Visions of the World and Representations of Time

Abstract

From the viewpoint of intellectual history, the displacement and transformation of the cardinal concepts which made orientation in time possible and also expressed a new vision of the world should be central topics. Although at first glance the same concepts seem in use, they nevertheless changed first their content and then their application. In this article five historical examples are examined in order to understand how changes in representations of time have accompanied and structured transformations in worldviews. The first of these comes from the beginnings of Christianity, which established a radically new time hemmed in between two limits: the Incarnation and the Last Judgment (with the Second Coming of Christ). This new time, which shattered the times of paganism, bore within itself a vision of the world with its history conceived as the history of Salvation. The second example comes from the humanists, whose project for constructing a new world by reviving antiquity involved a break with the time before, which was designated and also denigrated as the Middle Ages. The third involves the concept of reform and the Reformation, which ushered in a real bifurcation in time: it signified first a return to an initial state before it turned into the concept of progress that characterizes the European modern era. The fourth example: by attributing judgment to History, the European thinkers of the modern era secularized it and made History the ultimate judge. Revolution provides the final example. Is it the inception of a new time (like the Incarnation) or of a radically different time (like the Apocalypse)? Or perhaps the concept of crisis is sufficient to make sense of it?