Time and Suffering: False Metaphors, (De-)Synchronous Times, and Internal Dynamics

Abstract

At times, people feel something which they would describe as “time pressure”. But is time really a substance which could put pressure on us? I shall argue that it is not and that indeed a philosophical revisionism is sought for in this context; namely the avoidance of the permanent use of such false physical and economic metaphors like “time pressure”, “time costs”, “loss of time”. Having said that, the real phenomenon underlying this metaphorical talk is a discrepancy or dissonance between different time scales: the individual time scale of a person as structured by her intentions, aims, and goals; and an objective time scale or intersubjective time scale as structured by (natural or social) events of the world around her. I will argue that also the so-named “fear of death”—that is, the suffering resulting from the worry about one’s finitude—can be classified as a special type of such a dissonance; namely as an irreversible dissonance or desynchronization based on the overall stoppage of one’s individual time. This stoppage, in turn, will be characterised as the termination point of the ever new and tensed division or divergence between what is experienced as happening now and as being just past. Towards the end of the paper I will come back to the question of a philosophical revisionism—that is, to the cases where discrepancies or dissonances between individual time and intersubjective time do allow for a “re-synchronization” and, thus, for an avoidance of suffering.