Recorded course · English · Start any time
Time and the Gods II
Kairos and the number of time
How can time be both a uniform flow and a sequence of qualitatively distinct moments? Seven classes on the dual nature of time in Proclus and its roots in his theology, taught live in May–July 2024.
The Greeks had two words for time: chronos, sequential, quantitative time, and kairos, the right or critical moment for action. In the philosophy of Proclus, all time is at once both. Everything that appears has its right moment measured out to it, and the uniform flow of time is the measure of all things.
This course continues Time and the Gods I, which introduced Proclus’ philosophy of time on the basis of my book Time’s Causal Power (Brill, 2021). Both the book and that course left a paradox unresolved: time is a uniform flow capable of measuring all things, and yet it is differentiated into distinct kairoi, opportune moments. How can it be both? This is where this course takes off.
You don’t need to have taken the first course: the first class recapitulates what you need. The exposition draws mostly on the last chapter of my unpublished dissertation, so there is hardly any overlap with my published work.
Recorded course
- Seven classes of about 90 minutes, in English
- Recordings, slides and a recommended-reading guide
- Questions by email
- US$80, or US$140 for parts I and II together
- Paid through Hotmart by card, Pix or local methods, shown in your own currency
New to the series? Start with Time and the Gods I.
Seven classes
Programme
1. The reality of kairos, opportune moments
Arguments for a distinct phenomenon called the kairos: a time when certain events have to happen, or are favoured to happen (or cannot, or are impeded). In other words, qualitative distinctions in time: not every hour is like every other, but each has its own quality that makes it the hour of certain events and not others. A synthesis of arguments treated at length in the first course.
2. The reality of temporal flow
If the first class argued for difference in time, this one argues for sameness, even complete uniformity, in temporal flow. Only because the flow of time is practically no change at all, merely the persistence of an identical present, can it be the change that directs all other changes. This raises the central problem of the course: how can the flow of time be uniform and yet show different qualities at different times?
3. Time as the highest cognitive life of the world
We solve the paradox by introducing a new thesis about what the flow of time is: the activity of the world’s nous, its capacity for insight into eternal things. Comparing it to our own capacity for insight leads to a distinction between a natural nous, central to scientific inquiry, and a supernatural nous, engaged in moments of inspiration. Rare for us, inspiration is the constant state of the world soul, and its ceaseless flow of inspired insight is the flow of time: uniform in its source, differentiated in the soul.
4. The divinity of the world and its union with all the gods
Inspired insight is not only cognitive: it engages our will and our very self, the unity of the soul, our ability to say “I” and to enjoy union with the gods. The world is constantly inspired because it is itself a god, united with all the other gods. We study the one of the soul, divine unity, and unity with and among the gods.
5. The presence of the gods in the world: signatures and forms
If the flow of time unfolds the world’s union with all the gods, what the world knows in its successive insights is the signature of each god, the mark of its presence among beings. We study the notion of a divine signature and how it relates to the more common notion of form. It is signatures, not forms, that ultimately connect the heavenly bodies, which indicate time, with terrestrial phenomena.
6. The flow of time as the unfolding of the divine number
We synthesize the previous classes through Proclus’ description of the eternal order of Time as a nous modelled on Number itself, the union of all the divine signatures, which distributes them to each of the gods. The flow of time is then nothing but the blessedness of the world soul, always in union with the gods.
7. The ascent and descent of the soul in time
The ethical implications: each human soul belongs to a god, is imprinted with a divine signature and follows a temporal cycle, so that the salvation of souls involves their restoration to following the train of their god in the heavens.