Chaired by Emil Flatø
Johanna Sjöstedt: Augenblick and revolution: Temporal openings, gender, and change in the philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir
The aim of this paper is to bring the philosophy of time of French thinker Simone de Beauvoir (1908- 1986) into conversation with contemporary interdisciplinary discussions on modernity, temporality and gender. Here I will focus on the concepts of Augenblick and revolution in the essays Beauvoir published in the 1940s, including her major study The Second Sex (1949). While Augenblick has its origin in the Ancient Greek word kairos, revolution belongs to the modern temporal register. Both concepts describe temporal openings implicating change, in individual and collective perspectives. I will discuss how Beauvoir utilizes these concepts to theorize the oppression of women and how their different meanings and histories are brought into play in relation to each other in her thought. I argue that we can enrich our understanding of the relationship between modernity, temporality and gender through reading her texts, and reversely that we can deepen our reading of Beauvoir by focusing on the temporal concepts in her work.
Bio: Johanna Sjöstedt is a research project assistant at the Centre for Gender Studies at Karlstad University in Sweden. She has obtained degrees in the history of ideas and gender studies from the University of Gothenburg, specializing in the history of feminist philosophy and theory. Her work has appeared in journals such as NORA, Slagmark, and Ideas in history. She is the editor of Vad är en kvinna? Språk, materialitet, situation (Daidalos 2021) and Feminist philosophy: Time, history, and the transformation of thought (Södertörn studies in intellectual and cultural history 2023)
Marius Timmann Mjaaland: Time, Earth and Climate Change: Reconsidering Philosophies of Time in the Anthropocene
I will set out from the following hypothesis: The climate crisis has rendered the dominant philosophical theories of time and temporality in the 20th century obsolete. I will thereby revisit two philosophical debates in particular. The first is the analytic controversy on the unreality of time, initiated by McTaggart and Russell around 1900 and continuing as a debate on time and tense until the end of last century. The second is the phenomenological discussion of being and time, most prominently represented by Edmund Husserl, Edith Stein and Martin Heidegger, but including the French phenomenologists Henri Bergson and Simone Weil and continuing up to the late 20th century.
The two approaches have fundamental differences in their understanding of change: how we perceive change and how we relate to it. Strictly speaking, the analytic debate has difficulties explaining change in the world otherwise than a difference in the state of affairs at time T1, T2 and so forth. The phenomenological theory of (inner) time consciousness is definitely open to change, since change is presupposed in every moment, and from one moment to the next. However, when it comes to relating this flux of changes in human consciousness to some objective point of reference such as levels of CO2 in the atmosphere or degrees of overheating, the theory seems rather inadequate. Hence, for rather elementary reasons, both theories and the debates they have raised seem to be more or less irrelevant when it comes to the acute questions of a climate crisis that humanity is facing today.
In the epoch of the Anthropocene, marked by anthropogenic climate change, I will argue that we ought to rethink the philosophical notions of time, in particular what we perceive as the “reality” of time. In order to understand the consequences of human influence on the climate, and the possibilities of changing attitudes, consumption, production and pollution, I will argue that we need to reconsider the notion of time, both ontologically and epistemologically (cf. Chakrabarty 2018). The 20th century discussions may thereby be helpful for further understanding and clarification, but I am afraid they will also turn out to be the opposite. Rather than trying to adapt the 20th century theories to the new situation, I suggest starting with a reconsideration of the sources of philosophy of time in Aristotle and Augustine.
Bio: Marius Timmann Mjaaland is Professor for Philosophy of Religion at the University of Oslo. Published widely on philosophy, ethics, environmental philosophy, philosophy of religion and systematic theology. PM of the UiO:Nordic project Ecodisturb since 2020. PI at UiO:Life Science convergence environment 3DR since 2019. Currently visiting scholar at the University of Oxford.
Sabiha Huq: Entangled Temporalities in Tagorean Philosophy
In Western (read European) culture, the discourse on ‘time’ is rich because of the philosophical deliberations of Immanuel Kant and Martin Heidegger. While Kant’s ideas could have influenced the Bengali Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, Heidegger was a close contemporary who was conceptualizing time in a quite similar way as Tagore. Evidently Tagore’s concept of Nataraj, the deity of creation and destruction whose “ever-flowing rhythmic dance of creation”, is reflected in Heidegger’s fourfold “mirror-play and cosmic dance of earth, sky, mortals and gods”. Tagore connected time with objects and existence as Heidegger did, but again his idea of intuition matches with Kantian idea of time as the intuitions of self of our internal state. In Indian culture, both time and existence are mingled with metaphysics borrowed from major religions. Lalon, a folk poet calls existence “an ancient caged bird” drawing upon the Hindu cosmology that conceptualizes time as Kala or the eternal. The unit of time in Indian civilization embraces billions and trillions of years. Hinduism envisages the universe as having a cyclical nature, in which the end of each kalpa that equals to 4.32 billion years, is brought about by the dance of Nataraj who also ushers the next; as in the recursive process destruction is followed by rebirth. Thus, Tagore’s concept of time stands somewhere in between Western (due to his close orientation with Western cultures) and a mix of Brahmo and Vaishnava concepts that were further influenced by Islam that connects time with dahr (fate) that is responsible for happiness or distress. In some of his writings, written in a lighter vein, Tagore even challenges the course of time. This paper proposes to trace the entangled temporalities in Tagore’s oeuvre and show how he has propounded a unique concept of time in relation to existence.
Bio: Sabiha Huq is Professor of English at Khulna University. She completed PhD in theatre as a researcher of the KULTRANS project of University of Oslo, Norway. She has proven interest in postcolonial literature and women’s writings, theatre, translation, film, cultural studies, education, digital and environmental humanities. Her latest publication is The Mughal Aviary: Women’s Writings in Pre-modern India (Vernon, USA, 2022 and UPL, Bangladesh, 2022). She has jointly edited Ibsen in the Decolonised South Asian Theatre (forthcoming, Routledge UK). She occasionally writes short stories and poems. She is also the editor of Dead Metaphor, a bilingual literary magazine (https://deadmetaphor.net/).