Vivências do tempo: uma reflexão a partir de Hannah Arendt

Resumo

This article aims to reflect on time, in particular on some of our temporal experiences. Considering the flow that constitutes what we can designate as "objective time", we frame it inter-subjectively through the categories of the past, present and future, but we feel it, live it and understand it subjectively. It is on this last dimension that this article focuses. Based on a reflection by Hannah Arendt on the time of the "thinking ego", we will try to frame the time of our life and the time of the world where we live. Hannah Arendt refers to a non-sequential image of the past and the future, which suggests that all men are situated in an uneasy present, between two forces that correspond to those temporal categories. Effectively, we spend our lives remembering and anticipating, supported respectively by the fear of the future and the security of the past. This existential condition prevents us from being present, that is, from establishing a present for ourselves, which is fundamental to the tranquility required by the exercise of thought. Thus, according to Hannah Arendt, when we think we are inevitably located in the present, and therefore between the past and the future, but we endow it with a specific timelessness that corresponds to the suspension of our activities in the world in order to be able to think. Now, from that privileged position, we can dare to discover other subjective experiences of the time, namely, the bi-directionality inherent in the contrast between the time of our life and the time of the world in which we are allowed to live. These times intersect in the present, but they assume a quite different direction: the world settles in the past, while we are moving towards a future that constantly challenges us.