Chronos : the West confronts time

Author / Creator

Hartog, François, author

Available as

Online

Summary

""Ubiquitous and inevitable, such is Chronos. It is, first and foremost, impossible to grasp. Elusive, but at the same time, it is the one thing that humans have never given up trying to understand...

""Ubiquitous and inevitable, such is Chronos. It is, first and foremost, impossible to grasp. Elusive, but at the same time, it is the one thing that humans have never given up trying to understand." In his work Hartog has closely intertwined the intellectual history of ancient Greece, historiography, and the study of our relationship to time throughout history. This book is a meditation on the order of time. Reading it, we embark on a journey beginning with how the Greeks understood Chronos and ending with deep contemporary uncertainties. Along the way Hartog explores time as laid down by the Christians, devised and implemented by a nascent church-- a present stuck between incarnation and the Last Judgment. We follow Christianity's idea of time, how it was disseminated and established, before moving on to the rushing power of modern time, driven by progress, and fast-forwarding toward the future. Today, the future is clouded, and an unprecedented time has emerged, one which was rapidly designated as the Anthropocene, a new geological era, in which the human species has become the leading force. What will become of the old ways of understanding Chronos? What new strategies should be formulated to face this threatening, immeasurable future, while simultaneously we are confined in the limiting time Hartog calls "presentism"?"--Provided by publisher.

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