A secular acceleration: Theological foundations of the sociological concept “social acceleration”

Abstract

The term “shortening of time” is related to the Judeo-Christian tradition that announces the end of time as the moment when God, for the sake of the elect, shortens the duration of days and hours, because without this shortening no one would survive (This means that only a God's will could ended Time. The Christian perspective believes that the last days will be chaotic, and God will preclude History, ending time, to save a few men of goodwill.). While in this sense salvation is associated with divine intervention, the thesis of acceleration would reverse the above formula, making human beings responsible for the narrowing of time. But if the shortening of time in the Apocalypse is aimed at the salvation of the World: Where does acceleration, a secular idea of the shortening of time, aim? What is it that justifies the increase in the speed of completing tasks that previously took considerable time, which are today performed in just a few hours? How can we justify the frenzy to obtain what we want in the shortest time possible? In this paper we propose to address this and other questions, in order to show the relationship between a sociological understanding of acceleration with a theological-Christian view of time. In other words, the main claim exposes the transfer of teleology from a religious conception to a historical-worldly conception of time.

Keywords

Time acceleration shortening modernity

“If those days had not been cut short, no one would survive, But for the sake of the elect those days will be shortened” (Matthew, 24: 22–24) “If the Lord had not cut short those days, no one would be saved, but for the sake of the elect, whom he has chosen, He has shortened those days” (Mark, 13: 20)

Introduction

“Et minuentur anni sicut menses et menses sicut septimana et septimana sicut diez et diez sicut horae”.¹ (“And the years will be shortened to months, and the months to weeks, and the weeks to days, and the days to hours”).

The German historian Reinhart Koselleck begins his work Zeitverkürzung und Beschleunigung: Eine Studie zur Säkularisation² by proposing the comparison of the meaning of the preceding sentence from the Sibyla Triburtina, with the tale of a nineteenth century electrical engineer. In relation to the steady progress of technique, in which the development of productive methods was becoming increasingly more efficient, the engineer and entrepreneur Werner von Siemens intuited a law that captured such progress: “This law clearly recognizable, is that of the constant acceleration of the current development of our civilization” (Koselleck, 2003: 39). With this phrase von Siemens would unwittingly account for one of the hallmarks of post-eighteenth century time, namely the emergence of a situation of continuing acceleration.³

Following the comparison proposed by Koselleck, we face two distinct but related ways of establishing a relationship with time: whereas in the apocalyptic text time is shortened as a divine work in honor of salvation, the modern engineer claims time is accelerated by the succession of innovations and improvements within equal time periods with the aim of progress. In both cases abbreviated time intervals are evoked, although in different contexts and with different contents.

In relation to the Christian view of time, one of the elements most present in this conception is its eschatological character, within which the idea of the finality of time experienced as a time of waiting is highlighted. In this period, the output that could be thought of as the consideration of Sibyla’s book about the configuration of time as the horizon of earthly ordering is subject to the consideration of divine will as the rector of the worldly order. The next section will delve into this situation in order to show the explanatory output in the configuration of the “shortening of time,” in Christian doctrine, for a theory of “social acceleration”, in sociology. In what follows we will try, therefore, to give an account for this link, using the work of Reinhart Koselleck as a compass, particularly the compilation of texts available in Zeitschichten: Studien zur Historik. Complementing Koselleck’s exposition about the existing link between shortening and acceleration are other initial fluctuations by 1) Norbert Elias’s the sociology of time, which aims to clarify the manner in which time is defined in terms of modern societies; 2) later we will attend to several central aspects of the sense of time in Christianity through certain passages from French historian François Hartog’s Regimes of Historicity; 3) this last point will be connected with the rise of historic time noted in the works of Karl Löwith and Hans Blumenberg in which they make explicit a connection between the idea of salvation in Christian terms with the shaping of a secular conception of progress in order to, finally, hoping to having a panoramic view of the secularized tradition of certain Christian concepts as fundamental elements of structural aspects of the Modern Age; 4) addressing certain arguments that give life to the current thesis relating to a social acceleration in the work of German sociologist Harmut Rosa, culminating with some general remarks.

Denominalized time

“Time is a problem for us, a trembling and demanding problem, perhaps the most vital of metaphysics.” (JL Borges, History of Eternity)

Although the use of the reference to St. Augustine is nothing new, to paraphrase the sentence with which Husserl begins the introduction to his Vorlesungen zur Phäenomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins, any serious reflection about time requires a close reading of Chapters 14–28 Book XI of Confessions (Husserl, 1985: 3). Rather than deal with the infinite possible answers to question posed by Augustine of Hippo—What is Time?— we suggest addressing here a question that is less demanding and, at the same time, much closer to contemporaneity, i.e. our time.

Following the German sociologist Norbert Elias, one of the elements crossing reflection on time in the modern world refers to the project of denominalization that any question for this should to achieve:

“Reflecting on the problem of time, it is not difficult for us to mistake the nominalized form of the concept […] This language convention is somewhat reminiscent of the old trend, not yet completely disappeared, to personify abstractions. Work with justice became the goddess Justice […] Think of phrases like “the wind blows” or “the river flows,” as if the wind was something other than blowing and the river was distinct from its flowing. Is there perhaps a wind that does not blow and a river that does not flow? These linguistic habits, therefore, deceive reflection, reinforcing once again the myth of time as something that, in a sense, is found there, exists, and that, as something present, can be determined or measured by men, even if it is impossible to perceive with the senses.” (Elias, 1989: 53–54)

Thus, a more mature way of addressing time, if we follow Elias, would be to leave behind a model of “the time” as an entity encasable in fixed manner with personification in mind: “the temporary” would become “the Time.” The form “time” should be better understood as the emergence of a sophisticated mechanism of social coordination. In this way, they would recognize that the conception of time as an entity would be associated with the bad habit from earlier times of humanity directly identified certain experiences with deified representations. The current concept of time would have the double difficulty of, on the one hand, having to purify the nominalization (deification, personification, and determination) and, on the other hand, needing to recognize the status of the concept as a result of processes of social complexity that would have required a higher level of abstraction in observing temporal phenomena.

“If we go back to a remote enough past, we see that there are stages where men still do not have the ability to relate the many complex movements of the stars to create a relatively well-integrated schema. They survived a large quantity of singular events that did not have a clear nexus or in any case, just presented a fantastic relationship that was quite labile. Those who do not have a firm standard for determining the time of events do not possess a concept of time similar to ours.” (1989: 51).

This composition of the concept of time involved in social phenomena, however, deserves a detailed observation of the structural processes that are omitted in the analysis of Elias in his work. One way to generate a notion of “time” is to focus on the emergence and analysis of the concept regarding its, shall we say, functional character in social processes. In this sense time as an abstraction can well be understood as an epiphenomenon of the evolution of society or, in other words, a consequence of processes within society and not outside it (Tabboni, 2001: 9).

However, based on this type of approach, it confirms the accompanying explanatory relative to the characteristics of the temporal experience that the modern world experiences. Thus the monitoring of certain processes belonging to the west and, in particular, Christianity, shines an important light on the origin of the modern perspective of time and its configuration. We will try to explain this perspective.

From a Christian vision of time to an historic vision of time

Giorgio Agamben once wrote that God is the concept in which men conceive their deciding problems (Agamben, 2009). The fact that in theological concepts “deciding” problems are at play means pausing to consider these concepts and rethinking our questions in the light of their horizon. Because while it is true that theology today is seen by some as “small and ugly” (Benjamin, 1985: 177), this seems to offer an echo to the present. Being “small and ugly” does not mean that it does not have output. Being “small and ugly” does not mean that it has nothing to say (Benjamin, 2007).

To delve into a relationship between the Christian conception of time and the secularized idea of time in modernity, it is appropriate to note what would be the characteristics of speculation about the shortening of time in Christian doctrine.

According to the French historian François Hartog the characteristic of Christine time is the tension and relief of waiting. However, this conception is not an invention of Christianity itself, but rather a Hebraic formula that has been present since Yahweh’s command to the chosen people and their escape from Egypt

“from the departure from Egypt till the long-delayed entrance to the country of Canaan, with Yahweh walking in front, a wait is created which is a resource itself of the story. There begins this interweaving of time and the story that Paul Ricoeur has come up with, being a reader of Augustine and Aristotle. In this strain, to retake the vocabulary of Augustine, Moses is commissioned to create a history, while some of the people, unable to keep waiting, continue to spread to nearby regions. Twice, in Numbers and Deuteronomy, they summarize the moments and stages and the succession of events of the Exodus from Egypt to the shores of Jordan that constitute the history of those forty years that should mold Israel to make it ‘a dynasty of priests and a holy nation’” (Hartog, 2007: 85–86)

In that context, what provides the view belonging to Christianity is the division of time in two, thanks to the decisive event of the Incarnation: the birth, death and resurrection of the Son of God makes time itself and its design appear altered. This opens a “New Time” that will come to a close at a second and final event: the return of Christ and the Last Judgment. This time/interval is a time of waiting: a present that inhabits the hope of the End and the Salvation. This tension installed between present and future is what is expressed in the Gospel of Matthew through the revelation of the shortening of times, because in the End, no man on earth would be saved if God did not shorten time. This event has a unique interdependence at the time when Christianity ascends as the official religion of the Roman Empire under the rule of Theodosius in the fourth century A.D. In this context, there comes a time when the political and spiritual heritage of Rome passes to the Church (Arendt, 1968: 197–226) and when the tension cedes from the “already” and “not yet” constitutive of the present or the intermediate time. This is, for example, what Augustine testifies as “spreading time” that would suppose the institutionalization of the Church: if the Kingdom can be made on earth, the end times may be delayed. Between the two—the “already” of the Kingdom of God on earth and the “not yet” of the waiting—the “already” taken in a tradition that has been nourished by it, and contains it, it will tend to be heavier each time. They will ask, since then, to look less towards the future and more towards the past, to Christ in whom all begins and who is also the insuperable living model. “He is the lighthouse, whose shining beam sheds light on the former (on Adam and Eve) and the posterior (on Him towards the end of times).” (Hartog, 2007: 87)

“Thanks to the fact that the foundation of the city of Rome was repeated in the founding of the Catholic Church—though, of course, with a radically different content—the Roman trinity of religion, authority and tradition was taken up by Christian era.” (Arendt, 1968: 166)

At this point we ignore what would be a question for the discussion about the true meaning of a culmination of time and what would be supposed along with it by the variants of messianism in the Judeo-Christian tradition with the figure of the parousia (Borovinsky, 2009). One note about the debate on the place of man in a story told from multiple possibilities within open theology. “If, as Cohen points out, the time of the Messiah is the result of the life of peoples understood as history “end of days” or as “the future of humanity,” then the idea is not so “near or far”, but the converted will be understood as history or as “the idea of the moral world history” (Taub, 2011). The figure of the end of days, therefore, is beyond the scope adopted in this work and its exposure exceeds the purposes of this.

It is worth noting that the debate about the ways in which one can understand man’s place in a history told from a theological perspective opens many possibilities.

Returning to the turning point of the Christian order of time in the direction of the “already,” to a past continually reactivated by ritual, the Church manages to rediscover, restart and inhabit the old models of the mos majorum and the historia magistra vitae making them work for their benefit, but without ever fully identifying with them; by becoming a temporal power another time order will always be proclaimed. In short, what endures is a certain plasticity in the Christian order of time in which the past, present and future are articulated in Eternity. Although this is not to be confused or reduced to a single mode of historicity: not even to one that has had such influence that of the historia magistra vitae.⁴ Later Christian time and the time in the world dissociates through many crises, until the division. This does not imply in any way that the orders switched to the extent that the opening of Progress was gaining an advantage over the hope of salvation: a tension towards the former and a fervor of I hope turned to the future (Löwith, 1949: 18).

The chance that future is formed in the present, and, along with it, the relativity itself of any ontologization of time in a past–present–future structure (each one demarcated definitively with respect to the other layers) cannot be understood clearly without an understanding based in common sense. That is why the projection into the future in Christian doctrine is one of the fundamental ways of breaking the quiet distinction of layers of time in pursuit of a greater articulation thereof. This is something that will be corroborated in certain philosophical thought: Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty are in favor of a more problematic concept of time.

For both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty time is not a substance to which the world “sticks.” They do not talk about the entrance of the world “in time,” but instead discuss the constitution of time in consciousness. In the words of Heidegger: “Soweit in den heutigen Zeitanalysen überhaupt über Aristoteles und Kant hinaus etwas Wesentliches gewonnen wird, betrifft es mehr die Zeiterfassung und das ‘Zeitbewußtsein.’” (Heidegger, 2002: 433)⁵ In same line Merleau-Ponty adds: “Le passé n'est done pas passé, ni le future futur. Il n'existe que lorsqu'une subjectivité vient brisser la plénitude de l'être en soi, y dessiner une perspective, y introduire le non-être.” (Merleau-Ponty, 1945: 428).⁶ Seen this way, time borrows its existence from consciousness, since this is what is really able to designate something as “time,” to the extent that time is configured by the consciousness’s own distinctions. In this context, the projection into the future is what constitutes all experience of time. Returning to Merleau-Ponty, what is surprising is the connection between an order of time that will come and the “presentification of the future” in consciousness, not only as a question about what “is not yet,” but as a condition of the elaboration of time itself: time, in one of its aspects, is configured in the coming of the future to the present, in both Heidegger’s “Die Zeitigung bedeutet kein ‘Nacheinander’ der Ekstasen. Die Zukunft ist nicht später als die Gewesenheit und diese nicht früher als die Gegenwart. Zeitlichkeit zeitigt sich als gewesende- gegenwärtigende Zukunft” (2002: 350)⁷ and in Merleau-Ponty:

“Si la prospection est une rétrospection, cést en tout cas une rétrospection anticipée et comment pourrait-on anticiper si l'on n'avait pas le sens de l'avenir? Nous devinons, diton, «par analogie», que ce présent incomparable, comme tous les autres, passera. Mais pour qu'il y ait analogie entre les presents révolus et le présent effectif, il faut que celui-ci ne se donne pas seulement comme present, qu'il s'annonce déjà comme un passé pour bientôt, que nous sentions sur lui la pression d'un avenir qui cherche à le destituer, et qu'en un mot le cours du temps soit à titre originaire non seulement le passage du present au passé, mais encore celui du future au present.” (Merleau-Ponty, 1945: 473)⁸

This is precisely what the German philosopher Hans Blumenberg identified in the case of the affinity between Christian eschatology and—behold the novelty—modern progress: both, in their differences, update the constitutive structure of time pointing to the completion of future in the present:

“This is a formal distinction, but precisely because of this more manifest, and has to do with the fact that eschatology speaks of an event that breaks into history and that is heterogeneous with respect to it and beyond, while the idea progress makes the extrapolation of a structure that is characteristic of all present at a future immanent history. The idea of progress would not have generated naturally concrete progress has always been both the private lives of individuals and in a generation or group of generations, in the realm of experience, the will or the general practice; progress would be the highest degree of generalization, a projection to the whole story, which obviously has not always been done. We must ask what has made possible the idea of progress” (Blumenberg, 2008: 39).

Blumenberg’s response is based on the conviction that Christian thought invests to the history of the projection to a final time to which it is necessary to promote. If Heidegger and Merleau Ponty’s consideration of the future responds to a structure in the genesis of time itself, Blumenberg translates this formulation to the scenario that interests us, namely an eschatology of the shortening of the time linked to a secularization of such projection of the future into the present, in terms of accelerated progress. Such a situation is positioned as an item of interest for theology to the extent that this affinity is the transfer of an overhead key—the will of God save the chosen ones—an inside history: the human possibility of influencing the progress. The transfer—a divine order to an earthly one—under the concept of “historical time” in which Karl Löwith works with, as the engine of modernity. Then we delve into this.

The time of history

Since the emergence of the “historical time” (Löwith, 2008) the world is no longer experienced as something immutable, invariant. Since the 18th century, world time is essentially a stable reality. With the emergence of the historical consciousness during the 18th and 19th centuries, time is conceived as the place of change, the variant, and the event: stability is abnormal, change is normal. This permanence of change would be mainly supported by the periodic advances of technique, and would also be explained by the philosopher Karl Marx, who came to the conclusion that ‘the solid melts into air' from, primarily, the specificities of the modes of production expressed in technical progress. In addition to a mechanism that reproduces material conditions of existence, the technique is essentially a storage medium (Stiegler, 2002), i.e. a mechanism that makes up the relationship between the past, and the extent that it condenses an accumulation of knowledge. Time as a category of consciousness begins to be problematic: a dimension often so obvious, “internalized”, even “self-evident” due to the fact that the notion of time deserves further investigation, whereas the organization of societies is based on a defined and measurable concept of time. This, in turn, makes social coordination possible, as it is usually taken as a “natural” category without regard to important elements of its Constitution.

“If there is, in fact, an inmanent experience of time into the world and historic, differentiated from the temporal rhythms linked to nature, there is no doubt that is the experience of acceleration, under which it describes the historical period of time specifically produced for men. Only through this awareness of acceleration—or correlative slowdown—the time experience, always already given course, can be defined as an specific historic time experience.” (Koselleck, 2000: 46–47)

The transfer of teleology from a religious conception of time to a historical-worldly conception of time becomes clear only with the introduction of historical time as reality and question. Thus, the doctrine of the two worlds—the earthly and the divine—as ultimate proof of social order, is replaced. According to Koselleck, it is replaced by the notions of history and historical time with the burden that it places on the human condition: to characterize the historical time by being defined as a time produced specifically by men. It is in this sense that Blumenberg’s position regarding the situation that would characterize the modern time should be considered the historical process leading to the Modern Era: the opening of the scissors of the time, referred to in Weltzeit und Lebenzeit (1986b), Blumenberg notes the end of a time in relation to the future, without something new to bring to the modern age of the world exposes an infinite range of possibilities to the future, which can only be determined at the same time that the future turns into the present. Time periods correspond with what they had specifically in respect to what is expected of each of them in a pre-figurative world plan. The foundation of modernity would therefore be based on the emergence that no longer posed a threat to the inset of time periods in an orientation that would be carried out at end of the story. Moreover, over time, passage of time would have a “time period correlation” with life: what had been lived in the past and time itself is not a concept of time that you could differentiate epochally. For this reason, lifetime and world time are correlated.

What is emphasized here is the notion time has an open nature, to the extent that already lacks an established direction of history toward which it would tend to get its consummation.

The quote from Koselleck above fits inside a greater thematic, referring to a pre-modern Western consideration of a time that is carried out at the “end of time”. Each historical arrangement would be a prelude of what the union with God would signify, beyond this world and its time.

Modern change would mean to defend the belief of time identification in the peak of their current potential, and the connection with God would be figurative: “all time relates immediately to God”. History is not repeated, nor is there a predefined purpose, and there is no determinism or teleology. Variations, even though they are not pure entropy, and even to a lesser extent, are not a part of a circular route in which one direction of the story takes place. Historicism is nothing more than the epiphenomenon of the radical experience that represents the decrease of time in the most varied stages of modern life: in this radical experience, “everything was unique and incomparable”. Here, we find a root cause of the event⁹ that has been successful in contemporary thought.

Considering the argument above, it is possible to now delve into the way that modernity translates the narrowing of the time.

The modern translation of the “Christianization” of time

The Apocalypse, or the end of time in Christian terms, is a telos worthy of being reached because it represents the culmination of a world and the arrival of the Kingdom of God. Under the terms of a secular idea of shortening of the time, acceleration tends to the realization of history in a constant reduction of waiting. One of the translations of this is primarily premised on the proliferation of technical mechanisms that facilitate the decrease of intervals of time spent waiting in order to secure goods. The facilitation of human activity also signifies the support of the effort involving the production of sustenance, as well as the possibility of who is released from certain tasks who may be functional in others. In this regard, it includes both the completion of the work as forces for leisure, which, as we know from studies of cultural consumption of the Frankfurt School and Birmingham, is an important part of the consummation¹⁰ of products would be impossible without this sphere of thinking. Thus, it creates a transposition from a transhistoric goal to an intrahistorical one. The sense of a world destined to be exhumed by a beyond history force—God—is now understood as a necessity that must be assumed by human capabilities. The relationship with the eschatological expectation is thus transformed: if this Christian key is taken as a value and principle of the earthly order, in the secularized version, attempts to overcome acceleration.

The increasing technical progress for the reduction of routes served as a base to Christian interpretations with the formulation of a draft increasingly closer to the project of the consummation of the times. In respect to connectivity after the emergence of a railroad in Europe, Koselleck stresses:

The Christian heritage of the concept of acceleration must be, however, considered as a spectrum of different intelligibility. The secularization of the concept of shortening under the heading of acceleration must be some way autonomized, as Koselleck says, “From XVIII century the experience of acceleration thesis it's, to say it this way, autonomized. It could be argued regardless of Christian derivations” (2000: 63)

For Hans Blumenberg, the reduction of time that pursues modernity responds to an interest in the recovery of “lost time”, in that each time you invest more time, “gained time” responds to a claim for access to the realization of wasted potential. The acceleration would be a consequence of this situation. Like Koselleck, Blumenberg raises the question of the frenzy to increase the force with which passes the time, but in somewhat different terms. For Koselleck, acceleration is a secular phenomenon of shortening of the times in the Christian language, however, this acceleration has no objective or explicit target as in the case of shortening. In the Time of the world and the Time of life, on the other hand, Blumenberg states that both world time and time relative to the subject are dichotomies that come in connection with a different complexity. The thesis of the acceleration creates a hypothesis of a “life time” trying to achieve more time in the world. Prior to the modern world, life time assumed the irresolvable distance between the temporality, inconceivable and uncontrollable nature of the world. The technical progress and the confidence in the domain of nature would be a turning point in this attitude—by surrendering to the time lived a certain belief in the possibility to intensify their activities toward the consummation of the time in the world. In sum, it is recovering “lost time”, one in which the powers with which human beings could consummate their capabilities had not been developed. Therefore, there is a need to obtain the set of possibilities that the world delivers, which were always there and can now only be updated. Hence, the frenzy to make “enter” the world time in the life time.

Koselleck, meanwhile, thinks that acceleration could be related to the ability to anticipate events. Koselleck uses the concept of prognosis to refer to this phenomenon, under which many of the causes of the turmoil are said to reach “somewhere.” Here, the question of what the future may allocate in regard to the past is integrated. Usually, it is understood that it is the past that allows us to interpret the future as the future is the result of what precedes, while the future revels in the art to provide what’s possible once the past is done. But can the future “determine” the interpretations of this? Can something that is not the source of intelligibility of what is going on in the present? How is it possible to even conceive that it still “does not” interfere in the conditions of the present? In purely logical terms, such a possibility does not exist. What “not” cannot identify with what ‘is'. The recognized principle of non-contradiction exerted all his strength to interpret what disproportionately seeks to derive this, including the past, of what is yet to come. The point, however, can be defended. It is certainly not the same future that assumes what the vector would explain what happens in the present moment. What is at stake is rather thinking what are the chances that this is the same function of the past—projected into a future that, so to speak, makes predictions that conclude to this, then operate depending on the projection itself. In these terms is how you can make clear metaphor: it is not the present state of things, nor the last, which results fully in the present, but the projection arrives in future. These are part of a past–present relationship, such as memory, that sets the possibility of prognosis, not defining the plan itself that gives meaning to the present but to the extent that this projection ‘returns' is performed. This complex game of rough and tumble of meaning is reduced to the finding, or simply the very constitution of the human conception of time:

“The man who is open to the World, sentenced to lead his life, is referred to a future condition to be able to exist. In order to be capable of acting he must consider the inability to experience his future, the empirical disability of experiencing it”¹¹ [if done he would already be in the present which leads to huge problems of a theory of time that must face the prophecies’ challenges]

Blumenberg supports the previous thesis turning to Koselleck's argument: “The future would become consequence of current actions, the realization of points of view available in the present. Only then the progress rotates to a progress in a cluster of future determinations through the present and its past.” (Blumenberg, 2008: 42). Even more when it's not only a progress metanarrative but the indetermination of the form in which a telos of indetermination or contingency “is installed through an evolution horizon centrality put in technic-scientific force and nothing beyond that” (Sutherland, 2014: 59).

In a certain sense, Blumenberg's argument highlights the link between a Christian tradition that indicates the existence of a “Last-Time”, and a Modern claim who it perceives to Modernity itself as a “culmination of Times”. The secularization of the eschatology becomes in a birth of progress. “The discovery and awareness of the phenomenon of secularization retain continuity among present and past… There is a continuity of the historic, even in a negative relationship of the past with the present.” (Delekat, 1958: 58)

It is true that a different vision exists about the link between modernization and secularization in Hans Joas's work. For this German sociologist there does not exist a direct involvement between modern and secularized World, which would lead us to reconsider all the above arguments. Inasmuch as it is a topic in itself, exceeding the objectives of this paper, we don't introduce in modernity–secularization discussion and the consequent relationship among acceleration and secularization. However, it should be recalled that according to Joas secularization is not only one state, but a cluster of “waves of secularization” each one with own specificities (Beitía, 2012; Joas, 2004). It is not a secular state of society in the sense a quality of the modern world, but a heterogeneity of secularizations that would be shared between they an option that it increase into the Modern World through an secular option (Joas, 2009; Taylor, 2007). Joas, therefore, is right when he identified the diversity of secularizations with gradualness and levels of presence differing by region, social space, tradition, etc. but he doesn't work with such intensity that secularization is, permanently, a comparative horizon not for contemporary societies between themselves, but among these and those that preceding the world in which the center of explication isn't a religious point of view, more remaining in places where that does not happen as Joas says (2009). Thus, the secularization theory proposed an acceleration notion could be thought in accordance with Joas argument to the extent that is not put into question the secular nature (or not) of Modernity, but tracing of a concept who is vinculated first with a religious point of view and laic after, without denying the existence of dynamics of a non-secular coexistence in Modernity.

The modernity of time or how to make an accelerated society

“Paradise had been able to be such because there was no shortage of time.” (Blumenberg, 2007: 64)

As we saw, according to Reinhart Koselleck “since the eighteenth century, the thesis of the experience of acceleration has been, so to speak, autonomized. It can stand independently from Christian diversions” (Koselleck, 2000: 63). From this perspective the acceleration achieved conceals the origin of its relationship with time, which initially would have been a clear Christian motivation in the pursuit of salvation, becomes a secular argument of orientation towards progress. “Salvation” and “Progress” represent structural affinities: salvation for Christianity becomes progress for modernity.

This is when one takes into account that the notion of “acceleration” may have more to do with a sociological concept which alludes to the speed with which modern society unfolds in its various structural frameworks. This is not exactly the same meaning as the term “shortening”. The sociological concept to which the acceleration refers to means an increase in the speed of the lifestyles made possible by the structural conditions of society—individualization, secularization, functional differentiation, exploitation—and, in this sense, a mundane impulse in the way of living through time. The notion of shortening in theological terms means the divine will to give a space of redemption to those who are chosen, which would be possible if the narrowing of time was a result of divine will (Blumenberg, 1986a).

This process of autonomization of the idea of acceleration can be seen from at least two points of view: on one hand the force that takes on the thesis of acceleration after the French Revolution, which is supported by verification subject to empirical correlation, without turning to a divine time plan. The transmission of news was accelerated thanks to mail and the press, the horse carriages speed increased thanks to the improvements in infrastructure, the channels of the waterways registered a change in volume of activity per unit of transport and space of time, etc. On the other hand, the second view finds the mechanization and social capitalist organization, thanks to which the theory of acceleration acquires universal confirmation in the everyday experience (Koselleck, 2000: 66).

“… from the two million years of documentable human history, the thirty thousand years of autonomous and distinct artistic productions represent, in a retrospective calculation, a comparatively very small temporary margin. From the point of view of the history of civilization, the intervals are shortened further: the introduction of agriculture and livestock makes approximately twelve thousand years and the subsequent display of the great cultures some six thousand years ago, compared with prehistorical spaces increasingly narrow time, within which the new occurs in, so to speak, an accelerated way.” (2000: 70)

Acceleration or increased speed implies the acceptance of loss of control to a certain degree of injection. It would be naïve not to see that any increase of speed leads to reduced control that can be exercised over it. In this context, acceleration could not be understood from a univocal point of view. The plurality of social world events cannot be reduced to the same phenomenon of acceleration. Thus, Hartmut Rosa distinguishes three spheres of acceleration in modernity: technology, social change and rhythms of life. To further support the concept of acceleration, Rosa proposed a “society of acceleration” to those in which the increase or deployment of technological power from tending to slowdown the modes of life—left time spent in work places—proliferate new changes that experience a shortage of time, which would manifest in the acceleration of life (Rosa, 2011c: 20–21).

“The acceleration serves as a strategy to erase the difference between the time in the world and our lifetime … However, due to the dynamics of self-propelled ‘acceleration cycle’, the promise of acceleration never completed, since the same techniques, methods, and inventions that allow a rapid realization of options at the same time increase the number of options (the ‘time in the world’ or ‘the world’s resources’, so to put it) at an exponential rate… As a consequence, our part of the world, the proportion of the world options made with respect to the potentially achievable, decreases (contrary to the original purpose of acceleration) no matter how much we increase the ‘lifestyle’. This is the cultural explanation for the paradoxical phenomenon of simultaneous technological advances and the increase of the shortage of time” (2011c: 25).

This comes to even being an organizing factor in the allocation of time in the daily modern life: “In strange contrast to the idea that individuals in Western societies are free to do whatever they want, the rhetoric of obligation is abundant: “really I have to read the newspaper, exercise, call and visit my friends regularly, learn a second language, inspect the job market in search of better opportunities, have hobbies, travel abroad, keep abreast with the advances in computer technology, etc.” (2011c: 31–32).

At this point it is important to mention that there are two big sources in Rosa's approach. On one hand, there is Koselleck's thesis about decreasing time working every day, and, on the other, lies Blumenberg's argument about the split between separate individual life time and World time, particularly through society.

Also, it is possible to see a connection between Rosa' thesis about deployment of technological power from tending to slow down the modes of life and James Gleicl's theory of acceleration. Indeed, due to the influence of technology in rhythms of life, Gleick argues that time-saving measures are not transferred to increased leisure. New time-saving technologies render old technology obsolete. Then we must take the time to learn new skills (Gleick, 1999). The latter serves to show how the proposition of Hartmut Rosa meets and connects with several studies on acceleration (Rosa, 2012; 2013; Scheuermann and Rosa, 2009).

Even in the Enlightenment, the future of a quasi-religious promised was stained as, if he positioned Reason as the element that should bring freedom from all dominations, and both would have to be achieved in an accelerated manner by human action. But all these determinations of accelerations were founded purely to describe. We are here facing a type of secularizations that, according to certain analytical criteria, moves away from Christianity. However, we cannot doubt that the Christian heritage is still present, insofar as the globalization of the eschatological goals allowed in general define the future of Jerusalem as an immanent historic goal. In other words, the outside history budget of the shortening of time changes at the beginning of the Modern Age in an inside historical axiom of acceleration. The subject is moving from God to man, which must impose precisely this acceleration through a transformation of nature and society.

Final thoughts

Through the previous paragraphs, two major conclusions can be drawn that answer the questions that guides this work. Is secularization of Christian apocalyptic expectations of the end of time the origin of the theory of acceleration? Is the setting of modern acceleration time as the treatment of a Christian heritage? In short, Are they related to the shortening of time, acceleration, and secularization?—as follows:

On one hand, the representation that is possible to shorten time comes from the apocalyptic texts of Judeo-Christian tradition. The idea of the shortening of time is a concept of the religious experience, particularly the hope for salvation. It is a concept that involves the passing of a time interval that, structurally, is understood as a super historic quality, on which the man himself cannot influence. This situation is precisely the change in the Modern Age:

“The systematic nature of contemporary art that not only disrupts the relationship with time but with the understandings or what we “believe” about our own organic bodies (including man and understanding of their own bodies) representing a history of the technique that differs, although it intersects with the history of man. Or, if you want a history of man where this is exceeded infinitely as man as nature, and then denatured from the technician that he is, it is unnatural to be created again, to make up time. This opens the possibility of split time between a world, potentially unlimited, and a life time, limited temporality by death.” (Torres, 2015: 10)

This, in conjunction with the previous, is the shortening of the time intervals preserved as an argument to reach a future salvation, but with an appeal to the apocalypse that lost ground. This loses political resonance, although still practiced in certain types of Christian sects—millenarian, pietistic, theologian of the alliance. The core of the experience of the growing momentum was constituted by the discoveries and inventions of the emerging natural sciences. This brings as a consequence the differences of the arguments: what is the shortening of time difference in the eschatological horizon of universal judgment accelerating progress on the horizon? On one hand, God is no longer the Lord of action, but is the man who causes progress. It is a slow change of the subject of the action. On the other hand, the same time is no longer which is deprived of its natural regularity, and therefore shortened, but is rather the man who avails himself always uniform natural time to chronologically measure driven progress, supposedly, for him.

In short, the shortening of time before ending prematurely from the outside to history now becomes an acceleration that is recorded in history itself and which men have. The novelty would reside in that the representation that the end does not come quickly, but compared with the slow progress of centuries past, current developments occurring at an ever faster pace. Both positions are nurtured in setting a goal of determining teleology, a reasoning must be reached quickly. The goal of accelerated progress was the domain of nature and, increasingly, also the self-organization of society politically constituted. Since salvation is no longer looked at the end of the story, but in the development and execution of the same history, an issue that, in turn, would cause significant challenges to the dialogue and articulation of sociological and theological formulations.

Another important thing is noted in that the theory of acceleration does not imply the existence of a de-facto acceleration: in the first instance the hypothesis of acceleration of modern societies is rather the conceptual formulation in the field of self-description. In other words, whether both social acceleration are effective phenomena, searched and reproduced, but how a presumption of acceleration regulates important practices, and next becomes an explanatory category. When Hartmut Rosa raises the falsity of the promise of acceleration, referring precisely to the point at which the de-facto acceleration does not occur because in the same proportion technical results are accomplished that reduce time invested, new conditions requiring new devotions of time are created at the same time. The form, adopting the acceleration is therefore eminently teleological: to the extent that it cannot be resolved in the speed increase itself, it requires deferred always present or, more precisely, in a horizon of possibility. Always aspiring for more, never being fully present, the promise of accelerating structurally shares the form of eschatology. The promise of the presence in eschatology (reaching a final stage) is translated by the signing of acceleration of a fundamental impact on the destinies of the time. Thus finally under some theory of secularization, there are sufficient reasons to believe in a religious origin about how accelerating lifestyles is brewing, without assuming, necessarily, the existence of a type of eminently secular acceleration. Secularization and acceleration are not equivalent, although possibly branches of the same tree.

Footnotes

Acknowledgment

The author appreciates greatly the comments of Meghan Greene from Johns Hopkins University.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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