Natural Man and his Soul

Abstract

If I had to give a brief and synthetic description of every condition of human inadequacy in a situation, I should express myself by saying that there is uneasiness in the temporal dimension. The present becomes confused with the past, the future flattens on the present, past and present are fleeing toward the future. Our uneasiness makes us believe that our happiness or unhappiness is a mode of being of time and prevents us from seeing that time is one of our modes of existing, that is, of being in relation with. The more the contrasts between happiness and unhappiness, love and hate, life and death, become acute in a given man, in a given society, in a given epoch, the more will the problem of time become the central problem of that man, that society, that epoch. Temporality makes us all partial, and every mode of being finds in temporality the most profound evidence of its own partiality. Certainly, partiality is space-temporal, but temporally it imposes itself at emotional levels that are unattainable when the spatial representation is separated from the temporal one: the uneasiness in the temporal dimension manifests itself, first and foremost, as a scission of space and time. Space and time develop as two elements related in and by the possibility that living is becoming: the distinction between them is at a breaking point that time and time again cedes to the pressure of happening, subsequently to become transformed into a new and different relation of becoming.