Moment (philosophy)

The moment is an influential concept in philosophy that goes back in large part to Søren Kierkegaard's preoccupation with the moment, the short time interval . He developed it based on Plato's concept of the sudden ( ancient Greek τὸ ἐξαίφνης ) in Parmenideswhere the transition from movement to rest and rest to movement, all change, as well as the transition from being to nonbeing is described as strange because it is neither rest nor movement and does not belong to any time. For Kierkegaard, the contrast between time and eternity is united in the moment, which is thought of as an abstract moment that encompasses nothingness and eternity at the same time. Because it cancels the past, present and future, it is exposed from the empirical course of life. Kierkegaard understood the fulfilled moment in the sense of Goethe , who viewed it as a condensation of a cosmos of experience and not as a purely temporal concept:

No being can disintegrate into nothing!
Ew'ge moves forward in all,
keep you happy in being!
[...]
Enjoy moderately fullness and blessings,
reason be present everywhere
where life is joyful in life.
Then the past is constant,
the future is alive ahead,
the moment is eternity.

(Excerpt from: Goethe, Legacy , 1829)

literature

• Michael Theunissen : Wait a minute . In: Joachim Ritter , Karlfried founder , Gottfried Gabriel (Hrsg.): Historical dictionary of philosophy . tape 1 . Schwabe, Basel 1971, ISBN 3-7965-0115-X .
• Bruno Hillebrand : Aesthetics of the moment . The poet than conquerors of the time - from Goethe until today (=  Small series V & R . Band 4011 ). Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, Göttingen 1999, ISBN 3-525-34011-7 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
• Koral Ward: Wait a minute. The Concept of the “Decisive Moment” in 19th- and 20th-Century Western Philosophy (=  Ashgate New Critical Thinking in Philosophy ). Routledge, London / New York 2008, ISBN 978-0-7546-6097-2 (English, limited preview in Google book search).
• Christian Thomsen, Hans Holländer (ed.): Moment and time . Studies on time structure and time metaphors in art and science. Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 1984, ISBN 3-534-09669-X .
• Gerhard Thonhauser: About the concept of temporality in Søren Kierkegaard with constant reference to Martin Heidegger (=  Alber series of theses . Volume 43 ). Herder Verlag, Freiburg im Breisgau 2011, ISBN 978-3-495-48470-8 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
• Hans-Jürgen Gawoll: About the moment. Also a history of philosophy from Plato to Heidegger . In: Gunter Scholtz (Ed.): Archive for the history of concepts . tape 37 . Felix Meiner Verlag, 1994, ISSN  0003-8946 , p. 152-179 , JSTOR : 4363045 .

Web links

Wikiquote: Instant  Quotes

See also

• Time interval
• Philosophy of time
• Time perception
• Kairos
• Time and freedom
• present

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Michael Theunissen : moment . In: Joachim Ritter , Karlfried founder , Gottfried Gabriel (Hrsg.): Historical dictionary of philosophy . tape 1 . Schwabe, Basel 1971, ISBN 978-3-7965-0115-9 .
2. ↑ Tanja Dembski: Paradigms of the romantic theory at the beginning of the 20th century . Lukács , Bachtin and Rilke (=  Epistemata . Volume 294 ). Königshausen and Neumann, Würzburg 2000, ISBN 3-8260-1723-4 , p. 201 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
3. ↑ Quoted from: Bruno Hillebrand : Aesthetics of the moment . The poet than conquerors of the time - from Goethe until today (=  Small series V & R . Band 4011 ). Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, Göttingen 1999, ISBN 3-525-34011-7 , pp. 22 ( limited preview in Google Book search).