The Scent of Time

A Philosophical Essay on the Art of Lingering

Byung-Chul Han, Daniel Steuer

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781509516087
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

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.

1
Non-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 pre...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Preface
• 1. Non-Time
• 2. Time without a Scent
• 3. The Speed of History
• 4. From the Age of Marching to the Age of Whizzing
• 5. The Paradox of the Present
• 6. Fragrant Crystal of Time
• 7. The Time of the Angel
• 8. Fragrant Clock: A Short Excursus on Ancient China
• 9. The Round Dance of the World
• 10. The Scent of Oak Wood
• 11. Profound Boredom
• 12. Vita Contemplativa
• End User License Agreement