Lunchtime reflections on Leadership and Life
I guess that sounds like a stupid question. So let me qualify…
What if time, as Aristotle claimed, doesn’t exist independent of motion? Maybe I should add another warning: strictly speaking, this isn’t about chronological time (in case you’re looking at your watch), but about what Whitehead, Deleuze and others discussed as “ontological” time…
Why does that matter? Hmmm it’s hard to frame, but let me try to put it this way: if time is not independent of movement, but instead movement is co-constitutive of time, we are shifting our perspective on reality from a question of (static) “being” towards (the process of) “becoming”.
That would probably also imply that we would start rejecting a theory of movement that simply centers on what Aristotle called the “efficient cause”. In other words, in a world where time is just an independent variable of our perception, causation of movement is necessarily material: motion arises as a consequence of the external kinetic energy being applied to (push or pull) an object. Whereas if movement is constitutive of time, our focus shifts to the “telos”, the immanent inner energy of each object, and its purposeful motion to “become itself”.
It’s not hard to see why modern science fought hard to move away from teleology, as it couldn’t accept the idea that immaterial forces would animate our world. From the discovery and revelation of the inner essence and spirit of all things, and their becoming, we quickly turned to the science of domination and control of all things (and nature), and the maximization of their utility.
What I want to emphasize is that this is not just a shift in language. It runs much deeper. It is a paradigm shift. It turns our understanding of reality from inner to outer causation, from essence to control, from time as existential to time as coincidental. And I cannot help thinking that maybe we jumped too quickly.
If today all our “time is money”, this in fact implies that the single explanatory cause for every motion in our world is its relation to price, and our single measure for motion becomes efficient monetisation. If instead, the “volume of time” is an expression of the manifold potentiality of our becoming, what matters is not the control of time but the CREATION of time through our conscious existence, through the actualisation of our becoming, our “Dasein” as Heidegger called it.
Who knows, maybe in the end chronological time is one of those great historical deceivers that imprison us and deflect our imagination from those most essential things in life. Maybe time has long transmuted into a maladaptive collective defense against existential angst and its professional time management disciples are nothing but disguised prophets of societal nihilism…
Maybe we should turn off time and focus instead on our ability to create timeless moments, in the “here and now”, as joyful expression of our innermost humanity, beauty, goodness, love…
#transformation #leadership #personaldevelopment #philosophy
Q&A Summary and references from the extensive LinkedIn conversation following soon.
