The centuries have acted rather as a warehouse for the idea we harbour about the Renaissance: the age of initiative, the age, above all others, of motivated decision-making provoked by strong images, the age when decisions were taken with ardour and carried through with confidence. If this intuition is not an unreal one, then historians should both stake their claim in it and account for it.

The fine quality of self-confidence which we attribute to the great figures of the Renaissance supposes the necessary and certain knowledge that one can “change the order of things.” And one can have a fairly clear idea from the example of the French how this certain knowledge is formulated and how it operates.

We are now slowly re-discovering the conclusion reached by Alfred Grotjahn in his remarkably prescient Soziale Pathologie, namely that “zwischen dem Menschen und der Natur die Kultur steht.“ [1]. In some measure this maxim affects every branch of modern medicine but to none is it more relevant than psychiatry, which is so closely embedded in the social matrix in which the subject is practiced. A comprehensive study of this matrix would have to touch on a number of disciplines, including history, economics, social anthropology and sociology, but for our immediate purpose these multiple influences can be canalized by reference to the available systems of medical care which exist to deliver the two broad types of service offered by contemporary medicine: on the one hand, the specific products of biomedical research—a surgical operation, say, or a new drug—which are impersonal, often expensive and ideally directed at the cure of disease; on the other hand, the “non-specific” psychosocial contribution of medicine, intensely personal and more often directed towards alleviation or support. These two categories do no more than reflect the derivation of modern medicine from its twin sources of science and magic whose respective attributes were etched so sharply by Malinowski: “Science, even as represented by the primitive knowledge of savage man, is based on the normal universal experience of everyday life, experience won in man's struggle with nature for his subsistence and safety, founded on observation, fixed by reason. Magic is based on specific experience of emotional states in which man observes not nature but himself, in which the truth is revealed not by reason but by the play of emotions upon the human organism. Science is founded on the conviction that experience, effort and reason are valid; magic on the belief that hope cannot fail nor desire deceive. The theories of knowledge are dictated by logic, those of magic by the association of ideas under the influence of desire”. [2]

Logic is the science of pure time, just as geometry is the science of pure space.

In the past one would not have dared make such a statement. Just as geometry seemed to deal only with stable shapes and not with transformations and deformations, logic seemed to deal with the static modalities of thought and among its connections only with the syllogistic—and that as a matter of privilege. But geometry has become the science of moving spatial shapes; everywhere mathematics has brought in the fluxional element; on the whole, science considers rest as an extreme instance of motion. Logic too—even leaving aside mathematical logic— cannot keep its classical image. For thought cannot confine itself— and confines itself even less than mathematics does—to reflecting the static. While a circle can still be looked upon as a simple circle and not deformed by topological vision, a form of thought is always condensed time.

The task I have set myself in the following pages is the examination of certain problems concerning time in music from a phenomenological standpoint. Husserl's treatment of time carries on from that of Hume and Kant in the sense that, like them, he sees that our awareness is not merely successive. There is something in the very structure of consciousness which enables us to go beyond the moment, to stretch the span of the “now.” Without this capacity there would for us be no such thing as unity, identity and continuity of perceptual objects. It was with our awareness of ordinary sensible objects that Hume's and Kant's epistemology was mostly concerned. Moreover their analysis continued the stress on visual awareness characteristic of the western tradition. Kant's step forward as far as his analysis of time was concerned was to see time as the formal structure of all our experience. All that we can ever experience is seen through the lens of time. Kant, however, was equally concerned to show how our temporal consciousness entered into the constitution of the real world. He encounters difficulties on this score in so far as temporality is built into the structure not only of our experiences which claim to be objective but also into that of our merely subjective awareness. The problem of “reality” does not arise for Husserl in that the phenomenological method itself explicitly excludes this consideration. He is at one with Kant, however, in treating temporality in terms of the structure of our consciousness and, like Kant, insists on the importance of retention in perception. He goes on to specify that temporality is in common the form for not only perception but for phantasy, imagination, memory and recollection as well.

Let us begin by taking a look at the semantic background: the word criticism designated an action implying judgment and discrimination based on standardized poetics or on preferred taste. By virtue of implicit or explicit criteria, the principal task of criticism—of things either beautiful or otherwise—was to make a distinction, to disapprove or to praise. If one refers to French dictionaries (from the 17th century onwards), one can see that the first and stable meaning of the noun criticism is:

“The art of judging a work of the mind” (Academy, 1694). To this first acceptation of the meaning of the word was added, in 1740, the idea of enlightenment and explanation. It has now come to designate “literary science,” independently of any judgment of value. This new acceptation, although confirmed by use, did not appear sufficiently clear to the compilers of the 8th Dictionary of the Academy (1932). The definition proposed at this date hardly differs from that of 1694:

Any serious study of the literary and artistic forms of expression found in the continent of Africa south of the Sahara must open with a look at the traditional forms of expression. It is these forms of which the various intellectual movements in Africa are becoming increasingly aware, a trend exemplified by the Festival of Negro Arts organised a few years back at Dakar.

Among the elements in our contemporary civilisation which stand out because of their novelty in comparison with past epochs one must definitely remember the vast field which goes by the name of “industrial design,” which is also connected with the field of graphics (in its various incarnations of advertising graphics, traffic signals, lettering, etc.). Actually the advent of an industrialised society such as our own has brought with it the presence of an “industrial aesthetics,” of a will and an instinctive need to “aestheticise,” to make the “natural” world more pleasant and acceptable since today it is almost turned upside down and subverted by the products of a technological civilisation.