Thread by @ZoharAtkins

Yes and no:

Clock-time is a man made concept, but man is a time made concept.

https://twitter.com/yokoono/status/967090681662623745

Protagoras says, “Man is the measure of all things.”

Modern self help days, “You manage what you measure.”

Ergo: Man is the manager of all things (that can be measured).

The history of time is the history of time management and time measurement— from the sundial to the lunar and solar calendars to the clock tower to Greenwich Mean Time to the alarm app on your phone.

Yet there was a time when our sense of time was not so measured.

The story of technological and scientific progress is a story of moving away from an intuitive and naturalistic relation to time to one of coordinated, social convention.

It used to be that the concept of a “day” was functional—without electricity night was a time to stop. Now our cities never sleep and so a day no longer ends at sundown. A day is 24 hours now.

For Heidegger, temporality as a basic condition and time as social convention need to be distinguished.

We can measure time only because we are mortals who dwell on earth with a sense of finitude. An awareness of mortality creates a primal sense of care; and that leads to the construction of ways to manage time.

A being who felt no sense of mortality would not need to measure time. The lilies of the field take their measure from the rhythm of the dew.

A sense of history is an outgrowth of the time management—as we move towards a scientific approach, we swap history for memory, just as we swap the digital clock for the stars.

We are not and were never timeless; but the way we measure time has caused us to overlook the aspect of ourselves that cannot be measured.

Protagoras’s constructivist sentiment has become a kind of orthodoxy today—to our detriment. It is the sentiment that Heidegger sought to roll back without being a naïf.

An Authentic existence finds a singular relation to time; the calendar gets a say, but not a first or final say.

We intuitively get this, and yet it is so non obvious that we’ll pay millions to be taught by Eckart Tolle about the power of Now — an idea that would have been obvious to our ancestors and is still available to children before we socialize them into the cult of days and years.

Measuring is good and useful, but it’s downstream of existence.

Ancient time measurements give us a hint of how to relate to time unmediated by standardized convention.

As physicists come to challenge the average conception of time as an arrow, they’ll wind up proving mathematically what we know phenomenological. The universe itself is a thrown projection.

The time is out of joint.