On Time

Ancient Greek actually recognized two kinds of time:  Chronos and Kairos.  Chronos is the predictable rhythms of things:  looking forward to the weekends, harmonizing with the seasons, inserting ourselves into the cycles of life.  By contrast, Kairos is a Rupture — the opportune Moment, the break in Time and in the expectations of the future.  Scholars tell us that Kairos is both the Time of the Carnaval — when you realize that the social order might just be a shared illusion — and the Time of Crisis, when something must be decided, when sheer Possibility appears on the horizon.  Do we see the hidden connection between Carnaval and Crisis as expressions of Kairos?  Everything might be different, take a sharp turn.  Kairos dissolves the Familiar.

And so does the College.  Not just by giving students a whole new set of routines, which it does for sure. There is something about the way the Great Books shake things up.  The ‘great’ thing about Great Books is how they are inscribed in Kairos, written in this other, discontinuous dimension of Time.  They combine Carnaval and Crisis.  Many of their authors were addressing the problems, the crises, of their times.  But none of them were mere ‘products of their time.’  They are surprisingly free of the routine expectations and biases of their cultures. They seem almost able to play amidst the chaos as they make their worlds new.  Why is it so easy to slip into the present tense when talking about them?  These poets and thinkers take a very long view of the whole species.  Amidst the upheavals of their own epochs they bring Eternal — everpresent! — Problems of Humankind into the light.

— John Cornell, Faculty Member