But why does time die of its own mortality? What makes it aware of the latter? Also in the first portrayal Cacciari chooses, in Hogarth's picture, time is dying. With the last breath from the mouth of Cronos, while all around in the midst of a ruin everything lies devastated, the values of the world prove to be mortal products of time. But what has caused this self-destruction?
Like all artistic masterpieces, these too remain open, despite poetic and philosophical interpretations, to readings and further questions, even to those which come from other systems of discourse. A Cronos who wants to survive commits the unpardonable folly of consuming his own stock, his own children. Shock sits in his wide-open eyes, in his emaciated body. And what was the great thunderbolt which not only carries off Hogarth's hoary Cronos but has laid the whole world, finis mundi, in ruins, legally sealed before being handed over to chaos? If all existing values are destroyed in the process, as Hogarth depicts with delicate irony, if all hopes of continued existence are vain, what has caused this collapse? What does the iconography of the new age look like, the semantics of which does not yet enter the picture, but whose temporalized movement is already perceptible as a concept of history? In another painting by Goya, triumphant truth – is it the daughter of Cronos? – is depicted as a young, naked female figure. Cronos is still holding her by the hand, but he himself, furnished with large wings, has to give way. In the foreground sits history as a witness narrating the events, but what radiant young truth is it which Cronos has to release from his clutches?
The new age, which is mentioned increasingly more often from the second half of the eighteenth century, manifests itself through a new concept of time and becomes the distinctive feature of an epoch which succinctly describes itself as the 'modern age': ‘Time does not just remain the form in which all stories take place, it gains a historical quality itself. History then no longer takes place in time, but through time. Time is dynamized into a force of history itself.'11 It is recognized and accepted by contemporaries as the modern age. It manifests itself by being able to produce something new, and this is first of all - new knowledge. The old structure of knowledge, which extended from the early Middle Ages into the nineteenth century, was based on the principle of preserving the stock, of incorporation and storage in the great encyclopaedic and classificatory tradition. For Voltaire, the Encyclopaedia was still an ‘everlasting' and unsurpassable ‘inventory of human capacities'. In 1767, when the enterprise was still by no means finished, Voltaire stated that it was not just the first, but perhaps also the last example of its kind on earth. He saw it as containing the prerequisites, as regards theoretical content, for the final success of reason – the climax of human history, which admittedly still needed disseminating and implementing as a kind of post-history of uncertain duration.12
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Cronos's Fear of the New Age