Time is an Artist

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From Archive.org: Part 2 of a trilogy of books celebrating human tenacity and human genius, with a diatribe against “most philosophers,” by secular humanist Princeton philosopher and Nietzsche scholar Walter Kaufmann. Each book in the trilogy contains didactic texts from the Great Books along with philosophical commentary, poems (many are Kaufmann’s own), and a great many spectacular photographs taken by Kaufmann on his journeys around the world. The photographs in this volume illustrate the poignant beauty of the ravages of time, serving as a focus on its philosophical examination. NOTES ON THE COLOR PHOTOGRAPHS I TIME DISCOVERED OR TIME IN TEMPORAL PERSPECTIVE - 25 1. “Time is an artist.” 2. “Space is no artist.” “What is modern man? Nouveau riche.” 3. “The ancient Hebrews’ attitude toward time... revolutionized civilization.” 4. Israel and Hellas. 5. “Ancient India is the antithesis of ancient Israel.” “The notion that time, change, and multiplicity are unreal... was born in India.” 6. “How the view that time is unreal developed.” 7-9. Social consequences of this view. 10. “The Greeks had very little historical sense.” 11. “Thucydides... did not write real history.” 12. The Iliad, the Odyssey, and their enormous influence. 13. Sophocles. 14. “Perhaps none of the great Athenians came closer to an appreciation of time... than Aeschylus.” 15. “Heraclitus... may have been the first man to reflect expressly on the nature of time.” 16. “The Jews... overcame the widespread, if not universal, terror of change.” 17. “The ethos of unique events.” Genesis versus earlier creation texts. 18. “Jacob is the first example in world literature of character development.” 19. “The evocation of old age” and “a new sensibility.” 20. “The Hebrews accepted death as final... and made peace with time.” “History was seen as a development.” 21. “Many men are seen to grow in stature as they age.” Samson versus Oedipus. 22. “The first genuine example of historiography.” “Men cruelly shaped by time's artistry.” 23. “There was no going back.” 24. Abraham Lincoln. 25. “Why... we do not know how any of the great thinkers of ancient Israel and India, Greece and China looked.” 26. China and Greece. 27. “No artist before Rembrandt explored time’s work on his face as he did.” 28. Van Gogh furnishes “the most graphic example... of the difference between lived and astronomical time.” “Time is an artist but a cruel master.” II TIME’S EFFECTS AND RESTORATION - 60 29. “Time's effects on works of art.” “That time is an artist is a paradox.” 30. “The case for patina.” 31. “Fragments have much in common with patina.” Michelangelo’s “David” and his unfinished works. 32. “He knew when to stop.” Faust: A Fragment 33. “Ex ungue leonem... and from the hoof the ass.” 34. “Ruins... remind us of time, change, and death.” 35. “Why... in Knossos, and why not in some archaeological Disneyland a few miles away?” 36. “Restorers are undertakers who refuse to countenance time, change, and death.” 37. Goya: “Time... is also a painter.” 38. Addison: Time “made every picture appear more perfect than when it came fresh from the master’s pencil.” 39. Goethe: “Cleaning and restoring should be considered only as a last resort.” Jacob Rosenberg: “I have not the slightest doubt that Rembrandt himself would have preferred the effect of the uncleaned picture.” 40. “The craving for what is new is satisfied best by what also looks new.” “Our culture no longer respects age.” 41. “Time is an artist—who does not know when to stop.” “The only good reason for conservation is not aesthetic.” 42. “One must discover the genius of the place and then lend every effort to letting it speak in its own language.” “Cultural genocide.” 43. Borobodur. “We need all the help that time’s work provides.” 44. Borobodur. “The sense of distance has been erased, the aura is gone.” 45. Jerusalem. “Time has much to do with its charisma.” “Irrevocable harm is done when people forget that time is an artist.” EPILOGUE: OLD IS BEAUTIFUL - 77 46. “On the threshold of a new sensibility.” Protests: Chartres and the Acropolis. 47. “The percentage of the old will rise steeply... Attitudes toward age and time may change.” “One reason why widows were burned in India, and witches in Europe and America.” The women’s movement. 48. “Old is beautiful!” “I have tried a new way.” BIBLIOGRAPHY - 80