The concept of temporality is essential to human existence, influencing how people experience themselves and their world. It encompasses time's passage, changes, transitions, cycles, continuity, patterns, disruptions, and progressions, among others. Temporal experiences vary depending on various factors, including culture, age, gender, identity, environment, social positioning, and more. These temporal experiences are also shaped by the way individuals perceive themselves, the surrounding world, and their relationship to it. Selfhood refers to how people define themselves, constructing meaningful identities based on personal attributes and values. It involves subjectivity, agency, self-representation, cognitive processing, emotional responses, and embodied interactions. Thus, non-binary perspectives on temporality and selfhood influence understandings of authenticity and existential meaning differently from traditional binary ones. This article explores this topic.
Body: Non-binary perspectives emphasize that time is socially constructed and contextual, fluid, relational, dynamic, and multidimensional. People can manipulate or resist time's flow, engaging in past-present-future constructions while experiencing time simultaneously as an unfolding process. Such understandings challenge the linear view of time as a fixed sequence of moments that moves forward without repetition or reversals, making room for creative engagements with history and memory.
Some Indigenous cultures conceive of time as cyclical, where present actions shape future outcomes through rituals, ceremonies, and other practices. By contrast, Western views prioritize objectivity, rationality, linearity, precision, efficiency, productivity, and control, privileging quantifiable knowledge over embodied experiences.
The impact of non-binary perspectives on temporality and selfhood extends beyond individual lives, affecting social structures, institutions, belief systems, power dynamics, and politics. Understanding these perspectives allows individuals to rethink their temporal positions and relationships, questioning assumptions about time's inevitable progressions and recognizing opportunities to live more authentically. Embracing diverse temporalities enables us to explore how we experience ourselves and others, seeking interconnectedness, mutuality, reciprocity, and interdependence. We can create new worldviews based on non-binary temporalities by challenging hierarchical structures, fostering inclusive dialogues, and promoting collective action towards more just futures.
How do non-binary perspectives on temporality and selfhood inform understandings of authenticity and existential meaning?
A significant number of scholars claim that the conceptualization of time is embedded within our cultural worldview and influences how we perceive ourselves as individuals. These arguments indicate that human beings' temporal experience is shaped by their social contexts and life experiences. Accordingly, it is essential to recognize that there are no objective concepts for time; rather, temporal categories vary across cultures, historical periods, and individual minds.