The enigma of Time — queer, tempting, insoluble

We have already observed that, like a child, a primitive mankind acquires (as part of the inward experience that is the birth of the ego) an understanding of number and ipso facto possession of an external world referred to the ego. As soon as the primitive’s astonished eye perceives the dawning world of ordered extension and the significant emerges in great outlines from the welter of mere impressions, and the irrevocable parting of the outer world from his proper, his inner, world gives form and direction to his waking life, there arises in the soul — instantly conscious of its loneliness — the root feeling of longing (Sehnsucht). It is this that urges “becoming” towards its goal, that motives the fulfillment and actualizing of every inward possibility, that unfolds the idea of individual being. It is the child’s longing, which will presently come into the consciousness more and more clearly as a feeling of constant direction and finally stand before the mature spirit as the enigma of Time — queer, tempting, insoluble. Suddenly, the words “past” and “future” have acquired a fateful meaning.

But this longing which wells out of the bliss of the inner life is also, in the intimate essence of every soul, a dread as well. As all becoming moves towards a having-become wherein it ends, so the prime feeling of becoming — the longing — touches the prime feeling of having-become, the dread. In the present we feel a trickling away, the past implies a passing. Here is the root of our eternal dread of the irrevocable, the attained, the final — our dread of mortality, of the world itself as a thing-become, where death is set as a frontier-like birth — our dread in the moment when the possible is actualized, the life is inwardly fulfilled and consciousness stands at its goal. It is the deep world-fear of the child — which never leaves the higher man, the believer, the poet, the artist — that makes him so infinitely lonely in the presence of the alien powers that loom, threatening in the dawn, behind the screen of sense phenomena. The element of direction, too, which is inherent in all “becoming,” is felt owing to its inexorable irreversibility to be something alien and hostile, and the human will-to-understanding ever seeks to bind the inscrutable by the spell of a name. It is something beyond comprehension, this transformation of future into past, and thus time, in its contrast with space, has always a queer, baffling, oppressive ambiguity from which no serious man can wholly protect himself.

This world-fear is assuredly the most creative of all prime feelings. Man owes to it the ripest and deepest forms and images, not only of his conscious inward life, but also of the infinitely varied external culture which reflects this life. Like a secret melody that not every ear can perceive, it runs through the form language of every true art work, every inward philosophy, every important deed, and, although those who can perceive it in that domain are the very few, it lies at the root of the great problems of mathematics. Only the spiritually dead man of the autumnal cities — Hammurabi’s Babylon, Ptolemaic Alexandria, Islamic Baghdad, Paris and Berlin today — only the pure intellectual, the sophist, the sensualist, the Darwinian, loses it or is able to evade it by setting up a secretless “scientific world view” between himself and the alien. As the longing attaches itself to that impalpable something whose thousand-formed elusive manifestations are comprised in, rather than denoted by, the word “time,” so the other prime feeling, dread, finds its expression in the intellectual, understandable, outlinable symbols of extension; and thus we find that every Culture is aware (each in its own special way) of an opposition of time and space, of direction and extension, the former underlying the latter as becoming precedes having-become. It is the longing that underlies the dread, becomes the dread, and not vice versa. The one is not subject to the intellect, the other is its servant. The role of the one is purely to experience, that of the other purely to know (erleben, erkennen). In the Christian language, the opposition of the two world feelings is expressed by: “Fear God and love Him.”

In the soul of all primitive mankind, just as in that of earliest childhood, there is something which impels it to find means of dealing with the alien powers of the extension world that assert themselves, inexorable, in and through space. To bind, to bridle, to placate, to “know” are all, in the last analysis, the same thing. In the mysticism of all primitive periods, to know God means to conjure him, to make him favorable, to appropriate him inwardly. This is achieved, principally, by means of a word, the Name — the “nomen” which designates and calls up the “numen” — and also by ritual practices of secret potency; and the subtlest, as well as the most powerful, form of this defense is causal and systematic knowledge, delimitation by label and number. In this respect man only becomes wholly man when he has acquired language. When cognition has ripened to the point of words, the original chaos of impressions necessarily transforms itself into a “Nature” that has laws and must obey them, and the world-in-itself becomes a world-for-us.*

The world-fear is stilled when an intellectual form language hammers out brazen vessels in which the mysterious is captured and made comprehensible.

* From the savage conjurer with his naming magic to the modern scientist who subjects things, by attaching technical labels to them, the form has in no wise changed.

Quote from the book Decline of the West