The Past in the Present

The Past in the Present Arthur C. Danto There are two modes of what, with a certain ontological bravura, I shall designate “historical being,” which, taken together, set us off as a species. Both modes, from early on, have engaged me as a philosopher, because each involves a peculiarity of knowledge as well as of language. The first mode can be made salient by considering what I call “narrative sentences.” A historian says “Erasmus was Europe’s greatest pre-Kantian moral philosopher,” without anyone thinking twice. But no one could have said “Erasmus is Europe’s greatest pre-Kantian moral theorist,” for the obvious reason that the speaker—a contemporary of Erasmus—would have died well before Kant was born, let alone written Foundations of a Metaphysic of Morals. “Petrarch opened the Renaissance,” is made true by events in Petrarch’s future that neither he, nor his contempo- raries, could have imagined. The other mode of historical being is not quite so readily indexed to matters of tense, reference, and observa- tion, but it is of no less human importance than viewing life as narratively structured. It concerns the fact that we are always living in a historical period. A period—or a culture—is the weave of everything in what Hegel called its “objective spirit,” consisting of all the institutions of human life at a given time—language, art, clothing, laws, etc. In any period, there are certain temporal concepts indispensable to the conduct of life. Earlier and later; before, after, and at the same time; now and then. But these do not enable those who belong to a period to experience time, as most of us do, historically—seeing things as belong- ing to other periods. Hence people can not experience their own period as a period. In the present work, Thomas Rose is interested in how we experience time historically. In my view, his concern is with how one period leaves traces of itself in later periods to which those traces do not belong historically. Playing the Palace Rose’s grandfather, Thomas Leslie Rose, designed many buildings in his era, but my interest here lies in what must have been his masterpiece—the Palace Theater in New York. The Palace went up in a period that it reflects— the so-called “Progressive Era” of American politics, from the 1890s to the 1920s. Its essential structure still reflects that period, when it was America’s premier vaudeville house, and “playing the Palace” was the ultimate accolade of variety artists. Today parts of the Palace Theater belong to the period in which it was built, and do not belong in our present architectural period, other than as residues. No one today would or perhaps could erect an interior with the Palace’s decorative details, except as a replica, a facsimile—a re-pro- duction. Such a work would have an entirely different spirit from the surviving theater; it would belong to our period entirely, whereas what remains of the Palace is present in our period without belonging to it. Straddling two periods, we experience the theater in the light of our period, and hence we experience it historically. Let me introduce a piece of philosophical structure. In his masterpiece Being and Time, Martin Heidegger wrote of a Zeugganz—a whole consisting of tools that “refer” to one another: the hammer refers to the nail, the nail to the plank, the plank to the saw, the saw to the carpenter’s square. It is as if the system of tools came into being as a whole. One could not just have the saw; there have to be things to cut—namely, planks—for the saw to make sense; and the planks have to be connected if something is to be built, so we have to have nails or something like nails. I would like to propose that a period is a whole in which the parts reflect one another. The period to which the Palace belonged reflected the kinds of acts it was built to show to people who had the leisure to be entertained and enough disposable cash to pay for them. Vaudeville was a going practice in the year the theater was built, 1913, and its builder, Martin Beck, specifically intended to bring the top acts to New York. There was obviously already a hierarchy of acts and certain “star turns” that people wanted to see, and the name of the theater, “The Palace,” connoted an entertainment elite for an audience that appreciated quality. But interest in vaudeville ended abruptly. The Palace became a place to show and see movies in November 1932, and both the name and the Neoclassical architectural style became irrelevances—residues of a vanished form of life. To experience them now with reference to the period to which they belonged is to experience time historically. Tom Rose’s images of his grandfather’s architectural achievement are presented here as a way of enabling us—his viewers—to have that experience. Memory and Imagination An important aspect of the design of the Palace Theater was its beautiful integration into the building that housed it. An extruded arch, implying the proscenium arch, was set into the rusticated exterior facade, just over the marquee. This was crowned by an escutcheon, framed by swags on either side. A rhythm of swags then crossed the entryway, just above the marquee; and the facade itself was punctu- ated by baronial ornaments symmetrically positioned Danto / The Past in the Present