Kairos...Is the Modern Psyche Undergoing a Rite of Passage?...To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven

If the gods of time are multiple like Aïon (that of eternity), or Chronos (the god of time, the son of Ouranos), to differentiate from his homophone Cronos (the equivalent of Saturn, who devoured his children), there is one that invites us to seize the moment, opportune, ephemeral...": Kaïros. A mythological figure close to Hermes and Eros, he is a true gift for feeling "the right moment". Unlike that of the Devil ("dividing one"), the function of Kaïros comes under the symbol ("putting together"), allowing to evaluate very quickly what presents itself and what should be done. Because it provides a disposition to discernment, to work in multiple fields (medicine, navigation, rhetoric, etc.), it allows to make a decision, quickly and well, among multiple possible ones. Few iconographic representations have illustrated him: he was a young man whose only tuft of hair on his head had to be grasped when he passed by... in order to seize the opportunity! Without seeing it or doing nothing, we passed by... Relevant to both secular decisive time and sacred time, it has the particularity of being in relation to synchronicity, synchronizing two events without causal link between them where time and action combine. The difficulty is to seize this time in a timely fashion, this time just right. Symbolic tools can help us, such as images, dreams, archetypal representations or other media, such as astrology or tarots. Kaïros is no stranger to astrology, an area that Jung also looked into at the beginning of his research. Thus in Paracelsica, or The Roots of Consciousness, Jung evokes the possibility of raising the patient's theme during his cure. The celestial symbolism of the birth theme can prove to be a formidable road map of the psyche's time. But Kaïros, god of the "right moment", can also be compared to the Tarots de Marseille, whose cards - in a particular draw - present the constellation of the "moment" for whoever consults them: is it time to seize or not what is presented? Far from the predictable linear physical time (Chronos), Kaïros acts on temporality, it mobilizes our ability to evaluate the circumstances in order to act neither too early nor too late. Kairos (καιρός) is an ancient Greek word meaning the right or opportune moment (the supreme moment). The ancient Greeks had two words for time, chronos referring to sequential time, and kairos, a moment of indeterminate time in which events happen: mood of universal destruction and renewal...has set its mark on our age. This mood
makes itself felt everywhere, politically, socially, and philosophically. We are living in what the Greeks called the kairos- the right moment- for a "metamorphosis of the gods,"
of the fundamental principles and symbols. We are living in what the Greeks called the kairos- the right moment- for a 'metamorphosis of the gods', of the fundamental principles and symbols. This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious man within us who is changing. This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious human within us who is changing. Coming generations will have to take account of this momentous transformation if humanity is not to destroy itself through the might of its own technology and science....So much is at stake and so much depends on the psychological constitution of the modern human.
C. G. Jung
“…what is time? Who can give that a brief or easy answer? Who can even form a conception of it to be put into words? Yet what do we mention more often or familiarly in our conversation than time? We must therefore know what we are talking about when we refer to it, or when we hear someone else doing so. But what, exactly, is that? I know what it is if no one asks; but if anyone does, then I cannot explain it.”

-Saint Augustine, Confessions (book 11, chapter 3) (~400CE)

One thing is for sure, whatever the ego thinks time is—whatever spell it tries to cast with its alphabetic magic to capture it—it will almost certainly miss the mark. Whatever time is, we should admit we are mostly unconscious of it. In fact, it seems to me that there is an intimate connection, perhaps even an identity, between time and the Jungian notion of the unconscious, a connection that archetypal cosmology obviously substantiates. Despite time’s unconscious depths and ineffability, I am after all a philosopher, and we love nothing more than to try to “eff” the ineffable.

In the 15 brief minutes I have with you, I want to introduce, with help from the Ancient Greek language, 3 different modalities of temporality, or rather, I want to introduce you to 3 Gods, each with a powerful hand in shaping our experience of time: Chronos, Kairos, and Aion. In concrete experience, each mode appears to me at least to be co-present and interwoven; I only separate them abstractly to help us get a better sense for the anatomy of time. Of course, we should remember all the while that “we murder to dissect” (Wordsworth).

I therefore humbly ask for the blessing of the Gods of time as I embark on this short journey into their meanings. May you grant us entry into your mysteries.

A Brief History of (the Idea of) Time:

1. Plato suggests in the Timaeus that time is brought forth by the rhythmic dancing of the Sun, Moon, and five other planets then known upon the stage of 12 constellations. Through the cooperative and friendly circling of these archetypal beings, eternity is permitted entry into time. Time, in other words, is said to emerge from the harmonious or regular motion of the heavens—motion regulated by mathematical harmonies. Plato’s ancient vision of a perfect cosmic order had it that the motion of the 7 known planetary spheres was in mathematical harmony with the 8th supraplanetary sphere of fixed constellations, that the ratios of their orbits added up to one complete whole, finding their unity in what has been called the Platonic or Great Year (known to us today as the 26,000 year precession of the equinoxes). This highest of the heavenly spheres was the God known to the ancients as Aion.

2. Aristotle critiqued Plato’s idea of time as produced by motion. Aristotle argued that time couldn’t possibly be produced by motion, because motion itself is something we measure using time. Motion can be fast or slow, he argued, but time always flows at the same rate. Time is simply a way of measuring change. Aristotle’s conception of time, then, is chronic, rather than aionic. His was the beginning of the scientific view of time as a merely conventional measurement, rather than a cosmic motion, as with Plato.

3. Galileo’s view of the universe was, on the face of it, a complete rejection of Aristotle’s physics. Remember that Aristotle still held a teleological view of chronological time: an apple falls to the ground, for Aristotle, because it desires to do so, because earth is its natural home; for Galileo, nothing in the apple compels it to fall, it is simply a blind happening working according to mechanical laws. Galileo, like Newton and Descartes, rejected the idea of purposeful, meaningful time. Time became for them merely a function in a differential equation. In a sense, then, though the early scientists rejected Aristotle’s view of teleological time, they only further formalized Aristotle’s view of time as a measure of motion. Time became t, a variable quantity used to calculate the precise velocity of material bodies through space. 4. Einstein’s theory of relativity revealed how time and space are intimately related, since, strange as it may seem, as speed increases, time slows. But still, time is understood not on its own terms, but is reduced to a linear, easily measurable and quantifiable function. The reduction of time to Chronos may have begun with Aristotle, but was carried to new extremes by modern materialistic science. 5. Today we know things are quite a bit more chaotic than earlier thinkers, including Plato, let on: we live in a chaosmos, not a perfect cosmos; an open spiral not a closed circle. The orbital periods of the planets shift ever so slightly as the years pass, and the “fixed” stars are actually not fixed at all. Our universe is very strange, and measuring time is no easy matter. Even merely chronological time is extremely counter-intuitive: A day on Venus, for instance, is longer than a Venusian year. Everything is spinning around everything else. Time is then not a moving image of eternal perfection; rather, time is what happens when divinity loses its balance and gets dizzy. But don’t worry, there is nowhere to fall over in the infinite expanses of space. What is happening when referring to kairos depends on who is using the word. While chronos is quantitative, kairos has a qualitative, permanent nature. The union of kairos and logos is the philosophical task set for us in philosophy and in all fields that are accessible to the philosophical attitude. The logos is to be taken up into the kairos, universal values into the fullness of time, truth into the fate of existence. The separation of idea and existence has to be brought to an end. It is the very nature of essence to come into existence, to enter into time and fate. This happens to essence not because of something extraneous to it; it is rather the expression of its own intrinsic character, of its freedom. And it is essential to philosophy to stand in existence, to create out of time and fate. It would be wrong if one were to characterize this as a knowledge bound to necessity. Since existence itself stands in fate, it is proper that philosophy should also stand in fate. Existence and knowledge both are subject to fate. The immutable and eternal heaven of truth of which Plato speaks is accessible only to a knowledge that is free from fate—to divine knowledge. The truth that stands in fate is accessible to him who stands within fate, who is himself an element of fate, for thought is a part of existence. And not only is existence fate to thought, but so also is thought fate to existence, just as everything is fate to everything else. Thought is one of the powers of being, it is a power within existence. And it proves its power by being able to spring out of any given existential situation and create something new! It can leap over existence just as existence can leap over it. Because of this characteristic of thought, the view perhaps quite naturally arose that thought may be detached from existence and may therefore liberate man from his hateful bondage to it. But the history of philosophy itself has shown that this opinion is a mistaken one. The leap of thought does not involve a breaking of the ties with existence; even in the act of its greatest freedom, thought remains bound to fate. Thus the history of philosophy shows that all existence stands in fate. Every finite thing possesses a certain power of being of its own and thus possesses a capacity for fate. The greater a finite thing’s autonomous power of being is, the higher is its capacity for fate and the more deeply is the knowledge of it involved in fats. From physics on up to the normative cultural sciences there is a gradation, the logos standing at the one end and the kairos at the other. But there is no point at which either logos or kairos alone is to be found. Hence even our knowledge of the fateful character of philosophy must at the same time stand in logos and in kairos. If it stood only in the kairos, it would be without validity and the assertion would be valid only for the one making it; if it stood only in the logos, it would be without fate and would therefore have no part in existence, for existence is involved in fate.What are the deep stirrings in the collective psyche of the West? Can we discern any larger patterns in the immensely complex and seemingly chaotic flux and flow of our age? Influenced by the depth psychology tradition founded a century ago by Freud and Jung,and especially since the 1960s and the radical increase in psychological self-consciousness that era helped mediate, the cultural ethos of recent decades has made us well aware how important is the psychological task of understanding our personal histories. We have sought ever deeper insight into our individual biographies, seeking to recover the often hidden sources of our present condition, to render conscious those unconscious forces and complexes that shape our lives. Many now recognize that same task as critical for our entire civilization. What individuals and psychologists have long been doing has now become the collective responsibility of our culture: to make the unconscious conscious. And for a civilization, to a crucial extent, history is the great unconscious- history not so much as the external
chronology of political and military milestones, but as the interior history of a civilization: that unfolding drama evidenced in a culture's evolving cosmology, its philosophy and science, its religious consciousness, its art, its myths. For us to participate fully and creatively in shaping our future, we need to better understand the underlying patterns and
influences of our collective past. Only then can we begin to grasp what forces move within us today, and perhaps glimpse what may be emerging on the new millennial
horizon. I focus my discussion here on the West, but not out of any triumphalist presumption that the West is somehow intrinsically superior to other civilizations and thus most worthy of our attention. I do so rather because it is the West that has brought forth the political,technological, intellectual, and spiritual currents that have been most decisive in
constellating the contemporary world situation in all its problematic complexity. For better or worse, the character of the West has had a global impact, and will continue to do
so for the foreseeable future. Yet I also address the historical evolution of Western consciousness because, for most of us reading these words, this development represents
our own tradition, our legacy, our ancestral cultural matrix. Attending carefully and critically to this tradition fulfills a certain responsibility to the past, to our ancestors, just as
attempting to understand its deeper implications fulfills a responsibility to the future, to our children. A paradox confronts every sensitive observer about the West: On the one hand, we cannot fail to recognize a certain dynamism, a brilliant, heroic impulse, even a nobility, at work in Western civilization and in Western thought. We see this in the great
achievements of Greek philosophy and art, for example, or in the Sistine Chapel and other Renaissance masterpieces, in the plays of Shakespeare, in the music of Bach or Beethoven. We see it in the brilliance of the Copernican revolution, with the tremendous cosmological and even metaphysical transformation it has wrought in our civilization's
world view. We see it in the unprecedented space flights of a generation ago, landing men on the moon, or, more recently, in the spectacular images of the vast cosmos coming
from the Hubbell telescope and the new data and new perspectives these images have brought forth. And of course the great democratic revolutions of modernity, and the
powerful emancipatory movements of our own era, vividly reflect this extraordinary dynamism and even nobility of the West. Yet at the same time we are forced to admit that this very same historical tradition has caused immense suffering and loss, for many other cultures and peoples, for many people within Western culture itself, and for many other forms of life on the planet. Moreover, the West has played the central role in bringing about a subtly growing and seemingly
inexorable crisis on our planet, a crisis of multidimensional complexity: ecological, political, social, economic, intellectual, psychological, spiritual. To say our global civilization is becoming dysfunctional scarcely conveys the gravity of the situation. For humankind and the planet, we face the possibility of great catastrophe. For many forms of life on the Earth, that catastrophe has already taken place. How can we make sense of this tremendous paradox in the character and meaning of the West? If we examine many of the intellectual and cultural debates of our time, particularly near the epicenter of the major paradigm battles today, it is possible to see looming behind them two fundamental interpretations, two archetypal stories or metanarratives, concerning the evolution of human consciousness and the history of the Western mind. In essence these two metanarratives reflect two deep myths in the collective psyche- and let us define myths here not as mere falsehoods, nor as collective fantasies of an arbitrary sort, but rather as profound and enduring patterns of meaning that inform the human psyche and constellate its diverse realities. These two great myths in the collective psyche structure our historical self-understanding in very different ways. One could be called the myth of progress, the other the myth of the fall. The first, familiar to all of us from our education, describes the evolution of human consciousness, and particularly the history of the Western mind, as an extraordinary progressive development, a long heroic journey from a primitive world of dark ignorance,
suffering, and limitation to a brighter modern world of ever increasing knowledge, freedom, and well-being. This great trajectory of progress is seen as having been made possible by the sustained development of human reason, and above all by the emergence of the modern mind. We recognize this view whenever we encounter a book or program whose title is something like "The Ascent of Man" or "The Discoverers" or "Man's Conquest of Space," and so forth. The direction of history is seen as onward and upward. Humanity is here often personified as "man," and imaged, at least implicitly, as
a solar masculine hero of Promethean character: bold, restless, brilliantly innovative, ceaselessly pressing forward with his intelligence and will, breaking out of the structures
and limitations of the past, forever seeking greater freedom and new horizons, ascending to ever higher levels of development. The apex of human achievement in this vision
begins with the ascendance of modern science and individualistic democracy. The view of history is one of progressive emancipation and empowerment. It is a vision that emerged fully in the course of the European Enlightenment, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, though its roots are as old as Western civilization itself. In many respects our modern consciousness is so fully identified with this myth that it has become our common sense, the lineaments of our self-image as modern humans.The first, familiar to all of us from our education, describes the evolution of human consciousness, and particularly the history of the Western mind, as an extraordinary progressive development, a long heroic journey from a primitive world of dark ignorance,suffering, and limitation to a brighter modern world of ever increasing knowledge, freedom, and well-being. This great trajectory of progress is seen as having been made
possible by the sustained development of human reason, and above all by the emergence of the modern mind. We recognize this view whenever we encounter a book or program whose title is something like "The Ascent of Man" or "The Discoverers" or "Man's Conquest of Space," and so forth. The direction of history is seen as onward and upward. Humanity is here often personified as "man," and imaged, at least implicitly, as a solar masculine hero of Promethean character: bold, restless, brilliantly innovative, ceaselessly pressing forward with his intelligence and will, breaking out of the structures and limitations of the past, forever seeking greater freedom and new horizons, ascending
to ever higher levels of development. The apex of human achievement in this vision begins with the ascendance of modern science and individualistic democracy. The view
of history is one of progressive emancipation and empowerment. It is a vision that emerged fully in the course of the European Enlightenment, in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, though its roots are as old as Western civilization itself. In many respects our modern consciousness is so fully identified with this myth that it has become
our common sense, the lineaments of our self-image as modern humans. The other view, whose presence has become much stronger in our cultural discussion in
recent years, though it was always present to one extent or another as a compensatory countercurrent to the progressive view, describes this story in quite opposite terms. In the
form this myth has taken in our era, the evolution of human consciousness and the history of the Western mind are seen as a tragic story of humanity's radical fall and separation
from an original state of oneness with nature and with being. In its primordial condition, humankind had possessed an instinctive knowledge of the profound sacred unity and
interconnectedness of the world; but under the influence of the Western mind, and especially intensifying with the ascendance of the modern mind, the course of history has
brought about a deep schism between humankind and nature, and a desacralization of the world. This development has coincided with an increasingly destructive human
exploitation of nature, the devastation of traditional indigenous cultures, and an increasingly unhappy state of the human soul, which experiences itself as ever more
isolated, shallow, and unfulfilled. In this perspective, both humanity and nature are seen as having suffered grievously under a long domination of thought and society associated
with both patriarchy and modernity, with the worst consequences being produced by the oppressive hegemony of Western industrial societies empowered by modern science and technology. The nadir of this fall is seen as the present time of planetary ecological disaster, moral disorientation, and spiritual emptiness, which is the direct consequence of human hubris as embodied above all in the structure and spirit of the modern Western mind and ego. Here the historical perspective is one which reveals a progressive impoverishment of human life and the human spirit, a fragmentation of original unities, a ruinous destruction of the sacred community of being.

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Camera:	Panasonic DMC-GX7
Aperture:	f/4.1
Exposure Time:	0.003 sec (1/400)
Focal Length:	108mm (35mm equivalent: 216mm)
ISO:	200
Exposure Bias:	-1.66 EV
Flash:	Off, Did not fire
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Exposure Mode:	Auto bracket
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