The Illusion of Simultaneity
Except for light switches nothing worked by pushing a button. The phonograph had to be wound, a lot of the cars had to be cranked, coffee was ground by cranking, too, and the hand still had uses beyond separating pieces of paper money and pointing.
Arthur Miller, Timebends
At the turn of the twelfth to the thirteenth century, something began to stir in Europe. Eight hundred years ago', writes Adolf Holl, people in some European cities began to feel a strange and previously unheard-of desire. They wanted to know the time."1 God's time, as the French historian LeGoff put it, gave way to the time of the traders. What was dawning was a premonition of a future which would prove to be open to the human creative capacity. A future which involved risks, for only someone prepared to risk his or her assets again and again for the sake of an opportunity was able to head for this horizon. With the eighteenth century, the horizon of the future became dynamic. The idea of progress entered the history of the human race and temporalized it. Today the tension between present experience that does not value what is past and an expectation oriented towards what is, in tendency, endless improvement has largely collapsed. The belief in progress in the last two hundred years has been severely shaken. But the need for time, which the natural sciences first declared with the Enlightenment when they included in their programme the achievement of what is new, and hence, according to Hans Blumenberg, opened up the 'divide between lifetime and world time', has continued to grow.
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