A Philosophical Happy Hour exploring the experience of time, its loss, and the possible paths to its recovery.
Imagine yourself outdoors and alone—truly alone. No friends, no family, no strangers. No living human being in sight, no voice close enough to be heard (or ears to hear). No phone; no connection to anything but the world around you, no means of contact.
Among the many things noticeable amid such a silence, whether experienced in truth or merely imagined, is a renewed awareness of time. The world slows down. Our attention turns from the too busy life most of us lead. Our thinking ceases to feel crowded. We recognize the natural pace of terrestrial motion: wind in the trees, birds on the wing, perhaps the sound of water trickling in a stream; clouds in the sky, perhaps even the slow rotation of the sun’s light.
The passage of time, muted by our habitual distractedness, re-enters our consciousness; only, we must sadly admit, to be hidden away again all too soon. But such moments have an effect on us nonetheless. We feel something profoundly human in that reawakened sense of time. We struggle to hold on to those depths.
Why do we lose this sense of time from our grasp so easily?
Well—do we even know what it is we are touching?
Outside Acceleration and Deceleration
St. Augustine of Hippo rather famously stated in his Confessions that he knows perfectly well what time is—until someone asks him. This is not to say answers cannot be given: as, for example, the measure of motion’s duration according to before and after; or the awareness of change; the consequence of conscious thinking’s self-movement; or the “fourth dimension” of the universe’s constitution.
We can also make many distinctions: “objective” vs. “subjective” time, “profane” vs. “sacred”, “mythical” vs. “historical” vs. “point-time” and so on. There are many theories on time and its intelligibility. Some of these overlap with one another; others contradict. But one point on which most today seem to agree: our lives now seem sped up to a pace which deprives us of something with respect to time.
This experienced “acceleration” has some clamoring for a deliberate “deceleration”. Others want the acceleration to increase, believing—as It were—that continually increasing the pace of technological development (so intimately tied to the way we experience of time) will result eventually in a utopian (or near-utopian) state of life. Continuous expansion. Continuous improvement. Abundance without bounds. Such optimists tend to dismiss the concerns of the decelerationists as mere cowardice, or fear, or small-mindedness.
Conversely, the decelerationists see the accelerationists as impelling us towards a cliff—outpacing any natural growth of humanity, that is, and running us into a situation from which there can be no recovery.
But at a more fundamental, conceptual level, the experienced speeding up and desired slowing down of time in these two camps obscure roots of time itself. Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Kant, Husserl, Einstein—any great thinker who has contributed to the discourse on time wanted seriously to question what it is. Speeding it up, slowing it down—this presumes a lot.
Through Silence and Duration
Rather, briefly I would like to suggest that we need to consider time with respect to silence (or rest) and duration. The connection of silence and rest perhaps might be found in the term stillness. The still is silent. The resting is still. Time, it seems, always requires an understanding of motion—even in the motionless dark, we count time only by a certain motion within our minds; “two” comes after “one”, and “three” after “two” but before “four”. One moves to the next.
But we cannot understand motion, either, without an understanding of rest. So too, duration signifies the “lasting” of some thing, some event, some motion, some happening. There must be a sameness to every duration in order that it persist.
Within Conversation and Contemplation
What is time? In what phenomena, in what avenues of life’s experience, do we encounter time? How do we, how have we “lost” time? How do we reclaim it—by what actions, through what means, in what attitudes? How do we do this as individuals? As members of a society?
Join our conversation this Wednesday (10 September 2025, from 5:45-7:15+ pm ET) as we reflect together on the passage of time—and how to recover an awareness of it in our lives.
philosophical happy hour
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Come join us for drinks (adult or otherwise) and a meaningful conversation. Open to the public! Held every Wednesday from 5:45–7:15pm ET.
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