Kairos and Katechon: On the Conditions for (Not) Extending the “Remaining Time”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The article examines the concept of Christian eschatology, the katechon, conceived as a set of factors that keep humanity from a planetary catastrophe within the framework of the temporality of the “remaining time”. Based on the promise of Christian theology about the inevitability of the coming of the end of time, the conditions for (not) prolonging the remaining time are discussed. The introduction demonstrates the relevance of this issue and sets a general theoretical framework for the study. In the first part, the description of the temporality of “political bodies” used by E. Kantorovicz distinguishes between the time of mortals (tempus) and the eternity of angels (aevum), whose combination of urgent eternity constitutes the time of political unions. An appeal to the ancient and New Testament tradition of distinguishing between lasting time (χρόνος) and fateful moments (καιρός) allows us to interpret the time of political bodies as a chain of (not)favorable events καιρός, each of which may be the last. The second part defines the place of political bodies as a constellation of (1) territorial position on earth, (2) spatial position in the universe, (3) points of application of forces in relation to Another, and (4) places of self-identification. In the main part, the possible outcomes of the intervention of the temporality of kairos in the existence of political bodies are modeled. The de Certeau model is proposed, in which the intrusion of time in the form of concentrated wisdom (metis) into the original place leads to its improvement, as well as the Auge model, in which the opposite trend of successive deterioration of the original place occurs. The fourth part describes the temporalities of “metanoia time” and “somnambulistic time”, corresponding to the invasion of (un)favorable kairos in the Certeau and Auge models. It is concluded that the reconstructed temporalities correlate with the katechonic modalities of deterrence and transgression in the horizon of ὥρα (“time set by God”). In the final section, both models are combined in the concept of a “katechonic axis”, which both holds back the onset of disaster and pushes towards it, depending on how much people recognize a favorable kairos. In conclusion, it is concluded that the katechon as the sum of the forces of deterrence corresponds to the time of successful action in the conditions of the temporality of kairos, which contributes to the restoration of the coherence of the spatial and political-cultural order of the coexistence of political unions and humanity in general. The “remaining time” lasts exactly as long as a katechonic successful action is possible.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".