"Who can explain this easily and briefly?

  Who will be able to understand it with thought, and then talk about it?

And yet, what could be more familiar and known to us than the familiar and known

in our conversations than time?

What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know;

But if I want to explain it to the person who asks me, I don't know."

St Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, Ch XI

If your evening usually starts at five o'clock, the time you get out of high school, if you then have soccer, basketball, music or some other extracurricular activity, if after an hour and a average of hard training in the sun you go to the swimming pool to tone your muscles, from which you get out another hour and a average later, if, after a forty minute bus ride home you finally manage to answer all your messages and see the latest photos your friends have posted on social networks, if when you were finally going to sit down to study your mother shouts from the kitchen Dinner is ready! and you look at the clock and it's nine o'clock at night: don't worry, you're just an ordinary teenager.

Almost all of us young people today find ourselves in this status and, invariably, we reply: "I just don't have the time! However, this comment fascinates our grandparents, who consider us as people with a settled future or busy entrepreneurs, when nothing could be further from the truth. Some authors and philosophers have also given their opinion on this topic, asking questions such as Does time pass faster now than before or is it our way of life that doesn't give us a break? Has our utilitarian worldview managed to transform even time into a factor of production?

In this essay, I will try to answer this and other questions related to our view of time, I will discuss various theories that have arisen around this concept using the writings of various philosophers, both ancient and modern, and finally, I will try to shed some light on certain harmful conceptions that are in vogue in today's society using the novel Momo, by Michael Ende.

First of all, we have to know the philosophers whose reflections we are going to use, for which we will begin with a short biography of each one in chronological order, and then extract from their works what interests us about the topic this essay

To begin with, we will deal with two topics of Greek literature and Philosophy : chronos and kairos. Jorge Zabaleta, journalist and columnist for the American magazine Panoramical, explains: "Kairos was represented by a young man with wings on his feet and almost unreachable, but who could be caught if you grabbed him by the long tail of hair hanging from his bald head", while the chronos could be compared to "a kind of magnetized energy that impels us to move forward without return and without rest". These two images of time that Zabaleta gives us were a constant in Greek thought. While chronos was time as a measure, as an irresistible force that forced us to live the simple succession of minutes and hours, kairos was the opportune moment, a turning point in our life that we had to take advantage of. The Greeks gave much importance to this nuance, and the fact of differentiating these two types of "time" shows us that they focused their attention on the quality of time, always trying to find a kairos or opportune moment in the middle of a monotonous chronos, as the quotation of the Greek philosopher Isocrates shows "the wise man (...) handles well the circumstances he meets day by day, and possesses a judgment that is precise to face the occasions at the right moment". After differentiating these two concepts, we will go directly to the analysis of different philosophers and their way of seeing time.

St. Augustine was born in 354 in Tagaste (North Africa). From an early age, the influence of the Roman Empire permeated him, not only because Rome was the dominant culture, but also because his father, Patricius, transmitted to him this Latin statement of core values . A restless soul, as a young man he was insatiably searching for the truth, first being a Manichean, and later, after much prayer on the part of his mother St. Monica, he became a Christian. His thought, based on Platonic thought, has been one of the instructions of our western culture. His most influential work, Confessions, speaks of man's inner search for God, while the reflections are interspersed with references to his life. After being ordained bishop of Carthage, he died in that city in 430. St. Augustine begins by giving time the property of God's creation, which we can see well in this quotation of his: "You created all time, and before all time it is you, and there is no time that you have not created"(Confessions, XI, 14, 17). Therefore, everything created by God tends to Him, because God is its ultimate origin, and if time tends to Him, our time must also be dedicated to God: "Our heart is restless until it rests in You" is one of the maxims of the saint, and in the words of Enrique Eguiarte, Augustinian Recollect: "History is the time of projection towards God". Moreover, since God is eternal, as St. Augustine explains to us ("in your eternity you see all things immutable; and in your present, which does not pass away, everything is present."(Confessions, XI, 13, 16)), and time tends to God because He has created it, therefore, time tends to eternity. To explain St. Augustine's conception of time we could use this metaphor: time is a rope, as long as the history of humanity, from which an enormous weight, God, pulls towards a cliff that has no bottom, which is eternity. Thus we understand the tension of time of which the Bishop of Hippo speaks. Finally, the saint fails to understand the nature of the present, past and future times, for the past is no longer, the present is so ephemeral that as soon as you have thought of it it is no longer present, and the future has not yet happened "What, then, are the past and the future, if the past is no longer and the future is not yet? As for the present, if it were always present and did not pass into the past, it would not be time, but eternity."(Confessions, XI, 14, 17) Do we live then in a non-time? St. Augustine answers no, because time must be measured from the soul, our spiritual part, which is the one that suffers the effects of the passage of time along with the body. The soul, with its capacity for reasoning, can become aware of the passage of time "It is in you, my soul, that I measure the times, the affection that in you the things that pass by produce." - Confessions, XI, 27, 36. In conclusion, time ends not in death but in eternity with God, to which we have to direct our life as the helmsman directs his ship. Moreover, it is our soul, our inner self, that informs us about the passage of time, thus giving each person's time a charm of its own.

Henri Bergson, born in 1859 in Paris and died in 1941, was an influential philosopher who reflected on consciousness, the perception of time and creativity, but in a literary and concise style, which meant that he was read not only in his beloved French Academy (of which he was a member), but in many other circles, which contributed greatly to his winning the Nobel award for Literature in 1927. In his book Durée et simultanéité (Duration and simultaneity ) he proposes a purely subjective conception of time, from which we can differentiate a quantitative or measurable time, which is the one used by science and technology and the true time, the most human one, or as he called it, la durée or duration. "There is a purely qualitative and subjective experience of the passage of time, before we come to quantify it, but this is the truth of time and not a mere subjective deformation of an originally goalfact." His theory consists in taking the value of qualitative time to an extreme, almost like applying Einstein's theory of relativity (which was intended to be purely scientific) to a philosophical realm. In fact, Bergson had discussions with the German physicist on this topic, as we can see in the article Henri Bergson, the great philosopher who challenged Einstein face to face on the nature of time (and changed forever the discussion on the topic) written by the journalist Margarita Rodriguez. Although we do not subscribe entirely to Bergson's theory, perhaps it would be necessary to begin to appreciate time depending on its quality and not its quantity, because "when you court a beautiful girl, an hour seems like a second. But when you sit on red-hot coals, a second will seem like an hour." - as Einstein said.

Max Weber was born in Erfurt, Germany, in 1864. Although he made his living from political Economics and his writings were almost entirely of a legal nature, he is best known for his analyses of society, in which he studied the role of religious ideas in the modern world, the effect of capitalism on Economics and culture, and the role of reason in the Philosophy of his era. A humbler figure than Bergson, he is nevertheless considered the founding father of modern sociology, to which he devoted himself until his death in 1920. In his book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber speaks of how Protestantism, and especially Calvinism considers "The waste of time to be one of the gravest sins.", thus making an iron cage(stahlhartes Gehäuse) around man, which forces him to account for everything he does with his time, and gives time a purely numerical value, in his own words: "The domination of life by rational organization is also expressed in the necessity of accounting for the use of time." Weber insists that we must abandon the sense of efficiency in measuring time, and begin to enjoy it in a more leisurely and less self-interested way.

Martin Heidegger was born in Messkirch in 1889 (Spanish reader: if you manage to pronounce his name and place of birth, consider studying German). A consecrated philosopher, his baptism as such was his work Being and Time, considered one of the most influential works of the 20th century. Its success was to take him out of the river of Catholic theology where he had been formed, diverting him towards philosophical currents such as existentialism and phenomenology (the study of how things present themselves to consciousness, analyzing experience without previous or external interpretations). Not even his death, in 1976, managed to reduce his influence in disciplines from ontology to literature, but contributed to the emergence of controversy over his alleged link with Nazism. Heidegger speaks in his work Being and Time of a very important concept: the Dasein or being-there, a way of speaking of the human being as an entity in time, but not of an entity isolated from time, but deeply connected with it and with the world ("The being of Dasein is understood from time and is itself temporal."Heidegger says in Being and Time), to such an extent that, as the philosopher and journalist Carmen Segura explains in her article on the German philosopher, "he thought that life should be understood from itself and that living had to be experienced as an event that is neither fixed nor objectifiable".Again we see how a philosopher, seeing in the exaggerated quantification of time a risk for his enjoyment, lets himself fall to the completely opposite side of the network. Another very interesting question he deals with is death. For Heidegger, "death is not a later event, but a constant possibility of Dasein", it is an experience that can touch us at any moment of our present, and that, once we are aware of it, we will assign to time its real qualitative value.

Paul Tillich was born in 1886 and died in 1965. He left his native Germany to flee Nazism, and eventually emigrated to the United States. His recognized aptitude for theology and Philosophy led him to class at universities such as Harvard and Chicago, and he stood out for integrating existentialism with the Protestant worldview. He coined new philosophical terms and his goal was to build bridges between religion and Philosophy. For Tillich, time is not just something that passes, but something that passes through us, time is finitude itself, "Finitude is at the very heart of time; to be in time is to be finite." , and man, who is in time, is therefore finite. However, hope does not end at the end of life. Tillich does not speak of the end, but of kairos, "The kairos is the moment in which time is filled with meaning.", and that precise moment in which we pass from time to eternity is possible thanks to Christ (from here is where Tillich will begin to speak of Philosophy and religion hand in hand), because "In Christ, the eternal penetrates time without ceasing to be eternal.". Eternity will therefore be for the human being not infinite time, but being in totality, or as Tillich best explains, "Eternity is not the endless, but the eternal-present.". Let us not then ignore our finite nature with an infinite vocation, and let us take advantage of time to let ourselves be constantly pierced by the arrow of Kairos that will bring us closer to eternity. For, in truth, until we satisfy our vocation to eternity, our soul will find nothing to fill it, and if we remember St. Augustine, "our heart is restless until it rests in God"..... - or at least that is what Tillich would say.

Emmanuel Lévinas was born in 1906 in Lithuania, but obtained French nationality, which he kept until his death in 1995. A very complex person, he reflected on Judaism, war and ethics. He studied in Strasbourg and Freiburg, where he was a student of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, of whom we have already spoken. Another of the great followers of phenomenology, he was oriented towards ethics as the first Philosophy , especially in relation to the Other. Indeed, Lévinas believes that time is not only a succession of instants, but that it is an eternal kairos, it is the opportune instant that separates me from the Other. But what is the Other? The Other is the unknown, the destiny of man, that which believers call God, philosophers call Truth and moralists call Good. Time is, therefore, an infinite distance until we find the Other ("Time is not the consciousness of duration, but the separation, the infinite distance from the Other"- is how Lévinas explains it). As the philosopher Lourdes Zariategui explains "The reference letter to the infinite is produced in the immediacy of the disturbance, of the Desire that lights up the face of the approaching Other". Time is, then, also an ethical or moral obligation, it is the responsibility to use every minute focused on finding the Other (perhaps comparable to St. Augustine's longing for God), "Time is nothing but the waiting for the Other" - Lévinas would say. A beautiful invitation to give meaning to our time, even if at first it is difficult to understand his point of view, it is absolutely necessary to see the face of that Other who makes every minute a kairos full of meaning and hope.

Paul Ricoeur was born in 1913, in France, and died very recently: in 2005. The last French philosopher we are going to talk about, he is usually related to phenomenology. He lived the Second World War as a prisoner of war, but after it he did a good academic degree program in universities such as Nanterre, Chicago and Louvain. His thought is characterized by a constant attention to language, storytelling and ethics. Moreover, for Ricoeur time has a duality (probably based on the ideas of St. Augustine), a measurable and quantifiable sphere, or in the words of Tillich "Time escapes and yet we measure it. It is invisible and yet we narrate it." and another sphere that interpellates us, a time that we can interpret, treasure, give meaning, give chronology, give importance through narration. "Time becomes human to the extent that it can be narrated, and narrative finds its full significance when it becomes a condition of our temporal experience," he will say to explain this. Time is not something abstract, a purely physical measure, but through narrative we make it our own, we enclose it in meaning through words and we make this narrative help us to understand time and its effect on us. Literally Ricoeur will say "The identity of the self is a narrative identity. The subject is only understood in time." Time, therefore, has to be remembered through narrative, for only in this way will man know himself and gain wisdom.

Reinhart Koselleck was born in 1923 in Görlitz, Germany, lived through World War II as a soldier and prisoner and died in 2006. Although he was a historian, he specialized in a very philosophical topic : the theory of historical time. In his works he deals with the evolution of concepts such as "progress", "history" or "revolution" and their evolution in time. Koselleck introduces two fundamental concepts to understand history: the space of experience(Erfahrungsraum), what we have lived, what is "behind us" and horizon of expectations (Erwartungshorizont), what we expect, what "is not yet". He argues that since the Modern Age there has been a paradigm in which the horizon of expectation is increasingly distant from the space of experience, as we begin to desire things that have never happened before and to imagine futures that might seem improbable, revolutionary, "Historical time becomes accelerated time when the horizon of expectation is emancipated from the space of experience", is the phrase used by the philosopher. We can see that our "accelerated life" is nothing new.

Giorgio Agamben was born in Rome in 1942. He is a philosopher known for his programs of study in Political Philosophy , Theology and Aesthetics. He has taught at several European universities. He has focused on concepts such as sovereignty or the state of exception. In his book Homo Sacer, he explains why time is like "standing still" today, because modern man does not give it a meaning, but simply lets it pass or waits for someone else to give it a meaning: "Modern time is marked by the capacity to wait endlessly, to do nothing, to remain suspended." He actually predicted the era of "screen-persons," " zombie" subjects who set the autopilot and let themselves go. He talks about our paradigm being an "exception," in which the progress that has been occurring throughout history can be interrupted by a setback, a catastrophe, or any unpredictable event "the state of exception is a suspension of rule."

Franco Berardi (better known as "Bifo"), born in 1949, is an Italian writer and activist, a philosopher who has worked in alternative media, dealing with theories about body, mind and capital, and a leading figure in this field. Throughout his work, he explains that the modern world, completely digitalized and made comfortable for man, has made time a succession of stimuli, sensations, tasks, endless lists of jobs to do or reels to watch "Historical time has been abolished: only a sequence of informative shocks without depth remains. Time has become something we do not master, something that surpasses us, because in the face of the infinite number of experiences with which to fill our gaps, our brain simply gives up "the brain can no longer keep up with digital time. The time of the human mind does not match the time of the machine." . who hasn't started watching Instagram reels and lost awareness of time? However, this anxious acceleration not only harms our present, it undermines our future: as Bifo explains "Acceleration eliminates the future, because it prevents us from imagining, narrating, desiring." A hedonistic world, with all-consuming passions, the solution: "poetry is the tool to relearn the rhythm of the body, to deactivate the violence of digital time". Well, simply focus on healthy, simple pleasures, such as poetry or art in general.

Byung-Chul Han was born in 1959 in South Korea, but is based in Germany. He is known for his accessible, almost informative style and his approach to diagnose the cultural problems of capitalism. He studied Philosophy in Freiburg and German Literature in Munich, and has published many essays on topics such as time, power, transparency, fatigue and hyperconnectivity. He is currently working at the University of the Arts in Berlin. Han, throughout his prolific degree program, has made clear what he thinks of time and our society: "The society of the 21st century is no longer a disciplinary society, but a performance society. The performance subject exploits itself." According to Han, our constant search for effectiveness and profit has robbed time of all meaning, and time is no longer a path of learning or the search for meaning, but a fragmentation of hours based on our to-do list, a way of self-enslaving "acceleration does not allow for the construction of meaning. In it there is no duration or narrative. Time does not unfold, but atomizes." Explained through a metaphor, time is a fertile ground that we can devote to whatever we want (family, friends, passions, work), but our world of " action reaction", of easy amusements, has now made it nothing more than a sandbox full of gravel grains with no sense between them (the check-list we were talking about or the continuous digital inputs ), as they have no common goal or fertility. Secondly, the fact that we have at our disposal a continuous source entertainment means that we are not able to get bored, and it is precisely in boredom where such wonderful ideas as the law of gravity, Don Quixote or Las Meninas have arisen. Han laments: "Nowadays deep boredom is hardly possible. Hyperactivity and hypercommunication prevent it," and elsewhere: "Hyperactivity suppresses all temporal alterity. Everything must be available immediately. Waiting becomes a defect". To sum up, I would like to quote the article The Utility of Philosophy "in a world that only seeks the material utility of things, there are others that offer a return that is not monetizable but infinitely valuable".

Hartmut Rosa, born in 1965 in Thuringia, is a sociologist. He belongs to the Frankfurt School. He teaches at the Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena and is director of the Max Weber-Institute. His work revolves around the theory of "social acceleration" and our relationship to the world, to others and to ourselves. For him, today's acceleration fragments time and depersonalizes it, going too fast prevents us from enjoying the journey, as Rosa explains: "Acceleration in modern life leads to the loss of deep, lived time". Like Bifo, she also believes that this attitude deteriorates the fabric of our future, and in her phrase "Acceleration not only causes physical exhaustion, but an inability to inhabit time fully" she demonstrates a deep concern for this depersonalization of time, which prevents us from taking advantage of our kairos, and turns our life into an eternal kronos.

To finish this essay, I would like to reference letter to the book Momo by Michael Ende. It tells the story of Momo, an abandoned girl who lives in the ruins of an amphitheater in the middle of a big city. Momo listens to the people she talks to, and so, little by little, she makes friends, who come not so much to ask her for a committee as for her to listen to them: "Momo sat down, and although no one spoke to her, it was as if everyone suddenly calmed down. Sometimes nothing needs to be said. Sometimes, all you need to do is listen". Momo is the epitome of a friend who devotes all his time to his friends, of listening-and-reflecting rather than non-stop-doing: "Momo knew how to listen in such a way that fools noticed his intelligent thoughts." People are happy because, despite living simply, they have time for what matters to them "People who have time, have what matters most. If you have time, you have everything you could ever need. "Throughout the story, enigmatic characters appear, the gray men, who convince the people of the city to work faster and take on new responsibilities in order to earn more. Momo realizes that everything has changed, her friends no longer have time for her. Everything is done quickly, quickly, and badly, no love is put into the things that are done "People never seemed to realize that, by saving time, they were losing something else. No one cared to admit that life was getting poorer, drearier and drearier. The ones who felt it most were the children, because no one had time for them anymore." However, although people's efficiency has increased, they no longer have time, but the classic comment of " I have no time" is beginning to emerge ... "The more time they saved, the poorer they were of time." . To save the world Momo visit the owner of time, the master Hora, who explains to him that each person has a precious flower, which is his time, and that if they do not live their time as they should, the gray men will steal it, because time cannot be saved "Because each man has his own time. And only as long as it remains his own does he remain alive." And it is that "The time of men cannot be kept in boxes, but vanishes if it is not lived.". Isn't this book a beautiful metaphor for our current status ?

For "Real time cannot be measured by the clock or the calendar," but it is you who must decide what to do with the time you have been given, and thus you will bring value and meaning to every minute and every second.

So... are we going to let the clock tick on the soul?

"All time that is not perceived with the heart is as lost as the colors of the rainbow to a blind man or the song of a bird to a deaf man." (Momo, Michael Ende)