Nunc stans

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Nunc stans ( Latin ; German : "Standing Now") is a phrase from the field of philosophy that is supposed to describe eternity . It emerged from discussions about the relationship between time and eternity. Plato described time as a “moving image of eternity” ( ancient Greek εἰκὼ κινητὸν αἰῶνος ). Time extends to the present, past and future, but only eternity has the present. This determination becomes a tradition that defines eternity as the timeless now. Plotinus calls eternity “remaining in one”.

In the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas quotes the phrase with reference to Boethius , although it does not appear literally. Boethius differentiates between the now for man, which is, as it were, a running time, and a divine now, which is a persistent now and constitutes the eternity of God. Boethius calls this persistent now in German : “nunc permanens” ( Latin ), German : “remaining now”. The transformation of Nunc stans to Nunc permanens in Boethius may be influenced by Augustine , who dealt with the concept of the nun stans, but rejected it.

Due to Boethius' influence on medieval philosophy, this term is also adopted for eternity and is often found in medieval philosophy. Albertus Magnus then uses Nunc stans again to describe the eternity of God and refers to Boethius. Thomas Aquinas probably adopted the term from Albertus Magnus. Thomas Hobbes strongly criticizes the term nunc stans, for him it is not an appropriate term to describe eternity. A standing present is incomprehensible. Arthur Schopenhauer uses the term to speak of the "indestructibility of our being in itself". The individual life of man belongs to the world of appearance, in which becoming and passing away happen, but the true essence is the principle underlying this process. The time is the form of our knowing in which we grasp everything, while the being itself does not know all of this, but exists in the nunc stans. Schopenhauer refers to the teaching of the ideality of the time of Immanuel Kant . The will remains the immovable in the change of time, which one recognizes in a gaze that goes beyond the pure appearance. The difference between the past and the present disappears when one tries to present the sequence in human life “as suddenly and at the same time and always present, in the nunc stans”. The present, which can hardly be grasped from a purely scientific point of view, presents itself to the metaphysical gaze, which ignores the forms of empirical intuition, as the persistent. Schopenhauer refers here directly to the scholastics .

Friedrich Nietzsche does not use the phrase, but at one point speaks of the "Nu", which perhaps goes back to a translation of the nunc stan by Meister Eckhart . Franz Rosenzweig took up the term again and saw its meaning in the fact that man liberates himself from the transience of the moment and the moment becomes something new and new and therefore immortal, into eternity.

In the case of the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl , the phrase is used to designate a timeless essence of the “I function”. This essential form of the nunc stan is able to detach the comprehensibility of the "I function" from its connection to temporal positions and to grasp it as something ancient or non-temporal. This recording is timeless, untimely and now, without being tied to a specific time. Martin Heidegger distanced himself not only from idealism , also from the dualism according to René Descartes , but also from the conception of eternity as nunc stans. There is no purely spiritual subject that is detached from the world and that one can then relate to it again; instead, existence is determined by the fact that it finds itself in the world and always has to deal with it. The idea that there is no death where there is no time can also be found in Ludwig Wittgenstein , even if not under the phrase nunc stans.

Thomas Mann's Der Zauberberg also refers to the nunc stans . The inhabitants of the magic mountain experience an inner-worldly lived and idolatrous eternity, which is dizzying due to movement and represents an attempt to live the time of God on earth. The nunc stans here describes the essence of life as the present, which only presents its secret in a mythical way in the tenses of the past and future. The nunc stans are also mentioned in Doctor Faustus . Here the Nunc stans is connected with moments of rapture, which are at the same time the development of the artist-to-be and set free his composition.

For Hannah Arendt , the nunc stans, in which the infinite past and the infinite future coincide in the present, is a point in time of the timeless present that breaks the usual constructions of time. Through this experience, man can do timeless works in a kind of timeless time. From the position of the nunc stan, however, the thinking person is not without reference to history; rather, through him, historicity comes into a space of thought that is timeless. Arendt assumes a struggle of the spiritual ego against time in the sense of a struggle against the phenomena of the historical world: the flow of time, which carries everything with it and makes it disappear, must be interrupted in order to save the individual phenomena of the historical world.

Hans-Georg Gadamer saw the celebration of festivals as their way of being, in which time has become the nunc stans of an uplifting present and has become one in memory and the present. For example, Christmas is more than the memory of the birth of Jesus Christ , because every Christmas is in a mysterious way simultaneous with the distant present. During the festivities, time comes to a standstill, while in everyday life people are tied to functions and dates of their lives.

Walter Biemel asked whether Marcel Proust meant the nunc stans in In Search of Lost Time , when it was about a feeling outside of time.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Hermann Schnarr: Nunc stans . In: Joachim Ritter , Karlfried founder , Gottfried Gabriel (Hrsg.): Historical dictionary of philosophy . tape 6 . Schwabe, Basel 1984, ISBN 3-7965-0115-X .
  2. ↑ Dorothea Günther: Creation and Spirit. Studies on Augustine's understanding of time in the XI. Book of Confessiones (=  Elementa. Writings on philosophy and its problem history . Volume 58 ). Rodopi, Amsterdam / Atlanta 1993, ISBN 90-5183-453-5 , pp. 80 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  3. ↑ Paul van Tongeren , Gerd Schank , Herman Siemens (ed.): Nietzsche dictionary . tape 1 : Abbreviatur-simple, sv moment / moment. de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2004, ISBN 3-11-017186-4 , p. 200 ( limited preview in Google Book Search).
  4. ↑ Ursula Rohr-Dietschi: On the genesis of self-confidence. A study on the contribution of phenomenological thinking to the question of the development of self-confidence (=  Carl Friedrich Graumann , Maximilian Herzog, Alexandre Metraux [ed.]: Phenomenological -psychological research . Volume 14 ). Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 1974, ISBN 3-11-004048-4 , p. 44 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  5. ↑ Ernst Topitsch : Heil und Zeit. A chapter on worldview analysis . Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 1990, ISBN 3-16-145675-0 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
  6. ↑ Christian Hick: On the vertigo of the eternal present. On the pathology of time in Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain . In: Dietrich von Engelhardt , Hans Wißkirchen (ed.): "The Magic Mountain". The world of science in Thomas Mann's novel . With a bibliography of research literature. Schattauer, Stuttgart / New York 2003, ISBN 3-7945-2281-8 , pp. 82 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  7. ↑ Thomas Klugkist : Cosmogony of longing . Thomas Mann's “Doctor Faustus” in the vicinity of his Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Richard Wagner reception (=  Epistemata / Series Literary Studies . Volume 284 ). Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2000, ISBN 3-8260-1639-4 , p. 136 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  8. ↑ Timo Ogrzal: Kairologische Entbegrenzung . Zauberberg readings on the way to a poetology based on Heidegger and Derrida . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2007, ISBN 978-3-8260-3424-4 , p. 176 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  9. ^ Patricia Bowen-Moore: Hannah Arendt's Philosophy of Natality . Macmillan, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire 1989, ISBN 1-349-20125-1 , pp. 99 (English, limited preview in Google Book Search).
  10. ↑ Dag Javier Opstaele: Politics, Spirit and Criticism. A hermeneutic reconstruction of Hannah Arendt's concept of philosophy (=  epistemata / series philosophy . Volume 250 ). Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 1999, ISBN 3-8260-1642-4 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
  11. ↑ Hans-Georg Gadamer: About the festivity of the theater . (1954). In: Art as a statement (=  Hans-Georg Gadamer: Gesammelte Werke . Volume 8 , no. 1 ). Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 1993, ISBN 3-16-146159-2 , p. 297 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  12. ↑ Walter Biemel: Philosophical analyzes of contemporary art (=  Phaenomenologica . Volume 28 ). Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague 1968, ISBN 94-010-3368-4 , pp. 177 ( limited preview in Google Book search).