Art, Time and Consciousness

Abstract

Philosophical conceptions of time seem to fall into two groups, “flow” (river, arrow) and “block”: both of them spatialised. Kant was an important exception, and modern subjectivist thinking about time, or about the consciousness of time, seems to have taken its lead from him. But art (poetry, anyway: music and the plastic arts raise different time issues) seems always to have represented time as consciousness, or at least as an important element in it. Two groups again: “big-time”, apocalyptic poets like Dante and Virgil, and “small-time”, ordinary-life poets like Homer and Shakespeare. Modern (post-Kantian?) poetry wants to find big-time meanings in small-time lives. Maybe if we could blend philosophy’s block/flow conceptions and poetry’s big/small representations of time we might get a richer sense of the relation between time and consciousness.