Introduction to the section on time

On 6–8 May 2020 the conference on “‘Time, Forward!’: The Time of Philosophy and Philosophy of Time” was held in Saint Petersburg. The main goal of this conference was to offer a general methodology for cultural analysis of the Russian society in the first third of the twentieth century. As the main category of such an analysis, time was chosen, since the problematising of time served during this period as a leitmotif that penetrated and bound together all parts of the intellectual social whole. Indeed, in the twentieth century, the idea of and attitude toward time changed radically. This change was due to discoveries in physics (theory of relativity by Einstein), sociology (time as a factor of technological and cultural change), economics (time as a unit of measurement of aggregate labour costs for products), psychoanalysis (time as a structural model of personality), and the general atmosphere of social withdrawal including numerous political, economic and military crises, and permanent revaluation of traditional values. Time gained a new, personalised character and became the main form of historical and individual identity as well as a lens for interpreting the self and the world. Thus, time was transformed from an objective physical factor and a historical time into an existential phenomenon for human beings. This new approach to time can be characterised as a “temporal turn,” the main idea of which is, as expressed in Sergey Askol’dov’s words, that time “is inseparable from its content. Strictly speaking, it is not time that exists, but temporal being” (Askol’dov 1913, p. 147). The above conference was dedicated to the analysis of the “temporal being” of Russian people within the specified period. The conference participants aimed to observe how ideas of time changed, what concepts and symbols of time were developed, how new cultural forms and norms of time were established, and what meanings were given to the category of time in different spheres of life. In general, the talks and discussions dealt with transformations of temporal culture. There are many different subjects available for this analysis, such as literature, painting, architecture, philosophy, or science. What is remarkable is that all of these areas of culture attempted to reflect upon time and express it by the means available to them. Not only could professional philosophers philosophize, but scientists, artists, writers, and musician

did so as well. Moreover, art became a kind of practical philosophy, and philosophy, in turn, functioned as a central nervous system, which formed the general attitude towards the world and put together existing different worldviews into a unified whole of that cultural epoch. To give some examples: Gleb Khaziev (Yekaterinburg) showed in his presentation that the "intuition of time" underpinned the musical and philosophical work of Alexander Scriabin and can thus be used to systematise the composer's diverse heritage. Scriabin's music in general can be "deciphered" through the topic of "packed time," and, in particular, the Mystery-the culmination of his work-can be seen as a kind of "time machine." Vera Serkova (Saint Petersburg) analysed reflections on time among the literary OBERIU circle (Daniil Kharms, Aleksander Vvedenskii, Jakov Druskin, Leonid Lipavskii, Igor Bakhterev, etc.). Time, these authors believed, cannot be understood discursively, but it can be grasped through paradoxes, antinomies and thought experiments. It was sometimes not reason, but affect, such as horror-"catalepsy" (Leonid Lipavskii)-that helped being in touch with time and conceiving its nature and functions. Marina Savel'eva (Kiev) examined the concept of time in Jakov Golosovker's philosophy of myth and discovered that he defined time neither through space as its physical opposite nor by means of metaphysical speculations, but through imagination. Considering the October Revolution of 1917 as a realisation of myth, Golosovker was interested in how the mechanism of time perception changes in a situation of absolute rejection of the old and establishing of the new. According to him, orientation in a new situation, that is, in the situation of implementing a myth, was possible exclusively through imagination. In her presentation, Savel'eva reconstructed Golosovker's logic of mythical time during the period of socialist revolution. Tatiana Terent'eva (Yekaterinburg) analysed photography from the perspective of the manifestation of time through image. Her topic was discovering the invisible relations between different modes of time-past, future and present-in visual artefacts. Elena Savel'eva (Tomsk) focused on Soviet cinematography reflecting the practices of time management directed to constructing a new collective identity.
There was a large number of presentations devoted to special philosophical problems of time. In the field of attention were the conceptions of time of such philosophers as Gustav Shpet (Bourgeot Liisa, Helsinki; Natalia Artemenko and Evgenii Malyshkin, Saint Petersburg), Mikhail Bakhtin (Irina Popova, Moscow; Irina Enns, Tomsk; Inessa Oleinik, Minsk; Andrei Sychev, Saransk), Semen Frank (Tatiana Resvykh, Moscow; Viacheslav Tikhonov, Saint Petersburg), Nilolai Losskii (Valentin Balanovskii, Kaliningrad; Inna Tzagaraeva, Saint Petersburg), and more. These discussions allowed to reconstruct an impressive picture of the mutual influences of various traditions of understanding time such as Neoplatonism, Kantianism, philosophy of life and Hegelianism in Russian philosophy. Along with this, the general tendency towards ontologisation of time was revealed; human temporality became a new ontological foundation influencing all possible theoretical and practical questioning, and the worldview as a whole. The general result of these discussions can be summarised in saying that it is impossible to reflect on contemporary humanity on the individual or global level without addressing the question of time.
The participants discussed such topics as anthropological aspects of the engagement with time and space-chronotope, including different kinds of human relationships to time (escapism, eschatology, avant-garde, futurism, conservatism, messian-ism, etc.); connection between time and timelessness (eternity/temporariness, continuum/discreetness, historicity/universal forms of historical consciousness); interactions of individual time with objective, social, time (unification/diverse languages of time); the idea of time as the transcendental base of the meaning of cultural and personal life; and interpretations of time as a form of identity ("our"/"alien" time). Overall, the goal of these numerous studies was to understand the human being as she finds herself in her time and how she interprets time. The participants attempted to study time not just theoretically but also in its practical dimension, and not just from the perspective of scientific practice, but the social-cultural practice that had emerged in Russia during that period. The scholarly articles included in this cluster represent a variety of philosophical approaches to the problem of time.
Funding Note Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL.

Conflict of Interest
The author declares that she has no conflict of interest.
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