heidegger’s idea of ‘Being-free for death’. Death is deprived of its non-timeliness by being taken into life and into the present as a shaping and consummating force.10 The possibility of Nietzsche’s free and consummating death, and of Heidegger’s Being-free for death, both depend on a temporal gravitation that ensures that the present is framed [umspannt], closed round, by the past and future. This temporal tension [temporale Spannungsverhältnis] removes the present from its passing without end or direction and infuses it with meaningfulness. The right time, or the right moment, only arises out of the temporal tension within a time that has a direction. In atomized time, by contrast, all temporal points are alike. Nothing distinguishes one point in time from another. The decay of time disperses dying into perishing. Death puts an end to life, life as a directionless sequence of present moments, and it does so in non-time. This is the reason why dying is particularly difficult today. Nietzsche, like Heidegger, opposes the decay of time which de-temporalizes death and turns it into a perishing in non-time:
He who has a goal and an heir wants death at the time most favourable to his goal and his heir.
And out of reverence for his goal and his heir he will hang up no more withered wreaths in the sanctuary of life.
Truly, I do not want to be like the rope-makers: they spin out their yarn and as a result continually go backwards themselves.11
Nietzsche emphatically invokes ‘heirs’ and ‘goals’; he is obviously not fully aware of the full significance of the death of God. For one of its ultimate consequences is the end of history itself – which is to say, the end of ‘heirs’ and ‘goals’. God functions like a stabilizer of time. He ensures a lasting, perennial present. Thus, God’s death punctuates time itself, deprives it of any theological, teleological, historical tension [Spannkraft]. The present moment shrinks to a fleeting point in time, devoid of heirs and free of goals. The present no longer trails things past and future along with it. What Nietzsche undertakes is the difficult attempt to restore temporal tension after the death of God and in light of the approaching end of history. The idea of the ‘eternal return of the same’ is not just the idea of an amor fati: it is precisely an attempt at rehabilitating fate, even at rehabilitating the time of fate.
Heidegger’s ‘they’ takes its cue from Nietzsche’s ultimate man.12 The characteristics he attributes to the ‘they’ also apply neatly to the ultimate man. Nietzsche characterizes him as follows: ‘Everyone wants the same thing, everyone is the same: whoever thinks otherwise goes voluntarily into the madhouse.’13 Heidegger’s ‘they’ is also a temporal phenomenon. The decay of time goes hand in hand with the rise of mass society and increasing uniformity. Authentic existence, the individual in the emphatic sense of the word, is an obstacle to the smooth functioning of the ‘they’, i.e. of the masses. The acceleration of life prevents the emergence of deviating forms, of things developing and taking on distinct and independent forms. For that to happen, there would need to exist a time of maturation – but this is lacking. In this respect, there is hardly any difference between Nietzsche’s ‘ultimate man’ and Heidegger’s ‘they’.
Like Nietzsche, Heidegger invokes ‘heritage’ [Erbschaft] and ‘tradition’ as an antidote to the decay of time into a mere sequence of point-like moments. Everything ‘good’, he writes, is ‘a heritage’. ‘Authentic existence’ presupposes ‘the handing down of a heritage’ [Erbe].14 Authentic existence is the ‘repetition’ which ‘makes a reciprocative rejoinder to the possibility of that existence which has-been-there’.15 It is the task of ‘heritage’ and ‘tradition’ to found an historical continuity. Faced with the rapid succession of the ‘new’, Heidegger invokes the ‘old’. His Being and Time is an attempt to restore history in the face of its approaching end – more precisely, to restore it as an empty form, as a history which simply asserts its temporal formative force, devoid of any content.
Today, things linked to time become obsolete much faster than they used to. They quickly become things of the past, and therefore escape our attention. The present is reduced to a point of currentness. It no longer lasts. Faced with the domination of a point-like, ahistorical present, Heidegger felt that it was necessary to deprive ‘the “today” of its character as present’.16 The cause of the shrinking present, or the disappearing of duration, is not acceleration, as many mistakenly believe.17 The relationship between the loss of duration and acceleration is far more complex than that. Time tumbles on [stürzt fort], like an avalanche, precisely because it no longer contains anything to hold on to within itself. The tearing away of time,18 the directionless acceleration of processes (which, because of the lack of direction, is no longer really an acceleration at all), is triggered by those point-like presences between which there is no longer any temporal attraction. Acceleration in the proper sense of the word presupposes a course which directs the flow.
Truth itself is a temporal phenomenon. It is a reflection of the lasting, eternal present. The tearing away of time, the shrinking and fleeting present, makes it void. Experience is also based on temporal extension, on interconnections between temporal horizons. For the experiencing subject, what has elapsed has not simply vanished or been discarded. It is, rather, constitutive for the subject’s present, for its understanding of itself. A farewell [Abschied] does not dilute the presence of the past; it may even make it a deeper presence. What has become part of the past [das Abgeschiedene] is therefore not fully cut off [abgeschnitten] from the present of experience. Rather, it remains linked up with it. And the subject of experience must be open to what is coming, even to the surprises and the unexpected that the future holds. If it is not, the subject freezes, and becomes a labourer, someone who merely works away time, without changing himself. Changes de-stabilize the process of work. The subject of experience, by contrast, is never identical with itself. It inhabits the transition from past to future. Experience [Erfahrung] encompasses a vast temporal space. It is highly time-intensive, as opposed to lived experience [Erlebnis], which is point-like and time-poor. Knowledge is as time-intensive as experience. It derives its force from the past as well as from the future. Only through this linking up of temporal horizons does familiarity condense into knowledge. This temporal condensation also distinguishes knowledge from information, which is empty of time, so to speak – timeless in the sense of being deprived of time. Because of this temporal neutrality, information can be stored and arbitrarily retrieved. If things are deprived of memory, they become information or commodities. They are pushed into a timefree, ahistorical space. The storage of information is preceded by the deletion of memory, the deletion of historical time. Where time decays into a mere sequence of point-like presences, it also loses any dialectical tension. Dialectics is in itself an intensive temporal process. Dialectical movement depends on a complex linking up of temporal horizons, i.e. on a not-yet of the already. What is implicitly present in a particular presence, pulls that presence out of itself and sets it in motion. The motive power of dialectics results from the temporal tension between an already and a not-yet, between a ‘having been’ and a future. The present within a dialectical process is rich in tension, while today’s present lacks all tension.
A present that is reduced to the point of the current moment intensifies non-timeliness at the level of actual behaviour too. Promising, commitment and fidelity, for instance, are genuinely temporal practices. They bind the future by continuing the present into the future and linking the two, thus creating a temporal continuity that has a stabilizing effect. This continuity protects the future against the violence of non-time. Where the practice of long-term commitment (which is also a form of conclusion) gives way to increasing shorttermism, non-timeliness also increases, and is reflected at the psychological level in the form of anxiety and restlessness. Growing discontinuity, the atomization of time, destroys the experience of continuity. The world becomes non-timely.
The counter-image to time fulfilled is time extended into an empty duration without beginning or end. Empty duration is not opposed to the tearing away of time; it is, rather, a neighbouring phenomenon. It is, so to speak, a silent form, or the negative, of accelerated doing; it is the time that would remain if there were nothing left to do or make, i.e. the temporal form of empty doing. Empty duration and the tearing away of time are consequences of de-temporalization. The restlessness of accelerated doing extends into sleep. It continues at night in the form of the empty duration of sleeplessness:
Sleepless night: so there is a formula for those tormented hours, drawn out without prospect of end or dawn, in the vain effort to forget time’s empty passing. But truly terrifying are the sleepless nights when time seems to contract and run fruitlessly through our hands … But what is revealed in such contraction of the hours is the reverse of time fulfilled. If in the latter the power of experience breaks the spell of duration and gathers past and future into the present, in the hasteful sleepless night duration causes unendurable dread.19
Adorno’s expression ‘hasteful sleepless night’ is no paradox: haste and empty duration share a common origin. The hasteof day rules over the night as empty form. Time, now robbed of any hold, any holding gravitation, is running away, is elapsing inexorably. This tearing away of time – time elapsing without a hold – turns the night into an empty duration. Left exposed at the centre of empty duration, no sleep is possible.
Empty duration is a non-articulated, directionless time without any meaningful before or after, remembrance or expectation. In the face of time’s infinity, a short human life is a nothing. Death is an external power which ends life at non-time. One perishes prematurely at non-time. Death would cease to be a power were it a conclusion that follows from life and as the result of a lifetime. Only such a conclusion would make it possible to live one’s life to the end on its own terms, and to die at the right time. Only temporal forms of conclusion create duration – meaningful and fulfilled time – against a bad infinity. Sleep, too – good sleep – would ultimately be a form of conclusion.
Tellingly, Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdue begins by saying ‘Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure’ (For a long time I would go to bed early). In the English translation, the expression ‘bonne heure’ disappears altogether. These are far-reaching words on time and happiness (bonheur). The bonne heure, the good time, is the counter-image to bad infinity, to empty and therefore bad duration in which no sleep is possible. Torn time [Zeitriß], the radical discontinuity of time which does not allow for remembrance, leads to a torturous sleeplessness. The first passages of Proust’s novel, by contrast, present a gladdening experience of continuity, the mise en scène of an effortless hovering between sleeping, dreaming and awakening again, amidst a fluid medium made up of images belonging to memory and perception, a free to-and-fro between the past and present, between solid order and playful confusion. There is no tearing of time that would throw the protagonist into an empty duration. Rather, the sleeper is a player, wanderer and also master of time: ‘When a man is asleep, he has in a circle around him the chain of the hours, the sequence of the years, the order of the heavenly bodies.’20 It is true that occasionally the sleeper also experiences confusion and irritation, but they never end in catastrophe. Rather, ‘the good angel of certainty’21 is there to help:
when I awoke in the middle of the night, not knowing where I was, I could not even be sure at first who I was, … but then the memory … would come like a rope let down from heaven to draw me up out of the abyss of not-being,22 from which I could never have escaped by myself: in a flash I would traverse centuries of civilization, and out of a blurred glimpse of oil-lamps, then of shirts with turned-down collars, would gradually piece together the original components of my ego.23
Instead of indifferent and nameless sounds from outside or the excessively loud ticking of a clock, as would be typical for the state of sleeplessness, for empty duration, the sleeper’s ears hear something sonorous. Even the darkness of night appears colourful and lively like a kaleidoscope: ‘I would fall asleep again, and thereafter would reawaken for short snatches only, just long enough to hear the regular creaking of the wainscot, or to open my eyes to stare at the shifting kaleidoscope of the darkness, to savour, in a momentary glimmer of consciousness, the sleep which lay heavy upon the furniture …’24
