{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"d3ee5fbb-1124-4191-99e1-3139801e0da2","title":"Time The Modern and Postmodern Experience","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":null,"requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"d3ee5fbb-1124-4191-99e1-3139801e0da2","id":"d3ee5fbb-1124-4191-99e1-3139801e0da2","uuid":"d3ee5fbb-1124-4191-99e1-3139801e0da2","title":"Time The Modern and Postmodern Experience","normalized_title":"timethemodernandpostmodernexperience","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":null,"isbns":[],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":178,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/d3ee5fbb-1124-4191-99e1-3139801e0da2","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Time%20The%20Modern%20and%20Postmodern%20Experience","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/d3ee5fbb-1124-4191-99e1-3139801e0da2/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/d3ee5fbb-1124-4191-99e1-3139801e0da2/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/d3ee5fbb-1124-4191-99e1-3139801e0da2","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/d3ee5fbb-1124-4191-99e1-3139801e0da2/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/d3ee5fbb-1124-4191-99e1-3139801e0da2/search"},"page":{"printed_page":53,"pdf_page":53,"physical_index":53,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"359f06abe06fd63fea3c1c674c3f5e9c6141e25796e2aa605b906707cea7a486"},"chapter":"An Embarrassment of Proper Times:","content":"For Emile Durkheim, who wrote The Elementary Forms of Religious Life in 1912, it was obvious that it was the forms of social organization from which people draw their fundamental thought categories such as space and time. For a conception' of time means nothing other than an intellectual grasp of that which surrounds people in their natural and social environment. And Norbert Elias stresses:\n\nthat time assumes the character of a universal dimension, is nothing other than a symbolic expression of the experience that everything which exists is part of a continual sequence of events. Time is an expression of the fact that people seek to determine positions, the length of intervals, the speed of change and more besides in this flow with a view to their own orientation.15\n\nIt follows from this that, depending on the state of social development, time as a social institution, as a symbolic means of orientation, is differently conceived, and confirmed and institutionalized by behaviour, social habits and interaction. That is why there are different conceptions of time in societies; they change with the demands which are made in the present on the society of individuals.\n\nYet this is no longer the simple formula of the different evaluation befitting the past, present or future in a society, which was believed not that long ago by empirically oriented social researchers to contain the key to the understanding of problems of time.1⁶But the abolition of the category of the future, and its replacement by that of the extended present, does not suffice to cope with all the contradictions which have arisen and the pressure of problems. What has been set in motion is rather also the relationship between the linear and the cyclical conception of time. This is generally regarded as fundamental to the temporal architecture of a civilization'(Krzysztof Pomian). Its components can be taken apart and put together again, but even through the plurality of times - psychological time, solar, liturgical and political time, clock time and the ultra-long or extremely brief time of science¹7 – the deeply rooted dualism of thought and temporal perception runs in straight lines or in recurring movements. One's own experience of life sufficiently nurtures both views. The movement from birth to death can be conceived as part of a cycle, indeed as recurrence, or as a more or less straight line which runs from the starting point to the final point. The linear, says Michael Young, stresses the new and leaves behind it what is familiar and has already been experienced. Viewed in these terms, it does not repeat itself and nothing is repeated in it. But no more can the cyclical bring back what is familiar, what has already existed, and what is identical in human life, although it produces something new.18As with every dualism, there is ample illustrative material for both ways of seeing things, but in the valuation befitting them from a social standpoint they remain in a peculiarly ambivalent, and unstable, because easily 'revaluable' position. The extended present, which can no longer be conceived in a linearly open, continual future, must therefore necessarily re-evaluate and absorb the body of cyclical time. The arrow of time admittedly continues to point forward, but it is now composed of many, recurring cycles. Science confirms this, as if its report had been ordered by society at the right time. From chronobiology, which deals with circadian rhythms and investigates the different oscillations and frequencies of the cycles of the human organism, via physics to the history of art or economics, science offers a whole host of insights based on a complementary view between the linearity and the cyclicality of time.\n\nFrom the Future to the Extended Present\n\n53","previous_page":52,"next_page":54}