Strange Phenomenon

Tillich on Chronos and Kairos Time Experience

“6.3611 We cannot compare any process with the “passage of time”—there is no such thing—but only with another process (say, with the movement of the chronometer).”--Wittgenstein

Chronological time, or Chronos, (the Ancient Greek word, Χρόνος,) is linear time, or objectively measured clock time of science contrasted with the other Greek word for time, kairos, (καιρός ) meaning right, proper, exact, critical time, or lived time. Chronos is quantitative mathematical time, but Kairos is qualitative time. Personal psychological lived time, or temporal existentiality, is just as valid as abstract scientifically measured time. Tillich finds the same distinction in Heideggerian phenomenology as Existential time and objective time:

“Most radical is Heidegger’s distinction between “Existential” and objective Time…In his analysis of Kant he indicates that for himself Time is defined by “selfaffection,”[Sic] grasping oneself or one’s Personal Existence. Temporality is Existentiality. In distinction from this qualitative Time, objective Time is the Time of the flight from our own Personal Existence, into the universal “one,” the “everyone,” the average human Existence, in which quantitative measurement is necessary and justified. But this universal Time is not eigentlich, or proper; it is Time objectified, and it must be interpreted in the light of Existential Time, Time as immediately experienced, and not vice versa” (Paul Tillich Philosophical Writings, Vol. 1, ed. Gunther Wenz, 1989, pdf, p. 368).

For Kant, Time is essentially mathematical, linear, and spatial. A clock is a spatial metaphor (meaning to transfer) for time. The hands of the clock create a spatial pattern transferred from lived Time, but clock time is absolutely different than immediately experienced existential lived time. We can make the clock more accurate, change the spatial metaphor from non-digital to digital patterns, but existential temporality can never be reconstructed with observation and analysis of objectively measured time. Existence cannot be derived from essence. This argument is not based on the tautology of “my inner experience is my inner experience,” but that all knowledge assumes an ontological subject/object polarity.

The Ontology of Cognition

Tillich writes, “The unity of participation and separation in the cognitive situation will always remain a fundamental problem of philosophy”(PW., p. 338). This epistemological problem emerges from the “ontology of cognition”(p. 382). When we ask any question about existence the subject-object structure of reality is already presupposed a priori. Asking the question of Being, or the meaning of Life is “not mere subjective emotions with no ontological significance; they are half-symbolic, half-realistic indication of the structure of Reality itself”(PW., p. 365). Tillich critically reviews in his writings how various philosophers struggled with this assumption and the limits of human cognition. Tillich reminds us Schelling argued that the Principle of Identity in Thought is “valid only in the realm of essences, not of existence.” When Thought (Essence) and Being (Existence) are separated –not aligned, unsynchronized, not attuned--there is no correspondence to Truth. Truth is the state of thought being in agreement with, or attached to existence. The separation of subject and object logically implies the dialectical possibility of their polar unity. So knowledge as a possibility paradoxically depends on separation and detachment so that “There is no knowledge wither there is no separation”(PW., p. 383). Kant founded his metaphysics on the ontological separation between subject and object that characterize finite human reason. Heidegger believed that the Hegelian critique of Kant’s doctrine of the thing-in-itself (Ding-an-sich) was a denial of finite human knowledge. Tillich agrees with the Neo-Kantian critics of mystic ontology that any claim of a priori knowledge of Being is hubristic irrationalism, but “an ontology which restricts itself to the structure of finitude is possible.” Tillich believed--just as Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Husserl believed--that the objective impersonal worldview of naturalistic science is swallowing the creative source of life like a “monstrous mechanism” (PW., p. 366).

Tillich’s philosophical historical survey continues focusing on the fundamental ontological division between essence (Idea) and existence (Nature). This ontological division of cognition is the foundation of existentialist philosophy and the key to a critique of all Hegelian holistic idealist systems that make truth impersonal. Existentialism is the philosophy of personal participatory experience from which all interest and decisions originate—there must be “interest” for actual negation and synthesis (Marx). Hegelianism lost the participatory subject in an impersonal objective dialectical process of a progressive teleological history (Kierkegaard). When Hegelianism claims that “A” is negated into a synthesis with “not-A,” “A” is simply being labeled as negated. This is because thinking (essence) is being taken as the same as existence, which is a common error of pure Idealism. Labeling here is just ideology so there is really no negation of “A.” Marx’s insight is the Idea will fail if personal participatory interest, passion, and decision-making is not involved. Tillich applies this same criticism of confusing thought with existence to “every rational theory of progressive evolution, idealistic as well as naturalistic, including the later so-called “scientific Marxism.”(PW., p. 359). Marx famously said that philosophers have only interpreted existence as essences, but the point is to change existence. From these Schellingian, Hegelian, Marxist, Heideggerian critiques Tillich develops a systematic ethical and political theology of culture grounded in personal participatory temporal existential subjectivity, or Kairos experience. (Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture, 1970, pdf.).

The Kairos Circle

“Awareness of a Kairos is a matter of vision…. It is not a matter of detached observation but of involved experience.”—Tillich, “Systematic Theology, Vol. III, p. 370.

Tillich develops Kairos into an existential theology of participation that is more of an “attitude of consciousness,” than a political party, or a popular cultural fashion. The word Kairos is used in the New Testament as meaning, “fulfillment of time,” or “God’s timing” referring to the churches experiencing the “self-transcending dynamics of history.” Kairos is the opportune time, the right time, or the harvest time of crops. Kairos is the occasion of an existential decision made in a concrete historical situation based on an analysis, and anticipation of something old passing and the new emerging, but calculation does not produce the Kairos-experience. Scientific-technical foresight of unknown forces working along with human decisions makes predicting the world historical process impossible.

In the Greek sense of the word, Kairos means “any practical purpose which a good occasion of some action is given”(Ibid., p. 369). Kairos is used in the New Testament when Jesus speaks of the “signs of the times,” or when Jesus said the time for his death had not come yet; John the Baptist and Jesus used it to announce the fulfillment of time for the Kingdom of God; or when the prophetic Spirit arises in the Pauline era. Paul uses it in speaking of Christ, the “great Kairos,” that can enter history at any time and is selected as the “center of history” which can be re-experienced again, and again (meaningful repetition of time, not mathematical linear time). But not every Kairos is of the same historical importance. Relative “kairoi” (plural meaning “the times”) describes when the Church reforms itself against a distorted age, or refuses to reform against heresy.

The Kairos experience can describe a world-historical paradigm shift in an era of tyranny and domination that suffers from paradigm entropy by failing to provide a meaningful worldview resulting in collapse that makes way for a new paradigm, a new society—and a New Being-- to emerge in history. There is difficulty distinguishing a Kairos from a relative kairoi. Kairoi can be demonically distorted and tragically wrong.

The term Kairos was used after WWI in central Europe to describe religious socialism, but it was also used “…by the nationalist movement, which, through the voice of nazism, attacked the great Kairos and everything for which it stands. The latter use was a demonically distorted experience of a Kairos and led to self-destruction. The Spirit nazism claimed was the spirit of the false prophets, prophets who spoke for an idolatrous nationalism and racialism. Against them the Cross of the Christ was and is the absolute criterion” (Ibid., p. 371).

Kairos is a normative concept, not just a description. The Kairos is the moment the archer decides to release his arrow aimed at a target. Tillich tells us that no date foretold by Kairos has ever been correct. No situation foretold by Kairos ever came into being, but history has been changed. History does not progress in a steady predicable rhythm, but undergoes violence change, extreme creativity, extremely dormant periods, oppression, possibilities, cruelty, liberation, and expectation.

In 1919 Paul Tillich formed the “Kairos Circle” with Eduard Heimann, Carl Mennicke, Arnold Wolfers and others to ask the church to be open to socialism and social democracy, and a synthesis of Christianity with socialism. Tillich published the “Journal for Religious Socialism” between 1920-1927 for the group and later from 1930 published the “New Journal for Socialism.” Tillich declared that theology and ethics must “step forward in opposition to the capitalist and militarist order of society in which we find ourselves, and whose final consequences became obvious in the World War.” Tillich’s ultimate goal is for persons to “experience the divine in everything human, the eternal in everything temporal”(“Paul Tillich as a Systemic Theologian,” by Oswald Bayer in “The Cambridge Companion to Paul Tillich, Ed. by Russell Re Manning, Cambridge University Press, 2009, Pdf., p.19).

Peter Gabriel in Athens, Greece

"Lay Your Hands On Me"

Sat in the corner of the Garden Grill, with plastic flowers

on the window sill

No more miracles, loaves and fishes, been so busy with the

washing of the dishes

Reaction level's much too high - I can do without the stimuli

I'm living way beyond my ways and means, living in the

zone of the in betweens

I can see the flashes on the frozen ocean, static charge of

the cold emotion

Watched on by the distant eyes - watched on by the silent

hidden spies

But still the warmth flows through me

And I sense you know me well

No luck, no golden chances

No mitigating circumstances now

It's only common sense

There are no accidents around here

I am willing - lay your hands on me

I am ready - lay your hands on me

I believe - lay your hands on me, over me

Working in gardens, thornless roses, fat men play with their

garden hoses

Poolside laughter has a cynical bite, sausage speared by the

cocktail satellite

I walk away from from light and sound, down stairways

leading underground