THE INTUITION OF TIME BETWEEN SCIENCE AND ART-HISTORY IN THE EARLY 20TH-CENTURY

This article compares the corresponding effects in science and art of a change in the intuition of time at the beginning of this century. Mc Taggart's distinction between linear time and tense time is applied to the question of whether linear perspective requires a notion of time as succession. It is argued that the problem of self-representation is a basic problem for this kind of uniform space-time because of the co ntradiction between this model's need for a privileged point of view a nd its simultaneous denial of such a possibility. The paper's second p art analyzes the effects of the change in space-time intuition on Flor enskij and Heidegger. Florenskij applies modern mathematics as an argu ment against the aesthetics of perspective representation. Heidegger u ses temporal relativity to argue for the primacy of teleological reaso ning. Both reflect an early twentieth-century tension between theories of knowledge and theories of vision. The argument is that a change in mathematical intuition also represents a change in aesthetic intuitio n. The third part investigates the question of the intuition of time t hat corresponds to this shift. Husserl's Phenomenology of Internal Tim e-Consciousness is analyzed in order to elucidate the implications of the relation between tense-time and successive time for the problem of realism in art and science. I conclude that our culture is characteri zed by an unresolved tension between the ideas that all time is imagin ed and that all time is real, ideas deriving from a common sensibility . Our cultural dualism between Platonism and deconstruction makes our pre-twentieth-century past culturally exotic.