Temporality in Life As Seen Through Literature

Temporality pervades the dynamic joint of existence, and the human being as such. As human beings unfold through ontopoiesis, each move of which punctuates the temporality of life, they, whose life experience, deliberation, planning, reflection and dreaming are permeated by temporal motivations and concerns, feel that they are engaged in the spinning of a common thread. Attributing to that involvement universal laws, constant existential validity and power, they absolutise/hypostasise its rule as a cosmic/human factor: “time”.

Yet today technologies are transforming the temporality of our existence by accelerating, intensifying, expanding our partaking in the world of life. Human communal and social involvement is being challenged in its personal significance to the core of our being.

What happens to “time”?

A basic reinvestigation of the nature of temporality is called for.

Human creative endeavor – especially literature – may initiate it. Having the human subject – the creator – at its center, literature is essentially engaged in temporality whether that of the mind or of the world of life through the creative process of writing, stage directing, or the reader’s and viewer’s reception.

Out of the cross-motivations that the creative mind filters in its temporal synthesis in touch with all the perspectives of existence, there surges the deepest significance of life in humanity and culture. But, first of all, life comes to light as timing itself in its logos. (Tymieniecka)