Christophe Bouton – författare

Christophe Bouton’s Time and Freedom addresses the problem of the relationship between time and freedom as a matter of practical philosophy, examining how the individual lives time and how her freedom is effective in time.Bouton first charts the history of modern philosophy’s reengagement with the Aristotelian debate about future contingents, beginning with Leibniz. While Kant, Husserl, and their followers would engage time through theories of knowledge, Schopenhauer, Schelling, Kierkegaard, and (later) Heidegger, Sartre, and Levinas applied a phenomenological and existential methodology to time, but faced a problem of the temporality of human freedom. Bouton’s is the first major work of its kind since Bergson’s Time and Free Will (1889), and Bouton’s “mystery of the future,” in which the individual has freedom within the shifting bounds dictated by time, charts a new direction.

Modernity, proposes Christophe Bouton, is not about the acceleration of time, but about living in multiple temporalities—polychrony.Like a speeding locomotive that has lost its driver, the history of Western society since the mid-nineteenth century has been characterized as an exponential, out-of-control acceleration. Simultaneously, in recent decades, the destructive impact of human activity on the planet has increased at a spectacular rate, giving rise to what has been called the Great Acceleration. But a kind of reversal seems to be taking place: nature, once seen as a realm of repetition, has become historicized and even rushed toward an end, while history, the very site of change itself, appears strangely stagnant. In the wake of Reinhart Koselleck, Bouton offers readers a history of the idea of acceleration from the Enlightenment to the Anthropocene and invites us to undertake a critical assessment of this narrative of the "acceleration of history." Challenging the theories of Hartmut Rosa and François Hartog, he emphasizes the plurality of temporal experiences that characterize our present—the polychrony of modernity. Ultimately, the book's aim is not to deny the relevance of the categories of acceleration and presentism for understanding modernity, but rather to show that alternative rhythms and relationships to both past and future also exist.

Modernity, proposes Christophe Bouton, is not about the acceleration of time, but about living in multiple temporalities—polychrony.Like a speeding locomotive that has lost its driver, the history of Western society since the mid-nineteenth century has been characterized as an exponential, out-of-control acceleration. Simultaneously, in recent decades, the destructive impact of human activity on the planet has increased at a spectacular rate, giving rise to what has been called the Great Acceleration. But a kind of reversal seems to be taking place: nature, once seen as a realm of repetition, has become historicized and even rushed toward an end, while history, the very site of change itself, appears strangely stagnant. In the wake of Reinhart Koselleck, Bouton offers readers a history of the idea of acceleration from the Enlightenment to the Anthropocene and invites us to undertake a critical assessment of this narrative of the "acceleration of history." Challenging the theories of Hartmut Rosa and François Hartog, he emphasizes the plurality of temporal experiences that characterize our present—the polychrony of modernity. Ultimately, the book's aim is not to deny the relevance of the categories of acceleration and presentism for understanding modernity, but rather to show that alternative rhythms and relationships to both past and future also exist.

This volume addresses the question of time from the perspective of the time of nature. The book first explores the experience of time and its relation to time in nature in a set of chapters that bring together what human experience and physics enable metaphysicians, logicians and scientists to say about time.