The Ever-Present Origin - Michael Goodnight - Editor

At the moment when consciousness became able to account for theessence of "time," time is irrupted. The sense of "irruption" is ambiguousjust as the moments of transition are ambiguous and Janus-faced. Theterm "irruption" signifies both the intrusion as well as the collapse of timefor our consciousness.But what is "time"? It is more than a mere clock time which was previouslyconsidered to be reliable and constant. It is symptomatic for ourpredicament that today in the light of the most recent research evenastronomy has brought into question the constancy of clock time. Thetopic for discussion at a general meeting of the Swiss AstronomicalAssociation in Lausanne (Spring, 1951) was, "Is time constant?" It is in factnot constant but decreases by 5.3 seconds per century, as G. Thiercy ofthe University of Geneva Observatory has demonstrated. This resultconfirms in its own way the remark by E. Rosenstock-Huessy that we are"today laboring on a science of time" which, as he emphasizes, does notitself do justice to the trude phenomenon of time. And chronological timeis but one aspect of a more encompassing phenomenon: it is the mentalaspect of that constituent of the world which manifests itself, not as space,but as a basic phenomenon of space.In our deliberations in the fifth chapter of Part I, "The Space-TimeConstitution of the (Consciousness) Structures," we have shown that atleast three forms of time can be discerned: magic timelessness, with itsemphasis on the vital sphere; mythical temporicity with its psychicaccentuation; and mental conceptual time with its spatial accent—adeficient agent of dividing.The three-dimensional conceptual world of our fathers had no sensoriumfor the phenomenon of time. Living in a spatially frozen world, theyconsidered the temporal world to be a disturbing factor which wasrepressed, either by being ignored, or by being falsified by measurementinto a spatial component. That is to say, in the perspectival worldconceptioneverything was measured in spatial terms, including thephenomenon of time and other phenomena devoid of spatial (though notspatializing!) properties, which were reshaped by measure into spatialcomponents. For perspective-thinking man, time lacked all quality. This isthe decisive factor: he employed time only in a materialized andquantitativ sense. He lived by Galileo's maxim: "To measure everythingmeasurable, and to make everything measurable that is not yetmeasurable."This maxim—an Aristotelian axiom driven to extremes—formed theleading motif of the perspectival age. But to measure is to spatialize; andrampant measurement leads to quantification. One of the best authoritieson the theories and philosophies of the perspectival age, Werner Gent,stated that the age had declassed and degraded time to a mere numericalquantity. Stated in more precise terms: that era had perverted time bymaking it into an analytical measurable relationship and by materializingit. Because of the materialization the relationship gave rise in the course64