The intuition of time between science and art history in the early twentieth 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. McTaggart'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 contradiction between this model's need for a privileged point of view and its simultaneous denial of such a possibility. The paper's second part analyzes the effects of the change in space-time intuition on Florenskij and Heidegger. Florenskij applies modern mathematics as an argument against the aesthetics of perspective representation. Heidegger uses temporal relativity to argue for the primacy of teleological reasoning. 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 intuition. The third part investigates the question of the intuition of time that corresponds to this shift. Husserl's Phenomenology of Internal Time-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 characterized by an unresolved tension between the ideas that all time is imagined 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.