“They are Faithful, Precise, Relentless”

Clock Metaphor in Modern European Thought

Abstract

The clock metaphor, which began to spread in European literature in the fourteenth century, at first became an expression of certain Christian virtues, most notably temperantia. By the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the function of this metaphor had expanded considerably, and the mechanical clock also became a symbol of the orderliness and harmony of the Universe, the wisdom of the Creator, and the image of an ideal monarchical state. In early modern times, the metaphor of the clock was associated with mechanical philosophy, most prominently in the writings of R. Boyle and R. Descartes. A distinctive feature of the new natural philosophy was its approach to understanding natural phenomena as if they were the result of the action of machines, and the mechanical clock was most often chosen as the machine-analog of the world. The structure and functioning of the clock mechanism served as an analogue of the structure and functioning not only of the Universe, but also of an ideal state in which everything emanated from a single center. The political connotations of chorological metaphors clearly correlated with the idea of a strong central authority with its desire for all-encompassing control and a unidirectional (top-down, no feedback) system of communication with non-central elements. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the metaphor of the clock gradually lost its popularity, especially in England. By the end of the Age of Enlightenment, the relationship between the laws of nature, rather than the coherence of the wheels of a clockwork mechanism, was seen as the best evidence in favor of a Higher Intelligence behind the “system of the world”. Clocks, on the other hand, have come to symbolize regimentation and oppression, an unfree, dull, repetitive mode of operation, rigid determinism, and the denial of free will (including the will of God). The mechanical clock, itself a worthy and useful device, symbolized all that was rejected by English intellectuals of the second half of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, primarily in the subjects of theology and politics.