“Nagu pärlid kees”: mõtteid ajast, mis ei kulge
“Like the beads of a necklace”: On time that does not move

Summary/Abstract: Inquiry into the manner in which the relationship between time and the phenomena analysed using temporal categories is conceived, resulted in two widespread, yet contradictory explanations: time is either conceived as an abstract, eternal axis, in or on which discrete events take place, or it is conceived as an intrinsic property of things that only exists as long as things themselves actually change and endure. Time is thought of as either reversible, discrete and external, or as creative, cumulative and internal. The paper considers the various ways in which phenomena studied inquiry is manifested if one or the other view is adopted — how change and stability, linearity and cyclicality, diachrony and synchrony would be interpreted. It is concluded that by analysing culture and history under the abstract, chronological gaze, as is done in structuralist account, life in a society will appear as the life of a separate social entity, and change and development will be perceived as an alternation of stable states with intermittent rapid transformations into a new stable state. Behind all this there is the “platonic backhand”, a conceptual inversion that establishes the simplified description, acquired during the inquiry, as the originary source of life’s diversity, thereby turning a description into a cause, a model into an agent.

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