Annotation of the results obtained in 2021
In the last year of the project, participants completed their individual research projects, examining the meaning of the category of time in different spheres of modern life and the role that time plays in people’s lives and in culture. The project centred around the temporal turn – the events that took place in the first third of the twentieth century – and included the following research tasks: conceptualization of the notion 'temporal turn'; the study of the specific characteristics of personal entries into one's 'own' and ‘alien’ time; the study of the axiological meaning of time; and analysis of the connection between time and language. In her analysis of the story by Andrei Platonov The Foundation Pit, M.E.Soboleva investigated the expressions of time in language practices and approached Soviet modernity of the 1920s and 1930s as an individual case of the temporal turn. She showed that the two concepts - time and language - are the key to the understanding of modernity in this story. By connecting these two concepts, she demonstrated how time is constituted via language and vice versa. Soboleva argues that, in contrast to popular belief, there is no single modernity based on single semantics and temporal logic. As for the concept ‘temporal turn’, Soboleva identified the following aspects of this phenomenon: interiorization of time; pluralism of temporal models of life; emergence of a new form of time - event-based time; emergence of a new form of historical experience as experience of the present (not the past); emergence of the idea of historicity of history; time being invested with normative and/or existential significance; and emergence of ethical temporal imperatives. E.S.Cherepanova focused on the concept of temporal turn in the context of Austrian culture of the first third of the twentieth century. Her analysis of the ideas of Georg Simmel, Karl Jaspers, Otto Neurath, Moritz Schlick, Ludwig von Mises, etc has shown that skepticism towards Hegel's philosophy of history led to the creation of new concepts of time and history: left-wing (Otto Neurath's sociology), right-wing (Othmar Spann's holism) and liberal (Moritz Schlick's positivism). The analysis of Alexius Meinong’s biography has brought to light personal ways of entering the temporal turn. It was demonstrated that for the temporal turn it was the agent of the investigation who was transformed and whose identity hinged on temporality rather than the object of investigation. The research on the philosophy of Karl Jaspers was continued in the light of the problematization of the crisis of time. T.A. Kruglova explored the shift of temporal regimes in the interwar period reflected in Soviet art. Taking the idea of a 'conservative' turn as a point of departure, she studied various types of temporality in modern art and demonstrated how temporal regimes of the avant-garde and neoclassicism are intertwined in the work of Sergey Prokofiev. Prokofiev developed his own understanding of time, which led him to redefine the temporal characteristics of the avant-garde, neoclassicism and classicism. Kruglova has shed light light on the logical connection between the elements of Prokofiev's system, including the 'Being - Time - Man' structure, and analyzed its temporal characteristics. A.S. Menshikov focused on the question of time in the works of Henri Bergson, Franz Rosenzweig and Yakov Druskin and showed that in the work of these authors, the question of time acquired existential meaning. Menshikov has also found that their search for validation of personal experience (through Bergsonian intuition, phenomenological analysis of consciousness and existence, psychoanalysis, religious faith, and poetic creation), which underlies philosophizing, went hand in hand with a search for an adequate language to express the meanings evading traditional philosophy. Comparative analysis has shown that while Bergson, Husserl and Rosenzweig in their attempts to modernize philosophy continued to use the language of traditional philosophy, Druskin was well aware of the fact that new temporal experience requires a new way to convey it and found his own means of expression - 'hieroglyphs' and 'studies'. Druskin's philosophical works are, as Menshikov has shown, one of the most innovative philosophical projects of the twentieth century, standing on a par with the projects of Bergson, Rosenzweig and others. S.P.Purgin continued his research on the temporal characteristics of Paul Klee's art. His analysis focused on humour as a universal - philosophical, aesthetical, creative and practical - category which to the fullest reflects Klee's understanding of time. Humour was found to express the relationships between the plenitude of time ('eternity') as a source of any creativity and the current time ('moment'), where artistic conception is realized. The comparative analysis of Klee's philosophy and aesthetics and the concept developed by Jean Paul has revealed similarities in their understanding of humour, which also shed light on the connection between Paul Klee's work and the Romantic tradition. E.P.Emelyanov continued his research on the manifestations of the temporal turn in Soviet historiography of the 1920s. He studied the schemes of world history periodization in three Soviet textbooks: A.A.Bogdanov and S.M.Dvolaitsky's book A Brief Course of Economic Science; P.I.Kushner's Overview of the Development of Social Forms; and A.I.Gukovsky and O.V.Trakhtenberg's Brief Textbook of the History of Development of Social Forms. It was found that the world history periodizations in these books reflected the general tendency that shaped contemporary historical science, which made a special emphasis on the multilinearity and reversibility of social evolution. Emelyanov believes that this tendency originated in the Bücher-Meyer controversy about the nature of world-historical development and has traced the influence of Bücher's and Meyer's ideas on Soviet historical science. A.A. Sysolyatin continued his research on the philosophical work of Leonid Lipavsky, in particular the conceptual framework for the problem of time that Lipavsky built in his 'experimental' treatises on the relationship between motion/transformation and time. Special attention has been paid to the relationships between the notions 'transformation', 'world', 'quality', 'hieroglyph’ and some others, which enabled the researcher to connect the diverse array of Lipavsky's notes into a coherent system. Apart from Lipavsky's texts, the study also covered notes and diaries written by Yakov Druskin, notes of the chinari’s home meetings (Conversations) and literary commentaries (K.V.Drozdov, M.B.Meilakh, A.V.Korchinsky, I.A.Protopopova, T.V.Tsivyan, A.A.Shadrin, etc). Sysolyatin has proposed three sets of themes or approaches that correspond to the stages of the problematization of time in Lipavsky's work: ontological, psychological-anthropological and language analysis. Sysolyatin has expanded the scope of research to include hand-written manuscripts from the chinari archive to get a better understanding of the experiments underpinning Lipavsky's theory of time. A.M.Davletshina continued her analysis of Moritz Schlick’s ethical philosophy by focusing on the axiological meaning of time in the context of existential experience. She has shown how there appear the interrelations between the emerging regimes of temporality and value production in modern culture. Analysis of Schlick's ethical philosophy from the perspective of values has revealed certain peculiarities in his attitude to time: Schlick rejects the doctrine of atemporal values and contends that values, including happiness as the prevalent value, are a product of human attitude to the world. It is this observation that uncovers the temporal nature of Schlick's axiology: pleasure belongs to the present while happiness in its supreme form belongs to the future. In other words, happiness pursued by people connects the past, present and future. Davletshina has shown that capacity to be happy may be considered as a foundation of the ethics of the good. A.E. Yakimov considers the cinematographic language of the 1920s as a language of temporal reflection. In his research, Yakimov focused on Dziga Vertov’s documentary films and showed that Vertov’s work reflects the characteristics of the temporal regime of the culture of Soviet modernity. Methodologically, Yakimov to some extent relied on Aleida Assmann's work and on such notions as 'temporal reflection' and 'temporal regime of culture'. Yakimov shows that Dziga Vertov's documentaries can be considered as a symbolical language of temporal reflection and thus can be used to reconstruct the perception of time that is characteristic of modernity. Dziga’s temporal reflection is expressed primarily through such cinematographic techniques as cutting phrases, movements, repetitions, slow motion or acceleration of time. In addition, Yakimov analyzed Vertov’s theoretical works and creative manifestos. As a result of his research over the last three years, Yakimov has shown that in cinema of the first third of the twentieth century, a variety of temporal regimes and methods of appropriating temporality developed and co-existed, which shaped the evolution of cinema from expressionism to Soviet dramas of daily life. D.V. Andreenko considered the temporal aspect of melancholy in the first third of the twentieth century through the representations of this phenomenon in the works of Paul Klee, Edvard Munch and Walter Benjamin. The aim of his study is to explore the changes in the understanding of melancholy engendered by the changing temporal culture of society. Within the conceptual framework based on the network approach to psychopathology developed by Denny Borsboom and Angélique Cramer, Andreenko has formulated the hypothesis about the lack of clearly defined boundaries in the concept 'melancholy', which is why it should be considered as a cluster of interconnected characteristics (symptoms and their relationships). Methodologically, Andreenko's work draws from the studies of Hungarian social scholar Д. Сика and shows the influence of time on melancholy. Andreenko has described the mutual influence of the psychological factor and the cultural context on the subjective phenomenological experience of melancholy and proposed his own interpretation of the nature, boundaries and temporal characteristics of this phenomenon. The research results for this year were published in 8 articles in WoS/Scopus journals; 5 articles in journals from the list approved by the Higher Attestation Commission (VAK); and in the collective monograph Man in his Own Time. Multi-Dimensionality of Experience of Temporality (St.Petersburg: Vladimir Dal, 2021) indexed in the Russian Science Citation Index. 8 abstracts of presentations were published. 12 papers were presented at international conferences. 3 seminars for the participants of the project were organized. The panel Temporal Turn in Philosophy, Aesthetics and Art was organized and held as part of the Second Russian Congress of Aesthetics (1-3 July 2021, Ekaterinburg). The collective monograph was presented on 24 November 2021 at the Ural Federal University (Ekaterinburg) (https://urgi.urfu.ru/ru/events/11562/). Information about the work of the research team was also published on the official website of the Ural Federal University and on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/groups/342918633275863) .

 

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Annotation of the results obtained in 2019
The research was conducted in accordance with the plan and goals specified in the application. One of the main hypotheses of the project is that in the early twentieth century there was a 'temporal turn'. That means, time was no longer perceived just as objective, physical time but instead it turned into a factor that constitutes human life and man’s relationship to the world. As such, the problem of time, as it defined before, was discussed by E.Husserl (time as a form of consciousness), A.Bergson (time as duration whose present encompasses the past and the future), and Heidegger (time as a special form of being-toward-death). Speaking of the 'temporal turn', it is, however, not enough to simply point at these figures. We believe that these thinkers expressed the new perception of time rather than initiated it. To demonstrate this, we have included in our analysis the so-called 'secondary figures', not limiting ourselves to the domain of philosophy (M.Schlick, A.Meinong, A.Bergson, G.Simmel and others) but looking at other cultural domains such as music (A.N.Skryabin), painting (P.Klee) and literature (L. Lipavsky). To demonstrate that time can be considered as the transcendental foundation in the Kantian perspective, that is, as the condition of the possibility of experience, we reconstruct the key dimensions of man's temporal being. The main idea of this reasoning is that time enters human life through the meaning (the research part of M.E.Soboleva) and, hence, for a person in his ordinary being there is no abstract or 'empty' time, on the contrary, the time is always filled with a concrete content. We can, therefore, to formulate the problem of 'man in his own time': to conceptualize human life through temporality and to interpret time from the perspective of human life. The studies of the work of Skryabin (the research part of G.Khaziev) and P. Klee (the research part of S. Purgin) have revealed their understanding of time as a creative act. For A.N.Skryabin, the pivotal idea is that time appears only when we single out something from the flow of indistinguishable elements. According to A.N.Skryabin, the power of human being lies in the fact that he can influence time and in this way shape the future. A.N.Skryabin saw the movement towards the future as a mystery play and believed that it was the synthesis of arts that would save the humanity from the destruction of war and global disasters. In Skryabin's work, demiurgic motifs are combined with messianic motifs. This, despite of their specific symbolic expression, makes his perception of time similar to the more general revolutionary sentiments of the early twentieth century. The same sentiments are found in Klee's works, whose main philosophical idea can be expressed in his own words: 'Form is the end, death. Form-giving is life'. For P.Klee, time as the time of creative process is the main form of existence while human being is understood as a demiurge in the original meaning of this word – 'craftsman' or 'artisan'. According to P.Klee, there is the universal time hiding the truth and the way to the truth is to break time into basic elements. Such 'atomism' reflects the artist's creative credo: he believed that 'art does not reproduce the visible but makes something visible'. 'I am God', says Klee about himself, expressing the idea of the power of human being over time through the cognition and the simultaneous creation of truth. The phenomenon of Skryabin and Klee enables us to raise the question of drama called with the inclusion of an individual person into the social time. This leads to a whole range of other questions such as following time or getting ahead of time; submission of time or formation of time; involvement of an individual person into social time or becoming alienated from it; coincidence or divergence of individual and social time. What is the time in which we live? This question was posed by all thinkers of the early twentieth century, including neo-Kantians (H.Cohen, P.Natorp, H.Rickert); phenomenologists (E.Husserl, A.Meinong), philosophers of life (A.Bergson, G.Simmel), and so on. The same question can be addressed by studying temporal patterns in the development of art. Thus, we can distinguish between two paradigmatic understandings of modernity (the research part of T.Kruglova): modernity can be understood either as complete rejection of the past, which is clearly demonstrated by the avant-garde and futurist art movements of the early twentieth century, or as eternal present, which can be illustrated by the revival of neo-classicism in the 1930s. This question is also discussed by historical science. In this respect the approach to the periodization of history in the USSR in the late 1920s-early 1930s is particularly illustrative (the research part of E.Emelyanov). Recognition of modernity as the most important stage in social development led to the removal of history from the curriculum of schools, colleges and universities and its replacement by social studies. Only in the 1930s, history was reintroduced into the curriculum as a special discipline. It is remarkably that history has been seen not as a simple linear movement of society from Antiquity through the Middle Ages to Modernity but instead, the periodization of history was based on the Marxist principle of the correlation between productive forces and productive relations. Thus, historical time ceased to be perceived as neutral and abstract, and acquired substantial meaning. Such approach to history reflects the tendency to rationalize time in the sense of the technological epoch which by that moment had already begun but we can also observe the tendency to irrationalism. Therefore, it is interesting to look at the expressionist cinema focused primarily on the body language of emotions. It was, of course, mostly determined by the technical limitations of cinema in that period (silent cinema) but other explanations are also worth considering. Attention to emotional life of people can be interpreted as a crisis of the Enlightenment's rationalist ideology, which dominated modern culture since 19th century. To show these processes, we draw parallels between the processes in cinema, literature, philosophy of life, existentialism and psychoanalysis (the research part of A.Yakimov). What we are dealing with here is a peculiar convergence of discourses, different in form but sharing the same interest in the problem of time. Attention to emotional life of people can, to a great extent, be caused by historical perturbations of the given period. It should be noted that in this period, emotions started to perform those functions that had been previously performed by the mind: in their own way, they form our worldview. According to L. Lipavsky, it is the emotional relation to the world - primarily horror - that brings time into the world. The world in itself is non-temporal and exists in the state of homeostasis. Human being destroys this equilibrium by introducing time into the world. Since the introduction of time is a destructive experience, we can describe it as negative ontology (the research part of A.Sysolyatin). The human being herself is in the state of imbalance, a certain kind of psychological crisis, and the only part of the world she can master is the one she captures and expresses in speech. The constitution of reality from human experience leads us to another question - of the relationship between objectivity and subjectivity within reality. One of the aspects of this question is the relationship between norms and values. It could be said that the theories of values and norms which appeared at the beginning of the 20th century were aimed at solving this, in fact, temporal paradox. This question is discussed by A.Meinong, M.Schlick and others (the research part of E.Cherepanova and A.Davletshina). This paradox resides in the objective significance of norm and its subjective (social) origin. Therefore, questions arise concerning the universal significance of norms or their conventionality, the status of value judgments as universal or temporal, the norm and individual values, and so on. An important condition for answering these questions is the method applied for this end (the research part of P.Bojanić). As the above overview of the project’s results in 2019 shows, we have managed to identify a whole set of problems related to the category of time. Addressing these problems could shed light on the human situation in relation to the world, other human beings and oneself. These problems will be further explored at the following stages of the project. The research findings were published in 1 article in journals indexed in WoS/Scopus, 5 articles in journals indexed in the Russian Science Citation Index. They were also presented in 8 papers at international conferences. Members of the group made 6 research trips to work in libraries, research centers and archives. 3 seminars for members of the research group were organized. The project was presented to the public at Eltsin Centre in Ekaterinburg. The results of the group's work were also published on the web-site of the Ural Federal University (https://urgi.urfu.ru/en/research/laboratories/tolerance/projects/a-man-in-his-own-time/) and the group's page on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/groups/342918633275863/?ref=bookmarks).

 

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Annotation of the results obtained in 2020
The research was conducted in accordance with the plan and goals specified in the grant application. While in the previous year the group put their main effort into building the general theoretical framework, in 2020, they applied a more nuanced approach to work on the project’s key topics and research methodology. The main methods the research relies upon are as follows. First, members of the research team introduced into scholarly use a number of texts that had not been previously translated into Russian and, thanks to their efforts, became accessible to the wider academic community and general public in Russia (M.E.Soboleva (project leader), E.S.Cherepanova (principal investigator), S.P.Purgin (investigator), and A.M.Davletshina (investigator)). Second, archival research has enabled members of the team to discover and to introduce previously unpublished materials (A.A.Sysolyatin (investigator), G.P.Khaziev (investigator) and S.P.Purgin (investigator)). Third, members of the research group translated original texts into Russian. For example, S.P.Purgin translated one of Paul Klee’s major texts Ways of Studying Nature (Die Wege des Naturstudiums). Finally, we use an unusual perspective for our theoretical reflections. It is the perspective of time and temporality which gives us new insights into the seemingly familiar material. In this respect, the study of A.S.Menshikov (principal investigator) is of particular interest: he analyzes Henri Bergson’s lecture courses The Idea of Time (L'idée de temps) (published in 2019) and History of the Idea of Time (Histoire de l'idée de temps) (published in 2016) delivered at Collège de France in 1901-1903. These materials have been published in French only recently and have not been translated into Russian yet. A.M.Davletshina (investigator) discovers that Moritz Schlick, the father of the Vienna Circle, contributed to the study of the ethical theory. E.P.Emelyanov (principal investigator) considers the theory of A.A.Bogdanov, focusing on the latter’s contribution to historiography which has not been a subject of theoretical investigations yet. All participants adhered to the project’s general strategy, which is to search for unusual perspectives to explore the project’s topics, more specifically, to look at these problems in the light of the philosophical problematique of time and temporality. The results of this year’s work on the project can be summarized as follows. M.E. Soboleva (project leader) continued her studies of the foundations of time and concentrated on the problem of the ontology of time. It is interpreted as the problem of the being of time itself, which gives a clue to a novel understanding of history. The latter, in its turn, confirms our hypothesis about the “temporal turn”. The analysis centered on the concepts of time, paradigmatic for our investigation of this problem, was developed by Russian and German existential philosophers Nikolai Berdyaev and Martin Heidegger. Thanks to these authors, it was demonstrated that the concepts of temporality and historicity of man constitute the core of the ontological understanding of time. Assuming these cultural and anthropological constants, one can produce a new understanding of history putting more emphasis on the events unfolding inside human life rather than on externally imposed boundaries as the traditional historical science did. We found that the very understanding of sociality changes when the ontological perspective is adopted since sociality starts to be seen in the light of human agency in history (this question was widely discussed by postmodernist theorists). Berdyaev’s and Heidegger’s philosophical views, to a different extent, stem from Henri Bergson’s ideas. As A.S.Menshikov (principal investigator) shows, in his lectures of 1901-1903, Henri Bergson comes to the conclusion that metaphysics should be reoriented towards the problem of time. Since, for Bergson, the problem of continuity is the core problem of metaphysics, his approach can be interpreted as a full-scale project aimed at the reconstruction of philosophy. In A.S.Menshikov’s view, this project laid the foundation for the “temporal turn” in European philosophy of the early twentieth century and this trend was further continued in phenomenology and existentialism. The socio-psychological aspect of the problem of historicity was discussed by Karl Jaspers in the 1930s. E.S.Cherepanova (principal investigator) shows that Jaspers approached historicity in the light of the crisis of modernity, which, in Jaspers’s view, consisted in the possibility/impossibility of an individual’s self-identification with the historical time. The personal experience of contemporary social processes is thus reconstructed in terms of “own” and “alienated” time, which is the line of reasoning originated in Karl Jaspers’s writings and which was developed by Cherepanova in the direction of philosophical anthropology. One of the preliminary hypotheses of our project was the idea that temporal analysis of the cultural situation in the given period cannot be limited to philosophy alone but should include art and science. Therefore, the field of our research encompasses not only philosophers but also composers (A.N.Skriabin), artists (P.Klee) and writers (L. Lipavsky). Interestingly, any type of creative work tends to turn into philosophy of a certain kind since each of these individuals strove to comprehend the reality and express his vision through the means at hand. Thus, philosophy is turning into a mediator between different spheres of culture, uniting not only professional philosophers, but also scholars, artists, writers and actors. Moreover, philosophy becomes the core element which underlies the general attitude to the world and brings together various world understandings into the cultural epoch’s single whole. In its turn, the core element of philosophy itself, as the project makes clear, is the category of time. S.P.Purgin (investigator) continues his studies of Paul Klee’s work by focusing on the grotesque, which, the researcher argues, is not merely an artistic device but a more general method of seeing and interpreting the reality, encompassing the whole philosophy of Klee’s art. This approach is aimed at revealing a special temporal structure, which can be described as “expanding time” or as “inwardly growing moment”. Intuition of time underpins philosophy and music of Alexander Scriabin. G.P.Khaziev (investigator) believes that this framework can be used to systematize the key aspects of Scriabin’s work. Skriabin’s music works (especially large symphonic compositions and piano sonatas) reflect his philosophical views about the transformation of the world and humanity and can thus be interpreted through the of “packed” time while the Mysterium (Misteriya) he produced at the peak of his career can be seen as a “time machine”. The topic of time, argues A.A. Sysolyatin (investigator), pervades the literary work of L. Lipavsky, especially his treatises Investigation of Horror, Treatise on Water, and Vertigo. These works not only include elements of existentialism – a fact highlighted by other scholars – but also elements of ontology inherent in his “world-time” dichotomy. Remarkably, Lipavsky sees the relation to time as the key point which allows differentiating between different “worlds”. Such ontological structure is linked to the problem of temporal mismatch between man and reality, which, in its turn, causes a crisis in the relationship between man and the world. Thus, Sysolyatin demonstrates that Lipavsky’s ontology, which incorporates an element of time, is linked to the problem of environmental consciousness. A particular ideology of time in architecture is discussed by T.A. Kruglova (investigator). The key concepts that her analysis builds upon are “architectural style”, “power” and “time”. Her analysis focuses on the idea that in the USSR the functions of architecture were interpreted in relation to the dominant ideology and its temporal premises. For example, socialism was interpreted in Constructivism within the mode of future time while in neo-Classicism, the mode of present time prevailed. To explore the specificity of temporality in Soviet neo-Classicism, Kruglova continued the research that she started in 2019 comparing Soviet art with Italian art of the Mussolini period as a part of the general totalitarian project of culture. One can speak of a certain renaissance of neo-Classicism in Soviet cinema of the late 1920s and early 1930s, characterized by a transition from expressionism to the focus on everyday life in order to canonize behavioural models of the New Soviet Man. A.E. Yakimov (investigator) proposes to approach everyday life as a “new regime of temporality in cinema”. His research focuses on films Bed and Sofa directed by Abram Room (1927) and House on Trubnaya directed by Boris Barnet (1928). The analysis reveals the key features and technologies of the new “temporal turn” in cinema. Even A.A.Bogdanov’s Brief Course of Economic Science can be interpreted in the light of the “temporal turn” hypothesis, argues E.P.Emelyanov (principal investigator). This leads him to explore Bogdanov’s new approach to periodization of history and to reveal the previously unrecognized influence that Bogdanov’s ideas had on early Soviet historiography. Another significant contribution to the project was made by A.M.Davletshina (investigator), who reconstructed Moritz Schlick’s “ethics of youth” by focusing on his work The Meaning of Life (Vom Sinn des Lebens), still untranslated into Russian. Davletshina comes to the conclusion that Schlick’s “ethics of youth” is quite symptomatic of the first third of the twentieth century as it is orientated towards the “new” Nietzschean man, whose universal characteristics are health, stamina, spiritual vitality and active social engagement. Therefore, Schlick’s ethics should be interpreted in the context of a reflection on the individual in her/his time. As this brief overview of the group’s results in 2020 shows, the research has uncovered a whole range of problems related to the category of time. The study of these problems can shed light on the cultural situation in Europe in the first third of the twentieth century. Analysis of these problems will be continued in the following period of the project. Research findings were published in 4 articles in WoS/Scopus journals and in 7 articles in journals indexed in the Russian Science Citation Index. Members of the research group also presented 10 papers at international conferences. The manuscript of one article was submitted for publication to a Scopus journal on 6 March 2020 and was accepted for publication. The article will be published in 2021. The research group conducted 4 seminars and the international conference Meanings of Time: Our Time, their Time, No One’s Time at Yeltsin Centre in Ekaterinburg. The results of the research group's work are shown on the website of the Ural Federal University (https://philos-urgi.urfu.ru/ru/novosti/34362/) and on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/groups/342918633275863).

 

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