Minding Time: Chronos, Kairos, and Aion in an Archetypal Cosmos

Notes for a brief talk I gave today at CIIS.

[Update (July 15, 2016): This talk was expanded into an article published in Archai: The Journal of Archetypal Cosmology]

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 “…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.

Time comes in three modalities:

1. Chronos (chronic time/Saturn): quantitative, homogeneous, secular time. The modern age has entirely succumbed to the rule of chronic time. Chronic time is empty, passing meaninglessly and without narrative arc. Chronic time is mere conventional measurement, a means of counting time so as to be able to use it as we see fit for our private economic or public political ends, as something to be “spent” (time is money) or “wasted” (time is a resource). Chronic time is laid out on a grid upon which unremarkable change can be plotted; it is time as materialistic physical science knows it, where the past is imagined to be no different ontologically from the present or the future (that is, there is no creativity, no teleology). Chronic time is utterly indifferent to what happens, a passive background rather than an active and interested participant. With Chronos, the temporal situation is indifferent to the subject. Chronic time is ruled by death anxiety: Chronos is the time of the ego.

2. Kairos (kaironic time/Uranus)- qualitative, heterogeneous, seasonal, archetypally informed time. Kaironic time is full of potential, such that it beckons us to participate in special moments more pregnant than others. Kairos reveals to us that there are certain times when the order of things, the cosmos, the would-soul, is attempting to persuade we human souls to participate in the unfolding of events in a particular way, times when a certain mood descends as though from heaven to characterize earthly events. Kairos allows for a “subject-situation correlation.” Kaironic time introduces novelty into the banality of linear, chronic time. It is time as “creative advance,” to use A.N. Whitehead’s phrase. It is timeliness. We might even refer to the planetary archetypes as kairoi, as principles of timeliness, rulers of the different ways eternity puts on the dress of time. When we ask, “what time is it?”, we receive an answer in chronic terms; when we ask “what kind of time is it?”, we receive an answer in kaironic terms. If Chronos is the time of the ego, Kairos is the time of the Soul.

3. Aion (aionic time/Neptune)- unbounded, sacred or eternal time. Aion is time as a moving image of eternity, as an eternal circle that, when we contemplate it, grants us eternal life. Aion is time as experienced by the archetypes themselves (rather than, as with Kaironic time, when the archetypes spill out of eternity to participate in our more mundane experience). Aionic time is a sphere whose center is everywhere, and whose circumference is nowhere. Aionic time is our immeasurable movement of experiential intensification toward our unique but no less cosmic destiny. If Chronos is the time of the ego, and Kairos is the time of the Soul, Aion is the time of the Self.

Minding time means learning to participate again, to collaborate with the stars in the making of meaningful time. Without the promethean aid of astrology, the texture of time would remain invisible to our mind’s eye, its music inaudible to our heart’s ear. Astrology makes time sensible, meaningful, and moral. The archetypal astrological perspective teaches that each of us expresses our own time signature; transits make us aware of how our own psychic rhythms attune to planetary rhythms. Each of our beating hearts is a microcosmic Sun, which is to say that we are each at the center of our own mini-universe. Time doesn’t just happen to us, we help generate its meaningful passage. Only chronic time seems to happen to us, while kaironic time requires our participation. Aionic time dissolves any difference between what happens to us and what we make happen.

One practical way forward for our civilization would be to consider the difference between Conventional and Cosmological calendars: Ancient peoples tended to have calendrical systems based upon natural or cosmic rhythms (the Egyptians started their year with the periodic flooding of the Nile, for example). Modern people have introduced calendrical systems that are more mathematically regular, but bear little if any relationship to the cosmos itself (the Roman Empire introduced the Gregorian calendar, whose year begins arbitrarily on Jan 1, a date which doesn’t’ correspond to any significant cosmological or ecological event, for example). Today the modern world measures time in merely conventional terms, reducing it to a cultural construct. If we are to re-invent ourselves and bring forth a more ecological civilization, turning again to the cosmos for our sense of timing will be one of the most crucial steps.