The Second Birth by Tilo Schabert;

Author:Tilo Schabert; [Schabert, Tilo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780226185156
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2015-10-28T05:00:00+00:00

In Time

Let us dream: Human beings succeed in bringing about their second birth. They are on the path toward their civilization. And let us be watchful: Human beings go off the path toward their civilization. They obliterate the creative life they created.

The truth of this dream lies in the fact that human beings fall prey to time.

Everything that human beings are and do exists only in the Gestalt of time. Time is the power in whose mode human existence occurs. Human beings are occurrences of time, their life takes place as an event of time. Time encompasses human beings, takes them along, carries them forth, and covers them with its Gestalt. Human beings are the time in whose Gestalt they live. They wear time as their countenance, and their entire existence shows what they have become in time. Time makes human beings. It creates its work in them; it transforms, adds, repels, shapes anew, leaves alone, and exercises a forceful domination. Time gives itself a Gestalt for its own history in human beings, as if they were the material of its power. Time leaves no doubts about its power over human beings. With irresistible force, it exhibits to human beings that power through which it acts upon them. Human beings behold themselves in time, and they behold the power of death.

What are human beings in time? Are they completely powerless vis-à-vis time? Or can they resist the clutch of time? Are they pure creatures of time? Or can they also, in time, act for themselves? Is the occurrence of their existence nothing but a temporal occurrence? Or can it also be an event that they themselves determine? Does time always force them into its Gestalt? Or are they not, in the end, also the creators of their Gestalt in time?

As before,1 we find only one answer to this question. Human beings are beings toward birth; they come to their existence in the Gestalten of the power for their existence. One aspect of these Gestalten is that a human being is able to be himself a beginning and an author, a force creative of works; in a word, he is able to be toward himself. Taking the measure of the power of time once again, we must say that time settles upon human life and makes it heavy, refractory to the creative. Time is the deactualizing power that dissolves that complex of Gestalten into which life emerged and in which it had its consistency. “I am time (kala), the destroyer of worlds,” says the Bhagavad Gita.2 However, the power of the beginning is given to human beings in order to oppose the power of time. It is true that they cannot indefinitely stop the effects of time or, to put it precisely, its deactualizing. Everything that has Gestalt has been fashioned in time and also becomes dissolved again in time. Nor can human beings stave off their own “faulty behavior in the conduct of public affairs” forever, to use Plato’s words.

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