322
PARTISAN REVIEW
In
the age of classical cosmology, that
is,
in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, the prevailing conception of time
is
essentially
mathematical and mechanistic. Time
is
an objective, independent and
indifferent, continuous and homogeneous medium, a kind of reser–
voir which receives and holds all occurrences without influencing
them and without being influenced, colored, quickened, or slowed
down, by them. Time is in the mechanistic theories of the universe
an index, a mere accident of matter; material reality remains essen–
tially unchanged by the passing of time. The time-index here never
states more than a point or the distance between two points of time–
it merely locates an event in relation to other events; and time as a
whole
is
but the configuration of instantaneous occurrences or the
sum total of single moments; in a word, a line formed by the juxta–
position of points.
In accordance with this abstr.act and mechanistic conception of
time, the art and literature of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and even
eighteenth centuries show no real interest in phenomena connected
with the concrete experience of time. Classicism corresponds to a
philosophy
in
which changes are irrelevant, and absolute, timeless,
unconditional laws prevail. Time as a medium of variation, move–
ment, development, and decay is depreciated and degraded in rela–
tirn to motionless, timeless, invariable eternity. Classicistic art
is
the
description of an existence in which nothing of the transitoriness and
mutability of common, trivial life is preserved. The "unity of time"
in the
tragedie classique
is,
in fact, a negation of time, a means of
re'noving the tragic events from everyday life and giving them
eternity and ideality.
From the creations of the visual arts, in the age of classicism,
time
is,
of course, entirely absent. Painting and sculpture by their
very nature depict a situation rather than an action, and they do so
in periods in which unchangeable and incorruptible existence is the
essence of perfection, more emphatically than in ages with a dynamiG
philosophy. Even Lessing's doctrine of the "pregnant moment," by
which he understands the translation of temporal into spatial phe–
nomena, the transference of change and motion into the medium of
rest and coexistence, betrays a remnant of the classicistic predilection
for timelessness, although the very idea of a "pregnant moment" in
Lessing's sense is witness to a new interest in the representation of
temporal experiences.
