Abstract
The German sociologist Norbert Elias (1897-1990) defined time as a social and relational symbol, belonging to a fifth symbolic dimension, the human experience or consciousness. This eliasian image of a five-dimensional Universe is based on the understanding of the interdependency and mutual overlap among the physical, biological, social, and individual levels of integration, without which, the enigma surrounding the concept of time would remain without a solution for this author. Thus, Elias proposed a procedural synthesis that connects as a unit the dichotomous pairs that traditionally - and still - permeate the philosophical approaches about time: subjective and objective time, time of nature and time of consciousness, physical and social time, phenomenological and cosmological time, etc. This article critically examines the foundations of the eliasian idea of time in its holistic and procedural approach, as well as some of the possible outcomes in the understanding of this concept by different areas of knowledge.
Keywords:
Norbert Elias; Time; Time Concepts; Symbolic Time; Relational Time