← See the axis · Temporal orientation
ArgumentWe are heirs
The depth of a life lies neither in the instant nor in the project alone, but in the thread that links it to those before and after.
Supports
Confucius, Burke · Analects; Reflections on the Revolution in France
- Before projecting or savoring anything, we have already received everything: a language, a body of knowledge, tools, a habitable world that others built and handed down to us without our having earned it.
- To measure one's life by its pleasures or its successes alone is to cut oneself off from this depth. For as for , the community is a , a pact between the dead, the living and those not yet born. To honor one's debts to the past, through or simple gratitude, is to acknowledge what one owes.
- And to pass on in turn, a knowledge, a memory, a livable world, is to give one's brief life a share in a vaster time. What passes through us exceeds us: this frees us from the obsession with « optimizing » hours we thought were ours alone.
Therefore So to live time well is to know oneself a passage: to receive with gratitude, to transmit with care, and to find there a depth that neither the instant nor the project gives.
How far does this reasoning convince you?
Not at all
Entirely
Deepenings
A pact between the generations
- defined society as a partnership between those who are living, those who are dead and those who are to be born. Each person's life is but one moment of it, yet that moment carries all the rest.
- Far from crushing the individual, this view relieves him: he does not have to invent everything or succeed at everything within the short span of his years; it is enough to hold his link, to receive and to pass on faithfully.
How far does this reasoning convince you?
Not at all
Entirely
Put to the test
Objection