Temporality and Action as Abyss of Freedom

Our first basic and simple knowledge about the world comes from doxa, an opinion, because doxa is not something we seek, but something we already have. It is our a primordial mode of exposure to the world. In this manner our first preconceptual notion of time comes from doxa. In his Confessions Augustine expressed this experience when he said, that when nobody asks me what time is, I have some vague notion of time, but when I explicitly ask myself what time is, I do not know. Time becomes an enigma. In other words, understanding time in the dimension of doxa comes from our everyday, average involvement in the world; we deal with things, tasks, obligations, people, etc., and by doing that we are implicitly oriented by our preconceptual knowledge of time. For that we do not need a watch, time is not dependant upon watch, but on the contrary. We implicitly take and rely on time, because in a certain sense time is always available. In our habitual ways we always say: »Now, the time is to do this or that«. Explicitly, this is explained in Aristotle`s Physics as series of everlasting flow of »nows«. Hence, time is a number of movements with regard to »before« and »after«. The main condition for such notion of time was based on a certain Greek perception of Being (Sein). This vulgar or natural and cyclical concept of time stemmed from notion of Being as a constant presence. Being with regard to presence became horizon for determination of time instead of time becoming original horizon for explanation of Being. Martin Heidegger was the first one who radically sought to deconstruct this conception of time in order to dig up original sense of temporality. His phenomenology went far beyond naive epistemology in the sense of phenomenologically demonstrating not only our unauthentic, everyday experience of temporality, but also an authentic scheme of ecstatic temporality which is finite. Many of his ideas were reformulated by one of his students-Hannah Arendt, but in a political manner. If one could agree with her assessment that we today live under historical conditions of animal labornas, that is, under conditions in which birth and death are not longer seen as worldly events, but as ever-recurrent cyclical movement of nature and thus time, then that not only means that bare life as part of nature becomes the highest good, but also that we view politics as a form of labour, traditionally most despised activity of life. Hence, politics is degraded into never changing activity which serves sustaining cyclical, biological needs of life in all powerful time continuum of »eternal recurrence«. If man is by virtue of his birth unique being with the ability to start something arbitrary new then how can we view political action by breaking this powerful time continuum? My paper will try answering this question along with elaboration, these above thoughts.