III
Time is a counter-conception (Gegenbegriff) to Space, arising out of Space, just as the notion (as distinct from the fact) of Life arises only in opposition to thought, and the notion (as distinct from the fact) of birth and generation only in opposition to death.[[115]] This is implicit in the very essence of all awareness. Just as any sense-impression is only remarked when it detaches itself from another, so any kind of understanding that is genuine critical activity[[116]] is only made possible through the setting-up of a new concept as anti-pole to one already present, or through the divorce (if we may call it so) of a pair of inwardly-polar concepts which as long as they are mere constituents, possess no actuality.[[117]] It has long been presumed—and rightly, beyond a doubt—that all root-words, whether they express things or properties, have come into being by pairs; but even later, even to-day, the connotation that every new word receives is a reflection of some other. And so, guided by language, the understanding, incapable of fitting a sure inward subjective certainty of Destiny into its form-world, created “time” out of space as its opposite. But for this we should possess neither the word nor its connotation. And so far is this process of word-formation carried that the particular style of extension possessed by the Classical world led to a specifically Classical notion of time, differing from the time-notions of India, China and the West exactly as Classical space differs from the space of these Cultures.[[118]]
For this reason, the notion of an art-form—which again is a “counter-concept”—has only arisen when men became aware that their art-creations had a connotation (Gehalt) at all, that is, when the expression-language of the art, along with its effects, had ceased to be something perfectly natural and taken-for-granted, as it still was in the time of the Pyramid-Builders, in that of the Mycenæan strongholds and in that of the early Gothic cathedrals. Men become suddenly aware of the existence of “works,” and then for the first time the understanding eye is able to distinguish a causal side and a destiny side in every living art.
In every work that displays the whole man and the whole meaning of the existence, fear and longing lie close together, but they are and they remain different. To the fear, to the Causal, belongs the whole “taboo” side of art—its stock of motives, developed in strict schools and long craft-training, carefully protected and piously transmitted; all of it that is comprehensible, learnable, numerical; all the logic of colour, line, structure, order, which constitutes the mother-tongue of every worthy artist and every great epoch. But the other side, opposed to the “taboo” as the directed is to the extended and as the development-destiny within a form-language to its syllogisms, comes out in genius (namely, in that which is wholly personal to the individual artists, their imaginative powers, creative passion, depth and richness, as against all mere mastery of form) and, beyond even genius, in that superabundance of creativeness in the race which conditions the rise and fall of whole arts. This is the “totem” side, and owing to it—notwithstanding all the æsthetics ever penned—there is no timeless and solely-true way of art, but only a history of art, marked like everything that lives with the sign of irreversibility.[[119]]
And this is why architecture of the grand style—which is the only one of the arts that handles the alien and fear-instilling itself, the immediate Extended, the stone—is naturally the early art in all Cultures, and only step by step yields its primacy to the special arts of the city with their more mundane forms—the statue, the picture, the musical composition. Of all the great artists of the West, it was probably Michelangelo who suffered most acutely under the constant nightmare of world-fear, and it was he also who, alone among the Renaissance masters, never freed himself from the architectural. He even painted as though his surfaces were stone, become, stiff, hateful. His work was a bitter wrestle with the powers of the cosmos which faced him and challenged him in the form of material, whereas in the yearning Leonardo’s colour we see, as it were, a glad materialization of the spiritual[spiritual]. But in every large architectural problem an implacable causal logic, not to say mathematic, comes to expression—in the Classical orders of columns a Euclidean relation of beam and load, in the “analytically” disposed thrust-system of Gothic vaulting the dynamic relation of force and mass. Cottage-building traditions—which are to be traced in the one and in the other, which are the necessary background even of Egyptian architecture, which in fact develop in every early period and are regularly lost in every later—contain the whole sum of this logic of the extended. But the symbolism of direction and destiny is beyond all the “technique” of the great arts and hardly approachable by way of æsthetics. It lies—to take some instances—in the contrast that is always felt (but never, either by Lessing or by Hebbel, elucidated) between Classical and Western tragedy; in the succession of scenes of old Egyptian relief and generally in the serial arrangement of Egyptian statues, sphinxes, temple-halls; in the choice, as distinct from the treatment, of materials (hardest diorite to affirm, and softest wood to deny, the future); in the occurrence, and not in the grammar, of the individual arts, e.g., the victory of arabesque over the Early Christian picture, the retreat of oil-painting before chamber music in the Baroque; in the utter diversity of intention in Egyptian, Chinese and Classical statuary. All these are not matters of “can” but of “must,” and therefore it is not mathematics and abstract thought, but the great arts in their kinship with the contemporary religions, that give the key to the problem of Time, a problem that can hardly be solved within the domain of history[[120]] alone.