{"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":80,"pdf_page":80,"physical_index":80,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"3b3ebae9d283b77b4d2fb4302a2f9d9ab618e11f81db519abd1ee140e6a78168"},"chapter":"An Embarrassment of Proper Times:","content":"This has not always been the case. The sciences, as Blumenberg notes, announced their need for time very early on, indeed this partly even stands for the transition to modern science. But at first it was a need for time and a time-structure which was directed towards the past, which was intended to catch up on what reason thought it needed at the time of the Enlightenment. It was never a question here of procuring and creating time for the sake of pure knowledge alone. If the sciences have known how to meet their need for time successfully, then it is always because the time-structures discovered and created by them, and their peculiarities, had retroactive effect and were anchored in socio-economic connections, and in a practice through which every need for time on the part of science that was met became translatable into a societal need and demand for these very time-structures. They range from the rampant ideology of the machine age to concrete working-time regulations invoking it; from the logic of the pair of compasses, in which time is a succession of moments, and the actual change occurs when the eyes are shut, to the high-speed calculator. In historical terms, astronomy, which had tried as early as Kepler and Copernicus to reconcile the empirical observational data with the requirements of theory but also with a coming social 'turning point', was followed by geology. Today, it is the broad front of knowledge of the laboratory sciences which, increasingly interlocked with society and economics, anticipatingly articulates, moulds and puts into operation its need for time – as laboratory time. In the 1830s, there was a heated scientific controversy which began with a seemingly minor problem in the dating of geological strata in the English county of Devon, and ended with a new perspective on the history of the earth.⁶ But in order to comprehend the extent of the change in the understanding of the past with real, economic consequences for the present at that time, it must be recalled that the creation of the geological time-scale took place in a remarkably brief and dense period of scientific work in less than half a century. Around 1800, science admittedly knew that the earth was old, but there was no frame of reference at all to arrange historical events in their chronological sequence. The determining criterion generally accepted since then, based on the chronological order of fossils, did not yet exist. It was as if historians knew that there had been earlier civilizations on this earth, but had no idea whether the pyramid of Cheops had been erected before the cathedral of Chartres or not. Around 1850, however, history was a well-ordered sequence, embracing the whole world, of unrepeatable and recognizable events. It was defined by the history of life on earth, and established by a fixed nomenclature which was valid from New York to Moscow.7\n\n80\n\nCronos's Fear of the New Age","previous_page":79,"next_page":81}