The Newtonian abstraction of absolute time, while operationally precise, engenders a counter-movement in Romantic and literary thought, where temporality is reclaimed as subjective, affective, and relational. Time is no longer merely a deterministic measure; it becomes a medium through which consciousness, memory, and emotion actualise relational potentialities. The horizon of possibility is reframed: temporal experience is internal, symbolic, and contingent upon the interplay between self, other, and environment.
Goethe’s literary and scientific work exemplifies this integration of temporal and relational awareness. In Faust and his natural-philosophical observations, time is a flowing horizon of becoming, inseparable from the emergent relations between human striving and cosmic processes. Temporality is performative and interpretive: moments of insight, encounter, or transformation unfold in relational fields where the past, present, and future interpenetrate. Possibility is modulated not by law alone but by affective and symbolic resonance, as the human mind navigates emergent temporal sequences.
Wordsworth’s poetics further emphasise the reflexive, experiential character of time. Memory, imagination, and attention act as temporal operators, selectively actualising potentialities from the continuum of lived experience. Temporal horizons are thus co-constituted: the relational alignment of perception, emotion, and narrative produces a field of potential action, reflection, and symbolic synthesis. The linear determinacy of Newtonian time is recontextualised within a lived, affective temporality, where subjective rhythm and aesthetic modulation shape the possibilities of being.
Proust extends this relational reconstrual into the intricacies of involuntary memory, where temporal distance collapses and past events are actualised within the present through affective resonance. Temporal experience becomes non-linear, contingent, and perspectival, foregrounding relational emergence over sequence or law. Possibility is actualised through attention, recollection, and the symbolic framing of experience, rather than by external determinacy.
Modulatory voices: While Romantic and literary time emphasises subjectivity, it is not entirely unmoored from preceding frameworks. Elements of linearity, cyclical recurrence, and teleological expectation persist, subtly structuring the relational field of affective temporality. Moreover, scientific and philosophical discourses continue to exert influence, creating a complex interplay between deterministic and experiential temporalities. Romantic time thus exemplifies the negotiation between universality and perspectival contingency, illustrating how temporal construals can mediate between the measurable and the possible, between law and lived experience.
With Post 6, we have now explored how temporality shifts from deterministic, universal frames into subjective, symbolic, and relationally emergent horizons in Romantic and literary thought.
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