Between Chora and the Good: Metaphor's Metaphysical Neighborhood 9780823291038

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Between Chora and the Good

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Series Board James Bernauer Drucilla Cornell Thomas R. Flynn Kevin Hart Richard Kearney Jean-Luc Marion Adriaan Peperzak Thomas Sheehan Hent de Vries Merold Westphal Edith Wyschogrod Michael Zimmerman

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John D. Caputo, series editor

PERSPECTIVES IN C O N T I N E N TA L PHILOSOPHY

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C H A R L E S P. B I G G E R

Between Chora and the Good Metaphor’s Metaphysical Neighborhood

FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS New York

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Copyright © 2005 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Perspectives in Continental Philosophy Series, No. 41 ISSN 1089-3938 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bigger, Charles P. Between chora and the good : metaphor’s metaphysical neighborhood / Charles P. Bigger. — 1st ed. p. cm. — (Perspective in continental philosophy, ISSN 1089-3938; no. 41) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISSN 0-8232-2350-7(hardcover) 1. Philosophical theology. 2. Metaphysics. 3. Metaphor. I. Title. II. Series. BT78.B49 2005 110—dc22 2004023510 Printed in the United States of America 08 07 06 05 5 4 3 2 1 First edition

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For John Llewelyn In whom language lives and wisely speaks as in no other. In friendship with gratitude.

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Contents

Preface

xiii

Acknowledgments

xxi

Introduction 1. A New Beginning? 2. What Is Metaphor? 3. Being and Metaphor Yesterday and Today 4. Does Metaphor Still Have a Place in Philosophy?

1 1 7 10 16

Chapter 1 The Place of Metaphor 1. Old Wine in New Bottles 2. Logos 3. “Song Is Existence” 4. The Middle Voice

21 21 25 32 37

Chapter 2 The Matrix 1. Sacred Places 2. The Hypodoche 3. The Affective Matrix 4. The Between

51 51 54 71 77

Chapter 3 Plato’s Idea Theory 1. Ideas 2. Participation 3. Toward Being a Theoria 4. The Good 5. Contexts and Idea Classes

83 83 89 95 101 116 ix

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Chapter 4 To Feel and to Know 1. The World Soul 2. Phenomenological Foundations 3. Affectivity 4. Metaphor as Disclosive

121 121 131 134 147

Chapter 5 Deictic Metaphor 1. The Way Up and the Way down 2. Reality and Its Shadow 3. Eros

152 152 163 172

Chapter 6 Truth and Metaphor 1. “The Thing Itself” 2. The Truth of Metaphor? 3. Metaphysical Neighborhoods

182 182 188 198

Chapter 7 Aristotle: Poetry and the Proper 1. Aristotle: Rhetoric and Poetics 2. Saving the Sun 3. The Creative Between

208 208 210 215

Chapter 8 “To the Things Themselves” 1. Metaphor in the Shackles of Being 2. Metaphor: Apophantic or Semantic? 3. Intention: Signifying and Fulfilling

222 222 226 230

Chapter 9 The Hypostasis: Its Thisness and Its There 1. The Hypostasis 2. “On Being A This Such” 3. Da (Here and There)

237 237 246 258

Chapter 10 Elementals 1. The Place of the Placeless 2. Situations 3. Deductions

263 263 267 269

Chapter 11 Time’s Arrow 1. Whitehead and Zeno 2. Quantum Entanglements 3. Time in the Timaeus and Neo-Platonism

276 276 286 290

Chapter 12 The Originary 1. Bergson and Husserl 2. The Parmenides Scholium on Time (155E–160B) 3. Beyond Being and Time?

298 298 312 321

Chapter 13 Otherwise than Metaphor 1. Blanchot: Darkness and Light 2. Beyond the Wasteland

325 325 333

Contents

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Chapter 14 Saying Something 1. The Threshold 2. Producing a Metaphor 3. Making Is Finding

343 343 351 355

Chapter 15 The Receptacle 1. Derrida’s Chora 2. The Zoodochus Pege

362 362 376

Chapter 16 À Dieu 1. Rosenzweig: Saving the Word 2. Yes 3. A Christian Platonism?

381 381 386 389

Notes

401

Bibliography

471

Index

491

Contents

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Preface

I advance the controversial thesis that the scientists, philosophers, theologians, and poets who have best defined our metaphysical situation have found in metaphor—which is to see something in another, such as harmony in number, the beloved in a rose, electricity in the flow of a fluid, and even God in the stranger—the corrigible truth condition for understanding our participation in both transcendent being and immanent becoming. The landscape in which we dwell is situated in the gap (Gk. chaos) between the more-or-less inaccessible chora and the Good beyond knowing and Being. O come now, haven’t we put aside the illusions of transcendence and its metaphysical paraphernalia with the death of the transcendent God? Like it or not, we can not put aside the transcendent, since this gap is what we are and is our inexpugnable physical and metaphysical habitat. And so I propose to let Plato, its first and greatest cartographer, guide us through its labyrinths to the transcendent and supersensible source of life and intelligibility. To get there one must begin where we are, the rather barren and destitute world in which we find ourselves with the death of God— something Heidegger interpreted as the elimination of Plato’s supersensible. This leaves me with the uncomfortable task of interpreting Plato through our contemporaries who revel in making do with the remaining debris, having long since denied Plato’s central doctrines and the metaphysics of his illustrious successors. I live here too. As I xiii

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try to follow his lead, his principles and ideas often appear in a strange guise, for I will accommodate him to a strange god, Christianity, an evolutionary cosmology he did not anticipate, a history in which there is no form of change but rather a change of forms, and a phenomenology that he only intimated. I will, such is the fashion of our time, deny myself the onto-theological support of his greatest successor and friend, Aristotle, not so much because it is said to harbor the cancer of nihilism, but because Aristotle and his tradition got it wrong. I would pass beyond beings and their Being, not because their history is that of a metaphysics that harbors nihilism, which I would escape by recreating the illusion of transcendence within an autochthonic imminence, but because this is the way to their cause, the Good beyond being. We are told that “way,” “beyond,” “transcendence” and the like reiterate the ontology of being or presence, but our way is through Plato’s hypodoche, which isn’t any kind of being, and the Good we approach is not a being. Aside from Plato, the masters who have guided me on this inquiry have been the Greek patristic theologians, Duns Scotus, Husserl, Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Emanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, A. N. Whitehead, Jean-Luc Marion and, yes, Aristotle. Let me orient this work around their contributions. John Caputo tells us that Levinas, who might be thought to have abandoned metaphysics, leaves us with a “metaphysics of the Good not the true, a metaphysical ethics, not a deontology, but metaphysics still.”1 Though negative theology seems to offer the most accessible approach to the Good, Richard Kearney argues that deconstruction is “too specific in closing down options of alterity . . .They simply replace the theistic essentialism of onto-theology with a higher and more rarefied form of hyper-essentialism . . . whereas negative theologians . . . desire the wholly other in the name of a biblicalmonotheistic God, deconstructionists regard this wholly other as every other, regardless of its theistic pedigree”2 To identify it would make it other than something else, and thus a being or quasi-being. Greek Orthodoxy did seek a union with God as the ontic term of a mystical assent, but John Llewelyn and Levinas have taught us how to read this language hyperbolically, but unless we are careful, the providential concern of a transcendent God will be lost. If you eliminate metaphysics, then we creatures whose very form is homologous with participation—by which we are—and metaphor—by which we can know whatever appears in the gap we straddle between being and becoming—are condemned to ignorance of who we really are and xiv

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nihilistic sterility. Were we to deconstruct the Platonic Good in the name of a nameless alterity, what would be left of the theistic faith that comforts and guides, of the creative God who participates with and cares for his creation? On the contrary, I will hold the Good is revealed as agape, as a loving love that hypostatizes itself which we experience in the work of the trinity of hypostases (persons). Marion’s God Without Being showed me how to approach this Good and avoid the mystical union at which its partisans often aimed; in Reduction and Givenness Marion proposed to free intuition from the ontological burden Heidegger placed upon it. I acknowledge a very great debt to Marion for leading us beyond this ontological closure and perhaps even the nihilistic strands Nietzsche discerned in our metaphysics. Though I sometimes lament the death of God, he taught me to recognize that the God I worship is Loving Goodness beyond Being which can neither be said to exist or not to exist. If we can transform Plato’s Good beyond being that is said to be the cause of being and truth (Rep., 509B) into the love Saint John revealed (1 John 4:8), then love can and must hypostasize itself as a Trinity known through the kenosis of the Christ. Nor do I repudiate the supersensible, though I try to attune the latter to current concerns with an ethical approach to the transcendent alterity of the other. For example, I accommodate Plato’s ideas (being) to an evolving world that may, in large measure, design and make itself. My sentiments echo Richard Kearney’s: “If I hail from a Catholic tradition, it is with this proviso: where Catholicism offends love and justice, I prefer to call myself a Judeo-Christian theist; and when that tradition so offends, I prefer to call myself religious in the sense of seeking God in a way that neither excludes other religions nor purports to possess the final truth.”3 In a moment I will give the example of how “God is love” provides a way of understanding what a Christian Plato might have meant when he said the Good is beyond being and the cause of being and truth. Some of the claims of Christianity, such as Incarnation, speak with an authority reason could never have and open anthropological vistas that, for example, seriously challenge some of Levinas’s thoughts about access to the other as Other. If you have no sympathy for my faith and find my use of icons and dogma off-putting, please recall that the Trinity is an account of how the many are one in their mutual immanence and was the most important discovery in metaphysics since the Greeks. Scotus’s application of the actual infinite to God was the springboard for Cantor’s transfinite arithmetic. Alfred Tarski once told me that Preface

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many of his contributions to logic and mathematics were inspired by scholastic philosophy. You might even appreciate Feuerbach’s thesis that God was human nature objectified, and indeed theology has been the laboratory for both the physical and human sciences. Perhaps I can offer something more satisfying. I have had the best theologians and philosophers working for me for two millennia, and they are not to be dismissed. Since I do not disvalue my religion’s claim to truth, I must say it as it is, though I hope with humility when the tradition appears to be in error. Fusing Plato with aspects of the Christian tradition, which since the thirteenth century has so often given him a bad name, will certainly involve acknowledging distortions; even so, the truth that happens when these ancient horizons are fused with our own can show that we have been misled about the nature and knowledge of God. Isn’t that worth a try? We will argue as if it were true and await the consequences. It is often said that Plato had no place for the individual, that even in the ecstasies of eros one loves the idea, not the person; and this may well be true. But since mine is an incarnate model of the hypostasis or person, I have found some steerage way that could allow him to move in this direction, thanks to an interpretation of Duns Scotus’s haecceitas and F. H. Bradley’s “concrete universal” as latterly introduced by Iris Murdoch. Before we arrive at this more hospitable land, we have a difficult path to trace. You see, Heidegger and Nietzsche have saddled Plato with the claim that he is indeed the author of our nihilism. Heidegger says in “The Word of Nietzsche: ‘God Is Dead’” that the resulting nihilism is a repudiation of Platonism.4 Metaphor presumes that we can see the intelligible in the sensible or, conversely, describe the “supersensible” in terms of the sensible; but now that “the supersensible is an unstable product of the sensible . . . [the distinction between them] culminates in meaninglessness.”5 What future does metaphor have? If you can assume with me that Nietzsche has a point, awaiting us is the major task of restoring to Christianity a Platonic ontology which most in the West abandoned a millennia or so ago and, with this, the rule of metaphor which was lost with God’s death. Since the Good is not a being, I know of no logical proof that there is a “Good itself.” With Plato’s Socrates I find it to be “the theory that is most compelling . . . [I] assume the existence of a Beautiful itself by itself, of a Good . . . if you grant me these and agree that they exist, I hope to show you the cause . . .” (Phaedo, 100B–C). A tall order! This is my speculative hypothesis. What does this have to do with xvi

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Christianity? Overlook the subtleties and assume that if God is the Good, and if you can acknowledge with the tradition that God qua being is the cause of beings and truth, then the God is to be found in the Good and not in being (Rep., 509A). This abrupt and unargued assertion is at the very center of my thesis. Is the Platonic Good God? The Greek fathers, beginning with Denys the Areopagite, made that identification.6 According to Jean-Luc Marion’s collection of arguments and texts, neither in Exodus (3:14) nor anywhere else is God identified with Being.7 If, as Saint Denys says, His primary name is love and if, moreover, “God is love” is a Revelation (1 John 4:8), God must be thought of not as a being but a Good that expresses itself as love. Love is not an entity; it is a verb that takes an object, and, as the cause of beings, hypostasizes itself as persons in Trinitarian relations (see John 3:4, 16:3). One of these persons, the Son, is said to be the truth through whom everything was made (John 1:3). Most critics agree that Plato’s receptacle or chora (the other half of my title) was everlasting, but my interpretation reaches back to an initial creation, the formless void (Genesis, 1:2), and ahead to the supersaturated quantum field that went bang. Thus begins the reign of the Holy Spirit and, God willing, she will not exit with a whimper. Anyone doing philosophy with a Continental bias must reckon with phenomenology. This account develops within rather orthodox Husserlian perspectives, which, with Levinas’s aid, can accommodate an even richer Platonism than Husserl would have allowed, but the world that I intend has been transformed by Heidegger. This notaltogether-admirable man was a Nazi; yet such is the marvel of our humanity that he, more than any other, has within a wavering atheism shredded Enlightenment optimism to give us an insight into our deepest and sometimes threatening spiritual and even religious condition. Against the Husserlian intellectualism that founded phenomenology on an eidetic presence-at-hand, he began with Befindlichkeit, the affective matrix of mood or feeling, and thus opened the way to Levinas for a similar “foundation” in satisfaction. Fusing this with a similar affective bias in the Platonism of Whitehead, we can produce, exhibit, and effect a less intellectual and more existential Plato. Beyond this, the failure of Heidegger’s reduction of the world of beings by using anxiety or dread as an epoché to permit an intuition of Being led him to a search for Being’s beyond through the Ereignis. Though Being is not a being and to go beyond does not involve transcendence, my itinerary will take us beyond beings to the transcendent Good beyond His pathways. Preface

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Derrida also emerged from phenomenology, but his was the way of language—a way that is closer to Wittgenstein’s than to any others in my pantheon. In an important series of texts, he brought chora to the forefront of recent European philosophy. His “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy”8 is the most important recent contribution to metaphor, just as his “deconstruction” has become a most important methodological contribution and differance—the active discord of moving forces that Nietzsche sets up against the entire system of metaphysical grammar whenever that grammar governs culture, philosophy, and science that he situates in chora.9 The third major figure in my European pantheon is the venerable Emmanuel Levinas. What Whitehead did for the possibilities of the matrix, Levinas did for the Good. Though a student of both Husserl and Heidegger, his deepest attachment was to Plato and, as I just mentioned, through him I am able to bring Plato into phenomenology. His philosophy is a fabric of metaphors, and though he is sometimes criticized for his emphasis on the poetics rather than the logic of philosophy, I confess that he has opened my tired old eyes to so many wonders. I would be with him all the way were his deconstruction of the self in the face-to-face relation with the other not so “spiritual” and, understandably, neglectful of the holistic possibilities in our “incarnate” nature. What to me has been profoundly important is his use of satisfaction as an unquiet immersion in beings as an opening to the beyond of Being.10 Jean-Luc Marion has, more than any other, returned phenomenology to its origins in the intuitively given. Lawrence Hatib, in the wise and generous reading he gave my manuscript, wondered why I did so little with the notion of excess that had been forced on me by what cannot be directly. Perhaps he had in mind Marion, who said in Being Given and In Excess far more than I could dream of saying. Though these citations are late additions to my text, I have tried to make this as seamless as possible. My approach to the Good, which Marion mostly ignored, owes so much to his God Without Being. I add to this select list Alfred N. Whitehead, long out of favor in the Anglo-American tradition, which his work with Russell on Principia did much to found. He will be unknown to most of my readers, so a more substantial introduction is called for. I learned about him from one of his former students in New Guinea in 1944, and after getting hold of and reading Science and the Modern World, gave up my plans to return to physics after the war and decided to do philosophy. One of the few things I have in common with Richard Rorty is xviii

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the belief that it was a tragedy for American philosophy when we abandoned Whitehead for W. V. Quine and Oxford positivism. After Whitehead left pure mathematics and logic at Cambridge, he moved to London and turned to the phenomenological foundations of applied mathematics and physics in The Principles of Natural Knowledge, The Concept of Nature, and The Principle of Relativity. That done, he came to Harvard to continue the attack on misplaced concreteness and the ad hoc foundations of Einstein and classical physics in Science and the Modern World and Process and Reality, a Timaeus-based cosmology that is the book on creativity. After his example and in the spirit of the Timaeus, I will try to keep my hand on cosmology and the foundations of complexity theory, while my phenomenological approach to metaphor through images is an extension of his “method of extensive abstraction.”11 Plato intimated a similar approach in his 7th Letter when he appealed “to the things themselves” (to pragma auto, 341C).

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Acknowledgments

How did I get to this strange place? This journey began in the spring of 1996 when, in response to an invitation by Carlos Steele, President of the Institute for Philosophy at the Catholic University of Louven, I gave several lectures on chora and presented a paper on metaphor to Professor William Desmond’s seminar. That’s how chora and metaphor crossed, where “crossing” is my metaphor for metaphor. My lecture was a response to John Llewelyn’s discussion of metaphor and chora in Emmanuel Levinas: The Genealogy of Ethics. He has been for many years my patient and encouraging guide into the thickets of Continental philosophy. In 2000 I again had the opportunity to lecture to Professor Desmond’s seminar at Leuven. I owe a special thanks to Dr. Rudi Visker for a candid commentary on my developing thesis; this arose from its ashes. A cooperative course on, of all things, child development with John Whittaker and Sarah Pierce opened my mind to the all-important role of emotions. I also profited from a lecture by Daniel Provinelli of the Southwestern Louisiana University Primate Center. The affects seem to entail and thus bridge mind and body; Whitehead gave this a place in cosmology and Heidegger make it central in phenomenology. I also must acknowledge a profound debt to Michael Comforti and other participants, especially Mae Wan-Hao and Rupert Sheldrake, in the Assisi conferences. Comforti and his colleagues have been, for the past 15 years, adapting Jung to the complexity-and-chaos theory and they, xxi

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together with John Protevi and David Durie, have made me more aware of the field theoretic and relational possibilities of the hypodoche. John Llewelyn and Michael Zimmerman were the first to encounter this text in something resembling its present form. John’s discussion of metaphor and chora in Emmanuel Levinas: The Genealogy of Ethics crystallized this approach. Michael Zimmerman carefully read an earlier version and warned me that its beginnings were too dense. Hundreds of pages later, it is even denser. More recently I have been the beneficiary of careful readings by Robin Durie, who illuminated an important point in Husserl and saved me from a serious blunder, and Marc Froment-Maurice, who expressed doubts on the central role I assigned to the middle voice but was otherwise pleased with what he saw. More to the point was John Protevi’s contribution; he is extraordinarily attuned to English grammar and spelling and a much more careful reader of the many languages I mimic but hardly master. Moreover, he is especially attuned to the issues raised, and I am grateful for his advice. Francoise Raffoul’s enthusiasm and suggested emendations were most welcome. Pete Gunter corrected some misinterpretation of Bergson. If I go wrong, it will not be for lack of their trying to set me straight My version of Plato is highly idiosyncratic. The Plato you will meet here is not the one you will meet in Vlastos, Ryle, Owen, and Fine, but you might recognize my Plato if you began with Whitehead and continued through Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Levinas, Ballard, Llewelyn, and Sallis. My horizons are also informed by the unjustly neglected Pythagorean Platonism of Raphael Demos, Richard Brumbaugh, and Scott Buchanan. Buchanan’s Symbolic Distance introduced me to the concept of parametric order that informs my approach to perception as a model of participation. Lewis Hammond and William Weedon, Buchanan’s students at Virginia in the 1930s, jointly introduced me to classical philosophy. In a tutorial on poetics, Hammond had me read Apollonius on conic sections, Euclid, and Dante’s Convivio. Sixty years later, I think I know why. Catesby Taliaferro’s Introduction to the Timaeus and Leonard Eslick’s seminal paper on the creativity of the matrix were contributions by Buchanan’s former students at Virginia whose work deeply impressed me. Edward Ballard had also been Buchanan’s student, but when told by him that he would never be a philosopher, he went off to Harvard to study English. Whitehead persuaded him that he had a future in philosophy. On our return from the war, Ballard xxii

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graded my first philosophy papers and, somewhat later, we shared William Weedon’s seminar on Whitehead’s phenomenological Concept of Nature. With some help from lectures by Bill Weedon and Jacob Klein, Whitehead’s method of extensive abstraction became for me the upward movement of the Platonic dialectic and the monstrative basis of my theory of metaphor. Ballard brought phenomenology and then Heidegger to so many of us in America and inspired me to transpose a shared concern for Plato into recent Continental philosophy. He showed me how to interpret the cosmological gap between chora and the Good as phenomenological and intentionality as a “participation-effecting structure.”1 Jack Caputo, the series editor, and the staff at Fordham University Press, especially Chris Mohney and freelancers Gabriela Oates and Elizabeth Ohm, have gone beyond reasonable duty in making this publication possible. John Whittaker also deserves thanks for making possible a small subvention. And then there is Anne, my wife, whose radiant goodness is the background for my understanding of God’s feminine aspect.

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Between Chora and the Good

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Introduction

Philosophy is Plato. Emmanuel Levinas

1. A New Beginning? Modernity can no longer borrow the criteria by which it takes its orientation from the models supplied by another epoch; it has to create its normativity out of itself. Habermas

In with a bang and out with a bust? Isn’t that how last century was? It announced itself in Futurism and Ezra Pound’s “Make It New”; but, having eliminated transcendent moral and spiritual orientations, it left us bewildered. Levinas recalls how, as a young student, he welcomed Bergson’s “prospects for renewal”; how he learned from Husserl “to be clear about what we thought by exploring how we thought it” and that “being dictates its ways of appearing to us”; and how through Heidegger his ears “learned to hear being in its verbal resonance—a reverberation never heard before.” But excitement dwindled with a new awakening to history; “the Rock of God, the fundamentum inconcussum of the cogito, and the Starry Heavens of the World” that stemmed time’s flow and “secured a presence for the present” had fallen with the death of God. Language was cast adrift in a

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“sign game” alienated from meaning: “Genealogy as exegesis, the dead bodies of words, swollen with etymologies and devoid of logos, borne by the drift of the texts: such is modernity.”1 Can the names of persons “whose saying signifies a face resist this dissolution of meaning . . . signal the dawn of a new intelligibility” that is “not sustained by words”? We will find out if this can be and, in the meantime, restore some of “the meaning, desirability, and value” (Nietzsche) lost with the death of God. Most Anglo-American philosophers are among the atheists who stood by and scoffed when Nietzsche’s madman proclaimed God’s death, but some few in Europe were aware of and responded to its threat, and even tried to keep alive the promise of that century’s opening.2 The way has been made especially difficult by the loss of Descartes’s self-responsible and self-transparent ego; one could no longer reflect on and choose among absolute values and know the truth that would make us “masters and possessors of nature.” Like those who have lost empires, our loss of sovereignty over our inner life thought to be uniquely our own has shattered our confidence. Marx taught that values and ideals were the result of economic and material change; Freud, that our actions and thoughts were governed by forces clustering around unconscious traumas; while for Nietzsche our slavish wills, ejects or epiphenomenon of the will to power, are ruled by resentment and rancor. More recently the way ahead for me, and perhaps for you, has been made especially difficult by the results from the sciences, which tend to see us as vehicles for gene expression whose thoughts are programmed by the necessities of computer-like circuitry. Latterly we have become posits of a stochastic thermodynamics. This text is my response to these nihilistic threats. There will be much that is confused and confusing, for I borrow with gratitude from many sources upon which I hope to build something more beautiful than a blind man’s collage or more fit for human dwelling than Anselm Keifer’s Heavenly Palaces, for example, his great 1997 Dein und mein Alter und das Alter der Welt. I begin with the Greeks, even though it is sometimes said that classical learning is elitist and that, anyhow, the moderns do it better; yet spending almost sixty years working with Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, the scholastics, and, more recently, the French and German philosophers—the latter purportedly more Greek than the Greeks—has made me what I am, and I would not know how else to begin. Platonists tend to be romantic—or is it bipolar? From some such high, one can ask: What would the world be like were metaphor its 2

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form and truth its condition? Epiphanies of ideas in radiant splendor? If, however, you expect Plato to justify this vision, you may be disappointed. Like the truth about the God of Timaeus or the ideas, his theory of metaphor is past finding out. Prof. G. E. R. Lloyd reports that, unlike Aristotle, Plato never carried out a formal analysis of metaphor.3 His analogical arguments often employed resemblances, not my preferred identities, and were sometimes invalid. But it is possible to use Plato’s dialogues and the traditions in which they have lived to construct a thesis on metaphor homologous with participation and interpretation and, as such, with the creative potentials of life itself. If participation is, as Plato believed, a poiesis “calling something into existence that was not there before” (Sym., 205B), and this is replicated in metaphor, then we can see how it is with the world when it is “ordered like a metaphor.”4 Assume that these horizons are not determined by a primordial ontological understanding but are lighted or opened by the Good; then Being is not the Being of beings nor does it give a being its being. It is no giver of the gift nor, prior to the gift, is there anything there to receive it. That is the business of the Good and hypodoche, neither of which is a being. That which gives a being place (chora) through the givenness (Marion’s presencing of the given) of the hypodoche (receptacle) presupposes the latter’s more primordial diversification by a becoming that of itself never becomes anything, a chaotic welter of unstable structures, like the waves of the sea or the saturated quantum fields, that supposedly predate the “Big Bang.” This apeiron or non–self-limiting gignesthai (becoming) may, on being solicited, make a place (chora) which, like an enzyme, the invocation of the God, the form of a melody, or a template, may provide a matrix for the assemblage through which presencing into a presence runs its course. The Platonic matrix, appearing under such terms as hypodoche (receptacle) and chora (place), and in such avatars as affectivity (Whitehead), il y a (Levinas), or givenness (Marion), will be the creative and anarchical arché for my phenomenological inquiries. Most of what is said about the matrix could also be said of the Tao: Something mysteriously formed, Before heaven and earth. In the silence and void, Standing alone and unchanging, Ever present and in motion. Perhaps it is the mother of ten thousand things. I know not its name. Introduction

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Call it Tao. For lack of a better word, I call it great. Being great it flows.5

Heidegger accused Plato of having infected metaphysics with a nihilistic virus. If we are to defend him, we must return to classical and even scholastic philosophy for a new beginning. In this concern for a “new beginning,” I may seem to endorse Heidegger’s distinction between history (Geschichte) and historiology (Historie), where the latter is the written, linear record of events that occurred at a time and place, and the former, a recovery of a “first inception” in a unique and original “other reception,” where “reception” is a remembrance “that is a placement into Being” from which one can now creatively presence.6 Perhaps, however, the search for origins is secondary if the Good, an end, is primary. The Good determines its own origins, as what I am trying to communicate requires fidelity to a history in which the Good, not Being, has been primary, and, in a less-exalted sense, fidelity to our linguistic resources depends on my understanding, style, syntax, and the audience I address. The history I memorialize and to whose inception I am faithful was instituted by Plato’s passing reference to the Good beyond being and was then taken up as God in patristic orthodoxy. Unless we recall his veneration of “father Parmenides” or Socrates, we will find little of this “Andenken thinking” in Plato, but we can improvise in his name. History is certainly not a theodicy (Leibniz); nor is it a progression of forms of the Spirit (Hegel) ethnologically contingent rather than universal. Neither is it the historicality of Being (Heidegger’s Geschichte), which speaks only in German. Just as memory binds us to our past, history binds a community to its common past. The past binding a philosophical community may, like the tradition alive on the Continent, share much with the Greeks, while Anglo-American analytic philosophy seems to recall a method of analysis begun by Russell’s work on denoting and given a linguistic redirection by Wittgenstein or Austin. Our credulity is stretched by Heidegger’s paradigm example of Geschichte, an inception in the translation of eon as “becoming present in unconcealment” in “The Anaximander Fragment” upon which is said to hang the fate of the West.7 This recovery is supposed to lead to another thinking that frees us from a nihilistic “destiny in which Being illuminates itself in beings and so propounds a certain essence of man; that essence unfolds itself historically as something fateful, preserved in Being, without being separated from Being.”8 Really? Even if the history of Being begins with the so-called mistranslation 4

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of eon, Being has many histories and many ends. We take ourselves far too seriously if we think this mistranslation or Plato’s purported insistence on idea as “sighted presence” precipitated nihilism several thousand years later. More to the point would be our oblivion to the Good. Toned down a bit, Geschichte might characterize “world-historical” events—such as the battles of Waterloo and Borodino or the fall of the Roman Empire in 1453 at Constantinople—which are never limited to a place, a person, a particular time, but overflow “these singularities and become epoch-making.”9 Histories see this or that event as central (the failure of reinforcements, the ditch that wrought havoc on the French cavalry) and discern many causes, but the event was so saturated with meanings that the participants, like Stendhal’s Fabrice or Tolstoy’s Kutuzov, even Wellington or Napoleon, could only produce historical bits and never see and reveal the event as such. Interpretations invite endless reinterpretations. This having been said, attention to time and its unfolding resources has, until Heidegger, been uncharacteristic of phenomenology, which tended to see the world with phenomenalism as presentationally immediate. In bracketing out the natural standpoint, one brackets out and then ignores the phenomenon’s deictic roots in becoming. We hope to read Plato through Heidegger’s verbal Wesen (that which holds sway or is an “essential swaying”) or Levinas’s medial essance so that idea will be more like the plot played out in a play than the “everlasting fixity” of numbers. I am less concerned to go beyond Being and avoid metaphysics than to think toward the Good beyond being. Since Plato is said to have known and rejected the Ontological Difference,10 we assume that when he said epekeina tes ousisa (Rep., 509B), the context of what he meant by ousias is found not in the techné model in which the idea is a sighted presence, but in the “war of the giants and the gods” in which being is power, either active [determinate] or passive [determinable] (Sop., 248C), in the image of the life-giving sun, as well as in the Good which “pulls all this together and makes them capable of associating with one another” (Sop., 251D). This is Plato’s charter for metaphysics in which being or transcendence and becoming or immanence are complementary. But this lesson is seldom heard, and now metaphor seems to be entangled in the Ontological Difference and under the closure of Being. If we are to engage the grand theme of transcendence in philosophy, we must make our way through Heidegger’s program for Introduction

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the destruction of metaphysics and its subsequent modifications by Derrida and Levinas, learning from their efforts even if we do not always share their concerns. Heidegger spent a lifetime avoiding the metaphysical bog; and if we are to avoid ontologizing the Good, making it into a kind of being (presence), we must respect the developments he set in motion. First there was his destruction of metaphysics by overcoming it “in the name of something more primordial and originary that happened once, long ago, in a time of radiant splendor.”11 One returned to its Greek origin to make what was overlooked productively one’s own.12 That hope being dashed, there was then the even more formidable Ontological Difference, the difference between Being and being, which left us in a sort of Klein bottle with no stand either inside or outside of Being from which its destruction could be carried out.13 Finally there was the Ereignis, the effort to express the gift of being by what is not a being to what is not yet a being. In the meantime, Derrida’s deconstruction—best thought of with Levinas as a continuation of Kant’s effort to bracket out metaphysics, which, nevertheless, continues to leave its traces in the text—mostly operates within the Ontological Difference. In his work, “The Ends of Man,” Derrida says that there are two ways to escape this metaphysical closure: “One may attempt an exit and a deconstruction without changing terrain, by repeating what is implicit in the founding concepts and original problematic,” but one risks deepening and consolidating the “autism of the closure” one would deconstruct. Or one can respond to the “radical rumbling that comes from outside” by changing “terrain in a disruptive and discontinuous fashion,” but then language reinstates the new on the oldest ground.14 Can “participation” change the ground rules? Metaphysics, Aristotle’s science of being as being or its successors, where the todi ti, the singular first substance, is neither predicable of nor present in, that is, capable of existing apart (De Cat., 1a20–1b10), should be superceded by the relational structure of participation. Participation reaches out to hold and shelter another in the midst of becoming by means of an interpretation that it throws over it, all the while allowing this other to remain transcendently other. Metaphor also allows a term to cross over and dwell in another; but unlike its close relative, the “speculative proposition” and its Aufhebung, “supercession,” it does not transcend the subject but returns to it with a new lighting, in this case by the Good and not by Being. The good is not something to contemplate, but is something to be done. In a participatory history, 6

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present political, economic, cultural, and linguistic concerns can determine how to participate in a relevant past. Heidegger’s Andenken should commemorate not Being, but the Good, which, except in taking on our being in its kenosis, could never be present. Then ethics would be first philosophy, and metaphysics would, as its name says, concern itself with what is beyond being, the matrix and the Good. At the risk of a misleading immanent bias, I characterize participation as a relational structure in which a determinate “object” event is ingredient in a “subject” event under a formal or eidetic parameter. “To be” is just this relation, and whatever the ontological or determinate/determinable status of the relata, these too count as being.15 Nor do I think that this traditional ontology has dumped us in nihilism. The God whose death Nietzsche proclaimed was an idol. If the Good is taken to be God, and “God” is not a name—to overlook semantic difficulties—but is “Love” (which is not a being), then the Godhead is not a being. To say that God exists, Levinas has said, is blasphemous. I approach the Good in a Seinsentwurf (“projecting being open”) or, better, Levinas’s “passivity beyond passivity,” in which it, not being, comes upon us in love, as if an Annunciation. Our “crossing to the other beginning”16 that leads beyond Being does not lead to the Ereignis, but it would go nowhere without Heidegger and the others cited in this text. 2. What Is Metaphor? I follow the wise advice of the Venerable Bede and use metaphor to cover all tropes. Usually I employ it to designate a kind of seeing. What do we see? Something new? Something seen freshly or never seen as such before? Is it an artifact arising from a bewitchment by language, an emotional projection, or means of monstration? Is it sometimes an indispensable way to say and think what is so pervasive that it cannot easily be differentiated, or so abstract and beyond images that it cannot be imagined, or so emotional as not to be clearly delineated? We see something through a difference in another in virtue of an identity or resemblance as we see the marks of gravity on the human body through dance, or nature in a mathematical expression, but we are mostly concerned with seeing something, when one term crosses another in chora, the place of emergence. Benjamin Whorf says that most metaphors are ontological (“concerned with existence, personification, and metonymy”) or orientational (“I grasp the thread of another’s argument, but if its level is over my head, my Introduction

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attention may wander, but when he comes to his point, we differ widely, our views are so far apart that the things he says are much too arbitrary, or even a lot of nonsense”). Hitherto metaphor characterized God as the highest being, but if He isn’t any kind of being, perhaps we can find in Whorf’s observation a new way to look at divinity. If most metaphors are existential and orientational, then maybe the metaphors by which we approach God will show him existentially oriented and not thinking Himself. (See below, chapter 3, section 4). Do we see a resemblance between two things when they are juxtaposed by metaphor? Alison Denham, among the best of the traditional theorists, says that “metaphors are (a) contextually identified, figurative expressions, (b) of variable length and complexity, (c) characterizing one thing (or kind of thing) in contra-indicated terms which are standardly appropriate to another thing or kind of thing, . . . further, (d) metaphors present a and b as standing in a relation of similarity or resemblance, and (e), in metaphors, unlike similes or figurative comparisons, the relation of similarity is not presented by being asserted.”17 They are said to be conceptually autonomous, that is, their contents cannot be literally paraphrased, and they are cognitive, though irreducible to the usual cognitive expressions. We generate metaphors by placing things in relation; prior to the relation, there may be no resemblance. Metaphor is expressed, she says, in “contraindicated” terms, that is, terms “appropriate to another thing or kind of thing.” The elicited resemblance, which can either stress the affective response or its intended object, often resists expression in nonfigurative terms “wholly extraneous to that discourse”; for these terms “no literal paraphrastic can be devised.” Resemblance is often an acceptable ground for metaphor when its implicit nominalism finds a home in poetry or textual hermeneutics. Though resemblance is often all we can hope to find, like Flaubert’s train that trails an “ostrich feather,” it may only make one pause without telling anything one did not know or bring one to see what would otherwise be unseen; there is nothing here that compels ascent. Identities, on the other hand, can shape experience and make metaphysical claims. How many of us have been transformed by Shakespeare’s “love is an ever fixed mark that shines on tempests and is never shaken,” or gained metaphysical insights from Rilke’s “open”? Where Dante’s analogies found eternal truths in phenomena, we seem to have fallen into Gabriel Josipovici’s “demonic analogy” and discover only family resemblances: 8

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in the world around us [which] does not lead to the sensation that we are living in a meaningful universe; on the contrary, it leads to the feeling that what we have taken to be “the world” is only the projection of our private compulsions: analogy becomes a sign of dementia. . . . We become aware of the real in a shock of recognition, suddenly realizing, what we had dimly sensed all along, that what we had taken to be infinitely open and “out there” was in reality a bounded world bearing only the shape of our imagination. . . . The effect of demonic analogy is to rob events of their solidity.18 Such has been our estate since Kant; Heidegger, who dismissed metaphor, will lead us to its restoration and, where metaphor fails, show us a way to experience the Good. Nominalism does not allow us to play contexts against one another and, in their friction, generate the light that lets us see, as Plato lets us see, homologies and mutual participations between the human soul, the state, and the cosmos. These presumed functional identities are far more complex than he could have imagined, but his way leads to the nomological ties required by the sciences, the identities discerned in metaphysics, and the greatest poetic art. Besides unconcealing isomorphisms, these crossings can disclose affective resonances and tones, no less formal and even “conceptual” for being affective, and therefore make present to us an otherwise inexpressible deictic participation between dissimilar things. Most metaphors are resemblance, not identity, dependent; and while this may cover expressions such as “feels like . . . ,” “tastes like . . . ,” and so forth that elicit a response, resemblance does not presuppose a common aspect or feature. For example, tenor/vehicle (I. A. Richards) does not make this assumption, but frame/focus (Max Black) is a perspective on a same, and this same, like the conic sections circle and ellipse, are its sometimes-nonsubstitutable variants. Kepler saw that a circle was an ellipse with its two foci at the same point and finally broke astronomy’s tie to circular motion, but then not all circles are ellipses. “A tedious argument is a wandering street,” but this isn’t true of its converse.19 Denham’s juxtapositions can lead to the discovery of identities or to a strong belief that there is one, if only one could say what it was; and even where we do not see an identity, a term from one eidetic group can offer an illuminating but perhaps egregious comment on another. Resemblance is a generic term, which, without further stipulation, covers nominalism Introduction

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and its relative freedom, realism and its nomic ties, and participatory accounts of the same phenomena. If “representation” is tilted towards nominalism, it will not support the formal and even nomic ties in philosophically interesting metaphors. Terms are generated when a “meaning to say” crosses a, and b appears in the successive slot; rather than being taken up and sublated in the appearing b, these terms can visit one another or play back and forth. We must take a clue from the relational and partial identities discerned when a and b are placed together; they can mutually interpret one another and, like the identity 1:2::4:8, promise truth. For the most part modern philosophy has been oblivious to metaphor’s magical powers that transport us beyond the ordinary to reveal hidden identities, which collect, connect, order, and even transcend experience. Why? We shun identities and prefer ad hoc or Dada-like collocations. Beyond that, we are caught up in the dogma that a predicative, sentential model of reality is more appropriate than the mysteries of participation and so are drawn into Aristotle’s orbit. For all the richness and evident truth in that great philosopher’s discussion of metaphor in his Poetics, Rhetoric, Topics, and Metaphysics, metaphor was trivialized when it was taken to be the transport and substitution of terms on the basis of resemblance. Metaphor must be freed from its roots in Aristotle’s terms, categories, and hierarchies and the historical modulations of Being, such as those sketched by Heidegger in its history.20 Since this history is said to have nihilism as its unwelcome outcome, going beyond Being eliminates metaphor, which is “bogged down in metaphysics.”21 Ironically, what Heidegger attributes to Being may be the less determining and destining work of the Holy Spirit. 3. Being and Metaphor Yesterday and Today Why all this bother with metaphor? Because metaphor, which generated our traditional forms of transcendence, has been said to rest on the supersensible and has therefore been repudiated by so many distinguished contemporaries. Without metaphor, little worth saying can be said in poetry or metaphysics, done in art, discovered in the sciences, or worshiped in religion. I want to establish a Platonic way of thinking about metaphor and using metaphor for seeing form—a way that is sensitive to metaphor’s deictic roots. We are metaphors. This is the recovery I hope to bring off. We dwell in what Plato describes as the gap between that which always is, being, and that which never really is, becoming (Tim., 28A). 10

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We question in the name of being whatever shows itself in the gap and how it can be known. Heidegger believed that we are then trapped in a fatally flawed way of understanding these beings because of an ignorance of Being, which is, as Aquinas said, implicit in whatever is understood. But we must examine, if only all too briefly, what thinkers today who begin not with Being but with this gap, known to them and the Greeks as chaos, have discovered about its role in evolution (Bergson and Deleuze), creative and irreversible thermodynamics (Prigogine), quantum theory (Zeilinger), implicate order (Bohm), and the like. This phenomenal gap and its cosmological analogue are within the wider gap between chora and the Good. Creatures come to be and are through processes that they can in turn order—if only by iteration though often creatively—and not as fulgurations of the continuous or permanent. But to so think of them is to go beyond being and the resources of the gap, which we, as incarnate beings, span. Since neither the Good nor chora is any kind of being, then metaphor cannot take us beyond where we are; but these together give us a world that is creative, a world in which metaphor will disclose the radiant glory of things. Not just pyramids in the Louvre or courts in the British Museum, but the beauty and glory that radiates in the frangible faces of the dispossessed. Beauty calls us to care for and succor those who cannot care for themselves. This is how the Good addresses us. But now let us take a preliminary look at some of the problems to be solved and details to be explicated. Though Scotus, Heidegger, and Spinoza are notable exceptions, philosophers and theologians have understood being analogically and have used analogy to forge a bond between beings of every grade and type. The resulting community included everything that could be named, even those things such as God and primary matter, which could be known and named only by a resemblance to more accessible things. When, however, Kant placed nature within leading strings of reason’s own devising (Bxx), he also placed reason within bounds that denied it access to noumena. Today these bounds have been transmuted into those of the general text (Derrida), the linguistic nexus of signs signifying signs signifying signs . . .; but were we to break out of this closure, then anything intuited would be within the Klein bottle of Heidegger’s Ontological Difference. The sense of this ontological closure can be discerned in Aquinas’s dictum: “Being is first in the intuition absolutely and is included in whatsoever else a man apprehends” (ST, II, q.94, a. 2). This prior Introduction

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understanding reappears in the hermeneutical formula of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology in which beings are given within a clearing lighted by a prior, if unthematic, understanding of Being. He then came to see that Being has been understood within its history as eon, idea, ousia, substantia, subjectum, and the like, and that determines how beings, onta, are given. Underlying this history was a growing recognition of a more important distinction between Being (ontological) and beings (ontic), the Ontological Difference that came into focus in Identity and Difference. The need to escape from all forms of ontological closure became apparent when this “history of Being” was seen to lead to nihilism and not, like Hegel’s procession of forms of the spirit, to the absolute. Even though Being is not a being, metaphor represents it ontically, that is, as a being. The classical analogia entis, the bond of being (ST, I, q.13), which characterizes God as the highest being in terms of an exemplary resemblance to beings, is probably an ontic projection.22 If we are to know anything about Being, we begin not with a being, but with Dasein, a nothing, whose existential analytic may yield its intuition. Just what is this “Being” that we would transcend? In raising this question, Heidegger’s Being and Time has radically changed the course of philosophy; though “being” (einai ) has “presence” among its senses, this temporal meaning was more or less lost after Parmenides interpreted it as an eternal and unchanging presence. Heidegger opened the possibility that being is time, the groundless ground and cause of presence. If intuition can be freed from Being, perhaps it can be shown that whatever appears will be a gift of chora and the Good, neither of which is a being. Though such speculative reflections belong among this text’s conclusions, the way to them is beyond Being and must be taken if the Good is our goal. Aside from the Symposium’s ascent to a mystical birth in beauty (210A–212B) and the Philebus’s aitia [cause] (23D), Plato did little to make explicit his insight into the Good. For its development we must first turn to the neo-Platonists who abandoned Plato’s transcendent idea of the Good for a fecund One from whom beings were expressive emanations. This pantheism was rejected in the Greek patristic tradition— my mentors in much of what follows—which transformed the Good into the “God without being” on shaky Platonic grounds. To fully articulate the role of the Good, which has reentered recent philosophy through Emanuel Levinas’s grand design, is beyond the scope of my mind and vision. Levinas will be my Virgil, for though I may stray, I begin with him. Levinas thought we have an access to the 12

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Good by its deflection onto the face of the other, while through the impossibility possibility of its Incarnation; I claim a more direct and even substantive access through the other’s face, its icon, by His kenosis (Phil., 2:5–11). Plato speaks of the idea of the Good that “transcends and surpasses being in dignity and power” (Rep., 509B), not the Good as such. Since idea has an aspectual sense, this could mean seeing things under or through this aspect. If we see things through words, as Husserl unfashionably thought, rather than think the concepts they signify, so too for idea, the intelligible aspect through which things are grasped. Of course idea can be put out of play and, like a word, can become a nominal object; but an idea is more like a scenario, a story being told, a play being played, or the Hippocratic physician’s dramatic experience of disease. In addition to its phenomenological sense in which idea can be a meaning, as red means stop, or what is meant (the oncoming train), it also has a cosmological import. If, like Husserl, you can persuade yourself that you are a monad and that all conscious states are intentional, either in the sense of a concern for something like intuiting noema or signifying, you dwell in a virtual or even solipsistic world and may not need a cosmology.23 This bias has spun off on most philosophers I admire; but I am concerned with Timaeus, a cosmological treatise, and think that Timaeus’s arguments point to a deictic condition that takes us beyond the ego into incarnate, worldly being. Derrida can find in chora the condition for his general text, but Whitehead can find in its affective forces the origin of the knowing self and known beings. I trust that my occasional remarks on quantum physics, evolution, thermodynamics, and the like enable me to preserve chora’s phenomenological import while restoring its physical sense. But my epiphany with an icon, the Zoodochus Pege in Tegra, Greece, both straddles cosmology and phenomenology and challenges me to think these together. We may find here a role for God that survives his dismissal in complexity theory and Nietzsche’s notice of His death. Philosophy usually begins by questioning beings with the epistemological “What is . . .?” But if the Good is primary, should we not begin with an intuition of the Good as the object of desires and source of obligations? Though Plato’s Good is the cause of being and being known and is no stranger to epistemology or cosmology, it is first encountered in the love and singular beauty of those who care for us and give us self and world.24 As a preliminary gesture we can Introduction

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say the Good is affectively known as, for example, a wife and husband know one another. It may be experienced as the hope that dawns in the hopelessness of limit situations, in the mysteries of worship, in Buddhist meditation, in Bach or Messiaen, in icons, in a garden, or in obligations we discover in the eyes of a child. We should begin with “what is required of me?” Many of Heidegger’s moves, including his rejection of metaphor, are relevant to this undertaking. Thinking Being through resemblances to beings determines it as another being. As John Llewelyn observed, when “Being itself is thought, metaphor disappears because beings disappear.”25 When Plato failed in a direct search for non-being in the Sophist, he turned instead to being and found nonbeing in its other. In Being and Time, Heidegger sought to intuit Being that founds world and Dasein as a unitary phenomenon, using anxiety as his epoché (sec. 40). In a series of later texts,26 phenomenological reductions of various moods are undertaken to yield an ontological intuition. In anxiety, nothing seems to emerge as beings shrivel up and fade away as, in at least one version, the “nothing nothings”; then “the unapparent haloes that apparent”27 to make “being’s kind of being apparent.”28 Plato’s “becoming in which nothing becomes” (Tim., 27D) is such a no-thing-ing. So too, I suppose, is Aristotle’s primary hyle (matter, mater), a potentiality for both being and not being (De Anima, 417a 2–5) that is often mistaken for Plato’s matrix. Neither is Heidegger’s nothing a pure absence; it is an autochthonically presencing abyss forged from Kierkegaard’s anxiety and its roots in existential creation ex nihilo. In his final phase, Heidegger abandoned the search for an ontological intuition and found in the Ereignis a way beyond Being. In his important Reduction and Givenness, Jean-Luc Marion makes a convincing case that Heidegger’s failure is our gain. Not only would Heidegger’s search have freed us from the limitations of representational thinking and the objects of Husserl’s intuition—his failure could also free intuition from bondage to Being and, as Marion shows in Being Given, open it to hierarchies in givenness and its given as such. This freedom begins at birth in affective and nonintentional attunement to the other.29 The infant recognizes a human face almost at birth and is self-aware (feeling guilt and shame) or really conscious of other objects only after the second year; then, between the ages of two and four, with the dawning of language, empathy and selfconsciousness begin to appear. The mother, not Aquinas’s being, is “first in its apprehension absolutely”; affectivity which includes the 14

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nascent self and others is the ground of our being and being with others. Freed from ontological shackles, I to whom beings appear can welcome what is other than being, where the welcomed shows itself as Other in the Goodness of Beauty and the Beauty of Goodness. For now there are more mundane matters to be attended to. Breaking bonds begins where Kant’s productive imagination forged them. R. G. Collingwood observed that for Kant we hear sounds but the music we listen to is imaginary; so too is the world perceived and known. As the single and originary source of both forms of sensibility and the categories (A118, B161), imagination subjects all our concepts to time (A99). Can one break this bondage to time, that is, to Being as the form of presence founded on the present? At the risk of verbal spinach, a play on the manifold senses of presence, which articulates that the meanings of Being can yield a terse formula to be clarified in the pages ahead. Though it is no longer a matter of “my generating time” in the apprehension of a manifold (A143), unless there is a meaning of time that presences and is not founded on a present and in which the experience of what is presenced is not the gift of that present, one remains ensnared within Kant’s and Heidegger’s limits. Progress can be made if we take imagination to be the medial between which we cross to generate metaphors and open horizons (see 4:4). To escape this ontological bondage does not mean that the Good will be open to articulation in metaphor, for, as a creature of the between, one can reach below only in an impossible concatenation of terms and above only to the sun and light, the Good’s offspring. In terms W. H. Walsh and Peter Strawson made familiar, this is a revisionist, not a descriptive, metaphysics. What we are and will see and what metaphor discloses is not a basic particular but a hypostases, a nominal posit of a verbal becoming and my proxy for Plato’s “living creature” (zoon hempsuchon; Tim., 30B).30 Our journey to chora and the good begins with the hypodoche, the Platonic receptacle. Any who have visited it as Levinas’s il y a knows that this is not an altogether propitious beginning and may lead nowhere. Many feminists reject this matrix as essentialist and criticize those who, like Julia Kristeva, do not believe that gender is a pure posit of language and culture (NM RE). On the contrary, we will make the hypodoche, our mother, the archive of both and take its creative potentials as ontic necessities, though it may seem absurd to say this of what isn’t anything. Some friends of this matrix or its avatars, such as Jacques Derrida, John Caputo, Emmanuel Levinas (il y a), Martin Heidegger (es gibt), and Maurice Blanchot (the space of writing), see Introduction

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it as either threatening or as sterile, a desert. We see it otherwise: Ho Chora Ton Zonton, “The Land (place) of the Living.”31 These words over the portal of the ancient Church of the Savior in Chora govern much of what I will say. 4. Does Metaphor Still Have a Place in Philosophy? Metaphor, participation, and hermeneutics are crossings dependent on psyche whose inordinately complex how and why invites a preliminary schemata. In participation, for example, the world soul’s circle of the same crosses over and assimilates what appears in the circle of the other (Tim., 37B). Each individual soul is homologous with the world soul and, like the world soul, is a demiourgos that participates in the world’s worlding. Before being divided into these circles, psyche was constructed by blending the transcendentals from indivisible same, other, and being that characterize the ideas, the being that never becomes, with their divisible analogues, which in turn characterize becoming, and the results were ordered in arithmetical and harmonic proportions (35B–36C). Together with geometrical proportions and on the model of Pythagoras’s discovery of the nature of harmony, these can map (measure) all things into and onto number and render them intelligible. Mapping or measurement is a metaphor; and granted the musical form of the soul, “existence is song” (Rilke). Moreover, Adrastus (on Prodicus’s testimony) said: “Looking to the nature of things, Plato composed the soul of all these numbers in order that it might advance as far as the solid numbers, since it is the patron of bodies.”32 Something analogous happens in Kant when the intentions of the understanding cross sensibility and release things according to number. Since proportion is in Greek analogia, this patronage is poetic and musical. In hermeneutics the horizons of the present cross and fuse with those of the historical text to create understanding. Metaphor, with its roots in participation and hermeneutics, is what we are. As long as we live, there is a place for metaphor. The word metaphero is a metaphor and means “to carry over” the sense of one term to another on the basis of a resemblance or identity. In the “White Mythology,” Jacques Derrida makes the convincing case that there is no nonmetaphorical approach to “metaphor.” Even as Aristotle’s “transport” disappears, metaphor reappears in my “crossing,” “seeing,” and “dwelling”; I. A. Richards’s “tenor/vehicle”; Paul Ricoeur’s “semantic migrations”; and Max Black’s “frame/focus.” The univocal ideal of a science of being is founded by Plato’s images 16

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of the divided line and cave, but these polyvalent, enabling conditions for episteme must give way to an imageless logistic ideal. Aristotle’s demonstrative science (EN, 1141a 18) takes priority of place over his phenomenological sense of demonstration (Post. Anal., 99b 25–100a 15) where, instead of transporting terms, we let beings be seen from themselves and in themselves. When we see the point of something, fleeting thoughts come together in a concept as an army in route suddenly comes to a stand (100a 12–13). Metaphor is an epoché. Not only will it make manifest what is hidden in things, but its epoché can eliminate things and, instead of the “nothing that nothings,” intimate chora, their arché. To save both metaphor and metaphysics requires that we establish the rights of each of its terms to dwell with, sometimes in, and interpret one another.33 The metaphorical use of the verb “to be” is hermeneutical. Metaphor ranges over everything from mathematical mappings and models to poetry; the ability to see what something is in its “ratios” or logoi is the single root of the soul’s power. In Book 5 of the Prelude, Wordsworth wrote a not insignificant chapter in the ongoing battle between poets and thinkers. He symbolized this duality in the figure of the Arab with two texts: one was a stone tablet upon which were inscribed the formulae of Euclid, and the other was a seashell. Above the roar of waters, a Dionysian voice was heard in the shell that “foretold the destruction of the children of the earth.” The Apollonian text, the tablet, told of reason “wedded to the stars . . . in purest bond undisturbed by space and time”; but the sound from the shell was the voice of a god, “yea many gods, [that] had voices more than all the winds, with power to exhilarate the spirit. . . .” Such is Poetic Truth, “the passion which is highest reason in the soul sublime.” Wordsworth sought to fuse these in the figure of the Knight of faith. Our task is remarkably similar; we begin by recognizing that these are the dual aspects of the human soul in a process, not a substance, model of incarnation in which these modalities of being can exist “without separation or confusion.” To understand metaphor one must first have at least a schematic understanding of its maker. In the metaphor S is P, P crosses over to dwell in or interpret S, and perhaps conversely. Metaphor is born when, having said S, my open intention to say crosses the said to perhaps find its satisfaction in P. This is also close to the way Plato models soul by the crossing of the circle of the same, that of the subject, and the other; whatever his cosmic intent, we can also see life within this participatory schema. We are always reducing alterity, be it food Introduction

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or a formula in mathematics, into the orbit of our same. Metaphor has the same form as participation and hermeneutics and is for the Platonist that window onto the world that techné and its four causes were for Aristotle. You and I are metaphors. We participate in both its eidetic and affective dimensions, which we can with forethought unify. Metaphor reveals what participation establishes. In participating with an other, be it an idea, person, one’s past or future, an institution, the Holy, the world and the like, the alterity in question dwells in and determines a same to be a partial identity with itself, and all the while each remains other. The key to these crossings is the Timaeus’s construction of the psyche, the demiourgos of participation, which fuses indivisible same, other and being (35A–B) drawn from being (“which always is and is never becoming”) with the divisible same, other, and being (35A–B) drawn from becoming (“that which never is and is always becoming,” 28A). The ideas exist, not in everlasting splendor, but as determinates by which reason persuades the chthonic necessities, “fire or water” even “mud, hair, and dirt” (Par., 130C), to become conditions for habitation, for dwelling (an archaic sense of the German verb “to be”). Becoming in its most primordial sense is an apeiron gignesthai nexu–s of overlapping, and even opposed, drives, passions, interests, and the like, which carry an affective intensity whose topology we scarcely understand. Eros is our conatus essendi and can thumb its nose at goodness and beauty and make “wickedness itself” a motive,34 while at other times it can respond to their lure. In most accounts of final causality, the end is present as a potential in the beginning, as the oak is immanent in the acorn. On the contrary, the lure of eros is a transcending and perhaps compatible possibility. The conatus is replicative, as if inflamed by the lure of the Good with the natura naturans. In principle one can speak with equal truth of rational affectivity or affective rationality, though it must be acknowledged that reason and passion can get out of balance; reason can take a Faustian holiday and passions can blindly rule. Hume sought to found rationality on feeling and its complex formations and Plato made feeling an adjunct of reason, but we must say with Plato’s Stranger, “Give us both!” Edward Ballard proposed that the Timaeus gap [chaos] between being and becoming is the phenomenological clearing in which creatures appear; I would add that, more precisely, it obtains between affective determinability and eidetic determination and that these are in turn bounded by chora and the Good. The sequel will give many tools centering on the incarnate hypostasis or person for overcoming this incoherence; but since I am no Proust, my hand is heavy. 18

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Crossing, not transporting, is my usual metaphor for metaphor. Terms cross their between to dwell with, sometimes in, one another to engender, characterize, or uncover an identity. Catachresis avoids the tendency of the determining (predicate) expression to supercede (Aufheben) its determinable (subject) expression, but then alterity is preserved as the former in reticence “dwells” with the latter. However, the identity given in an epoché may be virtual, not real; then the downward or synthetic dialectic, like Euclid’s logistic, comes into its own in establishing deductive or empirical truth ties with things otherwise known. There are other ways of regarding metaphor, and Aristotle, I. A. Richards, Richard Rorty, Donald Davidson, Nelson Goodman, Eugene Gendlin, and, above all, Paul Ricoeur are among those who have spoken of it well and wisely. I borrow what is useful; and though I will sometimes criticize what I take to be misleading, especially the lexical and semantic thrust that has carried the field since Aristotle, my task is to get it right and not to show where others are questionably wrong. Metaphor urges us to reflect its terms onto one another and, through the light and open of their play, see as if for the first time. We will touch upon other ways of seeing through and thinking with metaphor; but it is and will remain a mystery and its elucidation, as with any mystery, will itself require a nexu–s of metaphors.35 With deconstruction the written ( gramme) text replaced Husserl’s focus on intuition; and while I find this to be unfortunate, it has its points. Husserl began this movement in The Origin of Geometry by recognizing that the condition for the survival of the spiritual and historical form of a culture, including mathematics, “is the survival of written texts . . . their continuing to be where no one has realized them in self-evidence . . . sensible utterances have spatiotemporal embodiment in the world like all corporeal occurrences, like everything embodied in bodies as such; but this is not the true spiritual form itself, which is called an ideal object.” In a certain way ideal objects do exist objectively in the world but “. . . ultimately in virtue of sensibly embodying repetitions.”36 Words carry with them their history and an implicit metaphysics, a nexus of sometimes incompatible and ever-shifting meanings from which there is really no escape, no new beginning. It is as if they spoke for us and said what we did not mean to say, a dilemma that vigilance cannot completely overcome. Derrida wants to go below even the written text to its condition in Plato’s chora: “The bold stroke consists here is going back and behind the origin, or also the birth, toward a necessity that is neither generative nor engendered and which carries philosophy, Introduction

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‘precedes’ (prior to the time that passes or the eternal time before history) and ‘receives’ the effect, here the image of oppositions (sensible and intelligible): philosophy.”37 The text lives in a sort of specious present where, like memory itself, all sorts of pasts can be equally present. Connections are de dicto, nominal, even virtual, not de re.38 The problem is that textual resemblances may never touch empirical reality. The world of the general text, for all the proto-dynamics of Derrida’s différance, is a virtual world, the way things look as one comes down from on high. It is thus the heir to the virtual worlds and the proliferation of meanings unleashed by the nineteenth-century novel, Mach’s phenomenalized physics, Frege’s Sinn and Bedeutung, phenomenology, expressionism, Cantor, Lobachevski, Bolyai, Riemann, and the like in a movement resembling Plato’s synthetic dialectic: “Having grasped the principle . . . [and] keeping hold of what follows from it, reason moves down to a conclusion without making use of anything visible at all, but only of forms themselves, moving on from forms to forms and ending in forms” (Rep., 513B). One always arrives at a being. As if in a dream (Tim., 52B)? Since the receptacle is spatially and temporally indeterminate, geometry mediates its relation to reason, while number mediates its movements. Seen as if from above, time is the time of the number series and space is that of a timeless geometry. Derrida tries to unify these in signification, but the result is a timeless space and a spaceless time in which choice can force no deictic issue. Chora, a foster mother, is barren. In the downward movement from reason to chora, analogous to Kant’s objective deduction, something remains of its indeterminacy; every rational system generates its surds as in Plato’s movement through the regular solids to an inscrutable cosmos39 or in Gödel’s movement from Peano’s axioms to undecidability and incompleteness. But soul is also affective, and then the receptacle shows herself from herself in, for instance, catastrophe and wanton indeterminacy as well as in tenderness and care. Within its chthonic roots there is a creative relation to an archival totality, such as David Bohm’s implicate order or Ilya Prigogine’s complexity, that permit coordinate and synchronic relations to societies of occasions that Derrida did not see.40 We do not have to epoché the text to arrive at chora: it speaks to us in its interstices, in what is about to be said, in searching for the right word, in our bodily orientation to the social and physical world. In the implicate order of saying, the meaningful proximity with another in which something is shown and said is never quite assimilated by the said and, indeed, stands in judgment over it. A poem is, Celan said, a handshake even if no one is present. 20

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The Place of Metaphor

Then what are images? What has been, what can be perceived again and again, and only here, only now. Hence the poem is the place where all tropes and images want to be led. Paul Celan

1. Old Wine in New Bottles Metaphor, that old, anarchical alchemist, transmutes belief into truth, illusion into reality, ignorance into knowledge—only then to turn around and do the opposite. How? She lets unsociable differences cross over to dwell with and interpret one another in order to reveal unsuspected identities—fictional, real, and virtual.1 Water is one thing, electricity is another; but when Faraday crossed them and saw electricity through hydraulics, a new science was born. Electricity isn’t a fluid and does not flow, yet its dynamics are formally the same as those of water. Sometimes what is seen is an artifact of the metaphor. Waves require a medium. Therefore waves of light require the luminiferous ether—that is, until Morley and Michelson put it to the test. Metaphor can make known what is otherwise unknown or sedimented in custom or everydayness, or create the illusion of knowledge. It even tells us what it is to know. Is it to see? To hear? To read? Is it a carnal union? Metaphor is the demiourgos of science, art, society, theology, and the enabling visions of common life. How? Like the logos whose creature it is, metaphor gathers differences into 21

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presumed identities to make the unknown believable or known. The secret of its powers lies in its bonds to Plato’s space and time granting hypodoche/chora matrix and the Good.2 Though metaphor is participation’s window onto a world in the making and being made, these Platonic roots and metaphor itself are no longer in favor with philosophers. For example, in The White Mythology, Jacques Derrida calls attention to the paradoxical situation in which metaphysics, the science of being, must eliminate metaphor, itself a metaphor, upon which its scientific ideal was founded. If there is no way of speaking of metaphor except in metaphor, the contrast with the proper or literal is obliterated. Unless metaphor can be saved from such doubts, our literary, theological and philosophical traditions are in dire straits. In Plato’s image of the divided line, dianoia (understanding) is on the level of the exact, mathematical sciences; but this is incompatible with its founding conditions in images and shadows.3 The univocal demands of metaphysics that are pursued in forgetfulness of the sensory derivation of its terms are even more evident in Aristotle, even though he made important contributions to the study of metaphor. The imaginative use of metaphor, for Aristotle a mark of genius, leads to the discovery of resemblances in otherwise dissimilar things. It gave metaphysics access to various realms or meanings of being and established ontological and epistemological bonds to entities of every kind and type, transcendent and immanent, intelligible and sensible, heavenly and earthly. Nevertheless, metaphor failed to meet the univocal test of science and metaphysics (Meta., 1006a 34–1006b 13). Of course, this dismissal of metaphor’s constitutive role in metaphysics is not universal; an earlier generation of distinguished American philosophers (Richard McKeon, Stephen Pepper, and Richard Brumbaugh come readily to mind) recognized that root metaphors determine the form of metaphysical systems. Among the greatest of these was Parmenides’ to gar auto noein estin kai einai (Frag., III), “there is a same for knowing and being,” where this “same” is established by an ocular metaphor. In noein, a “thoughtful seeing,” one has “visual” access to the being of beings by prescinding them from the flux of becoming and fixing them, thanks to the nominalizing power of einai (“to be”), in the amber of eternity. Though the analogia entis was sometimes denied, as in Duns Scotus (“God is grasped in a concept univocal to Himself and creatures”) and Spinoza, metaphor continued to provide philosophy with its controlling vision. Theologians could never abandon metaphor and retain the goal of making sense of Revelation. “All that may be known of God,” 22

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Saint Paul says, “lies plain before their eyes; indeed God himself has disclosed it to them. His invisible attributes, that is to say, his everlasting power and deity, have been visible, ever since the world began, to the eyes of reason, in the things he has made” (Rom., 19–20). The “supersensory” unknown is manifest in or through the “sensory” known; but since determining God by things is idolatry, we can appreciate Nietzsche’s dismissal of the intelligible/sensible distinction, and rejoice that metaphor seems unable to keep its promise. How can one sustain a real distinction between the sensory and the supersensory if in fact the latter is an “unstable product of the sensory”? But is it really necessary to dispose of the supersensible if God is not a being? Perhaps “disposing of the supersensible” leads to a “neither-nor in relation to the distinction between the sensory (aestheton) and the nonsensory (noeton),”4 but we can celebrate with Nietzsche the death of an ontic God and still retain that distinction through the Good, the cause of being and truth. Let us grant that the bond between the intelligible and sensible worlds, already mortally weakened by Hume and Kant, needs repairing. Unless this is possible, “God,” who is in part a synonym for Platonic ideas and centering ideals, and “the supersensory ground . . . thought as the operative, working reality of everything real (Wirkliche), has become unreal.”5 The promise of a “transcendent solution to life’s problems” will have been shown to be ingenuous by ever-deepening doubts concerning the status of metaphysics. With the death of God, “what matters most” (Plotinus) or, for that matter, anything mattering is in question. Earlier in the nineteenth century, poets had discovered the infinite, for example, in Hölderlin’s inwardness, Wordsworth’s strange presences haunting the hills, or Mallarmé’s abandonment of reference; later poets, such as Rilke, hollowed out a place seemingly beyond being where the yearning for the dead God could be expressed.6 That search culminated in Rilke’s discovery of the Open (in the eighth and ninth Duino Elegies), which, because of its affective, nonintentional, and nonrepresentational leadings, presents itself again and again in Plato’s hypodoche, Derrida’s chora, the “it” of Heidegger’s es gibt that gives Being and gives time, Blanchot’s space of literature, and Levinas’s il y a. Affects are not something one has, but are rather what one is and can “confine man in his corporeality as in a prison . . . or carry him through corporeality as a path leading out of it.”7 The subjective/objective distinction disappears in an affective Open, cleared for letting things be rather than for being appropriated. The Place of Metaphor

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If metaphysics sets up a partition between the sensible and the intelligible that with God’s death is eliminated, what is metaphor’s future if, as Heidegger said, “it obtains only within metaphysics?”8 Metaphor is rejected, John Llewelyn says, because it calls for the distinction between what is more or less present or near, between what is here and what is absent and what is representable. That is to say, metaphoricity has to do with beings in the widest sense of entity, process, event, state, or state of affairs, whether sensory, abstract or transcendental. Presence or the beingness of beings, parousia, is what marks metaphysics off from what he [Heidegger] calls the other thinking or thinking otherwise beyond metaphysics.9 Though the presence of sense makes present the intelligible, Nietzsche makes a strong case against this distinction and, on this basis, Jacques Derrida questions the apparent use of metaphor in Timaeus: Almost all interpreters of the Timaeus gamble here on the resources of rhetoric without ever wondering about them. They speak tranquilly about metaphors, images, similes. They ask themselves no questions about this tradition of rhetoric which places at their disposal a reserve of concepts which are very useful but are all based on the distinction between the sensible and intelligible, which is what the thought of the kho–ra can not get along with . . . the thought of kho–ra exceeds the polarity . . . of mythos and logos.10 Derrida says that chora “does not belong to the horizons of sense or to that of meaning as the meaning of being” and that it does not submit to but oscillates between polarities. Isn’t this because chora is best said in the middle voice? But metaphor can be saved if traditional metaphysical oppositions are neighbors who cross over and engender on the matrix rather than transport or sublate (supercede) one another, as in Hegel’s speculative propositions. If the intelligible can be seen in the sensible so that the “supersensible/sensible” bifurcation is overcome, and if what is made present is not conditioned on presence, perhaps metaphor can hold a place in metaphysics. Revelation is mostly in metaphors which convey their point through a similarity between the ways of God and man, and is given as if from on high, in archetypal, not ectypal, images. The Good Shepherd, Suffering Servant, Word, Son of Man, Living Waters, and 24

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the like relate the Christian’s imagination to God. In the third Critique Kant spoke of these as symbols, presentations (hypotyposes) of noumenal archetypes, through which God is known (IK CAJ, 353); other than that, he left philosophy with little access to divinity. If Kant abandoned the consolations of physico-theological reason, he opened possibilities for an affective experience of transcendence, especially in such music as Wagner’s Parsifal or the final movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Nietzsche’s discovery that art goes beyond language, “which can never succeed in bringing the innermost core of music to the surface,” was nigh. “The Dionysiac musician,” Nietzsche continues, is “himself imageless, is nothing but the original pain and reverberation of the image. Out of this mystical process of un-selving, the poet feels a whole world of images and similitudes arise.”11 Music is an egoless “dwelling, truly and eternally, in the ground of being” which, with the death of god, is the only transcendence available. Heidegger adds that our very nature is to dwell poetically.12 Taking certain liberties with Kant’s formula in which sensibility will become intellectual feeling and understanding the feeling intellect, we can say that art is the imagination’s play between intellectual feelings and reverberating images in the feeling intellect. Meaning and purpose are, as always, born in purposeless play. Something beautiful may happen that is a “symbol of the moral idea” or perhaps a symbolic presentation of the noumenal (IK CAJ, Sec. 39). In his own version of this gap, which is the experience of art and which is so close to the construction of the soul in Timaeus, Nietzsche pairs geometrical forms and numbers—“the universal forms of all possible experience”—with music’s “not yet abstract but perceptible and determinate” forms. Their crossing brings to mind Plato’s fecund gap between “that which always is and is never becoming” and “that which is always becoming and never really is” (Tim., 27D) crossed by the musical soul and within which all things come to be, as well as the gap between earth and sky in Heidegger’s “Origin of the Work of Art.” Metaphor dwells in and crosses the between to open a horizon in which something is seen as something else. Thanks to Kant and Nietzsche, in such experiences we hope to find God. 2. Logos Since any thing resembles another in some respect or other, nominalism is a fertile base for poesy. Aristotle usually favors the view that metaphor is the transfer of terms on the basis of resemblance. What The Place of Metaphor

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I wear in my mouth to close a gap is like the structure that allows people to cross over water. The resemblance is nominal.13 The Platonic school has looked to Euclid V and the theory of proportions as equality of logoi for a more realistic basis. I argue on the basis of participation, a holistic mode that, like realism, seeks an identity and, like idealism, introduces ideal determinations. This modification borrows from Whitehead’s thesis that supplementary eidetic feelings constitutive of the subject’s receptive mode fuse or mingle with those in the “objective” mode to give birth to the presentified eidos. I will argue in the sequel that the accounts of perception in Theaetetus (152E–161A; also Republic, 507B–508E) and the more fanciful Timaeus (44E–46A) lend themselves to this interpretation, while its hermeneutical and rather Jungian import is evident in the projection of images of the gods we followed onto others (Phaedrus, 252D–253D). In the second place, forms and events mutually participate.14 This is possible because of the reciprocal participation of chora or matrix and the Good; taking a clue from Dante’s Convivio, this could be symbolized as the way the transcendent Father and immanent Holy Spirit are in one another. Plato speaks of the “slow motion” of the eye (Theaet., 176D–157A) or, in general, the “passive motion” of the participant (Sop., 248B–D), so that even mind partakes in the power of the dynamical hypodoche.15 Finally, I assume that, though forms are externally related, they are also transcending potentials for other events. As immanent, they are also under the sign of Spirit and show themselves, first as sense and then as perceptual and other intentional objects. Sense objects are constants or parameters determining a range of conditions in the formal structures and transmissional events necessary and sufficient for their occurrence, but these events are not the sense object’s causes. Sense objects are limits on inquiry but are neither causes nor effects of the conditions inquiry discloses. This is an unintended consequence of the reduction, If it is red, then certain second intensional statements are also true, such as those pertaining to its genus, number, and the like, but we also know that a vast range of variable conditions—geometric, physical, background, psychological, transmissional, cultural, phenomenological, and biological—are also satisfied. We know what “red” is without knowing any of these, and it thus explains these conditions, and not conversely. For seeing red, certain rods and cones are necessary; but we can’t explain our seeing it by causal rods and cones. Red interprets this matrix and is its manner of being given. Only under such constants is inquiry into these conditions possible. The separationism of the 26

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middle dialogues must be overcome by seeing the idea in the thing itself (7th Ep., 322C). Perception unifies cosmology and phenomenology. But the registered idea is not the end of the story, for it occurs as a structural component in a field of shapes and colors that can be intended as this or that object(s). The being that registers the sense object also intends it as something, as perhaps an adumbration (Husserl) or a sign (Derrida). The recipient is also imaginative, so that what is merely registered, in addition to being recognized, can also be enjoyed as an “exponible representation of the imagination” (Kant, Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, 218). But in abstract art there may be no relatum for recognition under a concept and then, as Kant so admirably put it, the free play of the imagination never comes to rest; Marion adds, there is then a sensuous and irreducible surplus “of intuition over all the concepts and significations one would assign to them”; these can be intuited neither as objects nor under the rubric of Being. Such is the flesh, which individuates us and which is what we are; “it gives me to myself in giving itself to me.”16 Marion gives the example of a cubist painting of a newspaper, violin, vase, and stool. These supposedly simple objects give more than we can see and more than we can think. . . . The concepts by which we know what we see so well that we no longer take the time or trouble to go and truly see, serve only to sum them up, simplify them for us, so as to mask their exuberant splendor. . . . If we were to forget their concepts, we would see that there are so many things to see—so many things to see in this old violin on the simple stool, a rumpled newspaper and the sad little vase. If only we would let the facets of each of them appear (distinguished by the various plays of color they offer to the light . . .), all the perspectives on each object aligned with each other . . . and not only the real perspectives but also and especially the unreal one such as we could imagine and see them if we could pair the opposite side of one . . . [the violin] with the obverse of the other . . . [the newspaper title], the left on the one above [the vase] with the right of the other [the leg of the stool]. . . . For all their combinations are by right visible, even though our vision—therefore our intentions and intuitions— attains only an improbably small number to them. . . . The cubist happily exhausts himself in the endless race to the impossible and ever elusive summation of the visible bursting—for the visible burst, if one lets it arise in appearing, like a wave crashes The Place of Metaphor

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with exploding fireworks of water drops, each different in form and color, in space and time, in trajectory and how they glimmer.17 In this deictic epiphany, sensibility is an allegory for being (Levinas). Our way to metaphor begins with logos, which means both “ratio,” the relational unity of differences such as “1⁄2” or “window/soul” and “word,” and thus denotes the single root of the soul’s powers: the power to order, to map and measure, and, on the other hand, to make metaphors, to see the same in others. In addition, it also means “to gather”; putting these senses together, logos expresses the power of the word to show and gather difference into unity or make the unknown known by mapping it onto the known. Poetry lets us see the world in a grain of sand, while mapping physical objects onto numbers discloses the harmony of the world. Logos was said by Saint John 1:1 to name the Son of God by whom all was made and in whom this unity rests. Metaphor can both constitute and disclose identity in diversity, even where the unity is nameless or inheres in differing ontic regions. Although not all metaphors lend themselves to proportional representation, some acquaintance with their role in classical thought is propaedeutic. Plato said none ignorant of geometry were to enter the Academy which, under his guidance, was on the way to algebra and, in the monumental work of Eudoxus and Euclid, to a theory of ratios (logoi) and—as DeMorgan showed—limits and their proportioned equalities (analogos) that accommodates incommensurables. For now, however, consider such a trivial judgment that two objects are unequal in size. Though we sense neither equality nor inequality, we see things as unequal through a prior understanding of equality (Phaedo, 75A–D). With this in mind, take something, perhaps, a twig, to be a unit measure. Parenthetically, Euclidian geometry is the only metric geometry that permits recognition of self-congruence in transport, rotation, and imaging, operations presupposed in the work place.18 Consider two objects of unequal length and then, using the prepared twig as an integral measure, lay it successively alongside each so that the twig is to the thing measured as 1 is to x. This equality of ratios between visible—physical and intelligible—mathematical objects is the Platonic basis for metaphor. In being radically other they harbor a same. Assume that in the measurement, x=3, and in the second, x=4. 4 is divisible by 2 and is even, while 3, not being so divisible, is odd. The length 3 is related to 4 by “smaller than,” but these can be united as 3⁄4. Ratios, and neither Aristotle’s pros hen analogies 28

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(Meta., 1003a20–1004a 8) nor Aquinas’s proportionalities (ST I, q. 13), are being’s bonds. It will be recalled that Heidegger says nihilism follows on the loss of Plato’s “supersensible.” In Aristotle and scholasticism, it makes sense to convert being and good, to speak of the goodness of being and the being of goodness, but the latter is not true in Plato. The separationism characteristic of the Republic and other middle dialogues is overcome in the later dialogues, such as Sophist, Politicus, Timaeus, and Philebus, and the fundamental coherence—a mutuality of participation—between being and becoming is established. The ratios of the human soul mingle according to the grammar of philosophy, the Platonic transcendentals or greatest kinds—same, other, one, many, rest, motion, and being. In Timaeus Plato distinguished between determinate being, “that which always is and never becomes,” and determinable becoming, “that which always becomes but never really is” (28A). These define a gap (chaos)—like that between Gaea and Uranus (perhaps the origin of Heidegger’s earth and sky in the “ring dance of the four fold”)—within which creatures come to be. Heidegger himself spoke of this space-time as that “between” where it has not yet been determined what being is, though where by the same token “a total confusion and undifferentiation of beings and non-beings does not sweep everything away either, letting one thing wander into another.”19 In Plato Being, the domain of the ideas is under the sovereignty of the Good “which is not being but superior to it in rank and power” (Rep., 509B), while becoming is Heraclitus’s flux, a space/time matrix. Plato bridged this gap, which is what we are and wherein we dwell, with participation. “Participation” is our word for his lush nexus of metaphors. For instance, playing on the ambiguity of meta in metalambano, participation meant “to share the beyond amid,” or methexis, “to sustain the beyond amid.” But the gap, which appeared in a somewhat different form in the earlier Republic (476A–480A), harbored an incoherence that seemed to make participation untenable (Par., 130C–136D). The Eliatic stranger, who seems to speak on Plato’s behalf, said that it “left no place of life, and motion, and mind” (Sop., 249A); and so in Timaeus (34A–36C), Plato undertook a construction of soul that would span this gap and, granted this separation, establish a neighborhood that would allow different domains to communicate. How can these diverse regions share anything? There is really nothing in common, for one is a boundless, medial flux, an apeiron gignesthai (formless becoming) from which things come to be and into The Place of Metaphor

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which they pass away and the other, an everlasting world of forms. Ultimate differences, like thought and extension in Spinoza, can share something only if they are complementary aspects of one thing, such as his God. Inverting this, we can say creatures can partake in ultimate differences only if these are complementary aspects. Plato pulls this off by constructing the soul—the “how” of participation— by the “conjugation” of a sub-set of the “all-connecting terms . . . [the] some that mingle with all” (Sop., 252C–257B), namely being, same, and other. These transcendentals “explain” how alterity, immanent or transcendent, becomes same. The soul is between (metaxu), but is also constituted from, being and becoming; as a partial identity with each, it overcomes separationism.20 In Indian thought the soul and the cosmos mirror one another, so that to look within is also to look without. Something like this is operative in Augustine and Descartes and, on the reading of anamnesis Plato seems to invite, in Meno (81B–E) and Phaedo (73A–76A); it also seems implied in the ladder of love in the Symposium (210A–211B). In Timaeus this homology is work of the transcendentals, where the divisible is joined with the indivisible same, other, and being in the ratios and proportions that reason can grasp. The so-called supersensible is the inseparable correlate of the sensible. Assuming that the ideas are ordered by the good in accord with the growth and development of things under the sun, we have in mathematics methods and in philosophy dialectical analogues that will disclose their intelligibility. We live in the between and partake of both realms, and this between is metaphor’s metaphysical neighborhood. The gap admits of a phenomenological reading, which allows the eidos to be an epiphany.21 The imaginative variations employed in the phenomenological reduction culminate in the intuition of an eidos, the invariant or essential form of a phenomenon. One considers the intended entity in a variety of actual and possible or even fictional worlds in order to intuit what is eidetically same, if anything is same, over this series. Just as we arrive at an irrational number as the limit of a series of rationals, so here we arrive at a horizon determined by an eidetic necessity within which the entity can be intuited as same in these possible and actual contexts.22 Instead of beginning with a purported identity and then seeing if it is identical through variations, metaphor discloses an otherwise hidden same by imaginatively putting different things together and letting them play back and forth. If “A is B” is a metaphor, A and B disclose a same through their chiasmatic and imaginative play.23 Metaphor tweaks wonder and commands assent. 30

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Just as life is tweaked into new forms by matter, the mother, so the receptacle (matrix), the scene of crossing, tweaks language into becoming “a flower of the mouth.” Maybe we don’t get its point and maybe there is really nothing to be seen; but like the joke whose point eludes us, we feel that something must be there. This could be a formula common to diverse contexts but—because metaphors can be images or even actions that carry a profoundly felt meaning—what they disclose may be too deep for speech. It can also lead to disaster. For example, Nazi authorities persuaded many German physicians to become willing participants in genocide with the image of the Jew as a cancer destroying Aryan culture. But metaphor, itself a metaphor, does not really admit of any one reading. While I prefer “crossing” as its generative form and “dwelling” as its disclosive sibling, I keep the contributions of Ricoeur, Gendlin, and Max Black in play; I think an identity lies in their nexus but only another metaphor could say it and . . . and then? Plato’s metaphysics is a tapestry woven by metaphor. The sensible was a shadow or image (mimesis) of the intelligible. One approached its original, arché or idea (Rep., 506D–517D), by using hypotheses, not images (510B) “as underpinnings, springboards, stepping stones to take off from” (511A). Paradoxically, being “without images” frees noesis (reason) from entanglement in the images that made possible access to real being and truth and, unhappily, also gives rise to the illusion that ideas are absolutes. The price paid was excessive; instead of beginning with a thing, the ultimate explicandum thematized in deictic and phenomenological approaches to metaphor, one fits the facts to theory-laden observations. Since the extensivity of the receptacle lends itself to space and geometry, and its flux and motion, to time and algebra, seen from above—as in Plato’s works of reason— these are virtual, not real. The receptacle is the possibility of these virtualities and permits a kind of suspension of real space and time, as in mathematics, but also, as in a novel, it permits one to range over any event, real or imaginary, as if a god or, as in a painting or computer representations, over any sort of space. While virtuality lends itself to formal modeling within which, for example, the consistency of a logical or mathematical theory can be tested, this space and time is no more or less real than that in novels by Dickens or Mark Twain. As we should have learned from Plato, and he perhaps from himself, science is model-theoretic, a spinner of likely stories more or less adequate to real existence. Analysis, the movement sketched in Plato’s divided line from things below through images to hypotheses and The Place of Metaphor

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through these to ideas, is prior to synthesis, the downward movement of the synthetic dialectic. Unless one begins with analysis, which entails Kant’s sensibilized concepts, the downward movement will arrive at a shadow of being. Even when all precautions are taken, however, this movement terminates in an irrational root. In going from the works of reason to the necessities of the receptacle, something remains of its indeterminacy; every rational system generates its surds as in, for example, Plato’s movement through the regular solids to an inscrutable cosmos24 or in Gödel’s movement from Peano’s axioms to undecidability and incompleteness. In the receptacle’s virtuality, decisions are dreamlike, like those we might make on a computer; nothing forces the future, and the word will never really strike you. But soul is also affective, and then the receptacle shows herself from herself in catastrophe and wanton indeterminacy. Whitehead’s method of extensive abstraction, not unlike the Husserlian epoché, begins with sensory awareness and, using pointing or some other means of monstration as an epoché, demonstrates the inherence of eternal objects as integral elements in these “factored” regions in a largely forgotten protest against the reification of virtualities under the rubric of “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.” 3. “Song Is Existence” The return to the way things are begins with the musical eidos that is the soul’s essence. First there is the way music mirrors the rhythm of life; music’s tension and release or resolution is the analogue of the heart’s diastole and systole.25 In rhythm one is carried outside oneself, and interiority is entrained or externalized. One participates in the movement, and “images impose themselves upon us without our assuming them.”26 Then there is the soul’s harmony, its attunement to and participation in the world (Phaedo, 92A–95B). This musical metaphor broke down in the Phaedo, because the soul would be to its music as wind is to an Aeolian harp. The harp’s harmony is neither better nor worse, but the music I make with my life is subject to judgment. Thus is born the self-responsible I. The image of harmony returns in Timaeus (36A–C) and—if we can think the results medially—goes a long way toward returning sense to sense. Plato constructed—or if one prefers phenomenological jargon, constituted—psyche in arithmetical and harmonic proportions. The story begins when, in Yeats’s words, 32

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World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras Fingered on a fiddle stick or strings What a star sang and careless Muses heard.

By controlling the length of a monochord and measuring the lengths associated with the notes C, F, G and C′, Pythagoras discovered the form of harmony. In the Timaeus, the soul is the demiourgos’s “fiddle stick or string.” The demiourgos first divided the strip, the cosmic bond blended from the soul’s roots in being and becoming (37A), into intervals corresponding to the diatonic scale. He took the two sequences, 1, 2, 4, 8 and 1, 3, 9, 27, where 8 and 27 are the first cubic numbers, and filled in the gaps with arithmetical and harmonic means. Given any two numbers, m and n, the arithmetical mean is given by p−m=n−p and the harmonic mean by p−m:n−p=m:n. For example, the arithmetical mean between 1 and 2 is 3/2, so 3/2−1=2−3/2. The progression, to use fractions and not Plato’s more severe whole-number procedures, is 1, 9/8, 81/64, 4/3, 3/2, 27/16, 243/128, 2. It corresponds to the diatonic scale, roughly the white keys on a piano, and avoids Pythagoras’s surds.27 This lovely mathematical fiction has other applications. Because the soul is a blend of being and becoming, its proportions apply not only to the mind’s measurements and metaphors, but also to life’s biological rhythms, periodicities, and the primal frequencies. Life, not transcendental apperception nor a distension of the mind, is and orders time. When the strip formed from the blending of these transcendentals is split to form the great circles of the same and other (35B), the theme of the reduction of alterity to the same of biological, physical, communal, and conceptual life defines the integrative life of the self. Though Plato gives the circle of the other a cosmological role, it is also the cycle of biological life and defines the body as the chora from which the higher functions of the soul stand out. The reduction is also affective. Affectivity, as Bergson understood William James, is the sum of visceral and organic sensations and an implicit motility only because it is first a meaningful directedness or attunement to alterity.28Affects are mostly social strategies for action: in anger we desire to hurt, in fear to retreat. They are also shared, as in the phenomenon of entraining or attunement in which we are in synchronic or rhythmic movement with similar others, sympathetically sharing the feelings expressed. A jazz group improvising within a beat around a few chords is almost a self-generating system, playing and responding as one even though each does his or her own thing; we are attuned to and with them. Bergson gives a beautiful analysis of our experience of a dancer’s graceful motions. The Place of Metaphor

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If curves are more graceful than broken lines, the reason is that, while a curved line changes its direction at every moment, every new direction is indicated by the preceding one. Thus the perception of the ease in motion passes over into the pleasure of mastering the flow of time and of holding the future in the present. A third element comes in when the graceful movements submit to a rhythm and are accompanied by music. For the rhythm and measure, by allowing us to foresee to a still greater extent the movements of the dancer . . . the regularity of the rhythm establishes a kind of communication between him and us. . . . Besides the lightness, which is a sign of mobility, [we detect] some suggestion of a possible movement towards ourselves, of a virtual and even nascent sympathy. It is the mobile sympathy, always ready to offer itself, which is just the essence of a higher grace.29 The soul’s musical form opens the phenomenon of life to possibilities the ancients found in the middle voice.30 Strangely enough, music offers us an intention that has no object; its very surplus over anything that can be said presents the bedazzling excess that characterizes all high art. Blinded as if by its radiance, we are powerless to constitute it as an object. Music’s measureless mass comes over us in its presencing without a discernible presence, a coming forward not mediated by an objectifiable given. Such medial phenomena are paradigms for the promised experience beyond Being. In this, and in other saturated phenomena, the subjective, nominative, intending I is transformed into the receiver’s dative “unto whom.” What Levinas achieves by the transformation of the nominative self into the accusative by the “infinite” Other can be accomplished—granted the existence of this excess of givenness over and beyond any intention— by a variety of phenomena. Music’s paradoxical “coming forward” that exceeds what comes forward, what can be said or thought, is also the prototype of Marion’s “saturated phenomenon.” Marion’s concept of saturation is the apotheosis of phenomenology’s given-givenness distinction. Given-givenness is a medial doublet— for us, if not for Marion—that is fundamental to his aim to free intuition from a necessity dependence on intentional objects and the dependence of intuition on Being.31 The given arises in givenness, a process, and this suggests similar chiasmatic doublets, such as the doctor doctoring himself (Aristotle), the play playing, saying/said, becoming/being, and the like. He avoids the metaphysical imputation 34

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of givenness by showing that it does not repeat its problematics. Moreover, it was in play from the outset in Husserl. In Being Given Marion develops his concept of saturation within the framework of Kant’s analytic to arrive at antitheses of the schematized categories: saturation is not an additive quantity and so can neither be meant, aimed at, or intended in anticipation through causes, but is factically given all at once as unbearably intense in pure immanence.32 Modality, which for Kant entails an agreement of intuition with thought in general, appears as “irregardablity”; that is to say, the “saturated phenomena reuses to let itself be regarded as an object,” appearing in a “multiple and indescribable excess that annuls all efforts at constitution.”33 Rather than being constituted by the I, the I experiences itself constituted by the phenomena. Marion recognizes a hierarchy within intuition that begins with formal objects given all at once, continues through ordinary intentional objects and their endless object horizons that promise more of the same in a series, and culminates with inversions of intention in manifestations of saturated phenomena. The latter range from astonishing events, which are counter-intentional and sweep aside the I (that can, like the fall of Rome, retrospectively yield the self an infinite hermeneutic), through idols (whose splendor “stops and returns intentionality by filling it with the first visible”), flesh (and its saturation of ecstasy), and culminates in the Other.34 Husserl’s nominative, Heidegger’s genitive (of Being) and Levinas’s accusative self that becomes dative are said to be deconstructive of the self; but Marion says that “I receive my self from the call [which ultimately proceeds from the face, the Other] that gives me to myself before giving me anything whatsoever . . . [and which makes possible] as first gift allocated by the call, the openness for the givenness of all particular beings.”35 Hearing is a better access to phenomenal events than seeing, and this silent call marks Marion as quite close to Levinas’s saying. Openness is beautifully expressed in a phrase from one of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus (I, 3): “Song is existence.” Existence is the saturated open—not that within which beings are unconcealed but, as in the eighth Duino Elegy, what the animal world (creatures who are being-towards-life and not us, who are self-conscious and beingtowards-death) “with all its eyes beholds.” These unprotected ones need us, the even more unprotected, to give them voice. Augustine says that “animals and physical matter find a voice through those who contemplate them.”36

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Beyond the loved one, as if by accident, the realm is glimpsed. . . . But no one gets beyond the other, and so world returns again.

John Llewelyn notes that “existence” refers both to the singer and the sung, who achieve existence “together in the space and time of the song, which is the inner space of the world. . . . Why not the invisible too, or at least what gives it a local habitation and a name by transforming it into something heard?”37 Can we drop out the “inner” of Rilke’s “inner space,” which Heidegger also criticized, to let one, with Cezanne, resonate with the open world in an affective, though not yet self-affective, vulnerable field? As the musical construction of the soul in Timaeus suggests, life is this song. Poems frequently name what they cannot reach (such as all the things of the earth that linger and perish) or what cannot be named, as YHWH names the God who is nameless; but what is without a name or cannot be named can be praised. The poem or song, Llewelyn continues, is a medial performance, not a description. The poet is an inventor of names by which we can praise the thing. Instead of setting out to map the thing as it already is he makes another thing, a Kunstding, which is less like a map than an icon that helps him and us sing its praises . . . As soon as the most ordinary words are surrounded by the blank spaces of the verses on the page their extraordinariness stands out. Sung, they receive the touch of madness necessary if the visible is not merely referred to and described but transfigured into the language of the invisible, the language of death that confers on them new life. . . .38 Is song the only way of reaching what has perished? Is there a better way to protect things? Is the only transcendence a transcendence of transcendence?39 The separationist theory of ideas that gave Plato problems with participation provided an opening for Nietzsche’s critique, but this can be overcome if life is more like a song than a wave sustained by countervailing forces or bits of stuff cohering and then falling asunder.40 Experiences that would have invited use of the middle voice, such as playing, dancing, speaking one’s language, enjoying the satisfactions of being at home, and being absorbed in music, have no place for the usual metaphysical dualisms. In playing or listening to music, we participate in a process beyond the binary opposites and can become one with the music and with one another. For better or 36

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worse, we are entwined in the struggle between Apollo and Dionysus for the human soul; the flux of rhythmic and harmonic modalities is the temporality of organic life. In the midst of life reduced to song, we hover above a world that is the product of an errant causality (Tim., 48B), the unpredictable Dionysian receptacle, and this, like the cosmos as a whole whose form is that of the “inscrutable” dodecahedron, marks the downward limit of reason. The song takes us below, perhaps into the abyss, and above the visible. Before we are done we must show that even in the lower world there are traces of a beyond. Affectivity and the Good are bounds of the between. 4. The Middle Voice Our journey through the “between” will often encounter phenomena inviting articulation in the Indo-European middle voice, the voice of the hypodoche and its cosmological (power) and phenomenological (affectivity) determinables. In wise and cautionary words I do not always follow, John Llewelyn introduces the theme of the middle voice in his magisterial The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience. He reminds us that there is no strict and helpful definition of middle voice in the Greek and Sanskrit grammars and that, on certain usages, it threatens to replace metaphysics with a new metaphysics that posits “a power that has at most a contingent need for humans or other beings” or that would, as in a Heideggerian formula, “make a [medial expression of] language the master of man.”41 Though the middle voice had passed from use in Plato’s time, the absence of the Aristotelian active/passive dichotomy rooted in ousia (substance) suggests that its reintroduction may enable us to think beyond being. Jan Gonda notes: Medial forms originated in a mentality and view of life that assumed the existence of a great number of more or less autonomous potencies or power-substances, which within some form of experience were supposed to be present in objects, persons, and phenomena, and by virtue of which they were powerful, effective, influential. Not rarely these terms denoting powers of substances are used as subjects of verbs expressing such ideas as seizing, laying hold of, coming over, falling upon, striking, overwhelming, entering into, inspiring, animating, etc. They are mostly conceived impersonally, but are often regarded as more or less personal in character.42 The Place of Metaphor

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Such phenomena as Pauline grace and Heidegger’s Gelassenheit, releasement into “other thinking,” may also be medial.43 Though Gonda says that eventive, medial forms “denote something happening to or taking place in the person of the subject; a process takes place, by which the subject, in some way or other, is affected,”44 this does not fit its usual reflexive interpretation. To bathe (louesthai) oneself means “a process of washing is taking place with regard to the person under consideration.”45 Though he initiated and welcomes the process, he is not its agent. It may be that the middle voice is what Nietzsche hoped to gain by his self-stultifying “will not to will” or the will that Heidegger thought had to be relinquished to arrive at his Gelassenheit (even if “the occasion for releasing oneself to belonging to that which regions requires a trace of willing”46). Both presuppose, only to repudiate, the romantic concept of will as an infinite resource of power and, God being dead, without restraint. Archaic peoples preferred to use eventive, medial forms where we would use active expressions. “Instead of attributing the performance of a process to a subject that was not or only vaguely known to him, he made the person or object which was the “seat’ of the process the subject, connecting it with a middle verb.”47 According to Gonda, The original or essential function of the middle voice was not exactly to signify that the subject “performs a process that is performed in himself,” but to denote a process that is taking place with regard to, or is affecting, happening to, a person or thing; this definition includes also those cases in which we are under the impression that in the eyes of those who once used this category in its original formation some power or something powerful was at work in or through the subject or manifest in or through the subject, on the one hand, and those in which the process, while properly performed by or originating with, the subject, obviously was limited to the sphere of the subject.48 Charles Scott says that this voice, lacking a present indicative mood, does not “suggest predication or subjective intervention in the formation of its movement.”49 While it may be possible to formulate a medial, nonreflexive movement, which is not “for itself” or “for another,” such as a wave, there are medial phenomena, such as playing a game, in which “subjective intervention” is necessary. The reflexive “I can . . .” when letting a game play us is not the reflective “I can . . .” of willful doing. In the middle/active distinction, the active 38

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refers to “a process performed outside the subject” and does not have the sense of “active,” that is, of someone performing the act, in the active/passive voice distinction.50 In playing we willingly let the play play us and, in the playing, experience this or that as meaningful. We could not play by willing to play. These are not intentional phenomena, though unless mind brings into play in the two senses of intention, directed action and meaning, its essential spontaneity will mutate into scattered and aimless expressiveness. When the mind no longer gives itself a direction to follow, the whole phenomenon becomes devoid of significance, not unlike a dream state in which no contact with material reality is made. The middle voice is that “of something taking place through its own enactment,” not always as a wave reenacts itself, but rather as the narrative, not the author or hero, wants to do this or that, “searching for a way forward which will also be a way to a final point of rest . . . The ‘je’ is transformed into ‘moi.’”51 As another example, we live through the body’s own enactments by (relatively unchanging) enzymes, which originate in the metabolic processes they control. Medial phenomena eschew being and are beyond the Ontological Difference. Whatever is being played out, the narrative or life, enacts its own causes; but these “causal episodes” cannot be explained or predicted from their antecedents.52 Participation is like that. John Llewelyn, a master of nuances, says: “We obviously need a notion of power that does not just pass through the subject, and the notion of a subject that is neither a conduit or passage (the ‘through’ of pure passivity) nor the conductor who is entirely in charge of a performance (the ‘by’ of pure agency) but is performed by as much as he performs the process—or procedure.”53 What has hitherto passed for energeia (activity), dynamis (potential), and ergon (work) is usually associated with the self, in particular with the will as striving or as conatus essendi. But Plato could have founded these in medial becoming (gignesthai). Thus power or force pertains not to Aristotle’s masculine form but to the feminine, who, in giving birth, passes it on to her progeny. Being, which Plato says is dynamis (power) (Sop., 247E), is a gift from beyond being. Though approaching the middle voice by means of the will reinforces the sense of its power or force, it too may be medial. Under certain descriptions it shares cognitive, as in intending, and motile/sensuous expressions with the bodily matrix; what is simultaneously active and passive, receptive and directive, may demand a medial interpretation. John Llewelyn, referring to the role of will in Heidegger’s “releasement” (Gelassenheit), noted that in various historical definitions of the will from Aristotle The Place of Metaphor

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(prohaeresis) through Nietzsche and Heidegger there is an unavoidable ambiguity between its cognitive and affective functions. The processes that lend themselves to the middle voice implicate the subject without its being actively or passively involved; we are willingly sustained with and by what happens without its being willed.54 This is the voice that transforms a verbal process into a nominal continuant. Aristotle came close to getting it right with his “nature is like the doctor doctoring himself” (De Physica, 199b 30). In satisfactions or moments of intimacy, life is a dance dancing us, not something we try or strive to be or do; the play plays itself through us without our trying or striving to play; language languages us. Trying to live is like trying to dance or speak an unfamiliar language. Situations inviting the use of the middle voice have no place for the usual metaphysical dualisms. As is the case with grace, breathing, or sexual activity, one is more nearly the vehicle than the active agent or the passive recipient of the process. The Virgin Mary’s receptivity as represented in numerous Renaissance Annunciations is a “passivity beyond passivity.” The middle voice is the voice of processes that happen to such subjects which are not, even if willingly entered into, the issue of the will; in which one participates, often in full awareness though not self-consciously; and in which the future can sometimes be forced by seizing affective and/or rational alternatives. This is the voice of the hypostasis, our term for Plato’s “living creature” or Aristotle’s biological substance. It should have been the voice of Whitehead’s philosophy of the organism and of our translations of Zen; process is reality. For all its mathematical structure, music is a shared, not a private, affectivity. The musical, not just the spoken, logos gathers us into a hypostatic community—political, aesthetic, religious, military, and the like. The affective is prior to the rational dimension of music; and so to Plato’s austere constructions of the soul, the demiourgos of participation, we shall add empathy and compassion, primordial determinables of the receptacle, which are to human life what Plato’s solids are to nature; they reside in that part of the soul formed from “divisible same, other, and being” (Tim., 35A–B). The self belongs to the deictic order of singularity and is a medial manner of being that arises and is sustained by becoming. It is to be approached, not naturalistically, not under the formality of being, but of the Good. Though this usage is idiosyncratic, I intend it as an interpretation of Scotus’s dictum that singularity means that something is “undivided in itself and divided from all else” (Oxon. 4, d.6, 40

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q.1, n.4) and is an in qual perfection of a being (Meta. 4, q.2, n.13), not a numerical limitation (category of quantity).55 A hypostasis is a degree-admitting singularity achieved by a place-bound synthesis of genetic or archival alterity (the role of the hypodoche) with transcending alterity. These syntheses, which “divide it from all others,” are driven by eros within a narrative framework, a teleological conatus essendi, toward “perfection of being.” This is not final causation if this means that it is the expression of an original potentiality; it is the funded (Dewey) power (dynamis) to respond to propositional lures, to possibilities never till now seen on land or sea. Though haecceitas (individuation) is usually taken nominally, as if instantiation were a mere adjective of being, I take it as an adverbial interpretation of a basic framework partaking in a common nature (Averroes), which schematizes the nature within which the self works out its destiny. “To think, feel, and judge within such a framework,” Charles Taylor says, “is to function with the sense that some action, or mode of life, or mode of feeling is incomparably higher than the others readily available to us . . . It satisfies our craving for being in contact with or rightly placed in relation to the good” that has been “woven into my understanding of my life as an unfolding story.”56 Taylor neglects to notice how that framework also has an archetypal kernel that gathers an individual into its historical, psychological, political, and social field. “Hypothesis” is the patristic term for person or, in my generalization, a living creature. Its medial origin suggests, as Levinas put it, that it is a subject that arises from impersonal being. I intend it to embody the Timaeus soul, which is, in turn, a schema for participation. It was formed from the transcendentals, which bind together being and becoming, and, through the crossing circles of the same and other, it breaks immanent totalities by integrating alterity into the unity of life (Tim., 35A–37D). Reflexivity, the circle of the same, marks the beginning of self-consciousness, first explicit in the image of the soul setting itself in order in the Republic (443D–E) and undergoing a full articulation as the “inner man” of Augustine’s Confessions. Since Descartes the emphasis has been on the substantial ego cogito. This has been a mistake. Seminal studies in animal and human development by Daniel Provinelli and his associates show that, beyond explorations of present experience and sensations, the child does not become for itself a “historical being with a past, present, and future” until the age of three or four.57 Dr. Vilayanur Ramachandran, a neurologist, presented examples on NOAV of patients suffering from “blind vision” (PBS; October 23, 2001), a phenomenon resulting The Place of Metaphor

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from an injury to the brain in which one is aware of and can respond to things seen of which one is not conscious. Dr. Ramachandran proposes that this awareness is operative when, in attending to one thing, such as talking with our passenger, we do something else, such as drive a car. We can also experience both ourselves and those close to us as counterfeits since we have the relevant stimuli but the nervous system cannot correlate this with our memories. Moreover, recent linguistics teaches that “I,” rather than naming a substance, functions as “an explicit indicator of the taking place of language”58 and not the speech acts of a soliloquizing substance. The hypostasis, like Aristotle’s vegetable, animal, and human hierarchy of souls, comes in several grades. To act and be towards the world as a subject is to experience from the standpoint of a moving cause that is irreducibly separate from others for whom death is an issue, and for which there is the mineness of meanings. A bacterium such as E. coli qualifies, but it is a very low-grade hypostasis, a nonsingular individual. Though contrary to the usage of Levinas and the patristic theologians who have given me the term “hypostasis” but who restrict it to persons, on the model of Rilke’s open I extend hypostasis to all life that, however world-poor, is not worldless. Following the lead, though veering from the direction taken by Michel Henry and Jean-Luc Marion, I shall argue in the sequel that self-affectivity and then self-consciousness or thought per se is derivative from a more primordial and transpersonal affective field, the common medial root of self-awareness and its alterities. We are from birth already in the world. Heidegger’s Befindlichkeit is, for example, an opening on the world that is prior to intentionality, to all lived experience and all knowledge. It “essentializes its existence and existentializes its essence.” Dr. Borch-Jacobson says Michel Henry has represented Descartes’s cogito as “I think” in the sense of “I represent myself.” However, “‘I think, I am . . .’ means anything but thought. ‘I think’ means life—that is, as we also learn, an ‘I feel myself’ which is unrepresentable because it exceeds all objectivity, all transcendence . . . [but] a revelation . . . of a thought that, before thinking [Descartes has said that ‘feeling . . . is nothing other than thinking’] of anything, feels itself think.”59 Thus Henry reinstates the self-affective representation of what cannot be represented. In this Cartesian spirit, he asserts that “beings in themselves are never affective . . . the insertion in them of a form of affectivity is nonsense.”60 But something like that insertion and the fracture of closure occurs when the child recognizes and fixes on and even imitates human faces and nothing else during the first day of its life. 42

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Affectivity can be reflexive without being reflective. That selfawareness in which the self and its later ipseity if latent is probably rooted in separation anxiety, the unheimlich that is more primary than heimlich familiarity, and is, Lawrence Hatab continues, “always latent in being-in-the-world.”61 This is a modification of primordial affectivity, a kind of bodily knowing, an orienting situatedness with its ongoing and ever-changing implicate order. We must show that we can break from the cogito and, like the child, begin with feeling, which will, in turn, free the open from its ontological entanglements. Then, like the child and unlike the Angelic Doctor, the other is first in our apprehension absolutely and, with the grace of the Other, included in whatsoever else we understand. The basis for singularity lies in the traumas and being with others (mitsein) in pre-conscious affectivity. The child’s first responses are valuational and cognitive and, initially at least, nonintentional and nonrepresentative. The child’s eye is an innocent human eye, questioning and delighting in the wonder of what it sees. From the beginning the infant’s experience is hermeneutical, an active engagement if only in eye movements in the passing show. Affectivity becomes self-affective and responsive to the feelings of others during the second and third year of life as the self begins to form itself. With this I-Thou, the child comes to have a clear sense of his difference in thought and feeling from the other, and with the self-differing that occurs between three and four years, he shows empathy and the signs of a singular hypostasis begin to appear. During the third year, children cannot distinguish a belief from a perception nor what they were told about from what they saw.62 They have no sense of being mistaken and take counterevidence as if it was what they always thought. At the age of four they discover that they can deceive and distinguish truth from falsity. Reflective self-consciousness will be founded when this diachronic stratum turns back on itself to give consciousness its intentional and representative functions. Even if the ego is usually thematized as “I think . . .” or considered as an identity constituting transcendental apperception, it is initially latent in affectivity. Kant and others taught that we recognize in concepts, but developmental psychologists have shown that at birth babies can discriminate human faces and voices from other sights and sounds . . . and prefer them. Within a few days after they are born, they recognize familiar faces, voices, and even smells and prefer them to unfamiliar ones (it even looks as if they recognize their mother’s voice at birth, based on the The Place of Metaphor

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muter but still audible sounds they hear in the womb). . . . Before they can walk or talk, they can tell the difference between expressions of happiness and sadness and anger.63 Singularity, Scotus said, is a “unity less than numerical” and is not to be confused with personal identity. The latter becomes a problem when we look for the timeless reference proposed by identifying predicates. But permanence is first a character trait; one stands firm in one’s responsibilities or bloody-mindedness. I did it, even though I would like it to have been invisible to God and man. I said it, even if I wish none, not even myself, had heard it. I have responsibilities I did not contract. My singularity/individuation lies in the basic though revisable framework of obligation in which I find myself through inheritance and choice, the structures deriving from my genes, my culture, my highest aspirations, and my traumas that I am always trying to make sense of and through which I interpret myself in my dealings with the world. Levinas appears to avoid the teleological implications in his account of dwelling and its satisfactions and restricts the good to those more sublime moments when we are transformed by the Other. I follow the tradition that takes the good to be the universal object of desire. Our drive to assimilate alterity is thematized by Plato as eros, our conatus essendi, but this is transformed into Desire proper when egological satisfactions are subordinated to receptivity of the transcendent (Rep., 589D). These abrupt Pauline conversions are possible, but those of us raised in a more orthodox atmosphere see such transformation in which, for a moment, the nominal I becomes the accusative me as evolving within mundane frameworks where there are traces of the good. John Llewelyn has challenged my moderate line: While it is only in the attempt to meet these plural and relative responsibilities [“responsibility” is first a response to the other] that my absolute and singular responsibility to the other can be geared to particular circumstances, the absolute responsibility is as little dispensable as the moral law in the Kantian ethics. Without maxims it is blind, but it is a marker of our finitude, of, for example, that we are operating in one of many Weltanschauungen. It is a marker of the fact that I am under the eye of the others or the Other who does not enter my ken . . . Responsibility is a traumatizing and thaumatizing Affect . . . the agony of agape is that it must be to the haecceitas of the other that calls upon me, it must at the same time be a response to the faceness of the other others. (Personal communication) 44

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Though Llewelyn is correct and speaks as one of the saints, unless my primordial affectivity—which as primordial is already a hermeneutical being-in-the world—is shaped by those who care for me to see in them traces of the Beautiful Other, I am unlikely to see it in the stranger’s face. Levinas says that the traumatic approach of the other deconstructs the nominal and appropriative self and gives me back the ipseity of a displaced “self in exile from itself” and in bondage to another.64 But this trauma may be founded on the infant’s separation anxiety, a trauma in which a relation to alterity and an awareness of self is first differentiated. Heidegger situates this trauma in the anxiety provoked by an uncannyness [unheimlich] that first discloses world.65 Prior to the trauma that gives us the Other and the one that gives world is the infant’s discovery of his finitude in separation anxiety which is, Lawrence Hatab suggests, the primary unheimlich experience.66 In being at home, the original sense of heimlich, there is already the anxiety of separation that disrupts primal affectivity and releases me to have a proto self and world. Where Levinas would see us weaving atheistic satisfaction into the fabric of ordinary life, I want to weave traces of the good through Charles Taylor’s paradigmatic frameworks or Plato’s lifestyles. These begin with an ecstatic vision of an order of justice, a beautiful cosmos, and a meaningful life, the lifestyles given us to choose among in our rites of passage (Rep., 617D–619B) or the images of the gods through whom we interpret others in Phaedrus (252D–253C) and who, with some loss of splendor, remain with us to empower and guide us as we work out our own more-mundane destinies. Unless these epiphanies are founded on justice, I am unlikely to see the Other in the stranger’s face. The existence of the ego is questioned by many postmodernists. Since the self and its interiority as such seems to have entered thought with Heraclitus or Plato and to have been made thematic by Augustine, its philosophical availability seems to be a matter of a historical culture. It has a natural base, for even E. coli seems aware of what it is doing as it moves to a nutrition source, and so too selfawareness is necessarily a feature of the human hypothesis, when becoming, that is, awareness, folds back on itself. The ego as such presupposes a prior proto-self, a primal affectivity in which the I and its object are latent. Whitehead spoke of this as an awareness of factors of fact, where fact is an awareness that something is going on;67 other analogues are Levinas’s “darkness of the night” or Jean-Luc Marion’s “boredom.”68 The Place of Metaphor

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Whitehead employs an analogue of Husserl’s epoché to pass from the undifferentiated medley of sense awareness to its factors or entities, the more or less clear and distinct termini of thought in real and vagrant mathematical and physical entities, as well as in sense, perceptual, eternal, and physical objects. Phenomenology is a hermeneutics through which things are interpreted by a prior ontological and, I add, axiological understanding. We see things under the form of the Good or Being, perhaps also truth or unity. Whitehead’s is an eventual hermeneutics in which the Good is primary. In most phenomenologies, process is either ignored or eliminated by the reduction; but on the paradigm of Plato’s “instant” we must capture the event of creation itself, a medial unity in which the recipient of the given must develop the given just as the given develops the recipient in a “passivity beyond passivity.” The way to a creative and eventual understanding of phenomena is to be found in Husserl’s The Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time or in the life world of his Crisis but is left behind in the objective orientation of the reductions. Something like process is rather confusedly developed under the rubric Being (eon) and less confusedly as wesen by Heidegger, but I suspect that a medial or process understanding is required in which the eidetic noema is like the play that plays itself out in the actors’ movements. Does one find the implicit conatus essendi or its teleological antithesis one expects to find in medial processes? Teleology recurs in Husserl’s intentions as the noetic directedness of noema; in Heidegger’s ready-at-hand and in sorge; and in Levinas; but Marion banishes it from the given, even where that given is an event. Some saturated phenomena, rather than being the Platonists’ epiphanies of radiant form, are best schematized by a free play of the imagination and defy intentional fixity in concepts (Kant). Some, such as painting, can be idols in an object ontology; but then we are concerned with an invisible and unbearable display in which unconsummated intentions are reflected back on us. This seems to be a reflexive and virtual experience far removed from the deictic roots of what is given and, most important, from those prior conditions that enable the recipient to receive. In process philosophy, objects are recurrent features that define events; but on the more Parmenidian perspectives of Aristotle and Husserl, they are the primary givens over which changes play like clouds playing across the sky. How are they given? In Marion’s most promising analysis, the given is an ontic transmutation of eventual givenness, though givenness, like its hypodochic sibling, is muted 46

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and difficult to see in the given-givenness dyad. If the creatures are incarnate unities of being and becoming, then reduction can never in good conscience eliminate eventuality. Marion says that my time is the time of my flesh that “assigns me to myself without any possible return”: the cosmetologist might have me believe that this is change of changeless matter, as in Kant’s refutation of idealism, and not the irreversible time of aging I am. That inexpugnable sense of process is the point of Heidegger’s Wesen. That having been said, let us take a look at the nature of anamorphosis as expressed in Marion’s In Excess. He says that “what appears gives itself, it appears without restraint or remainder; that is to say, it thus comes about [ad-vient], happens, and imposes itself as such, not as the semblance of representation of an absent or dissimulated initself, but as itself, in person and in the flesh.”69 So far, so good; but there is more to the story, for, as Levinas has seen, there is a more original opening of thought (which Marion would never deny): Had it not already been opened to a deeper vigilance, beyond all unveiling, that which cannot be contained in any representation? A transcendence of the Cartesian idea of the infinite, in a thinking that finds itself thinking more than it can embrace, the blinding bedazzlement of the gaze by an excess of light and a bursting of knowledge in adoration. . . . Beyond the objective, which is always already correlative to a prior aim and intention to discover—behold an other that reveals itself.70 Even though Marion has a strong sense of fleshy and earthy individuation, it seems passed over: “What appears is emptied totally, so to speak (with its essential being [estance], its innermost depth of substance, its material individuation, and so on). To the point of passing from the rank of image, from simple seeming or bereft appearance, to the one unique thing at stake. If the phenomena did not give itself as such, it would remain the other of being.”71 What gives itself as such? The being of the phenomenon? The seen as fully visible? This occasional abruptness, appropriate in some contexts, nevertheless leaches process, the eventuality of what is seen, the scenario that unfolds. In metaphor’s reductions, or so I will argue, the eidos is a concrete universal which, in virtue of its deictic and ideal surplus given by its haecceitas, is this “one unique thing at stake.” But then how does it [the phenomenon] succeed in giving itself and not remain the simple image of itself with-out itself? Because the reduction eliminates from the process of appearing all that which is The Place of Metaphor

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not given without reserve; semblances and confusions, inventions or given memories, all linked to transcendences that merge the lived experience (possibly intentional) with the object intended, are marked, filtered, and finally separated from the remaining given.72 (italics mine) Can this really be? Granted the givenness of the given is difficult to discern and that the given is already eidetic and acausal, still metaphor can sort it out. Gendlin’s implicate order that animates the slot in which the word appears will make this givenness apparent. Later in this text Marion will make an even stronger case for eliminating immanent causes or reasons and their transcendent analogues, which would make goal-directed process possible. Marion’s “passivity beyond passivity” needs the directedness of the middle voice. It is said that the physical thing must cede its radiance to the painting “by an essential law”; but the painting is less an idol, as he puts it, than an icon of radiant, constellated eidoi. Marion cites Plato’s ekhphanestaton (Phaedrus, 250D) as that in which “the visible is brought to a density such that its incandescence no longer leaves a place for anything invisible, in short the visible elevated to the rank of an idol.”73 Plato speaks of the Beauty of the idea seen by those returning from the gods as “radiant among other objects,” grasped “sparkling through the clearest of our senses,” as “most visible and most loved” (Phaedrus, 250D). The other is an icon, not an idol, “so saturated with given intuitions that significations and corresponding noeses are lacking,” a mirror of our emotions like the dark panels in the Rothko chapel in Houston.74 Their dynamics are those of a becoming that never becomes anything definite, and not a way of making color, form, a subject, virtue, or way of life ostentatious. Better yet, iconic representations of an hypostasis are metaphors that are more radiant than the original because they desediment and let us in the thing itself as an incarnate “concrete universal.” In making seen what was never before seen by making the visibility of something accessible to all, the artist is making apparent the infinity of an idea, infinite not because it is saturated with intuitions, but rather because like Descartes’s God it saturates them. In creatures in which a self-directing focus first appears, as in bacterial self-replication, there is no inwardness. E. coli moves in zigzags up a nutritional gradient and in a straight line away from a lethal source. There being only one receptor to determine concentration, D. E. Koshland has shown that something like judgment and short-term memory are involved in these changes of direction.75 New dimensions 48

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of the ego, analogous to Aristotle’s vegetable, animal, and human souls, begin to emerge when the hypostasis is able to concern itself with itself. The presence of the higher modifies the lower. The affectivity of a rational being is not without the traces of “reason.” There is thus a kind of reflexivity that does not take itself as its object. Foucault’s “care of oneself” is not, for instance, a Delphic call to higher moral concerns or to self-aggrandizement, but to a reflective awareness of what is to be done or ventured, such as warning about the narrow bridge I must cross or the cold dampness I should avoid. Interiority is not explicit. We are processes that gather themselves into singular beings by standing out from a place (chora) through the resources of the receptacle (hypodoche), our root in becoming (divisible being, same, and other—Tim., 35A). If that were all, the hypostasis would be no more than a play of countervailing forces (Nietzsche/Deleuze). Rather than being self-singularizing, its individuation would be like the sea being individuated by a wave, which is without reflexive being-for-selfness. Waves maintain their identity; natives of the South Pacific could identify and navigate toward their home island over hundreds of miles by the unique form of particular waves, but the wave is the epiphenomenal resultant of, not a control on, the molecular movement that sustains it. Chora can give being place only through the gift of form, derived from our root in being (Plato’s indivisible being, same, and other). We are more than and yet both being and becoming, for by the soul’s chiasmatic crossing, the intelligible becomes the visible while remaining intelligible, while the sensible makes sense of the intelligible without becoming intelligible. But how are we more? By orientation, a third sense of sense. We make sense of sense as underway within history under the canopy of eternity. The beingness of being, its essence (Levinas’s medial essance) is eventive or verbal. This may reflect Heidegger’s use of Wesen in the Beiträge as a certain vibrancy in a “first inception,” such as eon in “The Anaximander Fragment,” that holds sway or is an “essential swaying.” This may be parasitic on essentia, but its sense is closer to the medial hypostasis so important in Levinas’s earlier works. We will develop a less epochal version of this around an inversion of Scotus’s haecceitas in which something comes to be and is by interpreting its essance (Averroes’s contextualized “common nature”) as an actor interprets a play (see 8:2-3 below). The hypostases’ modifiers are adverbial and not adjectival. Adverbial interpretation in the service of an erotic conatus essendi, not matter, is the principle of individuation. The Place of Metaphor

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Perhaps this is not what the Arabic philosophers meant by “apportionment,” but it is rather close to Aquinas, who spoke of the nature as apportioned to and participating in esse. This is how I will interpret Duns Scotus’s haecceitas. In medial phenomena, such as producing a play, the play—the essance or form of a process—plays because the actor, whose role is determined by the play, contextually interprets it.76 In summary, in virtue of its communitarian eros and inherent proportions, thought reaches out to discover the beauty of its same in the other.77 Because things and the natural laws by which they act and are understood are in the form of ratios, and because we are attuned to these forms as if a priori, man and nature are in concord. Isn’t this the ground for Parmenides’ “there is a same for thinking and being?” We are music and our lives are best spent singing and dancing.78 These medial phenomena and their moods, their affective possibilities, seem to have no place for separated forms. But the medial imagination is creative and, as I will later try to show, constitutes possible forms transcending those immanent in process. More to the point, by metaphor all beings, however differing, can be gathered into a unity of being. The soul is a metaphor and so too is the logos of life (Tim., 34B–36D). As Derrida says of chora, medial becoming “does not exist . . . does not have the character of a being.”79 Being, in the sense that it is one of Plato’s greatest kinds, can be said of chora as the diversifying receptacle with its active and passive powers (Sop., 248C), as an ocean is diversified by waves through its countervailing forces. Though the hypodoche isn’t anything and thus neither a giver nor receiver, in virtue of these forces it yields to solicitations by reason and the Good to grant beings or creatures a place, a gift that is exempted from the economy of exchange—metaphysical presence of the giver and the recipient—“and manifesting it according to givenness” which is no cause.80 Like Heidegger’s es gibt, this “does not refer to the deed of a giving subject, support, or origin.”81 By giving a medial reading to Marion, we anachronize being and offer a perspicuous access to such postmodern concerns as the decentered self and its linguistic formation, temporalization, and the elimination of founding presence from phenomenology.

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2

The Matrix

Sacred Places E. V. Walters’s Placeways chronicles his journey along the sacred path to Plato’s Academy and the matrix. He calls attention to Ptolemy’s distinction between topos, the space of geography—and Descartes’s extension or Aristotle’s innermost container—and chora, a qualitative, phenomenological place that organizes and evokes images, memories, feelings, meanings, and the work of the imagination.1 Like the Rome of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents “in which nothing once constructed ever disappears,” the matrix seems to hold in storage the entire contents of past experience. We have known this archival and creative or threatening power of place in Delphi, Chartres, or Ravenna and as a child put to bed in a strange place, but we have been with Plato on the banks of the Ilissus and with Proust in Combray. It is, Walters continues, “a unity of experience, organizing the communication and mutual influence of all things within it. Every place implies a form of dwelling together, and all the realities in a place, living people, images, animals, memories, plants, bacteria, and other hidden forces. Even though we barely acknowledge them at all, they participate in one another’s natures and form a topistic structure, the structure of mutual immanence.”2 Plato identifies the receptacle’s primordial contents with morphe (shape), dynamis (powers), and pathe (feeling), the passions expressed 51

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in the elementary shapes. In the immediacy of an opalescent experience of becoming, as in Zen meditation or listening to a late Beethoven quartet, these forms, feelings, and powers are and are not subjective/expressive or objective/physicalistic. Like Kant’s imagination or, even better, James’s “booming, buzzing confusion” and Bradley’s “living experience,” the matrix is the common root of these and other “groundless grounding” distinctions. As hypodoche, it gives place (chora) and life to its creatures through their genetic ties and their material and social connections. Levinas finds similar roots in the mysterious and often-frightful il y a he uses in a “deduction” of the hypostasis. The receptacle is a “container of forces” or a homologous “container of feelings” and, as chora, matrix of their ontic expression, real or virtual, and is the common root of what has hitherto been taken to be the mind/body dualism. Moreover, it is through the hypodoche that Plato, Aristotle, Heidegger, and Husserl are now with us in a timeless present. She is apprehended, Plato says, in a bastard (skotie) or dark reasoning, perhaps reflecting Democratus’s “bastard cognitions” (DK 68 B11) of sight, hearing, and smell. Sense is deictic, disclosing situated material things and not, as Milton’s Lucifer said, “a place in the mind.” For the romantic, however, this external field is metaphorical, a sort of accessory to mind. For Hegel it is “configured with deep feeling and detailed richness of insight . . . feeling is made the center.”3 This phenomenon is at work in the “strange presences” that haunt nature in Wordsworth’s Prelude, which led Whitehead to give such a prominent role to feeling. We experience energies in place, perhaps something like an erotic conatus, a creative drive and directness, which the early Renaissance scholars sought to reawaken. More important is a Neo-Platonic transformation of energeia from the Aristotelian potency/act (dynamis/energeia) distinction into “energy,” physical and psychical.4 Place is a nexus of energies, destructive and creating, sustaining and threatening, and hardly ever wholly benign. Plato’s description of chora as a “dreaming state from which we cannot arouse ourselves” (Tim., 52C) becomes in Thomas Taylor’s NeoPlatonic translation: “We cannot release ourselves from this fallacious and dreaming energy.”5 Our discussions must retain these Platonic insights; they are on the way to the truth about the Holy Spirit, God’s immanence in the res extensa. Overtones of this matrix that gives beings a place, virtual or real, in which to be and be appeared to is heard in the da of Dasein or in the “real” (das Wirkliche), which, with questionable etymology, 52

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Heidegger identifies with physis, “to bring hither and forth into presencing.” What gives existence, being, gives it to a being, which, paradoxically, is not there to receive its gift and does not exist even if, as the arché or source, it provides emerging creatures with archival or context-forming possibilities. Possibilities occur in binary opposites which, like the contraries dear to the pre-Socratics, Aristotle, and, more recently, Hegel, Saussure, and Derrida, could be gradients that vector becoming. Like Aristotle’s hyle (matter), the receptacle is the bearer of certain possibilities relative to the coming to be of something; yet with the increasing importance of probability, we should use multivalued logics. What is determinate in one context, the learning of a language or mathematics, can be the apeiron-like archival receptacle for speech or engineering. Unlike Aristotle, however, becoming definite presupposes a region from which processes, becomings, are gathered or focused into a place (chora) to stand forth and be something definite, as speakers’ bodies give place to language or the city gives place to the polis, and the like. These determinate and determinable conditions presuppose, on the one hand, the Good, and, on the other, chora. The chora/hypodochic duo is intended to state and make way for a resolution to the problem of corpuscularity or atomicity and continuity or field phenomena, said by Leibniz to be the greatest philosophical problem. The hypodoche is a field that is gathered into the corpuscular reality of the hypostasis, the living creature, through the creative mediation of chora. Whether this archival relation to the hypodochic field is named participation (Plato), prehension (Whitehead), morphogenetic (Waddington and context theorists), implicate order (Böhm), or resonance with the remembered past (Sheldrake), what is common is this matrix as an evolving, holistic bond with the past and through that, with a world. What changes anywhere will have an influence throughout the whole. We are indeed members of one another. Will this do as a preliminary characterization of the receptacle/chora context? As it is beyond being, it is difficult to be clear about it. Both the receptacle and chora are being’s other side, which is, of course, nothing. Not the nothing of Heidegger’s attempt (in “What Is Metaphysics?” and “On the Essence of Ground”6) to give a phenomenological reduction of beings in their totality by using anxiety as an epoché to arrive at the phenomenon of Being, but the nothing of the indeterminate apeiron.7 One must appreciate Heidegger’s desire to go beyond Being in a movement toward the Ereignis. This movement probably began with his reflections on Nietzsche and the nihilism implicit in The Matrix

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the “history of Being” in the End of Philosophy, and reached a turning point in the Geviert, the “event [Ereignis] of the interplay of earth, sky, divinities and mortals,”8 which come to a head in The Question of Being. However, we must search again for those conditions beyond Being that give and let us experience, not being whose heart is nothingness, but rather life as meaningful and valuable. The way will be difficult to find in Heidegger’s polygraphic space that makes it possible for him to cross from being by crossing it out in the dance of the fourfold; it may lie in the region of Derrida’s différance and works on chora, in Levinas’s il y a and in his images of being, as well as in Blanchot’s “space of literature”; while a less literary source is Whitehead’s cosmology. The receptacle is nothing apart from chora, the spatializing and temporalizing originary place that gives her creatures their spatial and temporal form. The receptacle is the possibility of place, the possibility of all those conditions that enable us to have and to dwell in a world—physical, cultural, historical, psychological, linguistic, and the like. It is also the place of crossing, of transformations of world-historical horizons, of the birth and death of epochs. Because it contains these possibilities, its virtual space/time sustains artistic and historical horizons. 2. The Hypodoche The hypodoche (receptacle) is the primary mode of the matrix. Today most philosophers ignore a long tradition in Platonic philosophy and begin with the more determinate chora (place); then hypodoche, with its sense of “underlying” could be an artifact of its generating metaphors, like the luminiferous ether that was thought to underlie and transport light. I take it to be the condition for genetic connectivity and its possible topologies, whether those of a text, literature, tradition, person, geometry, body, constitution, or physical cosmos. It first appears as diversified by becoming that never becomes anything (Tim., 27D). Whitehead’s identification of the receptacle with emotive force vectors, not altogether unlike the forces at the base of Nietzsche’s metaphysics but with a deictic conceptuality that borrows from Wordsworth’s feeling intellect, has been a major factor in my phenomenological interpretation. So too has Levinas’s reminder of “Husserl’s magnificent discovery of affective and axiological intentionality (without which the entire nontheoretical, lived experience of consciousness would lapse into hyletic content).”9 In Adventures of Ideas physical energy is held to be an abstraction from purposive 54

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emotions and is transferred from one occasion to the next as their “affective tone.” The anger that is the form of my experience now will be an “intention finding its completion” as “a datum felt” and a possibility to be maintained by its successor. You will hear again and again in the pages ahead what Whitehead says about Plato’s receptacle: It is “a persisting locus [“whose sole function is an imposition of unity upon the events of nature”] that provides emplacement for all the occasions of experience. That which happens in it is conditioned by the compulsion of its own past and by the persuasion of its immanent ideals . . . [The events of nature] obtain their actuality by reason of their emplacement within this community. How it constitutes itself depends on its complex of subjective forms [feeling or affective tone].” The fundamental relation is between the subject in its concern for the object or, put otherwise, between the “Recipient and Provoker.” The fact provoked “is an affective tone about the status of the provoker in the provoked experience. . . .” The identification of the receptacle with affectivity is implicit in the “extensive continuum” of Process and Reality and has been the charter for my idiosyncratic interpretations of the matrix.10 Something very like the receptacle has recently appeared as Levinas’s il y a, Derrida’s chora, implicate order in David Bohn, Heidegger’s es of es gibt, or the space of writing in Blanchot. Of these only Plato, Whitehead, and Heidegger see it as generously giving; the others are closer to Levinas, for whom it is a depersonalizing descent “toward an ever more profound abyss” that overpowers those who approach it. It is, Levinas says, the bad infinite and, unlike the infinite Good or God, “lacks the humility to contract itself” and be the source of a manifestation that leaves its addressee the freedom not to notice it.11 The contraction of the past into a value-maximizing archive in the creature’s concrescence, the coming-to-be of concreteness, pertains to the Holy Spirit as efficacious in chora. Gregory Palamas’s The Triads makes a useful distinction between God’s created energies pertaining to the archival hypodoche in which we participate (in the sense of the Patristic metoche) and the uncreated energies, which are expressions of the Holy Spirit in whom we participate (Patristic koinonia) by Grace. He identifies the Godhead with the divine essence, the darkness of the mystics, and His expressions with the uncreated energies in which the God beyond presence is present, for example, in the deictic and yogi-like hesychastic method.12 The hypodoche proposes to the choristic creation a past in which to participate, and Spirit makes of it a salvation history and, if The Matrix

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the tradition is correct, intercedes through our prayers with the Son to offer to the eros of the emerging creature an attractor, a lure to its concrescence. Were becoming continuous, the attractor could be an eject of the process of self-formation. Actuality would determine possibility and, novelty would be latent as a bud to open on appropriate environmental stimulation in the linear process of development. Such would be the case in the Deleuze/Bergson version of evolution. But in a granular time where each instant is ex nihilo, attractors can be optimal possible valuations proposed by the Logos for its decision or cut (See chapters 11 and 12). Possibility is prior to actuality, and while many possible attractors can canalize and be determined by an epigenetic landscape that allows development to a definite end point, as Waddington and chaos theory has it, only one canalization is optimal for being and well-being. Things being what they are, this “best of possible worlds” may be quite awful. The Holy Spirit is an appropriate Christian successor to the Platonic “world soul” and Gnostic anima mundi; but as personal, with the solicitation of the Logos, it proposes by natural grace a form of life to the emerging creature. It is possible to generalize the role of the receptacle if we strip it of the stereometric chemistry of Plato’s becoming; the chemistry is the archive upon which the emergent creature draws in coming to be. The receptacle can then serve as the archive in any coming to be that enables its creature to emerge and stand forth; as Socrates’ body with its muscles and bones was the archive, and not the cause, for his appearance before the Assembly. The next word I write will appear from my English archive (receptacle), the source of both the necessities and the possibilities to which my speech must conform. The receptacle is the arché of real and virtual presences. But it is not without its intricate order (Eugene Gendlin) and standards “of reason giving, reason accepting, and reason rejecting . . . and is only to be understood as a piece of metaphysics . . . [in] the atemporal now in which reader and writer encounter each other, that ‘now’ in which both can appeal away from themselves and the particularity of their own claims to what is timeless, logically, ontologically, and evaluatively, and is only thereby and therefore the property of neither . . .”13 This “belly of the mind,” as Augustine called its avatar memory, is also the ground of clock time, of the linear time of well-ordered before and after. In Edith Wyschogrod’s happy phrase, the matrix is an archive, a genetic pool for cultural and personal identity, from which creatures 56

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come to be and be definite as the said comes to be from saying. To give an example from Eugene Gendlin: All who have written poetry know of the time when we experience a blank, something felt, referred to, sensed, had, when no words come. The blank brings something new that is not performed by the linguistic forms alone. Rather, it functions between two sets of linguistic forms. The blank is not just the already written lines but rather the felt sense from rereading them, and that performs a function needed to get to the next lines. A second function: If the stuck blank is still there after a word comes, the line is rejected. Thirdly, the blank tells when at last a line does explicate—it releases. Between the objective and subjective side there is not a relation of likeness of resemblance. The words don’t copy the blank . . . what was implicit is changed by explicating it. But it is not just any change. The explication releases that tension which was the––––. But what the blank was is not just lost or altered; rather, that tension was carried forward by the blank.14 Derrida also made important, if unwitting, contributions to this archival concept in his metaphor of arché writing. Plato himself suggests that memory, the hypodoche, is a book (Philebus, 38E–39B) or a wax tablet “we hold between our perceptions and thoughts and take a stamp from them,” where what is received is a sign, not an image (Theat., 191C–195). In a very important commentary on this version of chora (or my preference, hypodoche), Maurizio Ferraris explains that this is a medial concept and is superior to its use as the retainer of what would amount to a jumble of images by Locke and Aristotle. The writing metaphor explains the withdrawal of memory “in the face of presence” and both its retentions and cancellations “while remaining virgin.”15 More to the point is Derrida’s own image of the magic writing pad in “Freud and the Scene of Writing.” One writes with a stylus upon a transparent sheet that presses on the black wax beneath it; the writing disappears when the sheet is lifted from the wax. Until it can be shown how reason can find in language ways of arriving at transcending alterities, Plato’s “things themselves,” rather than turning back on itself in uroboric closure, beware of the writing metaphor. The articulation of language through différance deconstructs the authority of hierarchy, the word or idea that comes down from on high. For now we can postpone these matters (see 16:1 below). The Matrix

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Cosmologically, the hypodoche is initially differentiated by an apeiron gignesthai (formless becoming), which, like the sea and sky, is nothing definite but which, as Augustine says, “stands between form and nothingness.”16 Like Anaximander’s apeiron, the opposing forces of the dynamical and indeterminate arché cause features, such as waves or mountains, and not individuals, to stand out. This is also true of the self-organizing systems, such as convection cells or tornadoes. But we are a nothing, not just that of creation ex nihilo, but also in Aristotle’s sense of a potential with the Platonic proviso that, instead of being imprinted with, it is solicited by form. She may respond to a proposition by gathering herself to give being through the mediation of the focus of chora, where “being” is power and the spatial/temporal configuration of the creature that emerges. From its place (chora) within the hypodoche, the creature gathers its recourses, as a flower gathers nutriments from the earth, the child from the womb, or the scholar from the library. I assume that the matrix qua chora is already fecund and not merely patient with respect to some formal determinate. What was initially the dynamical receptacle (hypodoche), an apeiron gignesthai, a chaos with its own implicate order, has gathered itself into place through the acceptance of a transcending formal increment and now, as nurse and mother, is delivering its powers to the emergent creature. Feminists have quite properly taken offense at the Aristotelian concept of conception. Why? Listen to Saint Thomas: “In terms of nature’s own operation, a woman is inferior and a mistake. The agent that is in the male seed tries to produce something complete in itself, a male in gender. But when a female is produced, that is because the agent is thwarted, either because of the unsuitability of the receiving matter of the mother itself or because of some deforming influence, as from south winds . . .” (ST 1, q.92, 1, ad.1). The Timaeus is a dualistic variant of the autochthonic Gaea myth. Creatures emerge in the gap (chaos) between the sky, Uranus and Gaea, the earth mother. She first differentiated herself and separated off Uranus. Granted that being is not an eject of becoming, this is also the story told by Timaeus’s cosmogonic myth. But then taking ourselves to be this gap, for the soul is isomorphic with the world-soul (Tim., 30D) and a mixture of being ( peras) and becoming (apeiron) (Tim., 35A–B; Phil., 26C–E), we are the there where phenomena appear. Therefore “world” itself may be understood cosmologically, as a beautifully ordered physical totality of infinite and mysterious extent, and phenomenologically, as an enduring structure of meaning and value. The cosmological aspect is 58

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important; it secures for thought the presencing of presences that can be intuited; without cosmology, we are likely to fall into a virtual world of signs signifying signs. Edward Ballard defined “world” on a generalization of such expressions as “the world of finance,” “the world of fashion,” and the like; and just as the cosmic focus is “seeing through God,” a human world embraces and sustains its referential totalities through the constituting “I.” Though the Timaeus is a cosmological treatise, the matrix thematized at the beginning of Timaeus’s discourse on “the works of necessity” (47E) is also the source of those necessities that sustain the meanings and values of a human world. I assume that the Good beyond Being is the lighting that lets us see how to shape the necessities posited by things through world-making possibilities. This imaginative and creative vision is the gift of metaphor. At the risk of unintelligibility, let me sketch how Timaeus’s discussion allows us to extend the matrix beyond its original physicalism. Erotic persuasion, a rhetorical metaphor, will have a more important role than is generally recognized. To begin with, creatures arise in this gap between being and the matrix by persuasion (48A). To emerge and stand forth, they must draw upon the archival resources, the necessities, of the receptacle through the focus of place (chora). Regional conditions for synchronic self-assemblage are drawn forth from the matrix and supplemented by the formal field of propositions ordered to this occasion, whose disposition is the archival role of Spirit, by the soliciting Good qua Logos.17 Propositions are lures proposing to something coming to be that an eidos, meaning or Sinn, is acceptably apportioned to its measure. Think, for example, of how the right thing to do is arrived at in Aristotelian phronesis (EN, 1140a 24–1142b 35). Propositions are erotic, impure potentials for the determination of becoming, drawn from the ideas or pure potentials and fused with the matrix (which makes up its haecceitas), and this fusion contextualizes the eidos without necessarily corrupting its pristine purity as a potential for other events. “There are experiences,” Whitehead said, “of ideals entertained, of ideals attained, of ideals defaced. This is the experience of the deity of the universe.”18 If the lure is accepted, a fecund chora is pregnant with a future. The divinely derived form, as David Griffith puts it, is the best possible for that situation, where the best is often bad. God can be ruthless.19 The lure can posit a novelty that the intellect can grasp which, contrary to Bergson, need not be a reconstitution of what is given. It is an erotic proposition whose reference picks out Plato’s necessities and proposes The Matrix

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to the gathering thing alterities that fall within the scope of its sense or meaning. In this way soul participates in being (indivisible being, same, and other) and becoming (divisible being, same, and other). The propositions of the logician are determinations of a virtual matrix, which, through valuation, can be real; if we understand valuation, a binding of variables with reference, is not necessarily linguistic, they can be erotic lures or ideals. Ignore for now their phenomenological analogues and consider how the primal processes on the hither side of beings that diversify the matrix, if only as features, are open to this suasion. Though he called it “matter” and said that it “lives on the further side of all the categories,” Plotinus has Plato’s receptacle in mind. “It must be bodiless and, having no limit or bound,” is mere “indetermination” and so has no right to the title of Being (Ennead, III; 6, 7). According to Augustine, the earth that God created in the beginning was such a becoming: “If one could speak of a ‘nothing something’ or a ‘being which is non-being,’ that is what I would say. Nevertheless, it must have some kind of prior existence to be able to receive the visible and ordered forms.”20 The matrix is a formless becoming whose order, in Plato’s case, is determined by the dynamics of the stereometric elements, earth, air, fire, and water, but these are, in turn, subject to a bond that determines their beautiful, well-ordered, and proportional transformations (31C–32C). John Sallis and Harold Cherniss take the often-disputed passage at Timaeus 49C–50B to be saying that these elements flee from rigid designation because they are processes, instances of something happening.21 Are their stereometric forms resultants of processes in selforganizing systems rather than expressions of a formal beauty which, as Gadamer somewhere suggested, opens becoming to the suasion of reason? If stoicheia (Tim., 48C) is taken in its usual sense as “letters” and not as “elements,” then we open the possibility that these could be codes being transmitted and modified, such as DNA or a computer program. Dare we say it, but temporal and spatial linkages lend themselves to interpretations in an information-theoretic metaphor, like reading and interpreting a text or what a computer does in reading or writing a program. Plato’s instant related to past and future is hermeneutical, not causal (see 12:2 below). On a dynamical interpretation, the receptacle’s triangular constituents are atomic or relatively simple determinates that gather and vector determinable becoming. Approached through complexity, these organizing principles are stable resultants of a process that I, but few others, place 60

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under the sovereignty of the Good. Even if the consequences are not strictly predictable, the resources of the hypodoche upon which they draw are always under a valuation. Does the demiourgos confront a world stereometrically ordered, or are these stereometric elements ejects, as in complexity theory, of a more primordial chaos? Since Plato’s cosmos is sempiternal, one usually assumes that the physical matrix is already disposed by the beautiful elemental geometrical forms by which the god first shaped the cosmos to succumb to his suasive powers. Complexity versions of creation seem to deny the relative transcendence of the ideas, the elementary elemental forms, and make these ejects of immanent becoming that, in turn, enable other formal ejects to arise in a thermodynamic, evolutionary spiral. The beauty the Plato’s god found in the elementary structures of the cosmos was, as Gadamer suggested, the “mysterious way the matrix partakes in the intelligible” (Tim., 51B). The resulting proportional ordering attributed to the god (32B–C) in response to his propositional appeal (“reason persuading necessity”) would in complexity or chaos theory be merely contingent, and the transcendent god would be superfluous. I assume, however, that the primal chaos, the saturated quantum field or whatever preceded the Big Bang (or the Bang itself, which instituted randomness and eliminated triumphal theodicy) is an ens creatum. The hypodoche on this Christianizing account could be an affectivity that is already under the rule of the Holy Spirit, Plato’s world soul, Whitehead’s consequent nature of God, Gregory Palamas’s “uncreated egergies,” Pauli’s proposed animi mundi, or what have you, and is thus open to the persuasive appeal of the god. Spirit makes the past of each member of a totality relevant to all. Its physicalistic analogue would be the synchronicity of quantum entanglement. What happens somewhere, the generation of a determinate, can be relevant everywhere. This relevance is effected by Spirit. The emergent is thus a transcendent form that is a potential for recurrence, an idea: even contingent ejects can be valued and take on the role of being to this becoming, that is, determinates to this apeiron determinable. The living creature emerges when some of these process-governing structures reflexively fold back on themselves and, not unlike the soul in Aristotle’s formula (“the first actuality of a naturally organized body” (De Anima, 412b 5), qua being bring these processes under a principle or rule. Like unchanging enzymes that are ejects of the vital processes they regulate, the soul exercises executive and directive agency on the creature’s doings and makings. While the enzyme gives The Matrix

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to the becoming it regulates an immanent meaning of being, the soul in addition has access to the transcendent. The (medial) hypostasis reflexively sustains itself, its being, by the order it gives to its becoming, its processes, and thus retains both senses of arché, origin (the matrix) and principle (being). Nature is alive and more nearly a dance that dances to the music the soul makes in its attunements than a substance. Its form is that of the diatonic scale (35B–36B), which, in harmony with other beings, draws and entrains possibilities from determinate being. The deictic roots of life reach down into the Dionysian matrix, the apeiron gignesthai (divisible or determinable same, other, and being; 35A), from which the creature reaches up to being (the indivisible or determinate same, other, and being). The soul in its uranian aspect is one with the idea realm, undivided same, being, and other. However, these ideas are not data for disinterested contemplation, pure possibilities forever barred from any contamination by the apeiron flux, but are its determinates (peras) and so meaningless apart from deictic involvement. Indeed they participate in—and so are determined by—that flux. Soul reaches out (ecstasy) and assimilates an eidetic other, a determinate, and integrates it with its chthonic aspect, its apeiron-like divisible being, same, and other. But the chthonic necessities can also reach out and determine an idea, achieve a dynamical and unpredictable same in its othering that in turn gives stability to the flux. I presume that this construction overcomes the separationism of the middle dialogues. Plato’s construction also overcomes dualism. The hypodoche is a field of anarchical energetics (divisible same, other, and being), given to the present by memory (Sheldrake). This apeiron determinable past is also a past of possibilities, or determinates, but these eidetic determinates are also what we are through soul’s participation in the ideas, the domain of indivisible being, same, and other. The soul is the world in virtue of its inclusion of the hypodochic field through chora and, in virtue of mind, can make its eidetic determinates knowable. Moreover, the realm of ideas or determinates also includes the totality of the world, if only virtually, and what is relatively everlasting, if not eternal. Mind is not in our heads but is out in the world in virtue of the world’s eidetic determinates, just as the world is in mind in virtue of its participation in its eternities (the indivisible same, being, and other of the Timaeus). There is no mind-body problem. The body and the mind are both in the psyche which is everywhere, poised between time and eternity. The determinate/determinable distinction understood chiasmatically overcomes the dualism which arose from 62

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Descartes’s assumption that the unextended finite soul which knows itself through the infinite idea dei as somehow localized in a body, in turn a mode of infinite extension. On the contrary, soul extends throughout the world, its chorastic body being a mode of its hypodochic infinity and its mind partaking in the infinity of possibility. Mind is founded on the hypostatic affective, hypodochic focus and the actuality of the ideas as its pure possible determinates. John Sallis’s Chorology is an important contribution to the growing literature on chora, but he hesitates to acknowledge that the matrix is one pole of the soul. Contrary to Sallis, however, I think that the matrix appears in the guise of the divisible (or many) same, other, and being, just as the other pole encompasses the indivisible (or one) being, same, and other. Soul, human or creaturely, is constructed from a subset of the “greatest kinds,” the Platonic transcendental terms one, many, same, other, being, and perhaps rest and motion (Sop., 254Bff), which schematize participation’s “how?”22 The constitution of the soul in accordance with these divisible and indivisible “all-pervasive, connecting forms of discourse” (253C), “the some which mingle with all” (254C) and thus inter se, overcomes the separationism. Life assembles itself in the between (Greek chaos, complexity theory’s creative and anarchical arché ) that it spans by participating in becoming and transcending being. Each creature is homologous with the world soul and is to its world what the demiourgos is to the cosmos. Life schematizes participation by drawing its eidetic determinates (potentials) from indivisible same, other, and being and persuasively assimilating these with their divisible or determinable analogues to constitute its same. One reaches out to the other in the name of the Good, narcissistically or for the other’s sake, but this ecstasis is also the possibility of mensuration whose constituted correlatives are time (circle of the same) and space (circle of the other) (36B–C). The creature is for the sake of a future enshrined in its immanent conatus (perhaps as David Bohm’s arrow of time in the explication of implicate order or Prigogine’s irreversible quantumthermodynamical complexity), or proposed to it by formal propositions, i.e., erotic propositioning. Plato says, in language that mirrors what we will later say about affectivity, that the receptacle is “conceived by opinion with the help of sensation and without reason” (28A). What seems operative here is not the “opinion” or epistemic sense of doxa, but its phenomenological meaning as the acceptance of something in its appearing.23 The receptacle in which the creature is formed is an accepting affectivity. What The Matrix

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appears for acceptance at the most elementary level is fire, water, earth, and air being transmuted into one another “as in a circle” (49D). These inconstant phenomena cannot be elicited by demonstrative adverbs for “that in which things severally grow up and appear and decay is alone to be called by the name this and that” (49E). The unchanging matrix is seen through appearances when these are accepted through akribeia, a precise or subtle analysis that discloses the unseen in the seen. John Sallis says these fleeting sensations are ways in which the matrix appears, shows itself, and becomes manifest as itself. This thesis that metaphors disclose identities over differing ontic realms and even reach beyond Being takes form in the chthonic reflections of Philebus and Timaeus. These roots make possible a deictic approach that lets the individual be seen, not as instancing a form, but in its full haecceitas, that is, as contextually singularizing form. We can begin to think Being, the ideas, and Becoming as participating in one another without reducing form to an epiphenomenon of process or making creatures clones of the ideas. If the Good is beyond Being and bears no likeness with any being, metaphor can only approach it. The situation is somewhat different with the matrix. This notion of the between leads to even more promising prospects. Not just words, but poems, plays, texts, and people can be neighbors and in their play create a middle, an Open, in which a new sense of same appears. Play disrupts presence, but if we take medial play as primary, then it is the “cause” of presence.24 A same cannot always be literalized nor expressed apart from metaphors that posit it. The elicited same is thus a regional parameter, determining an open that permits neither the affirmation nor denial of a same that is not unlike the open between the affirmative and negative way in theology. One thinks of the juxtapositions in Derrida’s Glas or the Heidegger/Rilke-like open that Sharon Cameron found in Emily Dickinson’s fascicles.25 Cameron shows that in such poems as “Heaven is what I cannot reach,” what was postponed until tomorrow went on yesterday under the name of Heaven and is thereby taken beyond the range of phenomenology to the “ultraphenomenological.”26 Self-reference replaces referentiality. Unlike the desolation of Derrida’s spiritual vision, she is not without a point of hope. But wait, for now consider its darker and more hopeless alternative: “There is a certain slant of light.” The “or” of these alternatives invites a choice, yet denies their resolution, and keeps in play opposites that cannot be reconciled or superceded. Perhaps more to the point is the 64

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opening between variants placed above one another within the same text. As an example of the opposites that function to create an open within a “single” poem where the center and the supplement work with and against one another, consider the poem in Fascicle 14. The “maddest” is thus also the “nearest” dream we “chase like the June bee.” The proximity of antithetical and yet complementary pairings requires a choice we cannot make in the unity of the single poem. In the words of Cameron’s title, by “choosing not choosing” the open is kept open as most things are, namely, in a sort of indeterminate determinacy. This undecidability is a metaphor that discloses the undecidability of what matters most. My use of “between” in my title, Between Chora and the Good: Metaphor’s Metaphysical Neighborhood, signifies the gap [Greek chaos] between the margins or supplements beyond the gap between being and becoming within which creatures come to be, a cosmological theme and, phenomenologically, the open or clearing in which they appear. The supplements are both beyond being. The being and becoming gap and its crossing is the domicile of metaphor. Like Eros, also a creature of the between, it is concerned to bring together in a new creation what otherwise might seem estranged. Just as mother and father cross to engender the child, so too the word and the open of its correlative neighborhood may appear when what I intend to say crosses the just said qua fecund matrix and nothing appears in the slot. Creative metaphor is a crossing, not a transporting. Understanding the between as a neighborhood that allows opposites to cross and play back and forth without resolution—a situation Derrida marks as différance—is a Heideggerian means for avoiding metaphor. It is between of the supplements and of Levinas’s “saying that opens a passage to the other where there is nothing in common, . . . [a]relation and rupture” in which there is no same. It is the condition for the “awakening of the Self by the Other, of me by the stranger, of me by the stateless person . . . [and signifies] a responsibility for the other, the other who must be fed and clothed . . . that is neither reflection upon oneself or universalization” but that in which “the divine comedy of transcendence beyond ontology is possible.”27 Though the dynamics of an encounter seem lacking in this face-to-face, if we look more closely there is an ongoing chiasmus between my solicitor and my passive solicitation by the other. This dynamism is more evident in neighborhoods where there is a reciprocal play that never elicits a same that characterizes music, art, prayer, liturgy, and the supplements. The Matrix

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Physics offers us the metaphor of “critical opalescence” for these situations. Water heated under pressure to 374ºC turns continuously into steam without boiling and, though here the metaphor falters, water and steam are indistinguishable. As Freeman Dyson puts it, when it is thus “fluctuating between a gas and liquid,” it is seen as an opalescent or multicolored sparkling.28 The point is, of course, the lighting, the shimmer colors, and the irresolution of flickering opposites. This opalescence characterizes the between in Dickinson’s poems or the neighborhood in Heidegger’s On the Way to Language.29 Neighborhoods permit “dwelling in nearness” and mutual visitations, which turn differences into neighbors, but not at the expense of an invasion that threatens their own uniqueness. For example, thinking and poetry are “modes of saying” whose “neighborhood” is marked by the colon between “the being of language: the language of being.” The meaning of terms in this relation is transformed without mutual dwelling. Like critical opalescence, there is a lighting and the terms are modified, but there is nothing determinate that appears. Chora and the Good also constitute such an opalescent neighborhood by lighting the gap between being and becoming that makes metaphor possible. The tension between chora and the Good is never resolved, and opalescence is a function of a chiasmus I will later attempt to explicate by an appeal to the Trinity. I will occasionally use “opalescence” to denote the luminosity of an “oscillating logic” (Derrida) that does not posit a same. On the other hand, in the creation of a metaphor, an “intending to say” (vouloir dire) crosses the just-fecundicated matrix (A) to generate and release another term (B); but once “A is B,” there is a between which they cross over to briefly dwell in one another. In “Being is Time,” “being” is temporalized, understood as ecstatic when seen through “time,” but then in its chiasmus, “time” is not merely other but has the identity-constituting and durative features of “being.” In Plato’s case, this is the quality of the hypodoche as a featureless, retentive perfume base (Tim., 50E), where retention is through its always being other (49E). Much of what I say is based on a rather willful interpretation of Plato’s nexus of terms, hypodoche (receptacle), chora (place), topos (space), and hedra (seat or station), which I lump together under the portmanteau term “matrix.” They seem to be variants of space and, at times, even suggesting what Aristotle meant by hyle (matter) or, better, Spinoza’s natura naturans. There is an inherent restless that gives rise to time.30 That is all right as far as it goes, but if we take 66

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that line, we miss the main point of the Timaeus, a cosmogonic myth about a world in the making and being made. The receptacle is nothing apart from its possible and actual contents. We first meet her as diversified by an apeiron gignesthai, a becoming that never becomes anything definite (Tim., 28A), which, when solicited by paradigms, gathers together and amplifies her resources to give rise, as chora, to a new creation. In “amplification” you should hear echoes of David Bohm’s intricate order, though not the determinism implicit in his “folding under,” and perhaps the work of Spirit in this matrix that expresses herself through the focus of chora.31 To begin with the receptacle as womb-like (Greek metra; Latin matrix; from mater, mother) and to progressively understand her other names through this metaphor (50D-51B) is to see Plato’s majestic, even sacred, text as an account of creativity, the oft-neglected root of so much Platonic philosophy. “Matrix” is a useful term for this nexus, not least because of its semantic riches; it means origin or source (arché), a situation encouraging the growth and development of something, a casting mold, a die or block or type, a circuit that produces linear combinations, open logical formulae, a copy, as well as the transformational structures of group theory. Few of these are foreign to the roles Plato assigns to this nexus. Today group theory can model metaphor’s “transformational grammar” and preserve the congruencies that make possible measurement and the exact sciences. Metaphor is the womb, the matrix, that worlds the beauty and intelligibility of the world. But it is also the “space” of literature, the virtual place of discourse and texts, and paintings’ placeless place. Our affects are always with us; a penumbra of inexhaustible orienting feeling haloes all that we think or orients all we do. F. H. Bradley said it as well as any: “At any moment my general feeling [is such] that there is more than the objects before me, and no perception of objects will exhaust that sense of a living emotion. We in short have experience in which there is no distinction between awareness and that of which it is aware. There is an immediate feeling, a knowing and being in one, with which my knowledge begins; and though this is in a manner transcended, it nevertheless remains throughout the present foundation of my known world.”32 We are haunted by virtual worlds, and if one is immersed in the textual metaphor, it is easy to imagine that there is no beyond. Derrida apparently thought that the linguistic de dicto forces discovered by The Matrix

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Austin could, with Nietzsche’s sanction, lead to a de re world of forces, but John Protevi has made the point that Derrida’s “deduction” fails to motivate this passage.33 Linguistic forces are not physical forces and the text in which they are expressed is a virtual world where an “agony of flame cannot singe a sleeve.” Any such movement, such as that from the works of reason to the receptacle or from the linguistic forces to the real world and its necessities resembles a Kantian objective deduction and if successful, would establish our right to make existential claims. In the pages ahead, you will encounter several deductions, such as Levinas’s subjective deduction of the hypostasis from becoming or spirituality from sensuality (see 10:3 below), while I will “deduce” the arché of temporal phenomena beyond Being (see 11:3 below). We can read the whole of Timaeus as a deduction. With apologies to Kant, one can discern an objective “deduction” in the movement from the time of the works of reason to the time of the necessities in Timaeus. The work of the demiourgos in fashioning the world is within a world in the making; that it occurs first in the dialogue does not mean that it is temporally prior to the business with necessity. A subjective deduction, to give a rather simplistic spin to Kant, would in context be a movement from the receptacle or the il y a (existence or being) to an existent, a being, while its converse would begin with the hypostasis or some social or objective context and descend to the il y a or receptacle. Timaeus’s argument from the works of reason to the necessities of the receptacle is an objective deduction. Any argument from reason, as the Pythagoreans discovered with the rational numbers, generates surds. Reason deconstructs itself, if not in surds or the failure of consistency proofs (Gödel), then by the errant causality of the receptacle. The discussion of the receptacle begins the ‘subjective’ deduction which secures against contingencies occasioned by the ‘way down.’ But a successful descent does not guarantee that its results will endure. A deduction is also a production. Levinas says that “‘production’ designates both the effectuation of being (the event “is produced,” an automobile “is produced”) and its being brought to light or its exposition (an argument “is produced,” an actor “is produced”). The ambiguity of the verb conveys the essential ambiguity of the operation by which the being of an entity is simultaneously brought about and revealed.34 Something like a production or a deduction is required if the movement from reason or language is not to terminate in virtual realities. John Protevi, as we just noted, has demonstrated 68

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that Derrida’s textual forces will not bridge the gap between the phenomenal and physical. The hypodoche is already such a bridge. Affectivity is the link. Rather than follow the reduction of this general text to a sterile chora, as he did in “Kho-ra” and On the Name, one should begin with the hypodoche. When the hypodoche is solicited or propositioned by the lure of form, Heidegger says that she juts out to give being place. His “setting forth of the earth” is a response to alterity and not, as he may have thought, an autochthonic striving.35 The earth, “mater,” tweaks life into expressing its infinitely varied forms, the boiling springs in the bottom of the sea in which bacteria thrive, the arctic north in which fox and bear assume new forms, the bacteria that grow new receptors to cope with new substrates. Just as Nietzsche would have a harsh, arbitrary, and non-natural morality tweak us into nobility, matter tweaks life into a creative response. The concept of the matrix is an assemblage from hypodoche, chora, topos, and hedra. “Assemblage” involves linking of terms that have little or nothing in common into a single term, which they describe through its aspects, as in Heidegger’s Gestell, Derrida’s différance, or Plato’s idea. Matrix is such an assemblage.36 Participation is a many-termed relation, which has an erotic and perceptual paradigm. Forces of the active agent and those of its patient cross and engender sense or the creatures that appear in their between, the white between the perceiving eye and the thing seen or the new life between the father and mother. The matrix underlies mingling and is the engendering condition for this fecund relation. Through this mingling, to use the sexual metaphors of the Theaetetus (152D–160C), the receptacle gives place to the emergent color, the white seen on the stone. Can this be grafted onto Heidegger’s Das Zwischen whose fecundity was first suggested by another between, Kant’s productive imagination that is the common root of sensibility and understanding? In Being and Time the between is said, with reservations, to be Dasein’s being (132), which, in straddling and unifying the between of birth and death (373), achieves authenticity or lets one fall into the inauthenticity of das Mann (390). But this is not the only transcendence if, as Plato said, soul spans being and becoming. Dasein can effect these unities through a disseverance (108) that lets things draw near to be touched (55) or allowed to fall into oblivion; I understand the between to be a function of the hypodoche that makes possible being-in-the-world. As the condition for making there and then here and now, it has affinities with Rilke’s “Open,” an animal affectivity The Matrix

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prior to intentionality’s objects and subjects. In general, the matrix is the cosmological and phenomenological condition for appearing and being appeared to in a place, a there to my here in relations of proximity with others. Proximity is short of assimilation, at least as it is represented in the coming together of Aristophanes’ lovers in spherical, Parmenidian union (Sym., 191B–192C) or Rimbaud’s “I is another.” It is also opposed to the common “togetherness” celebrated in beer commercials. Neighborly proximity invites visitation, the passage back and forth that is short of communal dwelling, that is to say, participation. The matrix’s creative, separative, and retentive aspects derive from Plato’s characterization of the receptacle. As the condition for those alterities that resist totalization, this matriarchal between draws on Levinas’s “proximity” and “saying,” as well as on the archive metaphor. In this linguistic era, the archive is a fathomless library of texts and, as we grow older, illegible palimpsests. Something that had been there left its trace. It is also the condition for those necessities synchronically expressed in natural law as in Bergson’s élan vital or in genetic speciation. The creature makes it new, but without archival traces it would be lost in Derrida’s desertlike chora. Traces of the “Big Bang” are with us, while our DNA encodes the trace of the origin of life. How can chora and the Good, both beyond being and Being, enter into community and communion and thus discourse? John Llewelyn has called attention to the difficulty in using language, the house of being, to go beyond Being, and cautions that the Ontological Difference may lurk in the very means whereby we would escape it. “Exteriority, space, respiration, inspiration; these are well-worn metaphors for being” and these ontic metaphors are apt to prevent one from recognizing the presence of the Ontological Difference.37 “The extraordinary word beyond transmits an ontic metaphor.”38 “When faced with the question whether ontology is beyond metaphysics or metaphysics is beyond being,” Llewelyn confesses, “we may be at a loss for words.” No doubt I will be less than vigilant, but I have other fish to fry and must run the risk of succumbing to being’s evident lure if I am to reach the Good, its beyond. My resources for undertaking this quest are founded on the Christian kenosis, the impossible possibility that the Good clothed himself in the accouterments of being to dwell among us. I cannot free myself of this bias, but it could be useful, if only for Feuerbach’s reasons. Theology has been to anthropology what astronomy has been for physics. Moreover, the issues and “impossible possibilities” I approach have been developed mostly within 70

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the Greek and Latin Fathers and, though I do not wish to prejudice the issue, I know no better way into the mystery of participation. 3. The Affective Matrix Since I deal in unfamiliar ways with more or less familiar material from classical and contemporary European philosophy, some stocktaking is in order. There is a largely unacknowledged debt to HansGeorg Gadamer’s “Idea and Reality in Plato’s Timaeus,” even though, unlike him, my ex nihilo bias makes the stereometric determinates of the matrix God’s doing. Gadamer thought that the elementary triangles (though not the proportions that order them), constituting earth, air, fire, and water, are not to be counted among the paradigmatic ideas. “When the god does his best, the best thing possible, he is dependent on the Necessary. There is no difference in human practice.” Though products of becoming, human products can subsequently be determinates and thus ideas. If there is no first moment of creation and if it is continuous, whatever is de facto is given and as such constitutes the necessities. If we differ with Plato and side with modern physics and assume a beginning, it is still the case that becoming is chaotic and, in Prigogine’s stochastic version, unpredictable. The god’s decision to begin with a field of discontinuous and nonlocalizable forces opens the door to stochastic probabilities, not mechanical necessities. Though never without contents that a demiourgos can persuade into being a cosmos and you and I into a world, bracketing these out (epoché) reveals the matrix as the possibility of the gift of being, its present and presence, through place (chora). This persuasion is possible because “ananke– [necessity] includes the chora within itself as the necessary presupposition for the appearance of everything, which already proves to be the beautiful itself. . . . Ananke– acts as if it wanted the beautiful when it accepts the regular solids. . . . It was a triumph and a completely new insight when one realized that the priority of the Beautiful [and by inference the reign of the Good] exists not only when someone makes something according to plan and with a specific teleological intention for it.”39 For instance, in selfgenerating systems there is said to be no plan or that it is “enfolded” in the system. The latter is a bit too strong, for the reign of the Good or Beautiful begins with chaos and its erotic propositioning. We have called attention to how, in a very bold generalization, Whitehead interprets the matrix as affective, “the foster-mother of all The Matrix

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occasions of experience,” and makes it a ground for “personal unity.”40 Though this may run against the grain of Plato’s text 2(Tim., 52B), it encourages me to let the matrix cover the immanent necessities, genetic and otherwise, to which any coming to be must conform. Already Derrida had intuited its role in the coming to be of the said from the saying, where the saying is the matrix diversified by signifiers and their forces anarchically ordered by différance; but this presupposes a more primordial saying. It is not without hyperbole that Levinas says that “becoming conscious is already language . . . to apprehend oneself from within—to produce oneself as I—is to apprehend myself with the same gesture that already turns to the exterior to extra-vert and to manifest . . . to express . . . [that] the essence of language is goodness, or again, that the essence of language is friendship and hospitality.” “Saying,” he says elsewhere, “signifies otherwise than as an apparitor presenting essence and entities [in a] signifyingness antecedent to ontology.”41 Proximity is founded on saying, on showing, the necessary condition for gathering from regional archives those necessary conditions, physical, linguistic, cultural, historical, and the like, without which nothing could be or be definite.42 Things closest are most difficult to understand, and that is certainly true of affects, a term I use to cover motivations, drives, moods, emotions, and feelings. Sometimes I use affect as a situational feeling, an awareness that something otherwise undistinguished is going on, which is only later distinguished by kinds relative to its objects and the noetic manner in which these are intended. Perhaps the German heimlich/unheimlich pair expressing the satisfactions and the threatening terrors of the homely, best expresses our most fundamental or existential sense of being in the world. This nexus is further modified by moods and such directed or intentional states as fear, boredom, joy, grief, anger, interest, disgust, and the like. Emotions are scenarios and have characteristic manifestations. Actors can learn to express them. Some, like the child’s interest, are innate. Their noema may be inexistent. Mere feeling as such does not orient us. Emotions and their objects are orienting. Something like a feeler and its felt, if not a conscious self, erupts from these otherwise apeironic affects. Though we have taken feeling to be prior to other affects and to be regional rather than purely somatic, the influential neuroscientist Antonio Damasio denies that somatic feelings are prior to emotions, which he takes to be the brain’s report on the success and failure of bodily transactions. He understands Spinoza’s notion that the first 72

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idea of the mind is the human body through experiments that show that “feelings are related to neural maps of bodily states.”43 Evolution is said to determine the presence of emotions of pleasure or pain before we have feelings, for the former have a survival value lacking in the latter.44 This is an interesting case of explaining what we could know by examining child and animal behavior—namely that affects are prior and develop before anything like a self and its emotions appear—by a postulated evolutionary advantage belonging to an unknown past. Damasio’s adoption of Cannon’s homeostatic model in which the conatus essendi would be a drive and not a teleological and creative directedness enfeebles Damasio’s account. We explain a present pregnant with the future by a nonexistent past. But let us not dismiss his thesis that organic somatosensing regions are involved in feeling; for without the proper neural mesh there are no affects. If there are no unconscious feelings in Damasio’s somacentric sense, there is awareness prior to the emergence of a subject and this does require the prior function of the neural somacentric mesh. John Sallis limits the “necessities” of the receptacle to the mechanical causes Socrates attributed to Anaxagoras (Phaedo, 97D–100A) and seems to ignore their affective deployment. If we are to generalize the hypodoche, then these necessities need not be nomological to be the initial or conformal conditions prevailing in any suasive or creative activity. Socrates’ presence in the prison is not the effect of these “sinews and bones,” even though, as he says, without them “[I] could not do what I am doing through choice of the best” (99A). What is now immanent was once a transcendent possibility, which reason, human or divine, persuaded actuality to accept. Like the decisions of the English Parliament and the common law, they are immanent necessities to which the future, short of formal increments introduced by accident or “choice of the best,” will conform. History is possible only with the recognition of the receptacle, the nexus underlying this genetic inheritance, and weaves its fabric from genetically inherited and paradigmatic possibilities. I generalize the receptacle to cover all archival necessities. We become aware of place when we are out of place or placeless. The receptacle, however pregnant with resources, is then like a desert in which we wander, lost and disoriented, looking for a place, chora. But the matrix is also temporal; how far and how long it takes, how near and how easy—these are expressions with a focal reference to the emplaced body, its stresses and strains, and its relation to possible alterities. Because getting lost, looking for a place, is a chorastic The Matrix

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experience, one might think that chora is ontologically prior to the receptacle. Yet for reasons soon to be apparent, I want to say that the receptacle gives creatures place and makes possible being there, Dasein. Though neither a being nor nothing yet, through its gift of place, it is the arché of being. Such is the locative power of einai that “to be” is to be here or there, then or now, but its work is done by the matrix. Though mind is Aristotle’s place of forms (De Anima, 429a 27), thinking is relatively placeless and has been thought, as in Kant’s inner sense, to be purely temporal. Kant speaks of time being generated by counting (A143/B183), but time is spatialized when represented by the before and after of points on line, even if all are not present all at once (B154). Thinking may be temporalizing, but in its temporal ecstasis it is also a spacing. Because of the strangely anarchical nature of conscious temporality, Kant felt it necessary to show that its well-ordering required an independent, permanent spatial correlate (B275–279). Otherwise, thoughts run together, vanish, are rekindled, or supercede in a flux in consciousness whose temporality is in an indeterminate “linear” stretch. Thanks to Cezanne, Dada, cubism, Mondrian, abstract expressionism, the cinema and the like, we welcome the indeterminacy of virtual space and its time. A surplus of meanings and the darker aspects of deictic necessity invite consciousness to take its stand within. The apparent freedom of thought from physical and biological space and time lets the ego take itself to be their master, but however we remake and reorder ourselves and our environs, we do grow old; this freedom can be a demonic illusion. Space and its linear temporality can, like a film, be cut and spliced to make narrative possible and is, though a descendant of the receptacle, only virtual, not real. Unity is a seldom-realized goal gained by the sometimes-unconscious stories we tell ourselves. Antonio Damasio speaks of this as occurring in a core or protoconsciousness. The story, he says, “is not told by you as a self, because the core you is only born as the story is being told, within the story itself. You exist as a mental being when the primordial stories are being told, and only then. You are the music while the music lasts.”45 Since we determine who we are within synthetic, narrative frameworks, ways of representing and unifying ourselves in a world by an orienting good, these plots may unify what is really incoherent. The hypostasis is always already social, already a genetic order, personally and institutionally, and the hypostasis arises from its communitarian conditions in the archival matrix. Narrative—because it can embody the durative vibrancy of Heidegger’s sense of Wesen (“essential 74

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sway”) and the radical contingencies that disrupt frameworks—can tell us more about what is essential to being human than most ethics, psychology, and sociology. This more complex self is marked by an interiority wherein it can take stock of and the measure of itself within a “web of interlocution” as it orients its self-interpretations through its frameworks (Charles Taylor)46 or paradigmatic life-styles (Plato) placed before it by the god, as Plato puts it in the myth of Er (Rep., 617E). These interpretations are within orienting narratives told and retold that gather us into a community, neighborhoods, and their betweens. Stories told about us in nurture become our nature and are followed unconsciously or consciously, wisely or foolishly, rightly or wrongly, selfishly or unselfishly. The classical novel, beginning with Tom Jones, was about becoming a self, an artifact first put in place by Augustine, whose status and legitimacy is now threatened, as if the virtual reality of literature had no ontological status. It has the reality of any archival or, to be Jungian, archetypal posit. Italo Calvino, a propos Dante and Galileo, defends the tradition in European literature that makes “a map of the world and the knowable . . . driven by a thirst for knowledge that may by turns be theological, speculative, encyclopedic or [concerned] with transfiguring visual observation.”47 The modern novel offers less hope of unity, reflecting the fractured self that no longer knows where to look for the unity it seeks. Though Blanchard and Levinas make this route questionable, frameworks will govern our thought in the pages ahead. Like the myths they often embody or like genetic codes, frameworks are very deep; some being better or worse, living towards the empowering good through frameworks gives our lives value and ontological weight. The good we seek takes many forms: wealth, friendship, power, self-fulfillment, and what not; some are fitted to some of us, some to others. Except for Aristotle, moral philosophy has tried to find a single pattern, utilitarian or deontological, as our common measure; if there is one, it is given by the Good’s love of us and not by ourselves. Until this epiphany, we identify ourselves with these “inescapable frameworks” as we work them out in an overlapping, if not quite common, space of moral and spiritual orientation. This sense of self, while it may tend to the self-closure Levinas associates with atheism and satisfaction, is an orientation that follows from our incarnate nature. Like the world of the demiourgos, the “works of reason” that occupy Timaeus up to 47E, these virtual frameworks can be real only through the necessities of chora or the initiatives of the Good. Even if, as in Plato’s case, time is cosmological The Matrix

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and not a distension of the mind as in Saint Augustine, until we reckon with the matrix, reason’s coordinate reality, these constructions remain virtual. Deictic metaphor can restore our relation to the matrix by reaching out to a being’s there to disclose what is hidden in its chthonic roots. The earth is self-seclusive.48 Plato’s demiourgos was originally a lion crossing the desert that wiped his traces away with his tail. Can we not assume that deictic metaphors can desediment the past, which both binds and frees? Traces of the Good are difficult to detect; otherwise, such prescient visitors as Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot, and Sallis would have seen it. Levinas alone detects its spoor in “saying,” a variant of the receptacle. The Timaeus begins when Socrates, picking up the thread of the previous day’s discussion, recapitulates the formal structure of the Republic. John Sallis has shown how this “work of reason” is strangely isolated from the “necessities” of history, as if in a virtual world of its own; but this detachment is abandoned in the historical narratives of Critias (20C ff). The matrix, which Whitehead took to be a (anarchical) principle of personal unity, is now a necessary condition for immanent order—narrative, historical, and even physical. Because the receptacle is errant and not cunning, whatever is inscribed in it can never be gathered up by Hegel into a theodicy. Timaeus is first and foremost a cosmological treatise. The immediate import of this trackless receptacle is to open the present, as if by bracketing out (epoché ) the past, to a new creation. The present is a seedbed sown by the past whose issue is a contingent future. The now is that from which the future issues into its own now in which to gestate and cultivate the resources within the parameters of these inheritances. For John Sallis, the Timaeus is about beginnings that repeat and fold back on themselves so that there is never an absolute source point. While this is the case with the hypostasis, the person, the time of the receptacle, like that of saying, does not fold back. The matrix is atomized by creative and epochal beginnings that mark each occasion’s passage from non-being to being (Sym., 205B–208C; see above, 11:2). The sensible world is “in a process of creation and created” (Tim., 28C). I understand that the various “beginnings” that mark the myth of Timaeus represent various ontological levels entailed in explicating participation, the mechanism of becoming determinate. In cosmogonic myth, temporal priority often marks as ontologically prior what is really simultaneous. Beginning with the works of reason marks reason’s ontological priority. When the cosmos 76

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is interpreted within this rational context, then the demiourgos’s intentions appear to be accepted by a pliant matrix. The result is a virtual world, as if within the horizons generated by a computer. It is also the deserted landscape in Wallace Stevens’s “Idea of Order at Key West” in which the young girl sings, only to have her voice drowned out by the sea’s roar. The “becoming that never really is” that occurs in the original distinction between being and becoming (Tim., 27D) is already domesticated by association with perception and opinion, the way the matrix would be seen under the formality of the copula or how saying looks when usurped by the said. When the elements earth, air, fire, and water are proportionally generated by a rule of reason (31B–32C), there is no evidence of the flight and vagrant shifting of form characterizing necessity. The next beginning that sets out the works of necessity is concerned with the verbal arché beyond being, whose issue is a world, even as saying has its issue in the said (47E). The matrix story begins with its self-diversification in these same elementary forms, “the first principles and letters of the whole” (48D), that resist nominalization and invite verbal names.49 What once seemed to submit to the rule of reason now appears as its sometimes-anarchic correlative. This matrix, the third class (48E), was implicit in the first distinction between being and becoming that never becomes anything and is the soul’s deictic root in divisible same, other, and being (35A–C). 4. The Between Metaphor, “to carry over,” presupposes a gap or between, which, when crossed, lets things and their horizons appear.50 The word has the power to summon beings and is that through which its intended object is seen. Whatever appears in the between may then validate the crossing by which it was engendered. Faraday’s seeing electricity as a fluid was constituted by a metaphor that also made the metaphor credible. That’s how we see it. Metaphor is monstrative, a showing, and this is the source of its dangerous authority. Seeing should not always be believing. Faraday’s “flow” describing the passage of an electrical charge from one pole to another created a science. Heidegger’s “where the word is not, no thing may be” neglects to notice that the possibility of the word depends on things that cannot be said. Whatever may be beyond being is beyond saying, except it, like the Hindu God, makes itself “manifest in a magnificence of richness in images. . . .” Hegel continues in a (hyperbolic) Platonic vein: The Matrix

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its symbolic procedure necessitates a vast search for kinships, and to accompany its universal meaning provides a great multitude of concrete and comparable phenomena, while the sublimity of its outlook leads it to use the whole vast variety of brilliant and magnificent superlatives to adorn the One being who is also there for the mind to praise. In these circumstances these imaginative productions do not count as something we know to be only the poet’s work . . . and not something independently real and present; on the contrary, [it is] the transformation of everything existent into the existence of an Idea grasped and molded by the imagination.51 “Where the word is not no thing may be.” Beyond intuition and beyond noein, thought, representation, intentionality, and so too metaphor, lie its supplements, the idea of the Good and the matrix, the mother of coming-to-be and appearing. Both are beyond being. Because the matrix partakes in being in a mysterious way (Tim., 50C) and can be expressed only in myth and probabilities (48D) and because only its “vestibule,” not the Good itself, can be approached in metaphors of light, its offspring, it is difficult to elucidate these supplements.52 Like the sun that cannot be directly seen, the Good too is visible only in its creatures. The beings it solicits and illuminates will appear in their chthonic or generative conditions, not as clones of a permanent presence, but as rather unpredictable creatures (hypostases) forging a future not always sought in the light of a higher good. Granted the Good’s kinesis, it can respond to the contingent needs of the creature. In Catholic theology, Mary prays or intercedes for us with the Son; whatever the viability of this as dogma, it makes an essential point. The possibility of reciprocal participation and the generation of eidoi lies in the fact that the arché as the determining principle and as determinable ground chiastically cross, like terms in metaphor, and interchange roles. Theologically that entails rethinking Spirit as modifying the matrix: the Father is in the Mother and the Mother in the Father so that we, images of the Son, may be in Them and They in us. The route to understanding the between as the condition for crossing and the place (chora) that gives beings their being begins with Heidegger’s “The Nature of Language,” an essay that first brought “neighborhood” into my focus. Neighborhoods permit “dwelling in nearness” and the critical opalescence that permits mutual visitations which turn differences into neighbors, but not at the expense of an 78

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invasion that threatens their own uniqueness. Heidegger explores thinking and poetry, “modes of saying,” whose “neighborhood” lies with the colon between “the being of language: the language of being.” Though the proper explication of this expression would require recourse to the mysteries of the Beiträge, for our purposes it is sufficient to note that the neighborhood separating these phrases lets what is apparently the same term in each phrase, “being” [“nature” or “essence”] and “language,” be different in each. The first phrase, “the being of language,” posits language as the subject whose essence is to be determined,53 while the phrase after the colon, “the language of being,” would be the “whatness” of the prior, subject phrase. But the colon opens up the essence, not as a nominal quidditas, but as the essencing “subject that possesses language” persists in presence. This is “what is ownmost to speech. . . . Language belongs to all things, because that is its most persisting property.”54 Their “nearness” to one another that gives being voice “must act in the manner of Saying.” On the Way to Language sows the seeds for Levinas’s later development by describing this between as the unspoken, which, though it cannot be spoken, is nevertheless “the structure of a show in which are joined the speakers and their speaking: what is spoken and what of it is unspoken in all that is given in the speaking.”55 This surplus in speaking that can never be said is “beyond being” and is retained as a scent is retained by a perfume base (Tim., 50E). “Prior to participation in any common content,” Levinas’s saying institutes “sociality through a relation that is irreducible to understanding” and to ontology. The hypostasis, the person, is through the relations with others and the Other implicit in saying; and when it, not the transcendental “I” or Dasein or the cogito, is taken to be primary, being is koinos (community, communicate, communion). Saying subtends these relations. In the soul’s chiastic crossing, the intelligible becomes the visible while remaining intelligible, and the visible becomes intelligible while remaining visible (Tim., 34C–38B). The way down may involve the sensibilization of concepts in deictic metaphors; while on the way up the intelligible is seen in, though not as identical with, the sensible. I see sensible unequals through equality, which itself is not sensible. Meno’s slave saw the double square in the drawn schema. Moreover, the here of the signifier and the yonder of the signified entail the topology of regions. The possibility of this regional inherence whose immanent conditions are given by the receptacle underlies monstration. Peirce and others have noted that what a sign signifies is itself a sign, The Matrix

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so there is the threat of an indefinitude of signs signifying signs signifying signs. This infinity is, however, closed off by Scotus’s haecceitas, which points, or so I will contend, to self-forming, individuating processes drawing their resources through chora that gives place to otherwise placeless form.56 But, of course, the cosmological sense of place, which contextualizes form—as the differing conditions of existence determine the difference in the plumage of birds of the same species—is not the sense in which affective conditions contextualize form. Form is always the form of a process, like the plot of a play or the tale told in the telling, which, though same, also changes with time and place, with the production or teller. The interpreted noema, like Leibniz’s Paris, is an excess, often as with justice or the Other a saturated and infinite excess, beyond the perhaps denumerable perspectives from which it is seen. Seen through love we seek its freedom and the Good that justice be done. Everything is given in a nexus of perspectives. Not all are to the point, and even Nietzsche would agree that when one is ill, the doctor’s relation to the object is closer to the truth than mine. But I can share with him the infinite horizons of the absolute perspectives, freedom, and justice Wittgenstein thought that one could define ethics only by superimposing more or less synonymous expressions in the manner of Galton’s photographs to “see what they have in common”; but here it could be that, like a montage, they do not show anything in common.57 Moreover, what they do show, if they show anything at all, may be only virtual, not a deictic and affective showing of, for example, Paris, a place wherein we can walk about, get tired and thirsty, smell and be moved, ever turned on by what we see. Eidos is not just the look of something, but is, on its being unconcealed (aletheia, truth), the “look something offers in its “what,” the look something exhibits of itself.”58 Bergson says that eidos is the stable view of the instability of things: the quality which is a moment of becoming; the form which is a moment of evolution,”59 which he challenges because of the cinematographical mechanism it suggests. Though Heidegger’s “sighted presence” leads in the direction of technology and the Gestell, it is more to the point to say that; in the eidos, self-disclosing physis, “nature” exhibits itself. The creature emerges from concealment in the earth to come forth in the light. Thinking means “to let beings emerge in the decisiveness of their Being [a decisiveness requiring a granular time] and to let them stand out before oneself. . . .”60 Heidegger was clearer about seeing in physis the primary sense of being than either Plato or Aristotle, and his reflections are implicit in 80

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much of what I will say about the “hypostasis,” my interpretation of Plato’s “living creature” (zoon hempsuchon, Tim. 30B). The beingness of beings—that means constancy in the double sense of persistence and duration. Beings as the constant, understood in this way as opposition to change or decay, are therefore entirely what is present, opposed to everything absent and all mere dissolution. Constancy and especially presence posit back on itself whatever comes into existence as constant and present, but they do not posit it away; they install it in itself as the uprightness of form versus the deformity of all confusion. The constant, what is present out of itself and formed in itself, unfolds out of itself and for itself its contour and limit [peras], versus what is merely floating away and limitless [apeiron gignesthai]. Constancy, presence, limit, and form—all these, especially in the simplicity of their reciprocal relations, belong to and determine what resounds in the Greek word physis as the designation of beings in their beingness.61 Idea can be saturated. As logos, it would be a parameter ordering an indefinitude of perspectives that we seem to “see” even though they prove indescribable. For example, on the Copenhagen interpretation of Heisenberg, a proton is a wave and a particle, which is of course a contradiction. But it is a wave in one world of instrumentation, such as polarization, and a particle in another, as in a photoelectric cell. Like Plato’s sense object, it appears as the what, unifying the object and subject poles in two different participatory schemes. The eidos may be a same in variation where these variants are themselves individuations. Classical Platonism has taken eidos to be an absolute, a Parmenidian fixture. But if it is a same in variation, evidently various conditions under which we have access to it could mark it. But idea is also same in a field of differences and an existential field of variation. Humans are sometimes male, sometimes female, at some times and places black, white, Greek, American, and each of these situations leaves its marks by which humans come to be and are. Eidos is the what of a process and is identifiable as a play is identifiable by its plot, or a life by its unfolding. This temporal aspect is captured by the verbal essance, where the -ance suffix is a medial marker. What gets played out is an adverbial interpretation of the verbal essance; this suggests that the verbal/adverbial dyad can replace the usual noun/adjective in Latin syntax. Though its verbal character was not recognized until Suarez, -ens is a participle, a Platonic The Matrix

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term expressing participation in being and becoming. Though reality is usually read as a noun undergoing adjectival changes, there is no compelling reason why one can’t speak of an adverbially qualified verbal process. Regarding being through the Good should give transformation and process its due. Chora lets things thing, words word, makes a place for thing or word, wraps it in a history and shelters it from more elemental and disruptive conditions. Secondly, if in this medial context differences, such as sensible/intelligible, individual/universal, and the like, play back and forth, there is no Hegelian supercession. In “dwelling thinking,” the play is minimized as one term crosses over to interpretatively dwell in another.

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3

Plato’s Idea Theory

Good is what every soul pursues and for which it ventures everything, intuiting what it is, yet baffled and unable to appreciate its nature. Plato

1. Ideas Since we are in for a heavy dose of my idiosyncratic Plato, some preliminaries are in order. Even among Platonists, the theory of ideas, whatever that means, is often suspect; others find it bizarre. This is especially true of those who work within my Continental tradition but who often take Nietzsche far too seriously; oddly, Platonic realism continues to be appreciated among logicians, mathematicians, and even many analytic philosophers. Can we make it appealing to our peers? If eidoi are to give metaphor a new life, perhaps even taking one to the Good’s vestibule, how are we supposed to think them? Is an idea a more or less separated Aristotelian formal cause having the eternity of his species? Since Hegel and Darwin, history, not eternity, is our archive and so an idea too must bear its marks. The Republic’s (511B) way to ideas led from hypotheses through hypotheses. Can we understand these hypotheses as a formal or even historical progression that has the idea as its limit? Doubtless, this is a good way of proceeding, 83

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even in these days of paradigms, but it fails to grasp the way an idea gathers a vast array of phenomena into unity. A circle is the unifying unity of wheels, pulleys, sine curves, business cycles, Nietzsche’s view of history, and the like. Each of these ways of thinking a circle is rather static, and Parmenides’ dogma that found a higher value in rest than motion haunted even Plato (527A); but only when we begin to see the circle itself as one of many conic sections do we begin to grasp the real eidetic drama. Among other things, ideas are unifying aspects of a transformational process that can be both theoretical and a posit of a history that they in turn govern. Consider how human rights, Suarez’s transformation of natural law, have shaped American constitutional history and the French Revolution or how equity, rooted in Aristotle, has shaped the common law. Kant taught us that understanding is rooted in imagination and Platonic myth extends this to reason itself; but to really appreciate that role, one had to await Husserl’s eidetic reduction through imaginative variation, where these variants could be historical epochs, metaphors, fictions, theories, Plato’s hypotheses, and the like. The eidos is seen through these as one sees the point as the limit of a class of circles such that each encloses another and there is no lea circle. Sometimes there is no such kernel, but sometimes an idea is generated. One has to wait and see. Ideas are usually taken as a development from Socrates’ questioning. Plato seems to have extrapolated his theory from the way Socrates asked for the being, the ousia, of this or that human excellence. True enough, but shouldn’t we also be concerned with the context of his questioning? It may determine how ideas are to be thought. Levinas has called attention to an almost self-evident though hitherto unnoticed point; in Plato’s dialogues the Good as cause of the ideas is not formal but manifests itself though the speaker. Dialogue makes saying prior. Moreover, contrary to the practice of logicians who take an idea to be a predicate, which can, in turn, be quantified over as an object in a higher-order logic, an idea can never be an object. In the sequel, we will follow Georgio Agamben’s observation that by which something is and is known is not itself known.1 Plato’s ideas are formed in his geometrical intuitions and are divorced from process. The presentationally immediate world of the empirical tradition, with its emphasis of vision, is unable to appreciate dynamism and the role that ideas play in its articulation. Berkeley’s and Hume’s world of objects is sterilized of the temporal connexities evident in kinesthesis, hearing, touch, and the affectivity that informs and surrounds them. Their objects, like a song in a 84

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crowded room, are temporal modifications of fields. We are nodes formed by and immersed in vibrating fields of influence, such as light, sound, electricity, chemistry, gravity, electro-magnetism, memory, feeling, and the like. The enduring objects of sight are complex vibratory phenomena that endure by gathering up their past, ultimately that of the universe, and projecting what they receive—with such modifications as they make to its harmonies—onto a future. This ability to reach back and gather a past, to transcend this immanence and gather it into a novel possibility, and project toward a future is called participation. Chora’s structures, ideas, are gathered and assembled to vector this dynamical flux and render what would otherwise be an apeiron pleistos determinate. This ecstasy that reaches out to gather and integrate alterity reappears in recent philosophy as Whitehead’s prehension; with the elimination of transcendence, its avatars are the origin of structure from chaos in complexity theory, biological morphogenesis, and the sometimes bizarre reflections of Rupert Sheldrake on memory’s morphic resonance. Ideas are scenarios that give events the Aristotelian unity of a beginning, middle, and end. Levinas expresses this in essancing and Heidegger’s in Wesen, what allows something to hold sway. But these are stochastic processes in which structure, like waves or the convection cells in a heated fluid, is an immanent possibility and an eject of process; like constitutions, the love of another as other, or justice, some transcend process and its possibilities and elicit a propositional response. Since something like decision among these erotic attractors is in any case involved, the Good is implicated in any being and coming-to-be. In the Timaeus, the most extended account of paradigmatic ideas, Timaeus says that, like any great undertaking, his should begin by calling upon the aid of gods and goddesses “that my words may be acceptable to them and in consequence to ourselves” (Tim., 27C). Isn’t saying first addressed á Dieu? Socrates, on Apollo’s mission, always speaks to us through the other, often such despicable others as Critias, Charmides, Meno, Alcibades, and the like; in our religious traditions, the Other is given most radically in the widow, orphan, prisoner, teacher, and so forth as a goodness transcending our categories. This “experience” of an absolute Good would be “inconceivable without the interposition of the Ideas.”2 Language is “a living being, a living and animated discourse that knows when to defend itself and when to keep silent” (Phaedrus, 276A) and is spoken, Levinas says, “when community between the terms is wanting or has yet to be established.” Discourse takes place in the transcendence of Plato’s Idea Theory

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the other, in his radical separation and his revelation to me. The ideas are interposed as an “experience of something absolutely foreign”; for example, for all her otherness, the other is known to be the same as me. One usually takes the idea to be a “sublimed and perfected object.”3 This could hardly be true if the idea is seen in the Good, which is not any kind of object. The “square itself” is not square. Isn’t the mythology of the Phaedo and the Meno that identifies the soul with the ideas nothing but a “metaphor expressing the permeability of being by thought”? Anamnesis invites myth and then seems to trivialize itself in fancy. The form of Plato’s myth gives the possibility of novel experience but then, turning to thought, takes it back. We do recognize what we have never seen, know what has never been experienced, so “permeability,” which does not judge the phenomena but recognizes a prior attunement, a felt community (koinos) of memory, sense, and intellect, is the basis for sharing and, sad to say, contesting any form of life. This pathos we feel when we feel for, and not just with, another is rooted in attunements of ideas with primordial affectivity, and it is from this that the societal and cognitive hypothesis arises. This attunement is a function of the deictic root of the soul whose affective modalities reach up to color rationality, its valuations, interests, and passions. Recollection, a trace of the Good, is an archival resource, which, with Levinas’s paradoxical memories of a past that has never been present, is to be thought through the receptacle.4 If being is permeable, it will not be by the thought of the solitary thinker but will be worked out with others who are Other in dialogue. When Plato says that we must first address the God, are we not being told that the ideas interposed in addressing another make an absolute claim? Though the idea and its constituted totalities is not an adequate basis for a just community, Herman Cohen said that one could love the idea because it is “in the last analysis tantamount to the transmutation of the other into the Other. . . . The philosopher [who responds to questions] who in the Phaedo is compared with the caretaker assigned to his post is under the magistrature of the gods; he is not their equal. . . . To what new purity does the elevation of a god correspond?” To the sophist’s words that would manipulate and order another to his measure, “Plato opposes the utterances with which we please the gods. . . . When it has reached truth, discourse is conversation with the god who is not our fellow servant. A just society does not proceed from contemplation of the true; truth is made possible by relation with the Other, our master. Truth is bound up with the social 86

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relation, which is justice. . . . The content presented to me is inseparable from him who has thought it.”5 This point was never lost to the Christian Platonist who understood ideas as God’s Word. Kant taught that questions put their answers in “leading rings of reason’s own devising.” Socrates asks, “What is justice? Who is Georgias?” “What” asks for the determinate idea; while “who” asks the prior question, namely, who put the question into play, and leads to the dramatic disclosure of a Critias, Charmides, Georgias, Laches, and the like. Except perhaps for Heidegger, “who” seems no longer to be of interest to philosophers who tend to think that a “what,” being unrelated to any existing who, is a Parmenidian invariant and can take the form of the predicative “is φ ” instanced by any x that binds its variable. “What” without a “who” predisposes one to a Parmenidian answer that fixes the object in an ontic eternity for judgment or assertion. “What” issues in metaphysics and epistemology. If we are to go beyond Being, we will never get anywhere if we seek by such questioning to evade its labyrinthine closure. Begin instead with the one asked and the one asking, with the veracity of the saying and the relevance of the showing that binds them in the appearing of the said, the said of the question and its answer, and thus with the possibility of the saying; but even here there may be no escape from Being. The questions asked by Socrates, a paradigm for such virtues as piety (Euthyphro), citizenship (Crito), or courage (Laches), has more to do with unconcealing the moral bankruptcy of his interlocutors than establishing a theory. The dialogue always has a rather specific locus, such as Agathon’s banquet, the Agora, a gymnasium, or the house of Cephalus whose “spirit” seems to determine the mood and even the theme of the dialogue. Those present are familiar with one another and may even be rivals, relatives, antagonists, friends, lovers, and the like; they come bidden or intrusively and go their way for various reasons, yet they are gathered by the drama into both self and eidetic disclosure. For example, if we look at Laches with the eyes of Plato’s first readers, we would know that a wrestling school was nearby, we would know of Socrates’ heroics at Potideae and elsewhere and of Nicias’s foolish delay and subsequent defeat at Syracuse. The dialogue brings them and other well-known contemporaries into our clearing through apophatic language, that is, language that points out something to them and lets it be seen from itself.6 The unfolding situation is already interpreted through the customary emotions and understandings the presence of these contemporaries might provoke.7 Rather than recognizing their merit in a class-forming judgment, the Plato’s Idea Theory

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dramatic context of Socrates’ questions lets them be seen from, even choreographed in, a place. Placing them, even if the place is virtual and not real, makes them “live” in a time of their own to which we, over countless centuries, return again and again. The discussions of courage, friendship, knowledge, and the like are metaphors through which we encounter the wonder that is philosophy in its pure form. Such is the mystery the matrix makes possible. As Plato reflectively crosses over these contexts and collects some of its members by the “courage” they might be thought to have exhibited, the predicate “courage” becomes ostentatious. Courage itself, something which had before never been seen, was to be questioned about its being, as if it were independent of those in whom it more or less made its home. We may now understand this “what” structure in various theories concerning the status of general terms and raise new questions about what Plato makes present to us. But then we forget the dramatic point, for by their words and previous deeds those present with Socrates in the dialogue are now seen through this new formality, “the courageous itself,” which then takes their measure, even if no one can quite say what courage really is. We know who they are. Language is in its first instance apophantic; what it unconceals and lets be seen is what we always already understand even if what we understand eludes theoretical articulation and justification. In one sense, this is sufficient, for virtue is something to be lived in an understanding that courageously grasps the fearsome future rather than, like Nicias, puts off battles by consulting fortune-tellers. When Socrates raised the question concerning some universal “what” and we began to see its fit, metaphor was already raising vision to the level of the idea, and justification and conceptual analysis could begin. A collection of men was seen for the first time in their exemplary reality through the idea, and a new horizon founded on eidetic identities was constituted. Metaphor is apophantic. What is then seen can lose its status as a way of seeing and become something seen, the universal, one over many. Our loss is as profound as is the logician’s gain. Just as Plato speaks of the Good through its offspring, the sun, and Levinas of the other, the widow or ranger, through whom it shines, so on this view of metaphor one can speak of the Good as erotically propositioning through the lighting of the word.8 Lighting prior to the word? Don’t we know when it is the right word and when we get it wrong? The Good and the receptacle are “otherwise than being,” supplements beyond the “texts” creatures read and write in interpreting and self-interpreting. If the receptacle is not a being yet gives 88

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being a place under the suasive Good, Plato does not deserve the role Heidegger gave him in the history of Being.9 2. Participation On the whole, our thought about form is entirely too sanguine. We have assumed it to be absolute, often on Plato’s authority; and in total forgetfulness of Socratic ignorance, have situated it in our semantic space as if there were no more to it than the correct use of a term. Form is to a process as a plot is to a play being played that could have been played in many different times and places, languages, societies, and the like. Each is the play; none are its clones. Or again, think of eidos as the unity of infinity of perspectives. Eidos is the law of this unity, like that binding conic sections. Of course, it could be an artifact of metaphor. We presume perspectives on an eidetic surplus in a myth, a dance, a song, a painting, liturgy, language, a catastrophic event, a theory, a region, and the like where each may require different sorts of transformational grammars. Though sensa are eidetic, in the pregnant sense an eidos is never the look of something; though without its eidos, there would be nothing to look at. An idea is a same qua logos that gathers a many into a parameter defining paradigmatic orders and as such is to be thought—not as a monadic predicate, ϕ x, but in terms of relations. It should be noted that the following formal account captures neither the creativity, supplementation by access conditions, nor the deictic contextualization entailed in a full account of participation. Moreover, it treats the idea as an object, something known, rather than that by which what is known is known. Putting this aside, we follow Plato’s dictum that to be is to be in relation (Theaet., 157B). Therefore, participation must be an n-ary relation, R (x1, x2, x3. . .xn), where R, an idea, is the super-parameter, the idea governing a range of sub-parameters (x1, x2, x3. . .xn), where n ≥ 2. The sense object R is such a predicate whose arguments, the percipient S and perceived O, are sub-parameters: S(x1, x2, . . . , xn) and O (y1, y2, . . . , yn). R is a parametric eidos, a constant, governing a range of variation in the arguments S and O. Moreover, any parameter or sub-parameter zi is an active or passive power in accordance with Plato’s definition of being (Sop., 247E) or the active or passive motion in the Theaetetus account of perception (153D–158B). Indeed, these differences can oscillate, the sensed provoking the sensor and the sensor provoking the sensed to show itself in a certain manner. S and O, themselves Plato’s Idea Theory

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events, are now what they are through participatory relations with their past, the world perspected from their locus standi, and their possible futures. Though presented as Protagoras’s, I take it to be Plato’s canonical version of participation, the primary meaning of being (CB P, 116–156). Sensation is eidetic, as we should have learned from Husserl if not Plato, and the subparameters governing its conditions, not its causes since it is acausal, are variously neural, biochemical, physical, geometric, psychological and ontological. Levinas said sensibility is an allegory of being.10 But that cannot be an allegory about a world as an aggregate of objects, a fallacy into which I am often led when I take what is real to be the correlate of names. Heidegger’s ready-at-hand points us away from the vicious intellectualism of this present-at-hand. Sensibility is situated within such a behavioral field; and this indicates the need for a more complex allegory than I have allowed, for only in the most controlled and restricted conditions is there any isolated ideal R; R is an element in a structured field, the white one that marks a boundary in a pasture, and its value is determined by what it says within the phenomenological conditions of the field. Platonism is a theory of moral behavior in social and cultural environments. Among the embedded conditions in the subject or recipient is the imagination which allows one to see the given’s field as saturated, as Kant’s “inexpugnable representation of the imagination,” an intuited superabundance that can never be captured in concepts.11 Though this concept of saturated phenomena—developed by Marion through an inversion of each of the moments in Kant’s Transcendental Analytic—is difficult to fit into the symbolism, it must be borne in mind, especially in situations where we cannot quite say what metaphor shows. There is another obvious problem in the above: third-person accounts that speak from a distance of subjects and objects have no place in phenomenology. So far nothing has been said from the standpoint of the one to whom R is meaningful; but following Jean-Luc Marion’s analysis of the recipient, this abstract formula can be phenomenologized. Let R* be the manifest resultant of the complex of sub-parameters involved in their “middle voiced” unity, which is given as R. The recipient transforms the eventual and dynamical givenness R into manifestation R* “in and through the receptivity of ‘feeling’ . . . it lets what gives itself show itself” by giving it “its first form,” as if by a “filter or prism.” The recipient submits to the given and its filter neither disturbs nor synthesizes but is a “reception in 90

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feeling” that shows itself for thought, “manifesting for consciousness, forming for vision, what otherwise would give itself to the blind. . . . Thought arises from pre-phenomenal indistinctness” and is received as “nothing more than the feeling of existence without a concept” (Kant), “indissoluble from the feeling whereby the given shows itself.”12 This parametric symbolism is useful in making the case for a participatory interpretation of Bohr’s Copenhagen version of quantum physics to be sketched in the sequel (see below, 11:2; 11:3). Among the sub-parameters of the super-parameter S would be the instruments involved in observing and detecting the phenomena and those referring to the observer and the conditions of observation. For example, the de Broglie-Bohm interpretation assumes real trajectories and attributes their unavailability to unavoidable ignorance, while the probabilistic Copenhagen interpretation is taken by John Wheeler, Pauli, and others to be a necessary condition imposed by the incarnate observer. It is impossible, Anton Zeigler cautions, to observe and predict an individual event, and this impossibility in predicting individual events is elevated by its statistical nature to a fundamental principle in quantum mechanics. Participation eliminates these either/or disjunctions of location or velocity and wave or particle. The experimental conditions make a difference—probably, as Wheeler has suggested, a creative difference.13 The disjunction between the unitary event of the photon and the diffraction grating and unitary event enveloping the charge released when it hits a plate is an instance of the ontological principle, namely, to be is to be in relation. Plato’s is a relational ontology in which all things become in relation to something; there is no thing that is just by itself (Theat., 157B). There is no isolated photon as in David Bohm’s attempt to make the simple trajectory of a particle appear as a wave by unverifiable “hidden variables.” There is nothing existing in splendid isolation; to be is communion. “In modern kinetic theory,” Ilya Prigogine says, “the concept of trajectory loses its observational support, and dynamics has to be embedded in a winder formalism that includes stochaicity and irreversibility. This step . . . is not due to our ‘ignorance’; it is due to the very structure of dynamical systems.”14 An anarchical matrix, such as it has been said to have existed before there was light (Gen. 1:1), is the sort of chaos that, given a nonlinear thermodynamics, has as its issue unpredictable creativity. Thus the phenomenon itself could be the result of this initial context (not unlike Plato’s triangles) and would thereafter be given as a determinate on subsequent creativity. Plato’s Idea Theory

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This would be a radical, evolutionary change of form that may or may not be a response to the suasive God who, with the world, is making Himself. Though there is an alternative way of establishing the context relativity of form, that based on the “war between the giants and the gods” (Sop., 246A–249D) is perhaps the most important. Plato’s several versions of perception suggest that form, rather than being an absolute, can be apportioned to the conditions of historical existence, where these conditions are carried by the hypodoche.15 In the Theaetetus account of perception/participation, the eidos R is said to be born of the mingling of the perceived and percipient events (156D) and so is neither subjective, as in “I see R,” nor objective, “x is R.” The first places the “I” beyond being, the latter suggests its unfettered givenness. Together, we have “I see the R in (or at) x.” R is eidetic. Descartes observed in a letter to Mersenne (July 22, 1641) that “the sense organs do not bring us anything which is like the idea that arises in us on the occasion of their stimulus, and so this idea must have been in us before.” If not innate, nevertheless R is not caused by the processes implicit in the sub-parameters; they are the conditions for its occurrence. Plato frequently uses mimesis (imitation or representation) to describe the status of the participant. The generic term seems to be eidolon (Sop., 32B; Tim., 37D). Assuming that R in the above formulae is the eidolon, image or representation “red,” what does it represent? The image, the eikon if not the phantasma, is not a likeness of anything; it is the iteration of the idea, its recurrence in the other and other of time, in its power to engender images. The classical representational theories of consciousness take “red” to be a qualification of the cogito, as in “I see red.” Red is then a secondary quality, an epiphenomenon of Locke’s “power in things.” This is a consequence of taking sensa to be one-place predicates; and since a prevailing skepticism has cast doubt on the external world, they become contents of the res cogito. The predicate R as in “R (x,y,z. . . .)” is n-ary and constitutes the unity, as if its formal cause, of the perceiver/perceiving event. R is an eidolon of the idea, the way the idea is contextually interpreted by the nexus of subjective and objective factors that condition its appearing and a constant defining a range of variation in those conditions relevant to its appearing. Red seen in this light or contiguous with these colors within such-and-such neural and cultural contexts is not quite the same red as would appear in other circumstances. An eidolon is the appearing or presenting of its idea. Plato’s eidolon comes in two species: 92

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eikon and phantasma (Sop., 236C). Seeing the red in these terms is not to see it as a being, as in the above parametric analysis, but under the regulative formality of the Good. An eikon expresses more or less adequately the proportions of the original idea or is attuned to it and makes its transforming power and radiant splendor present in a representative mode, as a play is made present in its production. Unlike Plato’s and Peirce’s use of ikon, it need not be similar to what it represents.16 Contrary to what Daniel Dennett, Ernst Gombrich, and, with some reservations, W. J. T. Mitchell have argued, the original need not be open to description nor be isomorphic, in whole or in part, with its representation. The vast variety of Hindu gods and their avatars that look out at us from sacred places are not polytheistic representations but make a single God present and accessible to various persons on various occasions. In Magritte’s “This Is Not a Pipe,” the painting is not what it represents nor does it follow that what is represented; the problem of representation is a pipe. A play, a dance, an intuition, a form of life, and even you and I are interpretations of an original which “exists” only in its representational possibilities. There is no idea of dogginess in itself that is neither a chow, a poodle, German shepherd, and so forth; but the idea or common nature is a pure potential to be variously interpreted and modified, perhaps by genetic engineering, as it is transmitted from one generation to the next. The living eidolon is self-imaging even if it seems that, as Robert Musil’s Ulrich says, “everything I think I am attaining is attaining me.” An eikon is the material vehicle that presentifies a spiritual or eidetic reality. Each presentification is to be welcomed as a unique expression, as if an annunciation, of its inexhaustible arché. On the other hand, phantasma distorts and entraps by appropriating our imagination. We experience what phantasma presents through the feelings it is intended to arouse. An eikon is an expression through which we participate in the surplus it expresses, while a phantasma arouses feelings by the way it is presented to us. The originality of the phantasma is with its producer; the originality of the eikon is the arché, the originary itself. These distinctions between eikon and phantasma can been seen to be at work in getting the right red in furniture design and the red right in a painting or a design project. Marc Rothko’s large, red surface that recently appeared on a U.S. postage stamp is an eikon that expresses or makes present an indescribable affectivity. Were the same red used in an advertising layout or on Hitler’s flags, it would be a phantasma that aroused feelings. No doubt, mental representations Plato’s Idea Theory

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have a role to play in works of the imagination and even in science’s virtual conructs; but their origin in the third Meditation’s adventitious ideas—objective realities whose formal reality is questionable—renders them suspect. The sophist hides among phantasma, yet we know from Plato’s efforts to catch him that he is Protean and the line between these types is often undecidable. Parameters, unlike Nietzsche’s perspectives, are not to be taken at the expense of the thing’s substance. Thus, as in Shakespeare’s FiftyThird Sonnet, that substance cast many shadows without dissolving into any: What is your substance, whereof are you made, That millions of range shadows on you tend? Since everyone hath, everyone, one shade [spirit or soul], And you, but one, can every shadow lend. Describe Adonis, and the counterfeit Is poorly imitated after you. On Helen’s cheek all art of beauty set, And you in Grecian tires are painted new. Speak of the spring and foison of the year: The one doth shadow of your beauty show, The other as your bounty doth appear: And you in every blessed shape we know. In all external grace you have some part, But you, like none, none you, for constant heart.

“The strange shadows” are not images of the ideas, shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave; for after the critique of separationism in the Sophist, they are singularized as concrete universals or as phenomenologically saturated and are now the shadows of her shade, aspects of her substance.17 Shakespeare’s ontology is ours. Participation is erotic. This is evident in the gaze, not just of the vamp but also of the eikon. The gaze when animated by the Good is “just and loving” (Simone Weil), and what is seen is a “concrete universal,” Iris Murdoch’s term of art. Hegel maintained that the idea by itself is deficient in reality, and reality is attained only when the idea is permeated by the individual. For Murdoch, the context determines the sense of this permeation, and that depends in part on how it is seen. With the eyes of anger, you are a hideous tyrant; seen in love, you are my life and freedom. These contexts determine how the individual is described in “specialized normative words.” In anger she is crude, vulgar, a harridan but is transformed in love’s eyes; then, allowing for the usual blindness, the individual is seen within its 94

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proper perfection.18 The great moral words are not good and bad, right and wrong, but refer to these specialized norms. In the highest sense, seen in the good, you are not a bag of bones and guts nor even beyond price, but are seen through the justice that must be done to you, the responsibility I bear to you. Murdoch cites Simone Weil’s “the will is obedience, not resolution”: like grace, the will’s movement is away from the self towards the other. Beauty’s saturation is its lure.19 3. Toward Being a Theoria A theoria is a person intellectually and spiritually qualified to represent the community at a sacred event. Phenomenology’s theoria must know how to relate, to have access, to the phenomena in question. He is no disinterested observer, but brings to the spectacle his moods, knowledge, culture, and the like. These perspectival qualifications are themselves eidetic, not merely subjective, at least in the pejorative and relativizing sense. For all the paradigm relativity of his seeing, the physician’s practiced and resourceful eye before a symptom is more subservient to the truth than mine. How do ideas qualify one to be a theoria, restore sovereignty to the eyes that have been unwittingly surrendered to theories about what should be seen? Philosophers too often explain what we know, such as sense objects, by brain states about which we know almost nothing. Idea comes from the root id, “to see,” where the emphasis is on the object, which, “shining like shook foil,” invites attention. We also want to accommodate Husserl’s access conditions to the absoluteness of Platonic idea without eliminating their power to put us to the test. With a bit of tinkering, Duns Scotus’s Platonism can provide a metaphysical realism that will eliminate the virtuality, the subjective idealism, haunting Husserl’s essences or ideas. Husserl objected to being called a Platonist on the grounds that ideas are supposedly actual, while phenomenological objects are not,20 but with Scotus’s aid this can be overcome to the credit of both Plato and Husserl. Husserl’s ideas are epistemic objects, constituted meanings, while Plato’s ideas are ethical paradigms and explanatory determinates in self-assemblage. For Husserl, the conditions of access are part of an entity’s meaning that, in an important sense, is not a matter of intentions. As Levinas put this in a brief 1940 essay on phenomenological technique: “. . . situations, the intention to which is not reducible to Plato’s Idea Theory

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knowledge, can be posited as conditions of knowledge, without this positing taking on the appearance of an irrational decision. A fully phenomenological way of proceeding is to discover, for relations of knowledge, foundations that, properly speaking, lack the structure of knowledge, not because these foundations impose themselves without certainty, but because as anterior and conditioning they are more certain than certainty, more rational than reason.”21 Experience is situational; that there is an unsaid situational surplus in saying and its affective environment that governs the said is a Heideggerian theme: “The possibilities of disclosure that belong to cognition reach far too short a way compared to the primordial disclosure belonging to moods. . . . Understanding is never free-floating, but always moody [situated]. Having a mood brings Dasein face-to-face with its thrownness . . . not known as such, but disclosed far more primordially in ‘how one is. . . .’”22 None have spoken so wisely on this surplus of saying or Befindlichkeit over the said than Eugene Gendlin. His earlier “felt meaning” derives from a similar surplus acknowledged by Husserl, and becomes in his later works the intrinsic order of a situation.23 Even the simple situation cannot be reduced to colors, sounds, and smells. People and things exist in terms of living and interacting. We are observable, yes, but we don’t begin as observations. We are never just things lying around, over there, waiting to be observed . . . Our interactions involve long stories that do not consist of externalities that can be photographed. Speaking is interaction: it is a change in a situation. It changes how the story will ensue. We speak from being here . . . from being bodily in our situations, not from something being presented to someone, whether in our own perspective or in the ideal observer’s. Both perspectives are with us, but we are always here in the way in which “knows we” and “bodily” and “are” and “here” say more.24 In commenting on affinities with Gadamer, Gendlin says that body is where we are and what we act from and carries with it the sense of tradition—and more. Gendlin is the great cartographer of this “more”—this excess never exhausted in the said but always going hand in hand with, and even ahead of, it. His slot is the arché of the said and as such has its own implicate order. It is source point, the chora of language, where the full archival resources of the hypodoche are focused and situationally contextualized in the coming into being of the word. Here, in this focus, we discern the withness (Whitehead) 96

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and wisdom (Nietzsche) of the body. The intrinsic order of the situation is conditioned by what we say. We sense our situation there. We sense what might happen to us from there [“also in front and all around me”], and what we will and won’t do there . . . A situation is not a view of things over there. My is my bodily sense of living (planning, feeling, being about to act . . .) in my situation. You see someone you know coming down the other side of the street, but you don’t remember who it is. This is totally different from seeing a stranger. The person gives you a very familiar feeling. You cannot place the person, but there is a gnawing feeling in your body. That gnawing feeling does know. Your body knows who it is. Although you don’t remember who it is, the has a very distinct quality. If you had to describe it, you might say. . . . It is a sense of something messy. I feel a little as if I’d rather not have much to do with that person. . . . You might not like this, but you are not free to make it something nicer! If you try, you will notice keenly that you are no longer thinking from the . A is very exact and very precise, more precise than the common phrases and distinctions. It is not given in convenient cognitive units. It does not come in three aspects or five. You must let new phrases come from it. Furthermore, all the is not present before you. You have to go in a murky sort of down or in, or allow some sort of coming from it. . . . Nor is all of it implicit at the start. . . . As you carry some of it forward into words, the comes to imply more and more.25 A situation is not a perspective. Points of view presuppose spectator consciousness, the idea that you and I as subjects here are reporting on objects there. “We speak from being here, . . . from being bodily in our situations, not from something being presented before someone, whether in our own perspective or the ideal observer’s. Both perspectives are with us, but we are also here in that way in which ‘we’ and ‘bodily’ and ‘are’ and ‘here’ say more. . . .”26 There is a justified interpretation of Plato’s ideas and, above all, the idea of the Good, as absolutes; however, there are good phenomenological reasons for thinking that meaning is relative to a constituting ego or the language in which it is expressed. This issue will be addressed by first stating a standard version of Plato’s theory, then by making a case for contextualization that preserves both its absolute aspect, analogous to the common nature in Scotus, and its contextualization, analogous to haecceity. Plato’s Idea Theory

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First, however, let’s face it: participation is already apportioning. I will briefly summarize and somewhat modify what I have said in my earlier Participation. Ideas are determinates, initially sensible whats granting access to complex relational structures. The account of perception in the Theaetetus (156A–160C), which requires supplementation from similar treatments in Republic (507C–509C) and Timaeus (43C), may be taken to be paradigmatic; it describes how the mingling of the “subject” and “object” engenders, effects the ingression of, the sense object or eidos, the quiddity of the process. The “active motion” of the physical object, its efflux and associated geometrical conditions, fuses with the “passive motion,” the affective and interpretative parameters governing the subject’s response, so that what appears is born of their mingling. This passive motion of the hypostasis, which presupposes a vast array of archival resources, is never altogether passive. It also has an erotic or desiderative loading. As a hypostatic fold it solicits what the active motion, the hyletic phenomenal field, presents. This relation can be generalized to cover the mingling of entities from the same and different ontic regions. For example, I endure because I interpretatively participate in my past. The idea is already a relatum determined in part by its relations. Moreover, novel eidetic structures can be generated when ideas participate inter se, as in metaphor, or when prepositional lures are proposed under the causality of the Good. Metaphor is usually understood as a nonstandard concatenation of terms. There is a presumed homology between what terms say (the order of second substances and their predicates—second intensions) and the things that are (the primary substances and things “present in” and not predicable of them—first intensions), to which these terms refer (Cat., 3a 1–5). Plato is not lost “in this maze of mental fictions” (Scotus). Predication was Aristotle’s logical razor for shaving Plato’s ontological excrescencies, while his formulable ousia, “what it was to be . . .,” the essence or quiddity thought in what the stoics first called a “concept,” was an ens rationis. Thus Plato’s separated ideas found a place in the soul which is first potentially and then, in knowing, actually soul’s object (De Anima, 431a 1–4, 431b 24–30). This self-inflation has as its ironic consequence the loss of Socratic ignorance, whose issue was justice, and its replacement by the unattainable ideal of certainty found within the self-certain ego. When things begin to be thought through their relation to a logically sophisticated knower, then they become particulars (kath, hekaon), substitution instances of the universal (kathalou, koina). The latter refers to abstract 98

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entities (“predicated of more than one thing”—De Int., 17a 38), which are semantic. Aristotle intended that universals immanent in thought do the work of real, separated forms. However, a form is not a “one over many” (Meta., 990b 12), a predicate collecting a class, but is, on Gale Fine’s exemplary analysis, a metaphysical and epistemological explanatory principle.27 It is also a paradigm or measure and, as such, bears a trace of its cause, the Good.28 Whatever the affinities between Husserl and Platonism, there is a fundamental difference. Plato’s ideas are usually taken to be absolute and to exist independently of any language that might express them or minds that might think them. But Aristotle had a point, for an idea is also a meaning, a Bedeutung or noematic object. If at times, as in metaphor, it is a noetic determinate, then the noesis—a fusion of intending something as something with archival determinates by which we have access to the noematic object—is in part determinate of the noema. Phenomenological ideas fall under constitution theory. In logics said to represent Platonic realism, terms are treated as one-place predicates. If substantial change cannot be formulated in this logic, how can it express what little is left of Plato’s flux after being has been captured by the nominalizing predicate, “is ϕ ”? The final argument for a predicative view of forms—which was brought to our attention by Gregory Vlastos and was to lose much of its sting on his later Pauline reading—was their presumed self-predication property; namely, F-ness is F.29 Dr. Fine says that what seems to be self-predication is an identity statement, a way of saying that forms, unlike temporal entities such as the elements and living creatures, which are sometimes F and sometimes not-F, do not change.30 Suppose that access conditions “more certain than certainty” are also eidetic and partake of the intelligible in a mysterious way. Then conditions, such as anger, “subjectively” determine something as angry and thus as threatening. Is it heretical to extend this commonly recognized phenomenon to ideas? But ideas are always relational for, as the Theaetetus has it, “no single thing is what it is by itself” (153E).31 Are these relations external? Unless knowing does something to ideas, Socrates says, it leaves them in an everlasting isolation (Sop., 249A). In the Republic (508D), the Good is the cause of truth; the neo-Platonists extend this connection, as in Philo’s first hypostasis, to mind in an anticipation of Saint John’s Logos. The relation of the Son, the Word by whom all was made (John 1:1–3), to the Father has been taken to be a relation between ideas and God’s mind. Mind is not a tabula rasa; beyond its categories, there is also language Plato’s Idea Theory

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and culture and, above all, affectivity; these are formal determinates on what is received. Our revulsion at Hitler’s deeds or Plato’s political opinions is not a contingently empirical reaction, but what such situations demand.32 Most moral reasoning is post hoc rationalization, but Gerald Clore and his colleagues at the University of Virginia have found that emotions are like the “kinesthetic system of the inner ear” by which we are morally oriented to “the goodness and badness” of things to which we unconsciously react; these judgments form the base of rationalization. They note that one cannot change children’s behavior by moral reasoning, but one can immerse them in a world “which says moral concerns are important” (Arts and Sciences, U. Va., July 2002, 7–9). Hume saw that ideas do not explain, but he erred in taking them to be ejects of more vivid impressions and founded explanation on their contiguities and resemblances. Simon Blackburn, commenting on this tradition, observes that even when we act from “cool and calculated self-advantage, our conception of where the advantage lies is shaped and sustained by our ‘passions’: passions of vanity, of fear, of how we stand in the eyes of others; sometimes from deposits from memories of shameful failures or elating successes.”33 All that being said, reason’s access to transcendence, one root of the human soul, is ignored. Nominalism failed to let Hume see that impressions are eidetic recurrences, not mere resemblances, governing extensional and dynamical conditions and can often propose, beyond affective habitualities, de re nomological ties. Levinas says that, on the modern view, there is “no meaning in itself . . . the access is part of the meaning.”34 The only world we know is the historical world and its relativities. Meaning emerges from a free and creative arrangement of the world by art, language, religious practice, economic activities, psychological fashions, music, cinema, and the like, all of which are produced by incarnate minds and reflect progressive forms of the spirit. “The subject who is there before being to ‘welcome the reflection’ is also on the side of being, to operate the assembling.” Since Kant we have assumed that what shows itself in the foreground as an object [Gegenstand] is not a replica of the noumenal idea but has been assembled behind the scenes and invested with being by the categorially structured imagination. There assemblages are not just the work of the mind; they take place in the home, with society, in the laboratory, and the like. “The anti-Platonism of modern philosophy consists in the subordination of the intellect to expression: the face-to-face position of soul and 100

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ideas are interpreted as limit abstractions of a coming into contact in a common world; the intellect aiming at an intelligible world would itself rest on this being [the relativistic cultural expression] which the aim can only illuminate.”35 Can the soul shake off its linguistic and cultural fetters and rise to contemplate the ideas? Yes. Thanks to the Good, Levinas continues, “being as a whole shines forth beyond the given.” Levenas’s “Meaning and Sense” cleverly stacks the cards again us, but, as a matter of record, he wanted to retain one such idea, the Good. The irrelevance of contingent access conditions is vintage Plato and no Platonists would wish to eliminate the absoluteness of ideas; but besides this intrinsic essence, ideas also have a relative nature. Like a phoneme, an idea is recognized as same when displayed in various styles and types of expression and, as Saussure argued, it is a same through its differences with others. Both aspects are captured by relative absolute. 4. The Good And if the good surpasses all beings one must also say, if one dare, that non-being [the apeiron gignesthai other than being] also tends towards the Good beyond all beings . . . and participates in the beautiful and the good and, to be brief, all things come from the beautiful and the good, and all non-beings reside beyond any essence in the beautiful and the good. (Saint Denys, Divine Names V, 7,821b; 8,824a; 1,816b)

What does it mean to say that the Good is absolute? How could it be otherwise if it is beyond being and thus any relation? On the other hand, how can it give creatures place without the matrix? How can the Good suffer, die, and be buried, that is, be incarnate, without a mother? Levinas finds it preposterous: “A being affected by the invisible—of what is invisible to the point of not letting itself be represented, or thematized, or named, or pointed out as a ‘something’ in general like a this or that and, consequently ‘absolutely nonincarnatable’ [italics mine], that which does not come to ‘take form’ and is unsuited to hypostasis—a being affected beyond being and beings, and beyond their distinction or amphibole; the infinite eclipsing essance.”36 Levinas expresses an understandable incredulity at the idea of an incarnate and thus consoling and redemptive Good, but some of us believe that He was born of Mary and died for each of us, however scandalous this may be, and, unlike you and me, He is thus absolute in his ever-changing relatedness. Plato’s Idea Theory

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In both Plato and orthodox theology, God is construed on Parmenides’ model. If eros is a passion (and thus founded on a lack) directed to another, it cannot be said of God. No doubt, agape is also directed to individuals, but it is taken as the expression of a God who is being itself and thus full and complete and will leave Him unchanged. God is passionless, a studied indifference. In neoPlatonism, the middle ground between Plato and Orthodox Christianity, the end is union with the One which “is better than being and knowing.”37 This movement beyond being and knowing is evident in the Symposium. Levinas says that “the idea of effective transcendence in sociality, rather than in ecstasy, will remain foreign to Greek thought . . . love is worthwhile only because of the transcendent immobility it seeks and in which the seeking is absorbed, because the One in which the lover coincides with the loved without distinction, in which the moment of ecstasy is extinguished and forgotten.” We can see the movement away from union, if not towards sociality, in the great sixteenth-century Russian Elousa icon. The Christ child passionately “nuzzles his face” against his mother and embraces her in “eager and boisterous” love. “God,” Rowan Williams goes on to say, “is not ashamed to be our God, to be identified as the one who is involved with us; here, though, it is not as if he were unashamed but positively shameless in his longing to embrace and be embraced. It is not simply that God will deign not to mind our company; rather he is passionate for it.”38 Here an icon is positively revelatory, making manifest Saint Denys’s intuition of God as “vehement in his manifold and beneficent Eros towards all beings and spurs them on to search for him with a yearning Eros . . . in as much as He allows himself to be affected by the zeal of all beings . . .” (Saint Denys, DN, 712a–b). We must go beyond Plato in the name of Plato, to see an empowering agape in the transcendent so that we may be infected with a zeal towards others. Incarnation is an “impossible possibility” as understood with Levinas and the Fathers as the hypostatic union of two natures, human and divine, in Christ Jesus. Even if post-Hegelian Christology made an effort to reconcile the original unity of matter and spirit in history and made the Chalcedonic formulae less central, one must continue to avoid dividing the substance and confounding the persons. I begin with the Platonic model of soul in which the transcendent, the indivisible being of the early dialogues, is unified with immanent or “divisible being,” that is becoming, and while these are not Anastasias’s different hypostases, they are ontically distinct. 102

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Spirit and matter are in the hypostasis, but this, an indwelling unity, does not confound them. How this can be understood will be clearer if we make an Aristotelian digression. Aristotle took immaterial thought to be inseparable from experience and even reason was based on the immanent history of the conscious phantasm. This image, which is synthesized by the imagination from emotion, memory, anticipation, and sense, is the immanent telos of receptive sense. But from the higher end of knowledge, the phantasm is the hyle, the matter, which as the potential intellect can became the actual intellect (concept) on being illuminated by the agent or poetic intellect (De Anima, 427a 17–430a 26). The phantasm was the synthetic product of sense, memory, and affectivity and was the necessary condition for immaterial thought. The soul is said to be “pleased or pained, being bold or fearful, being angry, perceiving . . . and all these may be regarded as modes of movement (each of them is a being moved)” (408b 1–5) which though originated by the soul, require an organ. “Thinking, loving, and hating are affections, not of thought, but of what has it . . . [these are not activities of thought since] when this vehicle decays, memory and love cease” (408b 25–30). In Aristotle the soul is the prior actuality, which, like any efficient cause, moves through contact; for Plato change is the name of the game, and the problem is to vector, not cause, it. The union of spirit and body (matter) is participatory, not causal, and thus even then material should show the spiritual. This is what we have been trying to accomplish through affectivity and such phenomena as in the infant’s unlearned empathy: because of the soul’s twin roots in being and becoming, affects are already spiritual. The hypostasis is a hypostatic unity, not of two hypostheses, but of flesh and spirit, and this is how we will understand our incarnate nature. One traditionally attaches to God different predicates, such as eternal, unconditioned, and infinite, to distinguish Him from beings relative to or internally related to events in time and space. But if we are speaking of the idea of the Good, which is beyond being and the cause of being and truth, then surely it is relative to any and all contexts and quite meaningless apart from them. The Good is a principle, not of plentitude but of limitation, and is responsible, not for all things, but good things only (Rep., 280C). It persuades rather than compels the necessities. How? Here we can only speculate. Perhaps the Good effects a Dedekind cut of the infinite dyad so that all is now this some, which it then holds as a lure before the creative advance of nature. “God is,” Whitehead said, “the great companion, the fellow Plato’s Idea Theory

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sufferer who understands . . . the poet of the world, with tender patience leading it by his vision of truth, beauty, and goodness.”39 The living creature can accept this lure as its future by its own decision, that is, by effecting a cut in the continuum of becoming. As it cuts it also prescinds the eidos, which could be a novel potential in its self-gathering. What determines the cut? There are many possible voluntary and involuntary causes, but of special importance is a response to the call by the Good of what He requires of us.40 In the Phaedrus myth the return from time spent with the gods (552C–553C), the “image” of the god we followed, determines how other persons are received. Though this self-gathering is rule governed within the erotic project of “becoming who you are,” the paradigm that gives the rule is another person, the role of the likes of Abraham, Buddha, Christ, Socrates, or Babe Ruth. It thus seems that our self-interpretations under the form humanitas are personally diversified; Plato’s Jungian scenarios must be supplemented by genetic, environmental, social, and linguistic factors, which, as we will see, pertain to the receptacle—which, with the higher responsibilities occasioned by the Good, singularize the decentered hypostasis. In the Symposium this between is the habitat of Eros. Like his mother, Poverty, Eros is a needy creature seeking to fulfill his lacks, sensible and intelligible. It thus seems that the “erotic” process of assimilating the other by the same is less concerned with the integral beloved than with some eidetic quality that fills a lack in the lover. This erotic being with others, if not being face-to-face with them, is not without its responsibilities. Need may not signify a lack “we can only be content with by eliminating or avoiding.”41 On the other hand, the Good, as if by its initiative, deconstructs this self. As beyond being, it transcends this intentional and appropriative process and institutes “a desire of another order . . . which no capacity comprehends, that no foundation any longer supports, where every process of investing fails and where the screws that fix the stern of inwardness burst.” The Good, Levinas continues, “hollows out a desire that cannot be filled, nourishes itself with its very augmentation, and is exalted as a desire . . . it is a desire beyond satisfaction” which is “dis-interestedness, transcendence—desire for the Good.”42 If, as Compte-Sponville maintains, eros is an empowering conatus founded on a lack, desire does not exist only “when want is perceived as such, but is ‘disinterest’ as “dis—inter—esse,” a joyful (Spinoza) cut away from my being for the sake of the other. This is not a transformation of eros into agape, but rather the birth of its possibility, not 104

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in Plato as if by recollection, but through the initiative of the Other who alone can awaken one to the infinite, the incomprehensible mark of the Good. As far as it goes, this is magnificent; but it is really far too narrow; for I suspect the possibility of self-transcendence was there from our beginnings. If the self is first an affectivity that is to become self-affective, this is not necessarily narcissism. Affectivity is Bradley’s inexhaustible feeling that, like an organ continuo, grounds all developments, including the God’s initiative. Republic II seems to identify God with and limit his power by the Good (379A–B); Saint Denys, Maximus the Confessor, Scotus Eurigena, Bonaventure, and others kept the Good alive in the Christian tradition. Fusing the Bible with a Platonism that stresses the primacy of the Good is to invoke a God who really isn’t anything except a verb form and thus nothing that can be named. Were it not pedantic and incongruent with Heidegger’s original intent, we could follow Jean-Luc Marion and place “God” under erasure. If we do not assume with the Latin West that God is an intelligibility that exceeds ours, but assume with eastern orthodoxy that he is (like Levinas’s infinity) beyond knowing, though not mystical experience or through his energy (Palmas), then some of these difficulties will be obviated. The Patriarchs knew that proper names do not always connote essence; that “God” is one such name, is beyond affirmative and negative predication, and calls us to participate in a new life. “The aition [cause] of all things is not one of them . . . and comes from the total love beyond all things” (Saint Denys, DN, I, 5,593c–d). This Good beyond being cannot be thought; it constitutes but is not Parmenides’ same for thinking and being (frag. 3). Can we somehow experience a God who is “without Being”? When Moses asks God in the burning bush for his name, he receives a verbal promise—ehyeh asher ehyeh (Rosenzweig’s “I will be there howsoever I will be there” or Buber’s “As the one who will always be there, so shall I be present in every time”—Exod. 3:13)—and not a name “that would appropriate Him to some thaumaturgical property. Instead, God keeps himself open for a future allowing for a more radical translation of his nameless name.”43 This is different from the imputation of Being, the ipsum esse of Augustine or Aquinas, which haunts its translation into English from Greek and Latin by “I am” in which Parmenides triumphed over life. Neither the New nor the Old Testaments attribute “being” to God. The New Testament reveals that “God is love” (1 John 4:8). However, in Saint John’s “o Theos agape estin,” agape is a noun and thus suggests a being, but agape is derived from the verb agapan, Plato’s Idea Theory

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which isn’t any kind of being. The concept of hypostasis lets us transform a verbal determinable into a nominal determinate. When this engendering and verbal agapan is “seen” through the Good beyond being, it is then hypostasized as a pluralized Trinitarian agape. When I am addressed by the other, intentionality comes up against the other’s inassimilable face “beyond manifestation and intuitive disclosure” and the “opening, like a reverse conatus, an inversion of essence, is a relationship across an absolute difference.”44 I cannot intend the face of this other perceptually or through the groping, grasping hand; only saying, even where nothing is said, bridges the difference between me and the one who addresses me. We are both beyond being. The idea of infinity is this absolute and noncontextual difference. Prior to this reversal, the other could have been an object of eros, if not desire, within the preferential scope of my conatus; in the “gentle presence of the feminine” I first encounter the other, if not as, then on the way to the Other. Vulnerability is possible only because the Good has made one receptive, where receptivity is a fundamental affectivity and not any sort of apperceptive synthesis; it deconstructs the “I think.” “The goodness of the Good declines the desire it arouses while inclining it towards responsibility, preserves difference in the non-indifference of the Good, which chooses me before I welcome it.”45 Do I experience the Good beyond being only as deflected on the other? I think not, but it is true that we experience God’s energies only as mediated by a text, a Christ, an avatar, a prophet. If I cannot see him, I can hear his call to love and serve. I sympathize with Levinas’s need to preserve an Absolute Good to which I am in a proximity that absolves us from the classical sense of relation and property. In this relation, John Llewelyn continues, “my uniquely own mineness is my unique thineness, my unique being at your service, but without being your property or your slave.”46 He acknowledges that being responsive to and responsible for another requires that I not go out to her/him empty handed; I must have goods to give if I am to sacrifice; this “entails this embodiment and these goods.” But the God who says, “Come unto me all ye that travail and are heavy laden and I will refresh you” (Mat. 9:29) or “who so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son to the end that all men who believe in him shall not perish but have everlasting life” (John 3:16) addresses me in my vulnerability and promises salvation. The relation to the infinite Other is through an incarnate Other. And how will we see Him? “No man has seen God; if we love one another, God 106

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abides in us and his love is perfected in us” (1 John 4:12). He is, Saint Denys says, “the ungraspable aitia that comes from the total love beyond all things” (DN, IV, 16, 713c). The gifts of grace have this love as their cause. In this sense, as Levinas said of the Good, it deflects itself on the other to whom I owe love. His responsiveness, thematized as Spirit in the World, requires a passivity beyond passivity, the mutual passivity of indwelling love.47 Up to this point we may have Levinas with us, but when we come to God’s kenosis, his self-emptying and, by taking on human nature, his physical situatedness, we begin to part ways. Be that as it may, we are on the same ground when Levinas says there is “a psyche holding its intentionality as one holds one’s breath . . . a pure patience: an awaiting that awaits nothing, or hope where nothing hoped for comes to incarnate the Infinite . . .” For Levinas the Good is infinite and beyond appropriation and this makes its access condition, the face of the other, “a moral summons” to which I relate as an interlocutor. The infinity of the other is not the correlative of the finite, but is something that overflows him and deconstructs my ego. His infinity is the transcendence of expression, not of power, and his first word is, “Thou shall not murder.” “Infinity presents itself in the ethical resistance that paralyses my powers and from the depths of defenseless eyes rises firm and absolute in its nudity and destitution.”48 True, but it can also present itself in less deconstructive moments in the vulnerability of everyday love of one’s family or colleagues and in the fragile beauty that surrounds us everywhere. Platonism is not without its problems. It sometimes seems as if things are mere images, if not clones, of an eidos, which, in turn, images God. Yet, as William James noted, when we see all things in God and refer all things to him, “we read in common matters superior expressions of meaning . . . the outward face of nature need not alter, but the expressions of meaning in it alter. It was dead and is alive again. It is like looking on a person without love, or upon that same person with love.”49 Beauty evokes eros in a way foreign to Good, and since Beauty is always the beauty of something, especially persons, then the orthodox Christian effort to personalize the convertible transcendentals, such as Truth (Son), Good (Holy Spirit), and Being (Father), is well taken. For example, we could speak of the being of truth and define it as the way the Father is in the Son. Aquinas says that beauty pertains to form and is proper to the second person in virtue of his integritas, consonata, and claritas, which James Plato’s Idea Theory

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Joyce rendered as “radiant splendor of form.” Though one can imagine a decorator saying, “It would be beautiful here,” aside from such vulgarities, beauty is not instrumental. It is intrinsically good in a goodness that denatures need and transforms it into desire; and while the good is beautiful, only in its aspect of beauty does it evoke passion, Plato’s sprouting of wings. It remains haunted, at least in our age, with “What’s it good for?” as if that was all that could be said about it. To say creation is beautiful is to evoke an engendering eros, as with young lovers in a travel ad, or the urge to care for the destitute. A flayed ox, a dying beggar on a Calcutta Street, or a cotton brokerage in New Orleans is not beautiful unless Rembrandt, Mother Teresa, and Degas frame it and make it so. Even when we turn away from beauty and frame urinals or elephant dung, these move by its betrayal. Plato’s creature is a living image (Tim., 30D) and does not exist just because it sublates its sensible differences in an archetype or instantiates a form, but rather because it makes a place for itself through its contextual interpretations, its imaging, of forms.50 It engenders on beauty, on symmetries that range from the mechanical resultants of primal forces, such as snowflakes, to those of the human body and the gods. Beauty is the only Platonic transcendental convertible with the Good and extends the deconstructive work of Levinas’s Other, its phenomenological vehicle, to all phenomena. To do justice to this claim would require a measure of time and patience none of us possesses, but, happily, Jean-Luc Marion’s brilliantly sustained argument in Being Given concerning the “saturated phenomena” has done much of this work for us. Beauty, a saturated phenomenon, gives itself absolutely apart from motivation or cause, aim, intention, without any concept and prior to any horizon, outside any relation, even causality. It is paradoxical, counter to all appearance, expectation, and opinion, and though, Marion notes, its appearance contravenes “what previous experience should reasonably permit us to foresee,” it nevertheless belongs to the sphere of truth. The synthesis, if there is one, “is accomplished without and contrary to the I, as a passive synthesis coming from the non-object itself, which imposes its arising and its moment on and before all active intentionality of the I; for the passivity of the “passive synthesis” indicates not only that the I does not accomplish it actively and therefore suffers it passively, but, above all, that activity falls to the phenomenon and to it alone. Thus indeed it does show itself, because it gives itself first—in anticipation of every aim, free of every concept, according to a befalling that 108

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delivers itself.”51 The Other is a saturated phenomenon that subverts the I. So too is every beautiful thing. We first encounter the Good in the Phaedo when Socrates introduces his ideas as the theory “judged to be soundest” and then he assumes whatever seems to agree with it. This entails “the existence of absolute goodness, beauty, and magnitude, and all the rest of them” (100C). He offers no proof beyond this intuitive appeal. Even this appeal may be denied in the case of the idea of the Good, which the Republic says is beyond being and the cause of knowledge and truth (508E–509A), and thus unavailable as an intuitive “presence.” If we throw away the beautiful images that are springboards in the dialectic leading to the Good, wouldn’t it be too austere to provoke love? Beauty makes God desirable. Does Plato identify the Good with God? This is suggested in Republic II (379B), and surely there is something god-like in being the cause of reason and its objects (508B), of the ideas and of their being known (509B); but the full identification had to await the neoPlatonists. Still, there is a problem if the Good is an idea and thus a being. Introducing the theory through the light metaphor suggests that, since idea (whose root id means “to see”) could mean “aspect,” it is a way of seeing. If neither Good nor Beauty is a being, then it is a way of seeing beings in their goodness and beauty. To understand what it might mean to see things under the aspect of the Good, substitute Good for Being in Aquinas’s hermeneutical formula “Being is first in the apprehension absolutely, the understanding of which is included in whatsoever else a man understands” (ST, q.94, a.2). In the proposed revision, the Good would be first in the apprehension and implicit in all acts of understanding, where understanding would fall under “I can” (praxis) and not “I know” (episteme). That God is not a being nor “god,” a name, should give ontotheism pause. The God who spoke to Moses in a burning bush and who, as love (agape), was for the Christian incarnate in Jesus was not a being. Socrates said love (Eros) is no God for he “has no part in goodness and beauty” (Sym., 202D), but perhaps through eros we have a part in creating a good and beautiful human world. Going beyond Plato to a God who loves us is not necessarily to go beyond the Good, as Saint Denys or Meister Eckhart can teach us. In one sense, Denys is too close to Plato, for the Good seems to elicit eros whose telos is a union with God that does not express itself as agape; but once the Good is known in kenotic revelation to be agape, the fact that the lover is a person in interpersonal relations should, Plato’s Idea Theory

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but probably doesn’t, take care of that. Being able to seek God or the Good is by natural (eros) or supernatural (agape) grace. The need is not union with but proximity to God. We do not need to go beyond that which comes towards us. “Let us call upon the Trinity, which is the source of good and is beyond good [sic]” (Saint Denys, DN 3, 680B). In a text cited by Derrida, Eckhart says that “Goodness is a garment under which God is hidden.” But suppose, as I shall propose in the final chapter, that the Trinity is the hypositization of agape? If, as Derrida says of Denys, “God is the Good that transcends the Good, the Being that transcends Being,”52 then even after Derrida’s magnificent explication of these great texts, we must part company. The Good and then beings must be released from bondage to Being. Traditionally good is a transcendental convertible with being, like true and one, and is either determinable, as in the goodness of being, or determinate, the being of goodness. “Being is good” is the second act (energeia) of being (De Anima, 422b 20), the thinker thinking or the mathematician teaching or doing sums. Being’s goodness makes it desirable, self-sufficient, electable, and intrinsic. Good is said of both God and creatures, because it is a perfection properly apportioned to the nature of each; God is always necessarily pure act and thus wholly good, while our virtuous acts are occasional and, together with our nature, contingent. Thus the goodness of God is not like ours in this analogy of being, but He can be said to be good because He is the non-univocal cause of his creature’s perfections. But if the Good is beyond being, how can one think it? What else is one to think if not being? Nothing? Are we really supposed to think the Good? Ideas figure in conversations about justice and the other virtues whose issue is the state of the soul or polis. The use of the Biblical call to characterize participation in the transcendent suggests that the ideas expressing the Good, their cause, could be obligations thrown over us and not entities to be thought, and the point of all this is to respond to its call. Perhaps something like this openness to the other was in mind when Plato said that the separated ideas prevented God from knowing “things of our world” (Par., 134D). In Philebus, the Good was said to be one of the four kinds “who fashions all things,” mixtures of peras and apeiron, “from which it is clearly different” (27B–C). It is with the matrix, a supplement from beyond being. Unlike Plato and his neo-Platonic followers, we must understand the Good as pluralized and multifaceted, if not context sensitive to chora and what she will accept and allow to prevail. Unlike the eternal Good of Plato and the neo-Platonists, this Good dwells among us in 110

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history, and what is appropriate or inviting or challenging or impossible is a function of context and, rather scandalously, this is a matter, not of reason, but how we find ourselves amid the disasters, pleasures, joys, sorrows, needs, and injustices of the world. These are the necessities reason must persuade. It is often unsuccessful; like Creon in Antigone it forgets the limits. The problem of evil that haunted religion’s Perfect Being is still with us. Isn’t it in poor taste, if not callous, to say, “The Good shows itself, even in the faces of the dispossessed and in disaster, in suffering and death?” Beauty anesthetizes. Can we do better in unwarranted suffering than the grumbling Job? Can we really and thankfully accept what shows itself in the midst of such destitution as the twin towers in New York? The light by which we see evil is, as Saint Denys the Pseudo-Areopagite says, “from the Good and is an image of goodness” (SD, 697c).53 In his Mystagogia, Saint Maximus the Confessor says that “God is the Good” (SM, 78) and that “goodness reveals God” (74). But there is a meaning of evil that is beyond the Good and eludes the suasive power of a loving God. Affects are implicit evaluations governing how we “see” ourselves, others, and the world. They are communicable, as one sees in advertising, political conventions, mobs, or the way some relate to us, entraining us in grim designs. To put it mildly, affects are not always benign, and, as Hannah Arndt said of Eichmann, even banality can be harnessed to serve evil. We are factical and decentered, neither captains of our fate nor rulers of our soul (Henley); on the contrary, we “are ruled by powers we scarcely understand” (Auden). Though the great religions have something to say about evil, there is neither a common agreement nor an altogether satisfactory account of what it may be. Its problematics come up in the paradox of an apparent incompatibility between the Goodness and omnipotence of God. As John Hick gives the classical argument (Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 3:136–141), “If God is all-powerful, he must be able to prevent evil. If he is all-good, he must want to prevent evil. But evil exists. Therefore, either God is not all-good or not all-powerful.” We have taken the line that God is Good and his power is limited. I presume that we must begin with his creation of the receptacle as field of energies from which creaturely beings will go their own way as befits a chaotic plurality of inter-active systems with resulting “accident and loss.” Though these stochastic systems are creative and so will of themselves issue into more complex and stable forms of order, they are also amenable to divine persuasion Plato’s Idea Theory

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and sometimes accept the ingression of higher forms. As Brian Hebblethwaite says, this is by an “imperceptible persuasion exercised by the divine Will on the chaos of natural forces.” The loci of these forces is the contextually defined receptacle that, through persuasion, gathers itself into an appropriate sense of chora. Persuasion sets “a bias on the positive and achieves the creatures.” God makes his decentered creatures make themselves in their own way.54 There are many supposed sources of moral evil: the devil; original sin; Freud’s cosmic Empedoclian thanatos; remotion from the Good; or the short view in a world where all works together for the good. However, malignant evil seems to me to be a matter of autonomous and powerful affects. Some forms seem to be identifications with a malign logos that, like a Jungian archetype, gathers us up—or entrains us—in a demonic and destructive form of life. In this identification the usual distance of participation is overcome and one is as if possessed by the archetype or some bizarre chemistry and, like Faust, driven by a strange obsession for wisdom and god-like power. Like the energetics of a tidal wave, the intellect is driven by resentful rage or an insatiable Faustian hunger that, granted the amplifications available to the human voice, can entrain others in its dynamism and sweep away or gather up into itself whatever stands in its way, promising empowerment but finally destructive of freedom and even life. Carried away by a calculating hatred, it is as if some manic god led the Arab fanatics to their own death in destroying thousands in the Twin Towers. As in the so-called Stockholm syndrome, parents who prey upon their children sexually or manipulatively take them up into a form of life in which they apparently willingly participate and find hard to shake. At the other extreme from these pathologies of the feeling intellect are those of more private vices associated with intellectual feelings. Evil seems embedded in the hypostasis that arises from such affects. For most, childhood training domesticates emotions as virtues within frameworks (Charles Taylor) or lifestyles (Plato) that articulate the Good. Nevertheless, there is also within the hypodoche a demonic possibility of evil founded on an initial anxiety that can lead to resentment, sexual frustrations, separation traumas, hatred, spleen, an avaricious ego, and the like. In earlier times these overpowering emotions were associated with such gods as the orgiastic Artemis at Ephesus or Sparta and Cybele in Anatolia. Those who in complexity theory want to construe things as purely self-forming and without any transcendent paradigm have only to look for evidence at those who are truly 112

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evil. This is a pathology of the intellectual affects, which order the world around passion’s cool and clever calculations, as if by a longrange will, and can lead to abominal consequences. Those same emotions that carry the three-year-old into an oppositional and destructive mode and normally lead to a sense of self can, if not challenged, lead to hatred and rancor. Something like Levinas’s il y a is always with us and, if internalized, can erupt in wanton destruction. A man fired from his job can walk into his old office and slaughter former colleagues. A child can carry a gun to school and kill those who were dismissive of him. Perhaps all of us can be swept away by decentering passions and darker motives. The surrender of selfinterest in empathy is only one side of the coin. We can surrender it to evil as well. Joseph Butler gives the example of the man who ruins himself for the sake of revenge. The self whose interest is in question is often monstrous. Confronted with the unspeakablility of such horrors as Bosnia or the Holocaust, some have found that “the upwardly transcendent finds its mirror in the monstrous” so that, as John Kearney remarks, “there is an apophasis of the monstrous analogous to an apophasis of the divine.” Himmler is reported to have said that the Holocaust was a “sublime and sacred glory that could never be written, spoken or represented” that partook of “an unspeakable sacred order.”55 The other who like Hitler or James Jones is the messenger of such tidings is hardly the other that deflects the Good, but to those fascinated by the monstrous, his appearance may render the apophastic poles indistinguishable and, as Simon Critchley says, deconstruct “the border dividing the ‘Illiety’ of divine transcendence from the il y a of abysmal immanence.”56 Undoubtedly Levinas and Derrida exasperate this undecidability by the radicality they associate with the appearance of other in full alterity “beyond all horizons of human or historical anticipation.” This appearance deconstructs the self, “ravishing it like a thief in the night,” and leaves it without the power to reflect or judge. For that reason I will attempt to retain a more responsible self who comprehends and judges God within a tradition “narratively remembered as a God of promise and justice recorded in scripture, parable, and psalm” which “teach us how to look at God.” This hermeneutical approach of Ricoeur, Gadamer, and Kearney is a salvation from contamination by this evil, an evil no doubt arising from the projection of our demonic il y a and its shadows onto the other whose powers then entangle us.57 Plato’s Idea Theory

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The stories that we tell ourselves to orient ourselves along the way, especially those that begin with a divine call or visitation, can take a more frightening turn. Their meaning lies not in propositions but in one’s response. When that of which we speak exceeds conceptual categories, like Abraham’s call and journey into the wilderness, it may open into a land of unlikeliness, of impossible possibilities.58 The way opened leads beyond being and into the proximity rather than into the presence of the Good, and the Good will appear only through its traces in the imagination, the between of reason and sense, and its intellectual feelings or affects that never quite precipitate into Cartesian certainty. The Good’s offspring may envelop itself in being and thus present the possibility of analogical, if not metaphorical, discourse that leads in an apathetic or mystical theology of light to the threshold of the Good. But such talk is only of a threshold and not yet in the Good’s proximity. As Meister Eckhart says: “When we apprehend God in Being, we apprehend him in his threshold [Vorbürge], for Being is the threshold in which he resides. Where is he then in his temple in which he shines in his sanctity?” (1:150). But if we seek to go beyond this threshold, how shall the Good beyond being be said? Is he on his threshold? If so and that is where we are, need we go further? Or like light, is the Good encountered only in another? For the time being let us avoid such exalted topics and deal with more mundane crossings. When the words in “metaphysical” metaphors cross (chiasmus), when in “A is B” B crosses over and dwells in A and conversely, the issue, if all goes well, is an open in which beings are lighted and seen anew, not by an understanding of Being, but by light that is the gift of the Good. In the formed metaphor “A is B,” B sprang from a fecund A (chora) when it was crossed by a “meaning to say,” and conversely. Llewelyn says that “a chiasmus is neither an eclectic, a collocation of externally related parallel lines. Nor is it a dialectic, a synthesis whereby two apparently contradictory opposites are both assembled in a neutralizing third. If it is not a dialectical contradiction, however, neither is it a contradiction of classical logic. In some sense the parties to a chiasmus belong to each other, complement and supplement each other.”59 Because the between crossed is most often the medial imagination, the expressions generated in this chiasmus will exhibit many of the ambiguities of the middle voice. This between (metaxu) is an avatar of Plato’s chora, the generative place that gives the word through which a world, an enduring structure of meaning and value, appears. How? Metaphor, an epoché, brackets out the violent, elemental forces, the 114

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linguistic surplus, and the not-always-benign forces that come between the saying and the said. Before we cross over, move in, and make the elicited subject our dwelling, we should know that what is “home-like,” heimlich, also has the opposite sense, unheimlich (uncanny), and already deconstructs itself. It is as if we maintained our identity by using these linguistic forces to reduce alterity to our own measure, to a form we can appropriate or with which we are comfortable. We often fail. Suffering is not always redemptive. This is the world in which the metaphors of art and religion too often effect a magical and consoling closure. Sometimes we may be driven out of this Eden of familiar metaphors, as by an angel, to become as gods (Gen. 4:22). Levinas says: The world, foreign and hostile, should in good logic alter the I. But the true and primordial relation between them, and that in which the I is revealed as preeminently the same, is produced as a sojourn in the world. The way of the I against the “other” of the world consists in sojourning, in identifying oneself by existing here at home with oneself. In a world that is from the first other, the I is nevertheless autochthonous. It is the very reversion of this alteration. It finds in the world a site [chora] and a home. Dwelling is the very mode of maintaining oneself, not as the famous serpent grasping its tail, but as the body, on the earth exterior to it, holds itself up and can. The “at home” is not a container but a site where I can, where, depending on a reality that is other, I am, despite this dependence or thanks to it, free . . . The site, a medium, affords means.60 Rudi Visker notes that before one can seek the interiority of a house, one must become one’s own home, become a being to oneself against the apeiron il y a.61 The house gives shelter from the elements, the il y a, but the victory is insecure. “Indeed, no sooner has ‘existence in general,’ Being without beings, ‘anonymous and inexorable,’ opened itself to ‘leave room for a private domain, an inwardness,’”62 than it [the il y a] seems as it were to change its mind and starts closing in again as if to undo that opening. Responding to this menace, Merleau-Ponty says that consciousness is first an “I can” and not an “I think.” It is “being toward the thing through the intermediary of the body,” where the body is the matrix with which I go forth to work together with others and in which I am at home with myself.63 Home, not Husserl’s transcendental ego, is the condition for freedom; but home, rather than being a Heideggerian immersion in the world, is Plato’s Idea Theory

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also where we welcome the stranger. Then we may hear an appeal, which may take us beyond security and dread. 5. Contexts and the Idea Classes Life, “the living being in his organization,” is the context of all contexts. This is the theme of Humberto Maturana, a biologist, and Francisco Varela, a cognitive scientist: our experience is moored in our structure in a binding way. We do not see the “space” of the world: we live our field of vision. We do not see the “colors” of the world: we live our chromatic space . . . the phenomena of knowing cannot be taken as though there were facts and objects out there. The experience of anything out there is validated by human structure, which makes possible the “thing” that arises in the description . . . Every act of knowing brings forth a world.64 Scholastic philosophers may not have known that life is itself apportioning, but they discussed the context relativity of form as apportionment to esse, an idea borrowed from Arabic sources. Granted that it is created ex nihilo, that is, in a radical dependence, which is, paradoxically, “exteriority to the system” and thus a grant of independence and freedom, it is still the case that the hypostasis is more or less self-apportioning. Exteriority, the coming from elsewhere of the given or gift, which is, paradoxically, “intrinsic to the given phenomenon” and, as Marion has it, is its phenomenological mode of appearing rather than its metaphysical cause or condition. The arising into appearing of what gives itself in appearing always bears the marks of an ascent to the visible, an ascent I attribute to chora, which is no being, the originary givenness. Marion understands that this ascent is free and autonomous so that coming forward from elsewhere does not necessarily indicate an origin or, as gift, the agent of an exchange. To the eyes of faith the story may be different. Since Plato, the self’s hollowness, its decenteredness, points beyond. Is this sense veridical? Of course not. But when the self is defined as arising in the givenness of the given, it is pretty thin, like the stickmen we once drew. Taking the self morphologically, it is first a reflexive fold in receptivity and a reflective opening into various forms of time. When we arrive at the instant in genetic analysis (see 11–12 below), this will be developed in some detail. 116

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Thisness (haecceitas) is something a hypostasis brings about by apportioning form to its deictic conditions in such a manner as to preserve its ability to make and keep promises and commitments. Saint Thomas’s analogia entis is a classical example of apportionment. However, this apportionment pertains to properties, such as wisdom and power, which are differently allocated in God and creatures, and not to those forms that constitute infima species; but Cornelio Fabrio has shown that Aquinas abandoned what Cajetan called “the analogy of names” and turned instead to participation in esse, which limited act by its native potency.65 In several places in his Book of Causes, Aquinas spoke of “reception according to the recipient” (106, 149, 157, 158). If we can eliminate these act/potency implications in favor of a medial reading that respects the verbal and nominal sense of the participle ens, being, then being in place and its encapsulated parameters is determinate situation. In medial contexts, such as sensing or saying, the recipient is also an agent, so that the received entity, eidetic or otherwise, is constructively acted upon: a determinate becomes a determinable. Plato speaks of the sensed as born of the mingling of streams from both the perceiver and perceived. We create these streams, this field, in which we are experienced by our moods, gestures, thoughts, and the like. Watch Hitler or a fundamentalist cleric entrain a mob. Pets live in and pick up our intentions. Examples and experimental evidence for this power of the mind to constitute morphic fields that influence others can be found in Sheldrake’s The Sense of Being Stared At. Even more important is the way a contingent historical development, such as technology’s Gestell, can constitute contextual fields and give an eidetic form to civilization. Contextualization raises at least three issues we have not yet faced. What are the sorts or kinds of ideas; second, how do these kinds participate; and from these follows the third, contextualization. The need to show the participation of being in becoming and becoming in being is brought into focus by the war of the giants and the gods in the Sophist (246A–251C) in which, lest we be left with the separated ideas, we must make room among them for being, which, in turn, cannot “exist without motion, life, and mind.” Otherwise, it could only “exist in solemn meaninglessness an everlasting fixture” (249A). Overcoming separationism requires that ideas and events mutually participate, that is, make a difference to one another. Thus becoming contextualizes ideas. But this raises a major difficulty, for “ideas never receive nor go out to any other” (Tim., 52A). At the same time, the receptacle is, Plato’s Idea Theory

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as Derrida will say, ever Virgin, never having been marked as she receives the imprint of all things (50B, 50E). At this point I, as a Christian, part company with Plato, even if as a Platonist I remain within his orbit. We have already allowed the Good to hypostasize itself as the Logos by whom all was made, which then in a kenosis took upon Himself our flesh and form and dwelt among us. Unlike the ideas, which never go out from themselves, He denied Himself his trapping of power and invulnerability that mark the Logos (Mt. 4:1–11) and went out from Himself in vulnerability to others. But that entails the rejection of grounds for the bifurcation of flesh and Spirit, body and mind. The Son and the Holy Spirit, the personal aspect of God immanent in the matrix whose icon is the Virgin, are reciprocally determinable and determinate, thanks to the creative role of the matrix and its Spiritualization, which I was brought to understand through the Zoodochus Pege (see 4:1 and 5:3 below). As chora, she juts out, as Heidegger says of her avatar the earth, as a determinate to solicit the Good to then, as hypodoche, be determined.66 This reciprocity or indwelling between chora and the Good establishes a neighborhood, the between. In the opening pages of the Parmenides, the young Socrates appears to distinguish at least three idea classes. Because I have discussed these in Participation, I will characterize them only briefly and indicate how they relate to contexts. First, there are constitutive ideas, the non-degree admitting “mud, hair, and dirt” (130D) the young Socrates is reluctant to entertain. Secondly, there are regulative ideas, such as “justice, beauty, and good” (130B), entailed in the constitution or formation of paradigms relative to lifestyles or frameworks, the practice of the arts, institutions, politics, cultural formations, and the like, whose instances admit of more of less. Finally, there are transcendental ideas (129E), said in the Sophist to mingle with one another and everything else, and, as “the all-connecting terms of discourse,” these articulate how the other ideas mingle and separate. The Sophist seems to have purged the set given in Parmenides and lists “its greatest kinds” as one, many, same, other, being—and maybe rest and motion. (254B–256B) A constitutive idea, such as mud, is always what it is and is neither more nor less mud, but if you are making an adobe house, then you will want mud that satisfies certain standards, which determine it to be more or less good. Husserl will call these eide, “ideas in the Kantian sense,” to distinguish them from the more empirical ideas, which he identifies with Plato.67 While both regulative and constitutive ideas 118

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can function as meanings, they are also metaphysical and play a role in the constitution or formation of paradigms. Regulative ideas are standards and criteria governing changes or processes. Formally speaking, relevant or apportioned regulatives can transmute an eidetic determinate into a determinable, whatever its type and class, whether singly or in conjunction. For example, the red (a determinate) I just splashed on the canvas is not what it ought to be (as determinable) and requires further determination; the political constitution (a determinate paradigm) now (as determinable) needs revising; or “Why don’t you be a man?” which my father might have said to determinable me who had all his determinate biological parts. Regulative ideas can occur at any level, real or virtual, ideal or deictic, and in one or other of these roles are constituted from being and becoming. In the case of pure or higher-order regulatives, the distinction between nature and artifact is fuzzy. For example, the grants of function and right following from the constitution are, assuming the consent of the people, so much a part of one’s nature as to be worth dying for. The Donation of Constantine, a forgery, was a real historical determinate. History is determined by error, fiction, duplicity, and the like more than justice. Evolution is possible only if something more-or-less artifactual becomes material. The initial determinable it, an eidetic kernel, is often involved in distinct events and, like the point of a metaphor, cannot be independently described. What is the real x? It is all those things it appears to be in phronesis. It you think of the x as independent of its participatory relatedness, then in some cases this may seem to attribute to it contradictory properties, such as the particle or wave interpretations of the photon. Call to mind all the parameters and sub-parameters entailed in its appearing, and then to say the idea exists apart from these relations isn’t to say anything intelligible. When it is entertained through a grill or by an “electric eye,” these are different events. The white seen in different conditions is a same as different, bluish in the sun and yellowish in the lamplight. The world that is being created now will be within these chosen parameters, the white under this or that lighting, the proton under this or that experimental setup. But what is true of photons is true of God and politics. This is where justice comes in. The various religions and even cults within a single religion often contradict one another, and here the traditions of the faithful may function like the grating and plates of quantum theory. The Abrahamic religions and other theisms, like the attributes in Spinoza, may be ways the intellect perceives God “as if constituting His Plato’s Idea Theory

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essence.” To see the Good through justice is to see multiple alterities; to see it in beauty is to see the single individual. Derrida has recommended Abraham as a common basis, but where does the classical Buddhist fit in? Since the Good is perspected in and stands in judgment over each religious viewpoint, some sects and practices may be too barbarous to count as a justified access to God. Minimally, the absolute is, as Levinas recognized, the other as Other whose integrity and rights must be respected, however ambiguous the carrying out of this injunction may be. The Good is always in relation and forms with the community of the faithful or circle of belief a unitary phenomenon.

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4

To Feel and to Know

Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply That it is not heard at all, but you are the music While the music lasts. T. S. Eliot

1. The World Soul Thanks to Whitehead’s rather elliptical mention of the consequent nature of God and recent discussions in quantum mechanics, the Holy Spirit now may have a relevancy it has not enjoyed since Joachim of Fiore, Hegel, or Karl Rahner. The way beyond being is dual; there is first the rather uranian Good (agathon) beyond being (Rep., 509B) which is the cause of knowing and being, and then, in the late dialogue Timaeus, its chthonic supplement, the procreative receptacle that gives beings place. Though neither is on the surface a promising subject for further discourse, we will find the chthonic aspect to be of special importance and relevant to theology. The Good and the matrix can hardly be named, much less known. That might well be the end of it, except that in our religious tradition the Good reveals itself as love hypostatizing in a Trinity one of whose members became fully human and lived among us. Why? That we might dwell in Him and He in us and thus participate with Him by whom all was made in a new creation. I welcome this kenosis, but 121

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would Plato? Perhaps not. There is also the even more elusive Holy Spirit who would, on Jesus’ promise, be with us as a Comforter. Granted that you and I will do most of the comforting, still Christ’s invitation in the “comfortable words” of the Anglican Communion rite, “Come unto me all that are heavy laden and I will refresh you” echo in my heart and I cannot reduce our Savior to responsibilities to others. This immanent aspect of God is usually taken to be the work of Providence; we shall, with the help of the anima mundi and some recent physical theory, integrate it into the archival doings of the hypodoche. We can bring these great classical principles into the neighborhood of Faith with the help of ancient myth and an icon that illuminates the hypodoche and the writings of some Greek Fathers who will close the gap with the Good. The latter were either oblivious to or in ignorance of Aristotle and worked within neo-Platonic and even Platonic schema. They found in apophatic theology a way of ascent to God as this ineffable and unknowable Good. One must begin with the Good as cause (aitia), taken in terms of God’s self-emptying initiative, and not ascend to it from the world with which there is no proportion and no analogy. Though I gloss Marion’s term “distance” as “proximate alterity” within the rubric of participation as koinonia and not as his “imparticipable participation,” it is an important approach to patristic mystical theology. Patristic theology recognized neither the way of affirmation nor negation, but sought a way beyond them in which the divine names direct one to a non-object from whom, as Marion says, “one receives determinations so radical and so new that they speak to me and shape me far more than they teach or inform me . . . They expose me to what lets itself be said only for the sake of no longer permitting me to say it, but to acknowledge it as goodness, and love it.”1 “The unthinkable, as the distance of Goodness, gives itself, not to be comprehended, but to be received. It is therefore not a question of giving up on comprehending (as if it were a question of comprehending and of not being comprehended). It is a question of managing to receive that which becomes thinkable, or rather acceptable, only for the one who knows how to receive it . . . If love reveals itself hermeneutically as distance . . . only love is able to welcome it.”2 Does an emphasis on distance instead of proximity neglect the latter’s attendant vulnerability and thus religion’s chthonic roots? Our Apollonian frameworks hover unstably over their Dionysian roots, which are most prominent in the orgiastic religions of the 122

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earth mother, in Ti’amat, Gaea, Cybele, Artemis, and the like. Early myths said something about the mystery of divinity that is eliminated by their Christian successors who rejected from its earliest times any effeminaton of the Godhead, even though the familial language of the Trinity requires a mother, even as devotion to Mary—reflected in such titles as Queen of Heaven and Mother of God and expressed in encyclicals on her ontological status, such as the Assumption or Immaculate Conception—provides a place for her in the deity. These, and efforts such as John Paul’s to enshrine her as Mediatrix, are misplaced. Nevertheless, they testify to a need to feminize God. Better that she be a symbol (Kant) or icon (Marion) of the Spirit. The effemination of Spirit and not the divinization of Mary, who would be her Icon, would go a way toward meeting the need to bring the feminine into these mysteries. Icons that make this chthonic appeal are to be found in numerous European representations of the Black Virgin. In the chapel in the crypt at Chartres, for example, she is represented—the original was destroyed in the French Revolution—as crowned with oak leaves. One can proceed from her presence in the mass through the crypt by the sacred well into the lighted nave and the labyrinth. Unlike Plato’s cave, which on one reading is an escape from the mother, this ritual is less a sacrifice than an ontophany, a plenary manifestation of being. The cathedral is itself an icon for the cosmology in the Timaeus. Its power is that of a sacred place, hedra, manifest in its name “cathedral.” Since Jesus was baptized in the Jordan and sought drink from the Samaritan woman at the well ( pege) (John 4: 1–42), water has been a symbol of the Spirit. Not always. According to Saint Albert, “The woman contains more liquid than the man, and it is a property of liquid to hold things up easily and to hold onto them poorly. Liquids are easily moved; hence women are inconstant and curious. Woman is a misbegotten man and has a faulty and defective nature in comparison with his. Therefore she is unsure of herself . . . And so, to put it briefly, one must be on guard with every woman, as if she was a poisonous snake and the horned devil.”(Commentary on Aristotle’s Animals, 15, q.11) This nonsense has informed the attitudes of Mother Church. Better to think her as the receptacle in the image of the sea, whose foremost characteristic, W. H. Auden said, is its “perpetual motion, the violence of the wave as tempest; its power may be destructive, but unlike the desert [which haunts Derrida], it is positive. Its second is the teeming life that lies hidden below the surface which, however dreadful, is greater than the visible. As this appalling ocean surrounds To Feel and to Know

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the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horror of the halfknown life.”3 With Mary these waters should have undergone a transformation. What had been a symbol of blind and irrational force is in part domesticated by dwelling, “the gentle presence of the feminine,” who is “welcome in itself.”4 These forces that surround even Tahiti always threaten rational control and self-understanding, the dwelling we erect and struggle to maintain against the elemental. Mary symbolizes hope that love will triumph. The chiasmatic crossing of God and Mary should transform our understanding of both. God would now be seen in Mary, his icon, as effeminated, while Mary would assure for women a part in creativity hitherto left to the masculine God. In seeing God through her submissiveness, patience, and loving care, he becomes the loving and caring Father and not the God of battles; while we see through her that the creative principle in divinity that gives being, power, and life is feminine, and Mary herself, if she is to be a type for women, as anything but the meek and mild nobody of religious tracts. The waters of death are still there, still those of an elemental and affective apeiron gignesthai. Violent anger, jealousy, greed, revenge, disrespect, and the like are not abolished, but her gift is the “impossible possibility” of an “insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy.” Mary is the arché of the waters of baptism and healing, the “living waters” of salvation (John 4: 13–16). Henry Adams’s Mont Saint Michel and Chartres makes the point that God seen through her is Love, an island of refuge and succor, and is no longer the cruel oriental potentate slaughtering the infidels as celebrated by the Psalms, troubadours, or in the fabric of a fortress-like Romanesque basilica. The great Cathedral of Notre Dame at Chartres and the Zoodochus Pege are revelations of new ontological dimensions of deity through which she, in turn an icon, is best understood. With the aid of our icon and Timaeus, I will make an effort to disclose this creative source of beings and a more integral vision of God, ourselves, and the participatory structures that govern these relations. Together with its meanings as purification, life, self-reflection, violence, death, and the like, water retains all things, though often as dissolved or otherwise transformed. This retentiveness, associated by Plato with the receptacle, is a vital element in the transformation of Mary through the Zoodochus Pege into an icon or symbol of the Holy Spirit. This can open us to a deeper appreciation of the role of God in the ongoing creation of the world. I will take up and develop these 124

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points in greater detail in the sequel. For now, please be satisfied with a sketch that suggests the importance of the Zoodochus Pege as a representation of the anima mundi, the Timaeus world soul or spirit. What? The anima mundi? Though she is not exactly respectable, let’s give her a hearing. It is through her that God is immanent in the world. Newton spoke of space and time as God’s sensoria. That presence of things to God is preserved in the anima mundi, an image that fuses Plato’s world soul, usually represented by water or a woman, with the Holy Spirit, which impregnated these with life. Avicenna, the great Muslim philosopher, reminds us that Spirit points beyond Christianity: “He is the spirit of the Lord which fills the whole world and in the beginning swam upon the waters. They also call Him the spirit of truth which is hidden from the world,”5 while the Hebrew Genesis begins when the Spirit walks upon the waters. The anima mundi symbolizes the immanence of God, the providential Spirit, which was later to play a major role in alchemy and, with Plotinus, Leibniz, Hegel, and Whitehead, lead into panpsychism. I once thought it highly unlikely that physical particles, electrons, photons, and the like have any share in such memories, but now I am no longer so sure. One of Plato’s most powerful images is of the receptacle that is always gold and never golden (Tim., 50A). This is seriously challenged by Aristotle in Metaphysics Z, where it is argued that the en suffix (as the translators have it) indicates the accommodation of an inseparable hyle to its supervening “substantial” form (Meta., 1032b 30–1034b 18). Put otherwise, for Plato the chemistry of in vivo and in vitro contexts is the same, but not for Aristotle. If the “elementals” show emergent properties, such as heated water will show in certain convection cells, the structure—and not the constituent—changes. The field theoretic synchronicities, affinities, and transformations that, for example, photons or electrons exhibit in transportation point to something like a coordinating cosmic Spirit. This is acknowledged by Anton Zeilinger who, with colleagues in Vienna and Salzburg, has demonstrated that a particle modified here and now can by quantum entanglement and transport instantaneously qualify another a considerable distance away. Star Wars’ “Beam me up, Scotty” is no longer wholly a fiction. Entanglement means that if two quantum entities interact, then no matter how far apart, changes in one are instantaneously recorded by the other. Bell’s theorem has a similar import. Bell began with Bohm’s assumption that a “hidden variable” accounted To Feel and to Know

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for the way an electron, a particle, might appear as a wave through a double slit and rejected, for example, the proposal I favor by John Wheeler that there are no isolated particles and the universe gives birth to communicating participants. Bohm assumed that local measurements on one photon cannot affect those on another, but this has been shown to be false. The modification is in fact instantaneous, as demonstrated by Alain Aspect in 1982. Einstein’s choice of the velocity of light as a cosmological constant may be untenable. While it will not do to base theology on contingent physical fashions, it seems that the coordination is the work of Plato’s world soul or the Holy Spirit. Aristotle said that mind was the form of forms. Something like that is true of the hypodoche, which is never private, even if my access to it (or what I make of it) is mine alone. We have called it the archive of certain determinates, structures and, yes, ideas that have been assembled over time as potentials for the iteration or analysis of order. Error as well as truth can tweak the affects and make history happen. We must take a lesson from Jung who allowed historical phenomena to become archetypal. In the Sophist, Plato gave artifacts, such as sponging, an eidetic status (228A). The fact that a product of evolution, art, or technology can function as if a paradigm, a structural invariant for later individuals of its species, should not give us pause. Paradigms embody the Good, apparent or real, and sorting this involves coordinating it with the work of Spirit. For Whitehead the graded order of determinates germane to the present instant or occasion, which, like Leibniz’s monad participates in the world from its own locus standi, is the work of God’s consequent nature. Each perishing occasion (Whitehead’s name for his granular, temporal analogue of Aristotle’s ousia) is received into God’s consequent nature, “transmuted into a living ever-present fact,” and passed back to its successor occasion “according to its gradation of relevance.”6 In other words, the past is internal to the present, not by Augustine’s distension of the mind, but through God, who grades and orchestrates it to achieve “solidarity” with the whole. I assume this is also the role of the anima mundi or, as I prefer to say, Spirit in the world. This constantly and simultaneously readjusting field that is atomized here and now is evident in quantum phenomena and it could well apply also to the initial conditions for those unpredictable and enduring structures that Ilya Prigogine, Mae-Wan Ho, and others show issuing from a similar chaotic becoming. The harmonious adjustment of each of these self-forming entities to one another is not, however, preestablished but must be reestablished at each successive instant. 126

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Though this patterning of deictic or hyperdochic structure pertains to the reign of Spirit, there is none of the triumphalism of Leibniz’s theodicy or Hegel’s progression of its forms (see 11:1 below). The arguments for Plato’s instant can be used to give an occasionalistic interpretation to physical entities that are analogues of Plato’s stoicheia (see 12:1 below); and this atomicity is over and above their cyclical transmutations (49C); the “volatility” (50A) of becoming always resists nominalized description.7 The “receptacle of all becoming, its wet nurse, as it were (49B)—that receives all bodies that must always be called the same . . . for she never departs at all from her nature” (50B), is the medial becoming of the original being/becoming distinction (27D).8 These processes have their own implicate order, but, unlike the deterministic scheme proposed by David Bohm, its explication is not implicate—it requires the decisiveness of the now. Hence my appeal for temporal atomicity, which allows continuity to become. The time is irreversible, but this is not the usual position. David Bohm illustrated the standard position by asking one to imagine a large glass cylinder with a container of glycerin mounted on a turntable. If a dot of black ink is placed in the glycerin and the cylinder turned, the ink disperses; but if counter-rotated, the dispersion will return to the dot. “So in the implicate fully dispersed state,” as David Harrison explains Bohm’s example, “we have enfolded the motion in space and time of an object throughout the glycerin.” Bohm also gave us the image of holograms to model the way the whole is in the part, to which I will give an occasionalist application. Through Spirit and its work-up of the archives of chora the emergent receives that whole. We have modeled Plato’s participation on perception in which observer and observed form a single event whose unity is given in the sensed eidos (supra, 3:2). John Wheeler and Wolfgang Pauli take this event to be central. Pauli is reported by Zeilinger to have written that what “is physically unique cannot be separated from the observer anymore—and therefore falls through the net of physics. The individual case is the occasio and not causi. I am inclined to see in this occasion—which included the observer and his choice of the experimental setup and procedure—a revenue of the anima mundi (of course in “changed shape”) that was pushed aside in the seventeenth century. La donna émobile—also the anima mundi and the occasion.”9 Because the connection is almost self-evident, I brashly integrate, and in the process modify, Plato’s anima mundi, Whitehead’s “consequent nature of God” and the Holy Spirit. The most radical To Feel and to Know

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difference between the first two and Spirit is that the latter assumed, besides the ongoing creativity common to all, an original act that is ex nihilo, and the assumption behind this is that living beings are not accidental strangers but have a home in the universe. We are not panpsychists and do not attribute the attunement of physical entities of lower grade to a spark of mentality or the implicate order of enfolded patterns but to Spirit. She orders the hypodochic archives to produce environments fit for the fully besouled hypotheses that can integrally shape their futures. Chaos has its own order. We can see this in Eugene Gendlin’s “intricate order” at work as we await the appearance of the word in the empty slot: The poem is unfinished. How to go on? The already written lines want something more, but what? The poet rereads the written lines. The poem goes on, there, where the lines end. The poet sense that that edge there needs (wants, demands, projects, entwirft, implies . . .). But there are no words for that. . . . Many good lines offer themselves; they try to say, but do not say— that. The blank still hangs there, still implying something more precise. Or worse, the proposed lines make the . . . shrivel and nearly disappear. Quick, get that line out of the way. . . . The . . . seems to lack words, since it understands and rejects the lines that come.10 The physical receptacle has its own implicate order; its elementary triangles forming its stereometric elements are initial determinates (peras) of a determinable apeiron gignesthai, “indeterminate becoming.” As forms, these triangles always are and never become and are given as conformal necessities on, not artifacts of, the creative god. Are they epiphenomenal resultants or eidetic determinates of more primordial forces? They are both. I am making an effort to accommodate both physical entities and the hypotheses in an archival, cosmic memory that renders them systematically and effectively present to one another in their unity and differences. The instant—Plato’s granular unit of creation to which we give an ex nihilo spin (Par., 255E–160B)—that receives, interprets, and transcendently supplements this past is itself modeled on the world soul (Tim., 37D) and thus partakes in both divisible and indivisible being, same, and other, then it receives the past within both parameters in frameworks or lifestyles valuated by the Good. I always wondered how prayer was supposed to move a pure act of being, but 128

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is seeing the Spirit active in the archival hypodoche an answer? A demonic and threatening il y a (Levinas), symbolized by the likes of the orgiastic Dionysus hidden in the soul’s archives, struggles against the more benign Spirit. The il y a is not something against which we can shore ourselves up in a dwelling; it is, as Visker argues, internal and always with us, never wholly exterminated by the Good. One cannot detach oneself, and in the inevitable return to oneself, one encounters the il y a. Levinas neglects to notice that until now the il y a had been an external threat to the subject and thought there was “nothing in him” by which he might be destroyed.11 We know otherwise. We are all too familiar with the psychic pathologies of an autistic apeiron il y a that wrecks havoc with all that falls in its path. Stoics have known that the “inside” is not without its resources. Raleigh sat in the Tower awaiting his execution and, having written a history of the world, could say in his great sonnet, “My Mind to me a kingdom is . . .” With some help from Leibniz we can permit Plato to approach interiority in his instant, which, as we will see (see below 12:2), is not unlike a monad whose only windows are on the future. The instant is a granular and ex nihilo duration born with a past received under a valuation, thanks to the gifts of archival, cosmic memory. It then interprets, revalues, and supplements what has been achieved to be transmuted into a potential for the world being formed. We follow Descartes and Augustine, even Pauli and Whitehead, in searching memory for God. If what Mary is showing us in her Zoodochus Pege icon is true, all nature moves and has its being in Spirit’s sheltering womb. But what chora inherits is a thermodynamical chaos that does not determine a predictable future and, as Ilya Prigogine has shown, is the condition for creativity. Much of the work of creation is done by the matrix. Both Derrida and John Caputo have observed that matrix talk seems to invite the negative predications similar to those used in negative theology. Does this mean that the matrix is divine? No. The created apeiron gignesthai is a nothing that nothings and is never anything definite, but thanks to the indwelling Spirit, she gives life and resources to make something of it. Her gift is that of being, take it or leave it, through a secular and sacred past. Moreover, what is inherited is a set of proposals for an assemblage, not a form per se. The creature reads the text, but unlike complexity theory, we assume that, while textual dissemination and its differential play can largely determine what it reads, the creature is prior to the instructions. To Feel and to Know

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It may have been misleading to speak of the matrix and the Good as supplements. In orthodox theologies, but not in Plato’s, the matrix was created and seems to appear in Genesis as the earth “without form and void” (Gen. 1:1); as such it is nothing. No matter. Both are outside the reign of Being and together make possible nature’s ontic text. The text metaphor highlights the idealistic, assimilative aspects of participation that assures one that the world always already shows itself as significant and signifying. Sense is Berkeley’s universal language of nature. Sometimes, as Descartes noticed, we must read it through the parameters of mathematics, but then animals, even E. coli, read it in part. Palimpsests on nature’s text, such as languages, customs, histories, myths, gene replacement, electric power grids, cloning, works of art, and the like, overlay and even fuse with nature so that the distinction between what is natural and what is artifactual is difficult to make. In any case, never assume that we approach nature through concepts, that “maze of mental fictions” (Scotus) we inherited from Aristotle, Aquinas, and Kant, which set us on the road to representational thinking. Whether artifactual or natural, we see form in the facts though the formal structures that we contribute. We must approach experience hermeneutically, putting nature to the test as we let ourselves be tested. If metaphor cannot reach the supplements, it can envelop and open a creative and disclosive place between being, the ideas or determinates that are always and are never becoming, and the indeterminate apeiron gignesthai, which is always becoming and never really is (Tim., 27D). This gap is metaphor’s home. Metaphor can range over these formal determinates and extensive determinables and, as an analogue of participation, creatively exhibit and even effect their unity. Beyond being and the range of metaphor is its cause, the Good (Rep., 509B), while becoming presupposes as its extensive condition the mysterious creative and procreative matrix, which, with some unintended help from Duns Scotus, can be understood as giving each being place (chora), its this (haecceitas) and its there (Da-sein). This procreative chora/receptacle is the mother, the creature engendering arché; meaning is its phenomenological analogue. If the creature incarnates form and the attendant possibilities of universality in the “maternal” or individuating features of its being, then approaching it in metaphor can also disclose both its formal or eidetic and deictic dimensions. We do not regard becoming from the standpoint of a value-positing will to will the “preservation and enhancement of life,” and then 130

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understand the resulting hierarchy of differences in terms of a “lust to rule” and the correlative submissions of its opposites, the others qua differing drives, instincts, and so forth in a replaying of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic.12 Instead, we assume an affective becoming in which, lacking a transcendent solicitation, nothing (no thing) becomes.13 Plato and Whitehead see it as creative and procreative. 2. Phenomenological Foundations The difficulties presented to metaphor by the Good are not those of the matrix.14 Since it is said by Plato to respond to the persuasions of reason (Tim., 88A), perhaps we can find metaphors that do elicit this receptivity, which—as it does not answer to the ontological predicates active/passive—must be a receptivity of a mysterious kind. Can we find therein traces of the Good, especially when “it” gives eidetic horizons in response to reason’s persuasion? It could be objected that metaphor is semantic and has nothing to do with constituting horizons, that is, letting things be seen objectively. Rather than being phenomenologically disclosive, it is a way of saying something about something in terms more appropriately said of some other thing. A bridge crosses a gap, so “bridge” is said of a dental appliance. But its polyvalence renders it suspect, for a word must have only one meaning if reasoning is “not to be annihilated” (Meta., 1006a 34–1006b 13). In a metaphor this meaning is transferred onto another on the basis of a resemblance, as if awareness of resemblance were prior to the metaphor. Does metaphor really entail, as Aristotle said, “giving something a name that belongs to something else”? (De Poet., 1457b 6). Yes, of course; but this substitution thesis confuses the issue, for metaphor rests on intuition; we see in the linguistic space of one term or, if reflexive, through their chiasmatic play, a world opened through the signifying intentions or interpretations of the crossing. We must first come to recognize the richness—not the positivistic limits— which words confer on sensibility, if we are to rescue experience from conceptualists and nominalists called to rescue us from Platonic mumbo-jumbo. Does truth depend on univocity? How else can we have science, save through carrying over things into and onto number? Like Pythagoras’s truth about harmony seen in whole numbers, Faraday’s truth about electricity in the flow of a liquid, Hölderlin’s truth about metaphor as “flowers of the mouth” or, in general, of almost anything mapped onto the semantics and syntax of a language, truth is mediated. Hence Plato’s appeal to the thing itself, the To Feel and to Know

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idea, through the mediation of the name, which is language relative, and images (7th Ep., 342A–D). The idea, not a semantic interchange, sanctions metaphor and translation, its near cousin. Metaphor is often a double mediation; when something x is newly or freshly seen through the metaphor “A is B,” I see x in A through B, and conversely. I could be said to transport or carry B to A, but now even talk of carryover is suspect. Echoing Donald Davidson, Richard Rorty says that metaphor has no place, no truth value, or cognitive content in a language until it “dies” and becomes a commonplace literalism or creates a new language game. It is a way of breaking off the conversation by producing an effect, like slapping or kissing your interlocutor.15 In this game there is neither showing nor saying, neither inside nor outside, and language is returned to its signs or to the sophist. Nietzsche’s expression that truth is a mobile army of metaphors need not deny the truth of metaphor, as Rorty claims—metaphors being expressions that have yet to be transformed into literal language games or to introduce new ones, as Copernicus created a new literal paradigm when the sun was no longer seen to rise but to stand stable in the sky. Truth is a matter of situation and interpretation, but not all metaphors are equally perspicacious. We must retain Husserl’s belief that we see the world through language that is, in turn, rarely self-referential. Rather than talking of the transfer of meanings or expressions awaiting a meaning, we should talk of seeing what a term designates as interpreted through the semantic space of another. Alexander Mourelatos suggests that Parmenides uses the copula as hermeneutical; whatever the case with Parmenides, metaphor’s copula is hermeneutical, a matter of seeing something as something. To see something objectively is to see it categorically, as a thing, an aggregate, part of a whole, a relation, an eidos, and the like, in what Husserl called nonsensory intuition. The red in the assertion “The book is red” gives “red” as part of a whole; but we can also speak of it as a red being, and then the book becomes one of many possible instances of the eidos red. Categories are not imposed on sense but are implicit in perception itself. “We see what one says about the matter.”16 Phenomenological seeing is not a matter of inner sense or a representation; it is objective and always implicitly eidetic. As Heidegger said: “Concrete intuition expressly giving its objects is never an isolated, single-layered perception, but is always a multi-layered intuition, that is, a categorically specified intuition.” Metaphor can let us see some of these eidetic layers and reveal the objective structure of 132

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a thing or state of affairs. To say that metaphor is “constitutive” is to say that “it lets the thing be seen in its objectivity.”17 Husserl’s idealism confuses the issue. Heidegger recognized this as early as 1925 in his lectures, published as The History of the Concept of Time, which is his most sustained discussion of Husserl and an altogether masterful introduction to phenomenology in a route leading through the sixth Logical Investigation. He mentions the pervasiveness of Cartesian immanent consciousness whose structure was “not thought in the original manner” required by phenomenology by Brentano, Scheler, and Husserl: “Even today intentionality is taken simply as a structure of consciousness, of acts . . .” (PT, 46). Husserl’s impending subjective idealism was evident even in the first Logical Investigation, where animated signs replaced indicative signs and signification seemed to have fallen prey to silent soliloquy. Though Dasein is not consciousness, the existential analytic in Being and Time was haunted by egological themes, which were then replaced by an earlier concern with Being and then the Ontological Difference. Though both Husserl and Heidegger recognized that givenness is central, in Husserl’s “Principle of Principles” it is said that “we must take the phenomena as they give themselves,” where givenness is understood as given to consciousness, and consciousness, not givenness, became primary.18 Heidegger also took givenness to be absolute, and Husserl’s detour into consciousness was the issue behind Heidegger’s break. In the 1930s Heidegger came to believe that nihilism was the issue of the history of being and would, with the help of Hölderlin, make possible “another beginning” that would take one beyond its nihilistic implications. Levinas anticipated our path in comments on a text from the Cartesian Meditations. “The peculiar attainment [of internality] is the uncovering of potentialities implicit in the actualities of consciousness . . . [in] what is meant in its objective sense . . . Every cogito as conscious, is, in a very broad sense, the “meaning” of the thing it intends, but this “meaning” exceeds, at each instant, that which at that very instant is explicitly intended . . . it is laden with more that extends beyond. . . . This exceeding the intention in the intention itself, which is inherent in all consciousness, must be considered as essential to that consciousness.”19 Phenomenology need not begin with the intentional givenness of an object to a self-transparent consciousness; one could take the more realistic route with the recognition that intentionality in its directedness to objects “does not grasp their meaning but only an abstraction in an inevitable misunderstanding.” To Feel and to Know

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This is because, Levinas continues, the “bursting forth of the intention upon its objects is also an ignorance and a failure to recognize the meaning of the object, since it is a forgetting of everything that the intention contains only implicitly and that consciousness sees without seeing . . . Intentionality designates a relation with an object, but a relation bearing within itself an implicit meaning.”20 If there is a surplus in the noesis, there is a greater surplus in the noesis that resists intentional disclosure. The meaning of the thing intended by consciousness “exceeds the intention in the intention itself,” and this excess, inherent in consciousness rather than in history, is, Husserl contends, essential to consciousness.21 The history in the world that Heidegger, not Husserl, joins is also the history of things, which are not altogether posited by constitution or construction. With this breakdown of a perfect concord between noesis and noema, should one think of construction as a persuasion of the necessities by mind (Tim., 48A)—which, though it may bring the “greater part of created things to perfection,” leaves open the door to incommensurables and Derridian “dissemination”? Moreover, the phenomenological subject rejoins history to discover the possibility that sedimented noema hidden in the earth or receptacle are necessary for phenomenology and their secrets can be partially desedimented with a metaphorical epoché. These reflections establish a bridge to Plato. 3. Affectivity In my general feeling at any moment there is more than the objects before me, and no perception will ever exhaust the sense of a living emotion . . . We have experiences in which there is no distinction between my awareness and that of which it is aware. There is an immediate feeling, a knowing and being in one, with which knowledge begins. F. H. Bradley

Whitehead experienced the dawning of a new awareness of the fundamental nature of affectivity for understanding ourselves and our world in the first book of Wordsworth’s Prelude. “It would hardly be possible,” he said, “to express more clearly a feeling for nature, as exhibited in entwined prehensive unities, each suffused with modal presences of others.” These “Presences of Nature in the sky and on the earth” that “impressed upon all forms the characters of danger or desire” haunted 134

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the young Wordsworth and made him aware of situational affectivity. Chora gathered him into nature’s archive. What Whitehead calls entwinement reappears in recent physics as holistic, quantum entanglement.22 Heidegger’s Dasein is also open to the world in feeling and mood before there is a subject or an object. Primordial affectivity frees there for the gift of the other unencumbered by representation or intention. This elimination is an aim of Jean-Luc Marion’s important Reduction and Givenness. Marion begins by observing that some years after the fact, Husserl spoke of his Logical Investigations as a “breakthrough work,” and then considers what he and his successors, Derrida and Heidegger, could have meant by this “breakthrough.” Was it through Husserl’s extension of the range of intuition from sensuous to categorical and even eidetic intuition that Heidegger, following a clue in the Sixth Investigation, was led to Being and then on to the Ontological Difference? This route culminates with an intuition of Being mediated by angst. Or was it the theory of signification in the First Investigation that led Derrida to renounce intuition and the intention to the things themselves for a virtually autonomous signification terminating in the deconstructive program announced in différance? Or does the breakthrough lie, as Marion says, “neither in the broadening of intuition, nor in the autonomy of signification, but solely in the unconditioned givenness of the phenomena”? To whom are they given? How are they given? As ready or present at hand to ecstatic Dasein? To intuition as intended by transcendental apperception? As representations to the Cartesian cogito? As an I’s auto-affection? At least in those contexts where intentionality breaks down, such as being face-to-face with an other, the I, stripped of its constituting intentions, it is left naked in his vulnerability. Affectivity is the ground form of experience which, through emergent self-affectivity and then self-consciousness, opens the possibility of representation. But it is equally an opening to givenness. The ego is nonreflexively engaged with the other prior to language, representation, or intention. Michel Henry and Jean-Luc Marion tell of a way beyond the ego cogito and, with the aid of Bradley and Borch-Jacobson, beyond self-affection. While Levinas never explicitly invokes the middle voice, “satisfactions” invite such descriptions. “The upsurge of the self beginning in enjoyment, where the substantiality of the I is apperceived not as the subject of the verb to be but as implicated in happiness (not belonging to ontology but to axiology) is the exaltation of the existent as such . . . One becomes a subject of being, not by assuming being but To Feel and to Know

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in enjoying happiness, by the interiorization of enjoyment that is also an exaltation, an ‘above being.’23 In happiness the world is “for me”; but this is the world of self-affection, not that of the res cogito; it is neither the object of a representation nor the mineness of horizons; neither is the “me” a self-reflection. Heidegger speaks of a similar transparency in the context of readiness-to-hand that, when interrupted by an alterity, can shift its focus to something present-at-hand or cope with contingencies. Transparency (Umsicht, “circumspection”) is a nonthematized seeing that is absorbed without being reflective. Francisco Varela says transparency “is a readiness or dispositional tendency [or habitus] for action in a larger field of specific ontological readiness, that is, an expectation about the way things in general will turn out.”24 The relation with myself is accomplished when I stand in the world that precedes me is an absolute of unrepresentable antiquity. The bit of earth that supports me is not only my object; it supports my experience of objects . . . The relation with my site precedes thought and labor. The body, position, the fact of standing—patterns of the primary relation with myself, of my coincidence with myself—nowise resemble idealist representation. I am myself; I am here, at home with myself . . . immanent in the world. My sensibility is here. Sensibility is the very narrowness of life, beyond instinct, beneath reason.25 The more-or-less diachronic time of happiness can give rise to a reflexive consciousness, which leaves behind its medial and chorastic roots. In reflexive consciousness, the future comes back to me through the past; when I say something and I want to get it right, it comes back to me as having been expressed; I hear what was said or pick it up from the response of others so that I can explain, apologize, correct, and the like. These ecstasies presuppose the diachronic time of medial becoming from which they can stand away. The time of Cartesian extension can be represented by a variable whose domain is the real numbers on coordinate axes that integration then eliminates. This virtual time that comes down as if from on high must be reconciled with Descartes’s granular temporality. God creates the world at each moment, and because consciousness, starting again in each “I think . . .”, is not causi sui and can neither assure itself the veracity of memory nor its future existence, embodied or otherwise,26 the time of the I is the time of Zeno’s arrow. Each moment is externally related to its own past or future. 136

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For all the many things that can be said against the usual interpretation of Descartes, something very powerful can be said on his behalf. If the indubitable “I think . . .” obtains whether or not we have a body, and thinking is first affective, then a moment has been captured that must be acknowledged in any account of human time. Thought can also bracket out its bodily base in standing out toward a transcending alterity and, on returning to itself, reduce this other to a same with itself. Actuality, past or present, does not define possibility, but something is possible only if its ingression makes sense. The theme of the reduction of alterity to a same has been familiar since Plato’s circle of the same crossed and assimilated that of alterity and Aristotle identified mind with its objects; the result is Levinas’s totalities that encompass being. But in this appropriative movement when Descartes finds that his thought can encompass all things, even make them its modes, he encounters within an Alterity, God, who lies beyond the limit of intentionality; and though this reduction of God to a being (ontic) obscures Being in the Ontological Difference, by showing that He is infinite we discover that the infinite cannot be assimilated to a concept. He made possible Levinas’s way to a radical transcendence. Descartes allows another opening; the return to the self is not to the object self, the self included in the procedural doubt, but to its formal embodiment here and now. Granted the systematic ambiguity of chora, bodies are its vulnerable modalities. Merleau-Ponty says that “experience discloses beneath objective space, in which the body eventually finds its place, a primitive spatiality to which experience is merely the outer covering and which merges with the body’s very being.”27 This proto-spatial/temporal matrix makes possible the fundamental structures of koinos, such as vulnerability, sensitivity, and even saying. This primordial spatiality is, in Lacoue-Labarthe’s words, the “place without place of the advent.” Levinas saw that for Descartes body is implicit in the position taken up in thinking. The body excluded by the Cartesian doubt is the body object. The cogito does not lead to the impersonal position, “there is thought,” but to the first person in the present, “I am something that thinks.” The word thing here is admirably exact. For the most profound teaching of the Cartesian cogito consists in discovering that thought is a substance, that is, as something that is posited. Thought has a point of departure. There is not only To Feel and to Know

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a consciousness of localization; there is also a localization of consciousness that is not in turn reabsorbed into consciousness, into knowing. There is something that stands out against knowing that is a condition for knowing. The knowing of knowing is also here; it somehow emerges from a material density, from a protuberance, a head. Thought, which instantaneously spreads into the world, retains the possibility of collecting itself into the here, from which it never detached itself . . . In spite of its sleepless eternity, it can begin and end in a head.28 The “something that thinks” has a body, the place (chora) from which one lives and the condition for its vulnerability. This original affectivity that can receive the gift of alterity is founded—not on the thought of the body, but on its incarnate reality. François Raffoul makes the case for Heidegger that responsibility begins when we take upon ourselves our opaque and ineluctable thrownness. The facticity in which we find ourselves in “affective dispositions” is beyond will and cognition. These self-affections are also hetero-affections. Dasein is “always already being with others and with others not of Dasein’s nature” and is thus primordially dispersed.29 This being with others (mitsein) is so essential that Heidegger rejects empathy as something accruing to a subject and not something primordial.30 Dasein is already from infancy open to others. Egoism is a defective mode of being. Though I too begin with affectivity as primordial being-with, my medial reading also places it beyond the willing and cognitive subject. Moreover, facticity is less a matter of the opacity of thrownness than the opacity of creation ex nihilo and our freedom to resolutely accept or reject the burden of being thrown upon us. Proximity, a mode of being-with, makes possible separation between persons. Though Levinas says proximity is asymmetric, this is not necessary; the Christian prays that we may dwell in God, and He is us. Moreover, the attempt has been made to show that the possibility of an approach of the other in whom we are affectively entangled is also legitimate. But from Levinas’s point of view, this would threaten the Other, the Good, with contextualization. Though I walk partway in Levinas’s tracks, I have a different destination. On my Platonic model, we are incarnate beings who discover who we are in the Incarnation. Jesus wept. The Good dwells with us. God is vulnerable. Beauty is its icon. We are singularized already by fear, pain, loves, despair, dread, joy, and all the archival feelings of the hypodoche 138

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or, if you will, the il y a that marks our origin ex nihilo and lurks within feelings or moods, which erupt on the approach of alterity. These are already intellectual feelings that can inauthentically justify or explain away what is unacceptable, but they can contain a trace of a transcendent love. In the mystery of the Incarnation, the absolute remains absolute even as it becomes man. We will take certain liberties with “proximity” by extending it, together with certain features of its implicit “spatiality,” to our relations with God and one another. Levinas says otherwise. Proximity is an obsessive relation with another, which is “not consciousness . . . but overwhelms the consciousness that assumes it . . . [whose urgency] jostles the ‘presence of mind’ necessary for the reception and identification of the diverse.”31 This is more like ecstasy that assimilates oneself with the other than separation in proximity. Be that as it may, I can respond to his pain, because I share it, feel it as mine. Those who rushed into the Twin Towers to save others were motivated by their emotions. Even a child can empathize with and respond to the other as other with her “Can I help?” But she who is in need or pain or misery is also in the likeness of God. He said of Adam as he was cast from the Garden: “Behold the man has become one of us” (Gen. 3:22). The Christian sees the Good, not as deflected onto the other, but as the Christ in his neighbor, irrespective of his neighbor’s enrootedness, facticity, religious affiliation. If that is too pious, then the other is seen as a concrete universal and a thing of infinite Beauty. The response on any account is one of love. I labor the obvious: rather than being deconstructed by Good’s enravishment, these are acts of the self founded on singularizing affect. Take them away and there would be no I to say “I will . . .” Levinas will tell us that on the approach of another, “I am not called to play the role of a perceiver that reflects or welcomes, animated with intentionality, the light of the open and the mystery of the world. Proximity is not a state, a repose, but a restlessness, null site, outside the place of rest.” But this is a virtual world seen as if from above, and not in its deictic mystery. Listen carefully. “It suppresses the distance that consciousness of . . . involves, opens the distance of a diachrony without a common present . . . [a] disturbance of remembered time.” In this irreversible passivity beyond passivity, “the term of the relation becomes a subject.”32 By loosing what made him one in the first instance? “This being caught in fraternity which proximity is we call signifyingness . . . [which is] the one for the other, exposedness of the self to another, it is immediacy of caress and in the contact of a saying.”33 Sensibility is one with affectivity To Feel and to Know

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whose transmutation into intentionality is motivated by the very signification of feeling as for-the-other. Affectivity is a being’s innate determinable, even essence, whose initial form is the infant’s recognition of another. Through relations with the mother, proximity becomes symmetric. Robert Post, reflecting on how emotional memories can effect neural activity, says: The amygdale is thought to be involved with imparting the emotional significance to an object and linking it to other memory systems initially imparted by the hippocampus but then subserved by other complex cerebral pathways potentially involving many hundreds of thousands of synapses. Just the way the properties of objects are synthesized convergently by different pathways, we can surmise that the historical and emotional significance of objects are likewise “synthesized,” but also edited, updated, and revised based on new experiences. In this way the more complex associative experimental properties and cues may be attached to critical objects in the environment, such as one’s parents, siblings, and even the concept of oneself.34 These syntheses pertain to one’s natural conatus essendi, the obscure framework of self-absorption within which we habitually live. Affectivity is an irresoluble surplus that at times points beyond Being. Rudi Visker makes the case that singularization can occur without our being taken up into self-denying responsibilities for the other, for these responsibilities are there from the beginning. The price Levinas would have us pay for the hypostases’ ransom from the anonymity of the conatus essendi is that one cease to be for one’s self, and that is a price few outside the lecture hall would be willing to pay. Though I do not doubt that the deconstruction of the self by the other as Other is possible, this may well require the gift of a grace beyond our doing. While we do not want the other “to disappear into his form, neither is he merely a face which is released from its form through its surplus.”35 In a face-to-face encounter with the other, is my only alternative to return to the world of the conatus essendi or to be released for the other from the anonymity of the demonic il y a? Is the il y a that demonic? But isn’t there a third way, that of vulnerability founded on being situated in a world? No doubt the conatus essendi elicits a response to persons recognized as belonging to some type or in some role and thus within a totality. But my facticity includes empathetic feelings 140

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for the other as a persona. Though perhaps sedimented or undeveloped since their emergence in infancy, feelings—and not just my respect for the other as self-legislative—are transcendent dimensions of the hypostasis that allows one to welcome a person as persona and thus as beyond price. I respond out of shared facticity.36 Aristotle recognized that the emotions are the material causes of arête. The courageous person is not fearless, but rather fears yielding to what is terrible more than he fears death. Affects need reorienting, not casting aside. We could not answer the call to be persons and to serve persons unless our vulnerability was the ground of our response. We respond to persons out of a common facticity, not as Good’s deflections. We must break ranks with Levinas and build the ethical relation that will take us beyond Being on an original affectivity that apparently is out of place in the face-to-face. Levinas wants to prescind the Other from formal and even singularizing aspects, such as race, sex, language, suffering, origin, and the like—vulnerabilities that make an appeal to my vulnerabilities, but which, he thinks, would compromise the absoluteness of the face. This abstraction of the absolute Good from facticity makes the face-to-face applicable only to saints. He also misses some criteria of human Good, namely, that it be attainable (E.N., 1096b 30) and choice worthy, the sort of thing a man of good sense would pursue (1097b 15). Levinas will continue to be my guide. If I disagree, it is in the interest of preserving the integral hypostasis in the face-to-face relation with other human hypostases. Now that we have made a plea for the role of affects in singularization, we need to see how they function in the economy of human development. Philosophers have tended to reduce all phenomena of consciousness to states of Descartes’s cogito; but in the light of the criticism this has engendered, just what this means is an open question. Jean-Luc Marion and Michel Henry begin with the procedural doubt, as if an epoché, which discloses the cogito to be first and foremost a primordial self-affectivity, which, though expressed by the cogito ergo sum, is prior to cognition and said by Descartes to be “a type of inner knowledge that always precedes acquired knowledge.”37 I want to show, on the contrary, that initial affectivity is at best only proto-self-affective and, as an avatar of Plato’s receptacle, its powers bear his marks of being.38 In The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis, Michel Henry reads Descartes’s at certe videre videor [“At the very least it seems to me that I see”] as the key—one Descartes immediately dropped—to consciousness’s nonintentional or nonrepresentative To Feel and to Know

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ground. Granted the procedural doubt of the first Meditation, then “existence means appearance, affective self-manifestation,” and not its external cause or object. Thinking that I see is seeing that I see. Let us take our clue from the medial interpretation of seeing in our ancient Indo-European origins; seeing would be, as it in fact is, a process occurring in me of which I am aware but not as its conscious agent or selfconscious subject. Videor, the infinitive “to see,” is a seeing that sees itself seeing.39 But if seeing is medial, then such doublets as videre videor may be its unintended marks. The self conscious of itself could be founded on a more primordial affectivity whose portal would be free from Being. Let us begin by recognizing that there is more to experience than perception can factor; this more persists in the perception and consciousness that arises from this surplus, which Eugene Gendlin identifies with situation. Situation is the bodily sense of living from an affective attunement to various alterities, and includes such things as how I feel about those near me, my awareness of and orientation to the space behind and around me, my sense of what may happen to me from there—these make up an affective and meaningful situation that is beyond the subject/object dichotomy. In “I seem to see,” seeming to see is situated, not locked within the representations and intentions of an autistic ego. Levinas may have been the first to notice the priority of situation in Descartes. “For the most profound teaching of the Cartesian cogito consists in discovering that thought is a substance, that is, as something that is posited. Thought has a point of departure. There is not only a consciousness of localization; there is also a localization of consciousness that is not in turn reabsorbed into consciousness, into knowing.”40 Seeming to see must then be a nonreflective seeing in which one has a sense of and even control over a situation. When I am driving and talking to my wife, am I selfconsciously driving? I have a tacit or reflexive awareness of what I am doing; if something unexpectedly comes up, I can usually deal with it. When I self-consciously (reflective consciousness) drive, it is difficult to keep the car on the road. Meaningful activity need not have anything to do with mental or linguistic acts or issue from selfconsciousness or even self-affection. Meaning is wider than Descartes’s ego-cogito or Husserl’s ego-noesis-noema formulae. If the procedural doubt were to be abandoned and the sum freed from any taint of intended or represented presence, then affectivity could mean a primordial acceptance, even a welcoming, not just intending, of the other. We could then free the I from Husserl’s transcendental subjectivity and Heidegger’s analogous clearing from Being. 142

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Let us return to Descartes and see if an elimination of the sum and a medial reading of the doublet videre videor can be worked into Henry’s thesis. In discussing the will in the Passions of the Soul, Descartes asserts the independence of certain passions from “proximate causes.” We self-affectively perceive our volitions; they are called actions because “they proceed directly from our soul and seemingly depend upon it alone.” Though willing something is said to be an action, “the perception of such willing may be said to be a passion of the soul.”41 Henry notes that this affectivity (“passion”) is thought’s essence, the “primordial aperceptio, appearance’s insurmountable passivity, its immanent self-affection that makes it what it is: appearance’s original self-appearing ‘thought’.” Prior to any self-appearing, it is a feeling for the other. Volition, said to be infinite, cannot be imaged. For Henry, its being has no outer face whose recollection and summation would allow its essence to be seized, that is because it is neither possible nor infinite except as power. And power can never be grasped in any given aspect or imagio, in the outside-itself of some exteriority. Instead, it experiences itself interiorly and arrives at itself and its own power to grasp and deploy it, only through the mute experience and passion of itself. Thus, as we have already seen, Descartes expressly characterizes the original aperceptio as passion. In this aperceptio, volition lives immediately as will, arising from and depending directly on soul. . . . Now the nature of this passion becomes perfectly clear, this passion that permits volition [the root of dubitans, affirmans, negans, nolens] to reveal itself in one fell swoop just as it is, in its infinity and power, the nature of thought’s most original essence: not understanding’s videre, in the finitude of its ek-stasis, but videors first semblance, the first appearance as it appears it itself in the self-affection of its radical immanence.42 Such are the affective, chthonic, and medial roots of the soul’s power. The sum in the Cartesian cogito ergo sum seems to be the cogito’s object. Henry and Marion argue that were this reflective sum taken either as a representation or intention, it would fall under the procedural doubt of the first Meditation and thus contradict the intent of Descartes’s formula. If this is to be the site of Descartes’s first certainty and the very foundation of his philosophy, then the reflectively apprehended sum, “I am,” can be given neither by an intention (Husserl) nor in a representation (the later stages of Descartes or To Feel and to Know

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Kant) to the cogito. While Descartes usually presumes representation, Marion denies that this sum is a representation. Henry takes the I to be receptive and directly given in auto-affective feeling; it is neither a noema nor a representation. “We, who are thinking egos, sense what we perceive—that is, we think only by sensing, since to sense here means to allow oneself to be immediately affected: to see as we do, i.e., sensing or thinking.”43 However, we cannot stop here. Is affectivity already self-affectivity, and is Henry confined, in BorchJacobson’s words, to the “closure of representation he so brilliantly challenges”? Being affected by the other is equiprimordial. Affects are intentional, and—except perhaps for angst—attuned to situations. “An affect is not representational; one passionately acts and experiences one’s actions before and without thinking about them. One does not say, ‘I love you because you made me think of so and so.’ The affect does not think before acting. It is [as medial] indissolubly thinking and acting, acted thought, thought in actu, a thought that is the more active as it is passive; pure passion of the present that never has time to think, to which is never accorded the time for reflection.”44 Henry’s acceptance of self-affection is an unnecessary concession to ingrained Cartesianism. Even if it does not begin in motion, as William James taught, an emotion is a motion. A restrained monkey and, by inference a child, watching another of its kind perform, will mirror an identical pattern of neural activity. Primal affectivity is a nonreflexive welcome of alterity and foreshadows the vulnerability in which we welcome the Other.45 These primal emotions, according to Dr. Daniel Siegel, occur in a wide range of wordless textures and can exist without consciousness; they reflect shifts in the flow of activation and inactivation, “of energy and evaluations” through the “system’s changing states.” Does one feel oneself as passive in loving another? Rather than experiencing himself, he experiences the passion that “carried him away” beyond himself.46 The beyond begins with the others through whom, as a child, one became a self. In mundane moments, beings given to my there are assimilated to “mineness,” as Husserl describes the domestication of alterity to the monadic ego in the Cartesian Mediations, to then become elements in a “totality.” Assimilation is participation (metalambano, “to share the beyond amid”) in which another, remaining other, is also a same. Dasein is also led to intuit Being by Heidegger’s analysis of anxiety in the 1929 essay, “What Is Metaphysics?” If this intuition is not a necessary consequence of his phenomenological/ontological reduction, 144

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that is, if the consequent experience of nothing does not lead to an intuition of Being, then the hold of the Ontological Difference will be broken. Why? Because no corresponding ontological intuition is possible—the conclusion which must be drawn from the failure of the 1943 “Postscript” and the 1949 “Introduction” to What Is Metaphysics? to provide one. There freed from Being is qua chora a medial matrix, which can welcome the gift of Alterity, such as Levinas’s Other or Plato’s Beauty that provokes “the wonder that is the pathos of philosophy” (Theat., 155D). These radical and inassimilable invasions deconstruct the self and its totalities. The details of Marion’s “third reduction” that makes a very strong case for “there” beyond Being must be passed over.47 I suggest that Heidegger’s “nothing that nothings” is not “a nullity” but is a medial matrix which, on provocation, can gather itself and thing. That the infant’s affective relations with others are prior to the development of interiority is a conclusion confirmed by the empirical discoveries of Alison Gopnik, Andrew Meltzoff, and Patricia Kuhl. They are persuaded that recognition of the other person is innate: The soul that arises with us, our life’s Star Hath had elsewhere in its setting, and cometh from afar: Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness But streaming streams of glory do we come From God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy.

Wordsworth and Plato are closer to being right than Watson and Skinner. Gopnik and associates have shown that the infant recognizes persons, and nothing else, within moments of her birth. Conscious life begins in the vulnerabilities of intellectual feelings that will, with nurture, become a feeling intellect. The infant is fascinated into exploring a world long before there is a self-conscious “I,” and her self-consciousness is a posit of growing individuation in the anxiety of separation in which she slowly becomes aware of her difference from the feelings and thoughts of others and then can feel their feelings as her own. The other is not posited by the alter ego as Husserl tries to show in his constructions in the last Cartesian Meditation. In an immediate and innate recognition of and response to the mother, in smiling when she smiles, in discovering her interiority when mother sometimes does not smile or is angry as limits are set, who talks with her in babble talk, she gives the child a self as she To Feel and to Know

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becomes its other. The other as the eject of Freud’s primal narcissism is a fiction. Self-consciousness comes to be through the willful and limit-testing behavior of the “terrible twos” in which the child studies the reaction of parents by doing what is forbidden; she establishes a self as she begins to establish her distance from them. In discovering the different likes and feelings of the other as other, the infant can become self-affectively aware of her own. Infants become upset at another’s distress and by the age of two they comfort: They don’t just feel your pain; they try to allay it . . . This kind of empathy demands the same sophisticated understanding of other people we see in the terrible twos. To be genuinely empathetic, you have to understand how other people feel and know how to make them feel better, even when you don’t feel that way yourself. You have to know that the other person needs a Band Aid and you don’t—just as you know that the other person wants broccoli, though you don’t, that she wants you to stay away from the lamp cord you find so desirable. Real empathy isn’t just about knowing that other people feel the same way you do; it’s about knowing that they don’t feel the same way and caring anyway. Babies aren’t born with this deep moral insight, but by the time they are two, they have already begun to understand it.48” This primal empathetic bond before there is a clearly defined self foreshadows its loss when one is face-to-face with the other. Thus is born the possibility of that more radical nexus of obligations that Levinas will associate with Alterity. With this, thanks to the other’s interiority, I begin discovering my own and, with this, the cogito’s representative function, the possibility of lying and truth. The loving face-to-face relation with the other is the matrix of the human world. The social, interpersonal nature of affectivity, which is “saying,” isn’t anything, yet it gives us a world, ipseity and others. Neither passive nor active and yet both, neither sensitive nor cogitative and yet both, neither subjective nor objective and yet both—such is the primal, medial affectivity within which a child progressively differentiates and represents a world, distinguishes faces, then things through stripes and movement, and finally distinguishes itself from others and others from things and one another. Affectivity frees a being’s there from bondage to Being and, opening the “I” to social alterity, bears in itself the sense of koinos, community, communion, and communication. The hypostases is from the beginning always 146

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already in participatory relations with others. We are intersubjective before we are subjects. Developmental psychology shows that quite literally from the moment when we first see other people, we see them as people. To be a person is to have a mind as well as a body, an inside as well as an outside. To see someone as a person is to see a face, not a mask; a “thou” not an “it.” We arrive in the world with a set of profound assumptions about how other people are like us and about how we are like other people. . . . In the first few months of life, babies already seem to have solved a number of deep philosophical conundrums [other minds, the existence of the external world, the nonconstructive character of original spatiality, etc.]. They know how to use edges and patterns of movement to segregate the world into separate objects. They know something about how these objects characteristically move. They know these objects are part of a three-dimensional space. And they know the relation between information that comes from different senses— they can link the feel of a nipple and its pink protuberance, the sound of a voice and the moving lips they see, the ball’s exuberant bounce and its accompanying boing.49 These are among the resources, affective and behavioral, implicit in the fundamental interpersonal relation, the hypodochic “between” or “saying” that links us with one another. 4. Metaphor as Disclosive Our discussion of metaphor focuses on its demonstration of the given rather than on Marion’s complex analysis of how beings are given to I’s welcoming there. Metaphor lets something be seen or seen in new parameters and, above all, in its truth, its aletheia. Seen in its aletheia? What has truth to do with metaphor? Nothing, if Richard Rorty is to be believed. It has no place in a language game; since it is an utterance that is neither true nor false, “one can only savor it or spit it out.”50 Maybe the contingencies will bring this into a new language game, where truth is what the best-informed players agree on. We should give up saying that truth is a deep matter, or that there is no truth, for the nature of truth is an unprofitable topic and best avoided. Unhappily, Rorty is caught up in the virtual world of language instead of language as a primal showing that comes down to us in the first teacher’s word. Miss Sullivan, Helen Keller’s first teacher, To Feel and to Know

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opened Helen’s world when, blind and deaf, Helen responded to the marks “w-a-t-e-r” Sullivan made on the palm of her hand as she ran the water over it. She suddenly knew that everything had a name and knew “joy and sorrow for the first time.” Even the blind see through the word. In literature metaphor is often constitutive. In an enthralling discussion of how metaphors worked in making her novel, Morpho Eugenia, A. S. Byatt shows how her characters generate and are generated by metaphors. “Morpho,” the heroine’s name, is one name for Aphrodite Pandemos, while “Eugenia” brought in “well-born” as well as sexual and natural selection; moreover, Morpho Eugenia is a butterfly, a name appropriate to the heroine’s transformations. The house central to the story is like an ant hill, and Eugenia is like Maeterlinck’s ant queen. A characteristic of working out a story through metaphors, and the metaphors through the story, is that you have repeated moments when you discover precisely and intellectually what you always knew instinctively. (Though the story calls in question any definition of instinct). . . . Late in writing my story I was flicking through my insect book and thought they were walking analogies, walking metaphors.”51 One character, the Darwinian agnostic William, sees all personification through Feuerbach’s lenses; while the clergyman father, Harold, reads Darwin through the design implicit in the eye and looks to places where natural selection is the work of Dame Nature. “I like the formal energy . . . in the personifications in Morphe Eugenia— Venus, Ant Queen, Dame Kind, Matilda. I think the stories are studies of the danger of thinking with images that think with images themselves (like Derrida’s La Métaphore Blanche) and I do think that in some curious way they find, not impose.”52 Metaphor is marvelously seductive—the shock of its unanticipated conjunctions opens a horizon in which something is anticipated that seems to make sense even if no sense is to be made. Is there a better way of unconcealing? Truth, Nietzsche says, is like a woman and must be persuaded to let herself be seen. Once aroused, she will throw aside her veils and come forth to meet us. Aletheia, truth or unconcealment, has this adverbial force of taking the initiative in presenting herself. Her approach is chiasmatic, for now she solicits the inquirer in her doxa, where doxa means “appearing in splendor” or, less dramatically, “agreeably appearing.” Strangely, she will appear only if we have already 148

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clothed her in language and its hidden posits. We are carried away by truth. Metaphor, the most important of these linguistic posits, is an imaginative and provocative receptivity to what then unconceals itself in what Aquinas called its claritas, its radiant splendor of form. To come to know is to be seduced by the appearing of truth. Seductions can be destructive, and appearances deceive. For better or worse, this is where we begin. Eidetic monstration is that movement that lets something be seen in its truth through provocation and response. The scholastics explored the levels of meaning—literal, moral, allegorical, and anagogic—but these were more like perspectives than homologies, such as those Plato discerned between the human soul, the polis, and the cosmos. The logic of such a many participating inter se underlies metaphor and is found in the logoi (ratios) and analogia (proportions) of the fifth and seventh books of Euclid, the terms in which Plato constructs soul in Timaeus. In the predicate logic, we collect the many as one through recognition in the concept: in metaphor, we see the eidetic one in the many, where this structure is monstrative and performative and only then expressive. Participation is poiesis, creativity. Saying is showing another and, like Celan’s poem, is a handshake. Another mediates the appearing of the form as something to be lived and not just thought. “Man always encounters the good,” Gadamer notes, “in the specific form of the particular practical situation in which he finds himself, the task of moral knowledge is to see in the concrete situation what is asked of it or, to put it another way, the person acting must see the concrete situation in the light of what is asked of him.”53 Moreover, the transcending “other grasped or nurtured in the midst of,” the sense of its other founding metaphors (metalanbano, methexis), also suggests that “participation” be thought through Beauty and the Good beyond being and not through the Parmenidian identification of knowing and being (Frag., B3). Beauty animates metaphor’s chiasmus; by mutually dwelling in and interpreting one another, its terms effect an epoché and the “confusion and obscurity of sensibility” are transformed, as Levinas says, though in a different context, “into the clarity with which a horizon opens.”54 Though metaphors disclose in science or poetics, they will not reach into an objectless catachresis intending the Good or some variant of the receptacle that can be addressed only in a theology that was spawned by the tradition that is ordered to the Good qua God beyond being. Let us follow Levinas and look elsewhere than to phenomenoTo Feel and to Know

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logical disclosure, theory, or their analogues, such as deontological ethics, for an understanding of truth at the most primordial level. It is found in the significance of the other for whom I may substitute myself and whom I may represent; in a word, it lies in the veracity of saying in which I open myself to my neighbor. This opening begins with birth when the child recognizes a mother’s face animated by love. Reality, a world beyond the ego, is the mother’s gift. Truth is attributed to statements, but it is founded on persons who, as social realities, must speak truly to one another. As the biological and personal issue of eros, one is always already in communion with others; what is unconcealed is my naked self to the other’s beautiful face. What unconceals this nakedness is not the abstract deflection of the Good, but rather the Christ who said, “I am the truth,” and calls from the cross to share his love for others.55 Saying and showing is prior to metaphor’s more mundane work of unconcealing structure (logos) in the identity of logoi.56 Metaphor strips away banalities of everydayness by letting the thing be seen from itself. This desedimenting is usually the work of imaginative variation and promises an eidetic intuition short of the full phenomenological reduction. Like Kant, we could say that intuitions without concepts are blind, but Husserl widens intuition to cover ideas or essences; we intend a red house, but this already presupposes the categorical intuition, which aims through sense at the essence red or house. “A new mode of apprehension has been built upon the intuition of the individual house or its redness, a new mode that is constitutive for the intuitive datum of the idea of red.”57 JeanLuc Marion summarizes this movement as the turning away of the first intuition “from the individual (and therefore from itself, which is first given hic et nunc in the mode of an ‘a this’), under the possessive fascination of the categorial.”58 Heidegger says, “These acts of ideation, of the intuition of the universal, are categorical acts that give their object . . . what is called an idea, species. The Latin term species is a translation of eidos, the aspect under which something shows itself. . . . The acts of universal intuition give what is seen in the matters first and simply. When I perceive simply, moving about in my environmental world, when I see houses, for example, I do not first see houses primarily and expressly in their individuation, in their distinctiveness. Rather, I first see universally: This is a house.”59 No, acts of ideation begin with recognizing individuals almost at birth, long before we have language or universals to recognize them under. If universals are involved, their status is closer to Plato’s anamnesis than to Locke 150

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or Kant. Phenomenology holds out the promise that metaphor is also deictic and, tapping these roots of consciousness, can descend to the originary matrix, the chorastic giver that is the phenomenology’s threshold. This necessary role of the receptacle marks beings and even their eidos—not as a one over many, but as a one apportioned to the many in which it inheres. Phenomenology is eidetic, but it cannot be eidetic without being deictic. The self-closure of Husserl’s world must give way to phenomenology’s original impulse: to the things themselves. The deictic theme could have entered phenomenology with desedimentation. Husserl said mathematics loses its way and trivializes itself as mere calculation when its arché is forgotten. Heidegger finds a more active sense of concealment in aletheia where what is unconcealed also conceals. The active or temporal sense hidden in pre-Socratic eon (being) was covered up by the first metaphysicians. We seek a logos that “lets something be seen from the very thing the discourse is about,”60 with the proviso that we are less concerned to unconceal Being than to arrive at an eidetic horizon in Husserl’s sense. If “man is a wolf,” then, as Red Riding Hood discovered, little girls should beware of us. Not just sense but also essences, eidetic structure, and even categories are intuitable. Getting to the eidos is never by way of generalization but requires the method of imaginative variation. To arrive at the essence, “what must belong to an object so that secondary and relative determinations may be attributed to it,” one begins with “the individual, perceived or imagined, object. By abstracting from its existence we consider it as purely imaginary and we modify different attributes in phantasy. But through all the possible modifications of an attribute something remains invariant, identical, the necessary basis of the variation itself. Its invariant character is given as something general, precisely because it is one “moment” in a series, in principle infinite, of imaginary variations: it has infinite extension within ‘possibles’.”61 An eidetic horizon is given when a series of “as if”s runs up against a limit, as when we see that there is no music without pitch, color without shape, etc., beyond which imagination cannot go without loss of the intended entity.62 Object horizons have a penumbra of possible and actual experiences. The result of this epoché is no more empirical than Descartes’s intuition of the wax as infinitely extendible. Like the full-fledged reduction itself, metaphorical intuition is the imaginative apprehension of an eidos.

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5

Deictic Metaphor

Our bodies cannot love: But without one, What works of love could we do? W. H. Auden

1. The Way Up and the Way Down Plato’s metaphors tend toward the transcendent, but now the matrix must have its due. Deictic images seek out the factical uniqueness that condemns us to live in both truth and untruth, in openness and in concealment. How can this be if, as it is said, Plato is unable to accommodate the todi ti, the individual? But does Aristotle do better? His solution hinges on the distinction between sensing the individual and, except in phronesis, knowing it as universal, and that gets us nowhere. Can Plato be rescued? Perhaps. The way to the individual is the way of love, but in the Symposium it appears that what is valued or loved is the Good or Beauty, the idea, not the persona. This happens because philosophy geared to reason cannot accommodate incarnation. I love my wife, not because she is the contraction of an idea and “is repugnant to being divided,” but because of her singular and inarticulable humanity. If I may be excused barbarous language, she is a concrete universal singularized by her persona, her individuating heacceity which puts the mystery of her life together in a framework that 152

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leaves her with an unfathomable surplus (see chapter 6, section 2 and chapter 9, section 1). Kant saw that the claims people make upon us as ends in themselves and beyond any price were formed within the noumenal auspices of the categorical imperative. It is easy to tie these transcendent claims to the persona through Plato, but tying deictic metaphor onto him is another matter. The way leads through concrete universals, but concreteness is virtual unless it is secured by the “enigma of persona . . . [a] quasi-divine thisness or wholeness.”1 Concretizing the universal through the haecceitas was the labyrinthine work of the great Platonist, Duns Scotus. Granted the persona, metaphor can also disclose chthonic qualities in being’s other side and preserve the integrity of the incarnate hypostasis. We middle dwellers are decentered and belong both to the archival and conditioning determinates of the matrix and the Good which, respectively, make possible immanent conditions and transcendent possibilities. Understanding our decenteredness, which has been obscured by the judging, knowing, executive, and manipulative epistemological “subject,” enables us to get closer to our deictic roots. Marion states the case for a less-than-omnicompetent subject: To have done with the “subject,” it is therefore necessary not to destroy it, but to reverse it—to overturn it. It is posited as a center: this will not be contested, but I will contest its mode of occupying and exercising the center to which it lays claim—the title of a (thinking, constituting, resolute) “I.” I will contest the claim that it occupies this center as an origin, an ego or first person, in transcendental “mineness.” I will oppose to it the claim that it does not hold this center but is instead held there as a recipient where what gives itself shows itself, and that it discloses itself as given to and as a pole of givenness, where all the given come forth incessantly. At the center stands no subject, but a gifted, he whose function consists in receiving what is immeasurably given to him, and whose privilege is confined to the fact that he is himself received from what he receives.2 Marion has lived too long in the shadow of Descartes’s cogito and seems to have forgotten that, as Levinas cites from and comments on Gabriel Marcel, “incarnation is the central given of metaphysics . . . it is the situation of [non-self-transparent] being that appears to itself as attached to a body.” Being toward itself is to be a “being exposed to others . . . There is no Cartesian separation between me and my body, nor a synthesis, but immediately an unobjectifiable participation.” Deictic Metaphor

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The body is the “absolute and original mediator” by which we are tied to being. 3 There is an embodied self through whose affects we can receive and be transformed by alterity, and only in this restricted sense can one say with Marion that one receive oneself. I will adopt an incarnational model founded on an immediate and unobjectifiable participation, mediation, and communion through the body with the world, even if it means pulling away from Levinas. I have attempted to capture the “ontological modality” of this participation in the Timaeus psyche which I will spell out in greater detail in a discussion of Parmenides’ scholium on time (see 12:2 below). Deictic metaphor is rooted in the Platonic matrix which I, though perhaps not Marion, take to be the arché of the unitary event, receiver and received. The receptacle is not only the contextually appropriate manifold, but it is also the archival condition required if the ensuing creature is to emerge and stand out from a place, chora. Both receptacle and chora are, like hyle in Aristotle, systematically ambiguous; wood is the hyle of a chair; mathematics is hyle to physics. Like matter, it individuates; but as field theoretic, it permits both the transformations and the intercommunion of things (“participation” as koinos) that will then submit to a post facto metric and topology. Only through chora is it possible to speak of spatial and temporal creatures as in space, topos. The use of the receptacle idiom will allow us to touch base with physical science and incorporate humanistic insights from Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida. As we will explain in the sequel, it accommodates the virtual time and space of Levinas’s images, Bohm’s implicit order, Maurice Blanchot’s “space” of literature, and Jacques Derrida’s several treatments of chora. Even more to the point is the individuation of the hypostasis by its facticity, “the cobelonging of concealment and unconcealment”4 in the existential matrix of mood and state of mind that determine how it is with its being in the world. Facticity is prior to all specific ways of being, such as that of subjects and objects, intentionality, knowing, and acting. In deploying idea theory in the service of metaphor, one must be sensitive to the differences among things which, except in iterative formalisms, can hardly be those of clones. The issue of the war of the giants and gods in Sophist is the reciprocal participation of being and creatures (Sop., 246A–249E). What we shall understand as contextualizing ideas makes this mutuality thematic, without prejudice to the creature’s integrity and eidetic invariance. If we move above sense, which is eidetic, then the higher-order idea, whatever its origin, is not the look of something but is a parameter with sometimes-ragged 154

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edges on a range of historical or genealogical modalizations. The wings of a bat are morphologically same with a human hand. Even today, when relativity is the name of the game, the Good continues to propose a transcultural moral ideal, which, even as it judges, attracts, and commands absolutely, does so in the name of universal and unconditioned Love of the singular self in its entire contingency. Since the Good cannot act under compulsion or from the necessity of its nature, it must proposition us in our vulnerability in the guise of Eros and Beauty. For all its absoluteness, the Good must be attuned to the relativities of history, religion, race, language, society, and the like if it is to claim our respect and love. Otherwise, what good is it? Being with us in the midst of a world is the traditional role of the Holy Spirit, of a providential and rather un-Platonic, because loving, Good (Sym., 202D; see Par., 134D–E). Deictic metaphor is a choragraphic seeing in which things disclosed and their extensive conditions may be virtual or real. But these, seen in the good, entail standards by which they can be brought to judgment. We can use such moral terms as good or bad and right or wrong, but what is fitting, appropriate, and due are the subtle valuations that a loving eye makes. She is grave and elegant, frivolous and wasteful, and so on and on. To see hypostases within a framework is to see them as Bradley’s concrete universals, a term Murdoch was willing to extend to all universals—which, by introducing ideal limits, opens an ever-deepening process of understanding to values that can never be accommodated by genetic accounts of meaning. Murdoch also borrows Simone Weil’s “attention,” a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality.5 Cezanne painted again and again the greens and browns of Mount St. Victoire. Colors, like Husserl’s eide, can be ideal end points infinitely to be learned and loved. There are reds in Rothko I can never forget. A concrete universal turns the ideal limits of Kant’s ideas upside down; ideas are concretized by beauty, made deictic by the demiurgic persona and are never totalizing. As Murdoch renews the Platonic theme of perfection, that is, understanding things in their paradigms, and extends the Good to all reality “revealed to the patient eye of love,” she corrects Plato’s tendency to let the universal supercede the individual that threatens to trivialize his account of Eros. Metaphor can create a closed world of artistic images in a virtual, hypodochic manifold and make manifest what is lost in the surplus that ordinary usage cannot say. But it can also mean anything or nothing, and when it does mean, this is usually within the conventions Deictic Metaphor

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of a tradition. Now that God is dead, the last of his names—beauty— having fallen into oblivion, and history is bunk, art can only be selfreferential. Frank Stella can reach for the solidities of his much-admired Caravaggio, but what we have are intersecting surfaces. Maybe Hegel was prophetic when he spoke of the death of painting. Like the Hollywood musicals of the 1930s, the novel is likely to be about what it is to be a novel. Even the fine writer Ian McEwan is caught up in literary analogues of Magritte’s “This Is Not a Cigar.” This virtuality of the world of art is a possibility only recently recognized by, among others, Levinas in images and Blanchot in the space of literature. For instance, in “Reality and Its Shadow” Levinas distinguishes between images irreducible to cognition and “a living relation with a real object,” which, as participating in the ideas, is conceived. Saying, the sociality of the face-to-face, is an affective proximity which is the subtending condition for this “living relation.” Any said or expression hovers over a nexus of unsayable saying. This surplus or saturated phenomenality is intimated by art, while the semantic surplus is the concern of the sciences. Classification begins with the recognition that metaphor, a creature of the between, can probe its roots, chthonic as in James Joyce, uranian as in Edmund Spenser or Dante, and mixed as in Blake or Donne. A semantic surplus is especially evident in the sciences. When, for example, it is said that this is smaller or larger than that, a realm of formal magnitudes opens, such as the relation “greater than,” which has its own enabling metaphors by which one can measure and assign a numerical value to the relation. A grape is smaller than a plum. By how much? The possibility of measurement or the meaning of “smaller than” as a transitive and asymmetric relation is not sensed. Relative size is determined by an analogy or proportion, a metaphor, in which physical objects are mapped onto the integers, while an upward movement would uncover arithmetic, the science of “many ones which are not otherwise different.” Catesby Taliaferro then observes that, while each form is unique, “every number is indefinitely multipliable. Unlike the events of nature, each number is what it is; unlike the forms there are a many in each different one of them . . . Arithmetic extends itself beyond itself . . . it takes in geometry and the incommensurables.”6 Rather than understanding the idea as contextual, Husserl distinguishes between ideas in the Kantian idea and Platonic eide.7 Kant’s ideas are said to have the exactness associated with categories, genera, and mathematical objects. Plato’s ideas, which Husserl calls Eide, are 156

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inexact and imprecise, “essences of the individual objects we find about us, considered in all their concreteness,” which are entailed in any “intuition of something individual [that] becomes transmuted into eidetic seeing” and “may be more or less clear, more or less distinct.”8 These “morphological essences” or eide intuited as indistinct lend themselves to descriptions (“notched, scalloped, lens shaped, umbelliform, and the like”) in which phenomena are accepted as given, not raised to the ideality of the exact sciences, and do most of the work of metaphor in literature. Granted that metaphor is a phenomenological epoché, these are probably concrete universals when the descriptions are aesthetic. Husserl adds that exact intuitions have as their correlates “ideas in the Kantian sense.” The Platonic eide is like “the spatial shape of the perceived tree as such taken precisely as a ‘moment’ found in the relevant percept’s intentional object.” But this is no idea, “no geometrical shape, no ideal or exact shape in the sense of exact geometry. Just so a seen color as such is no ideal color”;9 but it is on Plato’s own saying and in his sense an idea (7th Epistle, 342D). The life sciences are excluded from the reduction because their descriptions, at least prior to this biochemical era, are imprecise and vague; thus the reduction in moving towards an idealization of the eide with the goal of reaching the Kantian idea drops the living, individuating being, which is, in fact, the base for the phenomenological reduction. The red that is approximated as the limit of a sequence of reds converging on but never attaining ideal redness, is what Husserl takes Kant to mean by idea. Can one begin with an idealization of the eide and establish nomological connections? Husserl threatens what I take to be the real point of the eidetic reduction, namely, to see form in the fact, by advancing the thesis of singular ideas. Red is a recurrent, not a singular idea; to accept these as singular ignores the economy of the idea theory, a single base for epistemology, metaphysics, and axiology.10 It would be better to take Husserl’s intuited eide to be a concrete universal, a one singularized by its apportioned ingression into a concrete many, which could, on reduction, that is, elimination of contingent accouterments, lead to a first order Platonic idea. These second-order ideas, such as those determining various number classes or kinds, are already ideal. It would be better to follow the lead of Parmenides (129A–E) and admit idea classes, constitutive, regulative, and transcendental (the greatest kinds of the Sophist). Ideas not admitting of more or less, such as mud, hair, and dirt, are constitutive and, as when said to be good or beautiful, fall under degree-admitting regulatives, paradigms, or exemplars. Deictic Metaphor

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The transcendentals—same, other, and the like—determine how these combine and mingle with things in nature. Positively, this means that sense is primary and eidetic. Chora grants concreteness, and deictic metaphor makes manifest “mud, hair, and dirt” in their glory. We mentioned that one can pass upward through number to the mathematical forms and their homologies or downward to the manifold in allegories to their truth conditions in measurement. The upward way is that of the dialectic of same, other, one, many, and being, the way of sufficient conditions or reason’s reasons leading to the Good’s threshold. Science also has deictic metaphors. The Timaeus is a Kantian objective deduction from the works of reason, the conditioned, virtual world set up by the demiourgos, to its truth conditions in the four-dimensional manifold, the necessities. In this and following chapters we can show how the receptacle, the mud, hair, and dirt dismissed by Socrates (Par., 130D), makes possible art’s images or provides the pilgrim with a landscape on which there are traces that may lead to the threshold of the Good. The focus will be on how metaphor stands to truth and the overwhelming surplus of meaning in sensibility that eludes intentional analysis. Perhaps Plato was not sure that these fictions could be rescued from the sophist, for their power, the power of the receptacle, is the power of art. Levinas will show us how to use Plato to defuse his objections. His remarks on Homer put metaphor in a Platonic context: Meanings are not limited to any regions of objects, are not the privilege of any content. For they arise precisely in the reference of one thing to another . . . in the assembling of the whole of being about him who speaks or perceives, and who also forms part of the assembled being. In a study of Homeric comparisons, M. Snell pointed out that when in the Iliad the resistance to an attack by an enemy phalanx is compared to the resistance of a rock to the waves that assail it, it is not necessarily a matter of extending to the rock through anthropomorphism a human behavior, but of interpreting human resistance petromorphically. Resistance is neither a human privilege nor a rock’s, just as radiance does not characterize the month of May more authentically than the face of a woman. The meaning precedes the data and illuminates it.”11 Radiance apportioned to May and woman shows the Protean character of ideas. One must make them show themselves in a nexus of 158

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metaphors through which one can grab and hold on to them. Isn’t this our experience with Plato? We catch this most Protean of philosophers in a conceptual web, only to discover that he has escaped and has turned up elsewhere. The idea is an ordering principle that collects these into a unity that can defy univocal statement. There is no talk about the transport of terms, but rather of seeing differing things through a form: the woman and May morn through radiance. At the first battle of Bull Run, Jackson stood before the assault of the Union forces as a Stone Wall. Hereafter he was Stonewall Jackson; human resistance was interpreted petromorphically. This is what Marion calls the “third reduction,” in which the entity is not seen under the reign of Being (Heidegger) or as an object (Husserl) but appears as given in the affect it gives.12 As soon as we say “radiant,” we know that there is much in the saying (dire) that resists being said (dit). Part of this surplus lies in a thing’s chorastic roots, on where and when and how it is, so that apart from its power to articulate singular images, metaphor’s orienting and existential resources can describe, however haltingly, states of feeling and elemental qualities, or even represent a simple kind. “This is a purple plum” (or “this plum-ing appears purpley”) is a simple description. “Plum” is a common name that as such admits of a variety of determinations, such as ovoid, cleft, black-purple matte, green, damson; but when I try to get to its unique purple, the felt surplus over what is said in “plum” even when it is in front of my eyes, I must resort to metaphor. A character in one of A. S. Byatt’s novels asks, “What is the grayish or maybe white, or whitish, or silvery, or dusty mist or haze or smokiness over the purple shine?”13 If I were to say its purple surface is hazy, I would mean that it is as if obscured by a whitish mist that lets only intimations of its purple appear. This haze that dwells just over the surface of the plum is its bloom, and what might have been taken to obscure the plum is now a sign that its life has reached a marvelous perfection. What am I to name what lies beneath this hazy skin? Flesh? These words help you see it, perhaps afresh, but they will never constitute the purple as seen as a kind. Neither “flesh” nor “hazy purple” is an attributive predicate. The flesh and haze of a plum can, as dead metaphors, collapse into descriptions and, unless one is careful, can function at the level of representative intention in a way forever blocked by the plum’s own color, that surplus which can be intimated only in metaphor and can even be recognized in its full purpleyness, never as a kind in a concept. Deictic Metaphor

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Since metaphor cannot subsist on proper names, how do we say this, except as such? If singular otherness is always to be engulfed by sortal sameness, then isn’t it exposed to banalization? The poetic imagination must make heard as if for the first time what has become banal “through being said over and over again to the point where it would seem to go without saying.” Llewelyn would have us consider Emily Dickinson’s “A Quartz contentment, like a stone . . .” Quartz is a stone and the relation an identity. But Llewelyn noticed that when repetitions [of the same form of words, for quartz is stone] puts on hold the passage to new words, one may discover newness when nothing new is said . . . [as John discovered ana in banal]. The iteration compels us to focus attention on this, this now being the stoniness of contentment, such stupor and privative astonishment as is contained by the emptiness of our thoughts as we stand on the edge of a grave. The word “like” would state the usually possible but here almost hermetically closed off happy release that we reach for when we reach for a comparison . . . In the everyday world . . . we are unable to see what lies before us for what it is. So the imagination turns away to something with which to associate that from which we have turned . . . a turning away that is at the same time a turning towards, the trope of a trope . . .14 Iris Murdoch’s deictic reflections on art assume an intuitive understanding that overcomes the universal/particular distinction: We have seen that in the medial experience, the distinction between subject and object vanishes in a nexus of the imagination formed in the shadow of Kant by the juncture of intellectual feelings and the feeling intellect. Something particular, a poem, a color, or a musical phrase, can be lodged therein and held in attention as significant. The particular, as art shows us with an exemplary clarity, is not to be left behind, falling out of being, dusty, forgotten, lost in the dark; it must be allowed to glow with light . . . [As the mystical disciplines have taught], art exhibits . . . the mystery of the synthesis of different levels of cognition, how completely integrated these levels are, and how therein the “brute particular” is transcended and retained (known). A case of saving the phenomena.15 Beauty, the affectiveness of the Good, is the underlying ground of all experience and remains, as F. H. Bradley says of affectivity, within 160

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“every development that seems to transcend it. It not merely contains all developments, but in its own way it acts to some extent as their judge. Its blind uneasiness . . . insists tacitly on visible satisfaction.”16 “Save the phenomena” was Plato’s injunction. Beauty, as befits this harbinger of the good, decenters us, for in its face “we no longer stand at the center of our world.” Elaine Scarry suggests that the phenomena it saves are the “small tears on the surface of the world . . . [which] pull us through to some vaster space. . . . Beautiful things always carry greetings from other worlds with them.”17 What is this vaster space? Is it the world reduced to a sterile receptacle, a place without meaningful places from which the gods, and with them Beauty, has fled? Oh no. Beauty is fecund; it cries out for reduplication in an other, for being creatively memorialized in offspring, poems, laws, memory, photographs, dances. . . . Replication either preserves an existing beauty against the destructive flux or creates a new one. A promise is preserved, a hope for a futurity, for a new life. The place of Beauty, which is always a particular place, is sacred, and the furrow it leaves in our soul is a trace of the Good. Beauty in its random and unexpected appearances “lets lessimperfect possibilities shine through” and gives to the fragile things of this world a spiritual weight, an “immense regard.”18 But there is a deeper Beauty in the appearing of the sacred that, with its twin strands of terror and love, places it close to the sublime. Beauty is an annunciation. Levinas has demonstrated how the “lover of fair bodies” can discover the saturation by the Other in such a body and would thus, in Plato’s language, become a lover of souls whose embodiment may be uncomely. In the proximity of saying one might well seek “to give birth to ideas that make the other better” (Sym., 210B), a didactic role unwelcome among equals. This is perhaps why the philosopher, seeing for a moment the Good, sadly not without prodding, returns to the cave and the dangers entailed in freeing others (Rep., 519E). Had he noticed the Beauty of the Good, his erotic self would be deconstructed and, begetting responsibility, would give it the form of agape. To return to the main theme: Levinas says that the “sinking of teeth which the act of eating involves, above all measures the saturation of the aliment over every represented reality, a surplus that is not quantitative, but the way the I, the absolute commencement, is suspended on the [elemental] non-I.” 19 Baudelaire’s Correspondences makes apparent how through metaphor a region’s (hypodoche) sensible surplus is expressed: Deictic Metaphor

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Nature is a temple whose living pillars Sometimes yield perplexing messages; Man comes there through forests of symbols That observe him with familiar eyes. Like deep echoes that blend from afar Into a deep and profound harmony As vast as darkness and as day, The scents, the tones, the colors correspond. There are odors succulent as the flesh of infants, Soft as oboes, and green as any prairies, And others, corrupt, rich, and triumphant, Possess the diffusion of such infinite things As amber, benjamin, incense and musk, To chant the ecstasies of spirit and of sense.

These raptures are expressed and experienced in poetry and song, but this surplus otherwise eludes description. Phenomenological reductions, including those performed by metaphor, let us see form in, rather than separated from, fact. Anatole France has warned of some problems in metaphor that mark the downward or deictic movement from form to fact. In the dialogue, “The Language of Metaphysics” from The Gardens of Epicurus, Polyphilos insists, as we all must, that metaphysical metaphor must begin in sense. There are exceptions in divinity and mathematics, but for now we can adopt his deictic program. With a helping hand from “Aryan etymology,” philosophical terms will manifest their chthonic or deictic roots. While Heidegger’s sensibilizations are on the way to chora, sometimes—as with Polyphilos’s etymologies—the result is gibberish. “Metaphysicians, when they make a language for themselves, are like knife-grinders, who, instead of knives and scissors, put metals and coins to the grindstone, to efface the lettering, date, and type. When they have worked away, nothing is visible in their crown-pieces, neither King Edward, the Emperor William, nor the Republic, they say: These pieces have nothing English, German, or France about them; we have freed them from all limits of times and space: they are not worth five shillings any more; they are of inestimable worth, and their circulation is extended infinitely.” In the “spirit of comparative grammar,” Polyphilos interprets Lachelier’s “the spirit possesses God in proportion as it participates in the absolute that seems to circulate infinitely.” This means: “The breath is seated by the shinning one in the bushel of the part it takes in what is altogether loosed.” Sensibilization is not always useful. 162

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Baudelaire discovered an unarticulable surplus of qualities in the forest of symbols that stand between us and nature; these are, for the most part, qualities Levinas calls elemental. Their “source” is the earth, sky, cities, and oceans and they are denoted by W. V. O. Quine’s mass terms or by Strawson’s “feature-placing language.” Aristotelians refer to this extensive surplus as matter and Platonists as the receptacle. Levinas observed that the quality of an element, like the blue of the sky, does not qualify or cling to elemental things. “They come from nowhere. This coming from nowhere, from ‘something’ that is not, appearing without there being anything that appears—and consequently coming always, without my being able to possess the source— delineates the future of sensation and enjoyment.”20 He identifies the il y a with the future of this elemental, which, without the Good, would evoke an autochthonic cosmology, not unlike those found in the demythologization of the pagan earth mother by Anaximander, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. Levinas’s elemental is a movement [that] comes incessantly upon me, as the wave that engulfs and submerges and drowns—an incessant afflux without respite, a total contact without fissure nor gap from which the reflected movement of a thought could arise. It is to be within, to be inside of. . . . This situation is not reducible to a representation, nor even an inarticulate representation; it belongs to sensibility, which is the mode of enjoyment. . . The sensibility we are describing . . . does not belong to the order of thought but to that of sentiment, that is, the affectivity wherein the egoism of the I pulsates. One does not know; one lives the sensible qualities, the green of these leaves, the red of this sunset.21 It seems that John Sallis’s warning that Levinas’s easy assimilation of the elemental and il y a “effaces the specificity of the elemental” is unjustified. Taking it as matter may “deprive it of its capacity for heterogeneous provocation—[and] risk reinscribing the entire analysis of the elemental within the most classical conceptuality.”22 However, we have inscribed it in the provocative and dynamical matrix, not Aristotelian hyle, and have made it a fundamental provocateur in the evolutionary process. 2. Reality and Its Shadow Go and listen . . . , the whole movement [the adagio of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony] is a sublimely sustained melody by the composer Deictic Metaphor

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who more than any other “Doth refine and exalt Man to the height he would have.” Igor Stravinsky

Before we take up Levinas’s disturbing 1948 essay, “Reality and Its Shadow,” which leaves little room in art for our refinement and exaltation, we must say that it is valuable because it examines in Plato’s perspective the relation between representation and reality. First, there are some minor points to make. If outside of clinical contexts we take art to be expressive, it can mean anything one wants it to mean, and usually the critic asserts that he is better qualified than the artist or you or I to say what this is. In some cases, however, a painting represents as a metaphor represents, namely, letting reality appear in a dazzling saturated medium. Unlike metaphor, we do not necessarily look through art at a world; the artist’s image, not a thing or concept, is what addresses us. That means that for Levinas it cannot be an ikon or an epiphany, unconcealing something transcendent. Apparently the Biblical prohibition of images (Exod. 20:4) is behind his denial of art’s evident truth value, but many find in art archetypal patterns that take us into the secret heart of being. Do we not see the mystery of nurturing creation in the milk that pours from the blackness in Vermeer’s jug, the hopelessness of the struggle to break free in Michelangelo’s slaves, or the ambiguous promise of light in Anselm Kiefer’s collage, “Heavenly Jerusalem”? Though Levinas’s rejection of art’s truth claims avoids the frightful implications in Heidegger’s view that art sets truth to work in a happening, in principle not unlike Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies, which gathered a people into its historical destiny; and though the shadow gives representational thinking a new lease, we are left to wander in a desolate landscape that will become even more barren in the hands of Blanchot and Derrida. But couldn’t this shadow also be a saturated phenomenon, an absolute and invisible (for how can such wholes be taken in by a glance?), nonobjectifiable phenomenon that, as unbearable, bedazzles in a counter-experience that constitutes me as a witness? Is this what Heidegger was on the way toward? Though I will ignore this possibility, it should not be ruled out. Since Dada and cubism, art has fled from beauty and one has to look elsewhere for its signs. From beyond being, seen through beauty, every being is radiant. The beautiful thing, the flower in the vase, the face of my beloved, Rilke’s poems, a painting by Cézanne, open being’s “other side” into a beyond that has been unfashionable since the death 164

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of God. Was Levinas too caught up in these dismissals? Did he thus rob himself of an access to truth? Elaine Scarry courageously ventures into mysteries closed off by this dismissal: Something beautiful fills the mind and invites the search for something beyond itself, something larger or something of the same scale with which it needs to be brought into relation. Beauty, according to its critics, causes us to gape and suspend all thought. The complaint is manifestly true—but simultaneously, what is beautiful prompts the mind to move chronologically back in search for precedents and parallels, to move forward into new acts of creation, to move conceptually over, to bring things into relation, and does this with a kind of urgency as if one’s life depended upon it . . . What is beautiful is in league with what is true . . .23 Or so it is said, but beauty has a regressive, antiquarian flavor lacking to the adventure proposed by the Good. That’s where truth lies. “Moving over” and bringing things into relation are among the truthmaking works of metaphor. Its claims are objective; the experience of beauty is corrigible, in the sense that something felt to be beautiful fades or is reconsidered, while other things, too common to notice, become its epiphanies. Beauty brings about a longing for truth “that sooner or later brings us into contact with our own capacity for making errors.” We find this conviction so pleasurable that “ever afterwards one is willing to labor, struggle, wrestle with the world to . . . locate what is true.”24 Even if beauty is beyond being, these representative acts gather the past of a particular thing into a presence. Heidegger wished to avoid such imputations and proposes the elimination of representation in order to destroy its sense of presence. The paradigm seems to have been a Greek temple which, though opening a world and gathering a people into its destiny, does not represent anything. It stands there, “drawing out of the rock the mystery of the rock’s clumsy yet spontaneous support . . . the Greeks called this emerging and rising in itself physis. It clears and illuminates that in which man bases his dwelling. We call this ground the earth . . . that whence that arising [the Temple] brings back and shelters everything that arises without violation . . . [the statue] is a work that lets the god himself be present and thus is the god himself.” 25 The receptacle, the stone, is gathered into standing out as the god’s chora, his temple or seat (hedra). The elimination of representation that makes something present seems Deictic Metaphor

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easier said than done. In a brilliant commentary on this passage whose depth we can only intimate, Marc Froment-Meruice observes that what Heidegger does not determine is the ontological status of the statue that “is” the god himself. We cannot determine this as a pure and simple identification. The god is not stone and yet he “is” the statue in the sense of an analogy with Being itself. Just as the god manifests himself, makes a remarkable modality of presence that has entered into presence (visibility, eidos), so too the statue brings the truth of appearing into presence. In its brilliance, what appears effaces all difference between the present and presence, what appears and appearing. The work as bringing into the open of presence is presence, difference that has been effaced because returned into the work. But the effacement of difference takes place in the name of an analogy with Being, a metaphoricity of which Heidegger does not speak.”26 Heidegger avoids mentioning the presence of the anthropomorphic or theomorphic figure, for each presupposes a person or subject as their base; but Froment-Meruice notes that the temple is itself a stage in which something, the goddess Aletheia, is represented. Even were this evasion of presence successful, we could surely question the truth made manifest. “Art is the becoming and happening of truth,” the rift that opens even as it “sets itself back into the heavy weight of stone, the dumb hardness of wood, the dark glow of colors.” In the intimacy of a struggle between earth and world in which, by means of a design or figure, truth is given a place that, in turn, makes possible a “happening,” which would “draw man up from his enclosed ground” and set him upon the ground in which Being is unconcealed. To stay within the truth revealed in the work: is this what the Zoodochus Pege set to work in me? Or does this foreshadow the ecstasies of Nuremberg?27 In her review of Gjertrud Schnackenberg’s marvelous collection, A Gilded Lapse of Time, Rosanna Warren speaks of those “gilded lapses or rifts in time through which revelation gleams and in which history seems—fleetingly—absolved. For poetry takes time, reclaims it, most of all, from the sacrificial succession of history. Such at least has been the dominant poetic claim of the west.”28 This is not the theme of an autochthonic earth setting itself against the world, but rather of an epiphany, the intersection of time and eternity. Representational art, rather than mindless happenings, has taught us the meaning of our humanity as it releases and lets stand out from the earth beautiful and tender things. Nevertheless, we must beware of the magic of “the 166

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dominant poetic claim,” a construct of the imagination that can turn one away from responsibilities. Levinas is on the side of representation. Plato’s divided line distinguishes within the visible realm the shadows (eikones) imaginatively (eikasia) entertained at the fourth or lowest level from the real things that are taken on trust (pistis) on the third level (Rep., 509E–510B). These together make up the visible realm, which, in turn, images the intelligible order. Levinas opens the hypodochic matrix to art and religion by reinterpreting this distinction in the context of Plato’s denial of the idea/image relation as a result of the “third-man argument”; real things are no longer representations of the intelligible, the thesis behind the divided line that becomes explicit only in Republic 10 (595E–598C). The ontological disjunction between the visible and the intelligible is abandoned; the shadows or images are not the work of ignorance but are imaginatively engendered in the percipient by the real thing (res vera), which participates in the ideas. In the Sophist, Plato distinguished two species within the image-making arts: one concerned with the transparent eikon “in which the proportions of the original are preserved,” and the other with phantasma, the semblances (Sop., 335E–336B) that have a certain density. In Timaeus the living creatures are moving eikona (37D) and thus realities that may be presumed to preserve the proportions of the everlasting ideas. Since it is a determination of time, the very nature of an eikon is to represent the idea in each different and deferring instant in time. An idea is a possible recurrent. Then what about the other phantasma such as representations of art? Rather than seeing reality through them, for that is the truth claim of an eikon, a phantasma or image “neutralizes” any relation with a concept and establishes, through its commerce with the obscure aspects of the thing, “a totally independent ontological event described in categories irreducible to those of cognition . . . [Art] is the very event of obscuring, a descent into the night, an invasion of shadow.” 29 The shadow or phantasm is the reflection of the eikon that occurs when lived time turns back on itself so that what gives itself originally is given to reflection, its interpretations and modifications. The eidolon unconceals (eikon) and conceals (phantasma). The open time of the eikon becomes the frozen dead time of the phantasma. Perhaps, however, there is more to be said. The phantasma is the husk of the living present, the way in which what presences is reflectively entertained, and here in reflection it can be worked over and reworked, made into a work of art or analyzed as a history within hermeneutical frameworks. The shadow is the place in which we can Deictic Metaphor

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sort out the sense of the constitutive and regulative concepts at work in the living present. Proust, for example, spreads out in the time of the novel an intricate description and analysis of the shifting and complex affects felt at a dinner party that lasted a few hours and yet takes days to read. Bergson, commenting on such situations, remarks that there is a juxtaposition of simple states in an infinite permeation of a thousand different impressions that have already ceased to exist the moment they are names [and] we commend him for having known us better than we know ourselves. This is not the case, however, and the very fact that he spreads out our feelings in a homogeneous time and expresses its elements by words, shows us that he in his turn is offering us only its shadow; but has arranged this shadow in such a way as to make us suspect the extraordinary and illogical nature of the object which projects it; he has made us reflect by giving outward expression to something of that contradiction. Encouraged by him, we have put aside for an instant that veil that we have interposed between our consciousness and ourselves. He has brought us back to our own presence.30 But sometimes, as in Joyce’s Ulysses or Mann’s Faustus, the novel is a shadow of a transcendent archetype embedded in the tale that gathers us into a form of life or, as in Jane Austen or George Eliot, an articulation of the moral order itself. On Levinas’s account of these shadows we are abandoned to a desiccated, lifeless world beyond truth that can be related to the real world only through the critic. What has gone wrong? Has Beauty really fled from the world? Without it, as Hans Urs von Balthasar has observed, “the good also loses its attractiveness, the self-evidence of why it must be carried out.”31 Of course, there is the danger of being snared by images, but isn’t it also the case that the receptacle as chora is procreative and in attunement with the Good and Beauty? With truth? Its regular polygons, Plato’s physical forms, are inscribed in Chartres’s windows. Don’t we still see the essential form of things in a painting, a poem, a face, a flower, an expanse of sky? But first, let Levinas explain how the image is the sensuous double of existing realities: “A being is that which is, that which reveals itself in its truth; and at the same time, it resembles itself, is its own image. The original gives itself as though it were at a distance from itself, as though it were withdrawing itself, as though something in a being delayed behind being. The consciousness of the absence of the 168

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object which characterizes an image [the domain of the arts] is not equivalent to a simple neutralization of the thesis, as Husserl would have it, but is equivalent to a simple alteration of the being of the object, where its essential forms appear in a garb it abandons in withdrawing. To contemplate an image is to contemplate a picture.”32 A represented object is said to be a disincarnation of reality, because “by the simple fact of becoming an image, [the real object] is converted into a non-object.” What we perceive in the arts is not the object but “spots of color, chunks of marble or bronze” that remark its removal. Art does not lead beyond being but rather, as being’s allegory, to its “hither side,” to “what in the object doubles it up.”33 Allegory is saturated; it has the opacity of an image. The receptacle makes possible every sort of allegorical horizon. But the shadow has its own reality; for example, the shadow of motion represented in the calculus. Scott Buchanan describes how ratios and proportions bring “some of the speculative boldness of poetry into measurement. . . . We do not catch motion itself; we catch its path, and if we do not follow the past step by step, we follow it in leaps and bounds; if in the end it is no longer motion that we have, but rather its ghost, that is good mathematics and good poetry . . . whatever direction we search to find literal truth it always leads to the same eerie destination.”34 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, reflecting on the poetry of Paul Celan in the spirit of Levinas, says that art is das Unheimlich, the disquieting, and exists as strange, vague alterity in relation to a self, a near, an own, a same. It is the distant, the elsewhere. Rather than being fascinating, which would require that it “occupied its own place [and] exercised attraction in a particular direction,” it is disquieting. “Art has no place of its own.”35 This ubiquitousness has its own topology and, at times, its own history; but it is the place of shadows, a virtual place that can exhibit not being’s shadow but estranging, unheimlich artifacts, which displace humanism’s grand, ravishing phrases and noble ideas, even the human itself;36 and it is the antithesis of nature; but this can be a response to art’s tendency to displace reality and efface its difference from things and nature, in turn making these over into its image. For all its similarities, Levinas has a somewhat different story to tell. Apophantic discourse thematizes the existing thing; even if neutralized, it still proposes an object horizon referring to actual and possible places. Art’s images presuppose diachronic time, a “non-indifference to duration,” in which, nevertheless, “something [is] delayed in a being behind being,” as if in the horizons of a virtual memory beyond the Deictic Metaphor

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thing’s chorastic arché or, again, as if in “an interruption of time by a movement going on the hither side of time, in its interstices.”37 These images invert the phenomenological reduction and aim to disclose the sensible, if not in its actuality, then in its virtual reality—like a still life by Chardin or a character in Dickens. Art replaces the concept with the image in which we participate without representing and, as Thomas Wall notes, “consciousness, having nothing to aim at, becomes supererogatory, as does the body, for, at once actor and spectator, the body is transformed into sensations belonging to no one.”38 Sensation is freed from conception and has a function all its own; “the hold that an image has over us, a function of rhythm,” takes place in the imagination as “a distinct ontological event.” In this captivating, closed whole “elements call for one another like the syllables in a verse, but do so only in so far as they impose themselves on us, disengaging themselves from reality.” This obsessive hold presupposes a welcome in which one is caught up and carried along as “part of its own representation. It is not so despite itself” for, in this diachronic temporality, “there is no longer a oneself, but rather a passage from oneself to anonymity.” This is captivation by the incantation of poetry or music. It is a mode of being to which applies neither the form of unconsciousness (as the I is there stripped of its prerogative to assume its power) nor the form of consciousness (as the whole situation and its articulations are in a dark light, present). Present, Plato says, as in a dream? This present cannot pass, cannot force the future, and is caught up in a time between the eternity of ideas and the flux of events. Music, Aquinas somewhere said, “can transport us to God in an absence of truth” until the day we are “dazzled by an excess of truth.” The promise of a future is given, but as in dying, “the future as a promise of a new present is refused.” It is a paradox that in the artistic image time can stop in the promise, like Zeno’s arrow petrified forever in an instant. As in the welcomed Other’s hold over us, so too in art we are possessed; as if by its own initiative the thing invokes in us a fundamental passivity that is most “visible in magic, song, music, and poetry.” Its hold is that of sensation, of rhythm. Music and poetry are images, waking dreams, “where nothing is unconscious but where consciousness, paralyzed in its freedom, plays, totally absorbed in this playing.” In such dreams we behold the receptacle (Tim., 52C). To enter into the spell of an image is to be among things which [for cognition] should have had only the status of objects. . . . It constitutes the pathos of the imaginary 170

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world of dreams—the subject is among things not only in virtue of its density of being, requiring a “here,” a somewhere, and retaining its freedom; it is among things as a thing, as part of the spectacle. It is exterior to itself, with an exteriority that is not that of a body, since the pain of the I-actor is felt by the I-spectator, and not through compassion. Here we have really the exteriority of the inward . . . a sphere situated outside the unconsciousness and conscious . . . a reversal of power into participation.” A virtual participation whose real analogue would be not patristic metoche but koinonia, communion in a Kantian “kingdom of ends”? “Reality would not only be what it is, what it is disclosed to be in truth, but would be also its double, its shadow, its image.” Being escapes itself in its image, which, like a caricature, holds all that escapes one’s substantial identity. Here is a person who is what he is; but he does not make us forget, does not absorb, cover over entirely the objects he holds and the way he holds them, his gestures, limbs, gaze, skin which escapes from under the identity of his substance, which like a torn sack is unable to contain them. Thus a person bears on his face, alongside of its being with which he coincides, its caricature, its picturesqueness . . . Here is a familiar everyday thing, perfectly adapted to the hand, which is accustomed to it, but its qualities, color, form, and position at the same time remain as it were behind its being, like the “old garments” of a soul which had withdrawn from the thing, like a still life. Yet all this is the person and is the thing . . . The thing is itself and its image . . . In the vision of a represented object a painting has a density of its own . . . The perceived elements are not the object but are like its “old garments, spots of color, chunks of marble or of bronze. . . .39 This duality is the sphere of poetic imagery, that is, metaphor. In this sense, poetic metaphor is virtually only chorastic. Its “here” is a virtual “somewhere.” Is “virtual,” used to name what seems to hover between the ideal and real, always pejorative? Though Levinas did not use the term, he took art to be disengaged from the world, not toward Plato’s ideas or “the eternal that towers above the world,” but toward its hither side, a “descent into the night” whose “categories defy cognition.” Can one really strip art of its epiphanies? Not really. This can depend on the ordering of virtual space and time. In real time my life is not my own, Deictic Metaphor

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but in virtual time I can make of it whatever I will, even a fable. I can also let the imagination play and, through it, let something come to be and be for its own sake which, in being beautiful, defies all use and justification (Kant). In being what it is, it can be more, perhaps even a symbol of the moral idea or a route to high and strange adventure; thus as children we went with Alice through the looking glass or to the South Seas with Melville. Even virtual space can be iconic. Panofsky showed that medieval painting often used a sacred spherical and hierarchical space of proximity, not mere coexistence. Even more to the point is Leo Steinberg’s demonstration that art can be cognitive and even spiritual. In his magnificent Leonardo’s Incessant Last Supper, he successfully argues that this painting is not the representation of a dramatic moment, the account current since Goethe, but “conflates the ritual and the episodic; conflates the two natures of Christ” in an icon that presents the sense of the Eucharist. Moreover, the painting simultaneously represents the ambiguities in six successive Biblical episodes in a virtual duration. The space, like that of medieval art, is that of sacred proximity. If perceptual intentions let something show itself from a place, then places in works of art are virtual, the London of Dickens or the St. Petersburg of Dostoyevsky; for nothing more can happen there except what can happen again in the telling. That the characters in a book are committed to the infinite repetition of the same acts and the same thoughts is not due to the contingent fact of the narrative, which is exterior to these characters. They can be narrated because their being resembles itself, doubles itself and immobilizes—by its reflection in a narrative, being has a nondialectical fixity, stops dialectics and time . . . A total exteriority, like the exteriority in rhythm . . . where the subject is exterior to itself . . . is the true vision of the novelist. . . . All the power of the contemporary novel, its art magic, is perhaps due to this way of seeing inwardness from the outside.40 “Seeing inwardness from the outside.” Not all the magic, perhaps, and certainly not epiphany, but magic nevertheless. 3. Eros Serious reflection on love—poetic, political, or religious—begins with the Symposium, and if it does not have all the answers to the mysteries hidden in eros, philia, or agape, it is a perspicuous beginning. 172

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Though Plato denied that God, being complete, could love (Sym., 202C), in our tradition the religious aspect has been primary, and we have not hesitated to say with Saint John that love (agape) is God. If God were a perfect being, complete and in Himself, then Eros, a creature of needs and lacks (Sym., 203E), could never be a god. But if God is Good and beyond being in self-surpassing goodness and is, as Christians have it, self-loving love, then He is not a being, loving or otherwise. This reflexivity is anything but autistic, for agape is the Good’s giving that precipitates its given, the divine hypostases and our cosmos. According to Wilamowitz, theos (god) is a predicate. Usually the gods are referred to as oi athanatoi, “the deathless ones,”41 so that we are not being told about God per se, but about the divinity of love or beauty. Classical Greek and Augustine, if not Saint John, will say, “Love is God” and not “God is love.” Though we often say that “God is love,” and though theos is not usually nominative, still the nominal or substantive term, God, is verbally qualified by agape, itself a noun. His being, agape, must be understood as a hypostatic posit of infinite love (agapan). All love is directed to something or, better, somebody (199D), and this primordial agape must have an object toward which it can express itself. This is true of us. Any hypostasis is itself nothing without social relation to other hypostases—father, son, mother, friend, lover, and the like; and since each, being other, needs the other, then this internal structure of participatory indwelling is the work of eros. The hypostasis imports the necessary sociality into eros. The movement toward the transcendent one or Good takes time to be a loss of unicity is, when understood hyperbolically, a movement of return to the others. This bias will deeply color my reading of the Symposium. Before we launch into love’s transcendent possibilities, we must take account of Heidegger’s analysis of the ambivalence of the hypostasis’ relatedness to alterity that is prior to intentionality and the subject/object distinction which is, on his account, Dasein’s definite way of being in the world, namely in states of mind (Befindlichkeit) or moods (Stimmungen). Dasein transcends toward world, not God, in an account that will seriously challenge the more transcendent eros to Good and Beauty. In “The passion of Facticity,” Giorgio Agamben traces Heidegger’s initial insight, gained through Augustine, that love is a more original opening on world than knowing, and this finally leads him to facticity. Facticity is not the fact correlative to a true proposition, but means something made, facticius, rather than natives, natural. Thinking must begin from facticity, a constitutive non-originarity,42 and Deictic Metaphor

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is, Heidegger says, “the way [Dasein] is delivered over to the Being, which, as existing, it has to be . . . the pure ‘that it is’—is veiled in its ‘whence’ and ‘whither,’ yet disclosed in itself all the more ‘unveiledly’ we call it the thrownness of this entity into its ‘there.’ The expression ‘thrownness’ is meant to express the facticity of its being delivered over . . . The first essential character of states of mind is that they disclose Dasein in its thrownness and, proximally and for the most part, as an evasive turning away.”43 This “turning away” has many forms, but what concerns us is love’s turning, its demonic self-absorption, excessive sensuality, and even cruelty. We can begin to understand this resolute turning away through facticity. Being “delivered over” means that the self is opaque and oblivious to its whence and wither, that it is decentered. This thrown facticity is what Christians, Jews, and Muslims understand as creation ex nihilo. Before we approach this opening to the transcendent, we must begin with Heidegger’s post-Nietzschian radical immanence. Facticity as “being there” essentializes existence and existentializes essence. Because facticity is factical, Dasein must be its guise (factio, fashion; what reveals it and that into which it is thrown) as dispersed into bodiliness and sexuality. Natural and artifactual, proper and improper, authentic and unauthentic are equally original. Agamben then can say that the experience of the potentiality for freedom coincides with that of impotentiality.44 If facticity disappears from texts on the emergence of Ereignis, which is itself situated within the space of the proper and improper, then to “appropriate” (eigen in Ereignis) is no longer to evasively turn away within the oblivion of Being, but to accept our irreducible hiddenness and opacity, “the blind impress that our behavings bear.” Concealment no longer conceals itself but becomes the “attention of thinking.” Gelassenheit means releasement to the mystery, “the non-epochal opening to the ancient something that conceals itself in the word aletheia.”45 On Agamben’s textual assembly, this movement is proper to Appropriation, where what shows itself “turns towards us in its withdrawal, and thus first shows itself to be thought.” We appropriate the fact of hiddenness. “Facticity must show itself in its concealment and opacity.”46 Had Levinas approached “images” through the deictic roots of facticity in his il y a or Plato’s matrix, his view of art would have been more robust and revelatory. To return to our theme of love, we begin with Agamben’s “provisional definition”:

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Man’s proper is not just his light and opening to knowledge but, above all, to concealment and opacity. Aletheia, truth, is the safeguarding of lethe, nontruth; memory, the safeguard of oblivion; light, the safeguarding of darkness. It is only in the insistence of this abandonment, which is forgetful of everything, that something like knowledge and attention can become possible . . . Love suffers all this (in the etymological sense of the word passion). Love is the passion of facticity in which man bears his nonbelonging and darkness, appropriating them while guarding them as such . . . it is the passion and exposition of facticity itself and the irreducible impropriety of beings.47 There is no sense in distinguishing proper from improper love, the love of God from self-love in this atheistic world of the totalities. However, the issue need not be quite so nihilistic. As we will soon see in Levinas’s deduction of the face, the prosopon that looks at us from beyond me and calls me, from the erotic caress: “lovers bear the impropriety of love to the end so that the proper can emerge as the appropriation of the free incapacity that passion brings to its end . . . The free use of the proper is his most difficult task.”48 This difficulty is compounded by the inscrutable need for an initiative on behalf of the transcendent that comes out to meet us. We must begin with incarnate persons, Kearney’s persona, and not constellations of instantiated qualities. On the authority of Revelation, God is a person, “Father,” and love (agape); if so, God is to be sought through love that hypostasizes itself in a nexus of personal relations. W. H. Auden, who wished to write a modern Vita Nuova, remarked that Plato lacked the concept of a person. Eros never led to “a revelation of creaturely glory . . . the glory of a single human being . . . [where any accompanying] physical desire is always, and without any effort of will, subordinate to a feeling of awe and reverence in the presence of a sacred being.” Dante’s Beatrice was always a person, never an “allegory of something greater than herself.” 49 Perhaps not, but we can assist matters with the saturated hypostasis, the haecceitas or persona that concretizes the universal. Iris Murdoch’s proposal that persons be treated as concrete universals, incarnations of flesh and spirit, goes to the very heart of love and morality.50 Like one’s experience of art, this cannot be fixed in a concept, but unlike art, the persona is always on the move and, until death, there is always more to come. Plato seems to have grasped something of this when his Diotima remarks that we are always Deictic Metaphor

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“being renewed and passing away” (Sym., 207D–E). The concept of the persona individuating the universal, that is, making a concrete todi ti, goes a long way toward making love more intelligible. In Plato it seems that we love the individual for the sake of the universal or to make up for some lack, but here the factical individual is inseparable from the universal through its haecceitas or its equivalent persona, in an ongoing relation with others. By a process of reassessing and redefining “that is a function of individual history” we grow in love and understanding of the other.51 For Plato love begins with the individual, with parents and friends, and only then moves toward transcendent “institutions and laws” and “the science of beauty everywhere” (Sym., 100B–211D). Love has a connatural (Aquinas) knowledge of the persona and faces the incompletable task of making articulate what is in the end inarticulable (see below 9:1). We are compelled by the reality of what we see and not by saying “this is right, this is what I ought to do.” The moral words are normative descriptions, contextually appropriate to what love sees in the context of attention, a just and loving gaze at the individual. What I see leads me to act “in obedience, not resolution.”52 Plato’s Symposium is a poetic celebration of love in an autoerotic cosmos. The earlier speakers in the Symposium praise love, but Socrates shifts away from these encomia toward the object of eros, its intended noema, which for us shadow people is our true being. This shift reflects Murdoch’s desire to use not loaded words denoting moral generalities, but the “secondary moral words” specific to the context that let us see more.53 Eros is of something we lack, not of some lack in us. Its constituted object is neither wholly real nor wholly ideal. The self’s framework determines the being it aims to be. Do we find our clue in Plato’s Aristophanes, “Eros is a great god who restores us to our native selves, to our true and original nature” (Sym., 183D)? Do we love in the other our complementary self? Aristophanes’ version of love is an analogue of Parmenides’ “well-rounded sphere”; rather than being teleological and creative, life would be a drive to appropriate an original presence found in the beloved’s other self. But a different image is given in the Phaedrus. The suggestion is that in visiting the gods—Ares, Hera, Zeus, and the like—we are in a process of making ourselves through a complex fusion of responses to the Good and our chthonic drives and phobias. Human nature is already contextualized by its factical frameworks. A cautionary note: An appeal from on high may mask the lowest and most nihilistic instincts, which range from narcissism to ideologies; unless it places us under judgment, calls us to a 176

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responsibility for others beyond anything we could possibly impose upon ourselves, it is self-idolatry. The framework is first a saying, and the response must be to another, not to an idea alone; the latter informs those egological totalities in which alterity is assimilated to the same qua self, which is indeed a sort of formula for participation, rather than its deconstructive converse in being face to face. Through this deconstruction I become the other’s hostage. The infinite is not “in front of” me; I express it, but precisely by giving a sign of the giving of signs, of the “for-the-other,” in which I am disinterested: here I am. The accusative here is remarkable: here I am, under your eyes, at your service, your obedient servant. In the name of God. But this is without thematization; the sentence in which God gets mixed in with words is not “I believe in God.” The religious discourse that precedes all religious discourse is not dialogue. It is the “Here I am” said to a neighbor to whom I am given over, by which I announce peace, that is, my responsibility for the other.54 The accusative is a modification of the nominative, but this is a modification explicitly denied by Levinas, because the face, and thus the ethical, is prior even if “blurred by lust, . . . a mixing of the animal and the metaphysical.”55 To take liberties with Levinas’s terminology, unless there were such a modification, his own deductions of the other as prosopon, the icon of God in this flesh-and-blood person, from the sexuality of the persona that first transfigures me are suspect.56 The monstration hitherto entailed in saying becomes “expiation as uniting identity and alterity.”57 This, however, neglects the fact that we are incarnate, uncomfortably at home in, rather than trapped by, existence.58 If the love is agapic and is, as the Protestant theologians de Rougemont and Nygren maintain, “unconditional and creative, spontaneous, uncaused, indifferent to human merit,” is it directed to the individual per accidens and not qua individual?59 No, it is an affective and deconstructive response to Alterity. The experience of Beauty that culminates the soul’s assent in the Symposium (211A–D) deconstructs the egological and erotic soul in a releasement, not necessarily from facticality, that “gives birth to true virtue because it is in touch with true beauty” (212A). For me, if not for Plato, this birth in “true virtue” would be the deconstruction of the erotic self that releases the new life in agape. Deictic Metaphor

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The beatific vision in the last cantos of Dante’s Paradise leaves traces in more mundane relations that culminate in the face of the other. What I love under the lure of eros is first the individual haecceitas, the persona or concrete universal. The experience of Beauty, placed by Diotima at the end of the assent from the beauty of this one to Beauty (210B) and then to the beauty of all (211C–D), foreshadows the final birth in Beauty in which the assent culminates. Whatever the state of things in paradise, this initial “abduction” by the beauty of one moves from the attraction of the other’s body to the call that issues from her face, the face of the Christ or Mary we see in the other, or the face of the other as Other. How can this response to the one lead us to take up the difficult task of “the free use of the proper” in responsibilities to others? The saturation of the Beautiful, in this rather exalted sense, is not unlike the experience of the sublime. To “behold the divine beauty itself in one form” (212A) may not be as tidy as Plato would have us believe, for the beautiful is terrifying and lovable, commanding within facticity both fear and ascent and is, as Kant reports, the felt expression of an infinite idea that “is a check on the vital forces” (IK CAJ, 245). The apportionment of Beauty is also the work of the contingent haecceitas whereby the common nature through immersion in the world existentializes itself. However, listen to the more ecstatic Saint Denys: “The beautiful beyond being gives beauty from itself in a manner appropriate to each, it causes the consonance and splendor of each, it flashes forth upon all, after the manner of light, the beauty producing gifts of its flowing ray” (Saint Denys, DN, IV, 7, 701C). The Good and Beautiful are, in their expression, apportioned to each creature whose goodness and splendor is its own. This is how beings look within a Platonic variant of the mystery of creation ex nihilo; this uncompromised Good is God, and the creature is paradoxically an independent dependency and dependent independence. In the Mystagogia, Saint Maximus the Confessor says that “God is the Good” 60 and that “goodness reveals God. . . . Good means ‘existing’, ‘set-down’, ‘running’ or ‘exceedingly’ . . . which bestows existence, permanence, and movement on all existing things.” 61 It is as if he first set us down so we, being independent, could run away and, on discovering responsibility in Beauty, return. Unless that infinite Good in its radiance, its Beauty, shines through the person as the lighting shines through a Rembrandt portrait so that we see in this face an icon of the divine hypostasis whose word commands us to love one another even as he has loved us, in 178

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whom, as Saint Paul says, “your life lies,” and to whom there is “no question of Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Sythian, slave and freeman” (Col. 3:4,11), it is going to be very difficult to give an account of love that does justice to the other.62 Beauty lets us see the fragility, the wanton and tragic contingency of life, calls upon us to do for the least of these what we would do for Him and thus to feed, clothe, heal, and nourish this destitute other who is all others. Short of “the word made flesh who dwelt among us,” however, it may be difficult to find a personal paradigm that does not just deflect desire, that is to say, love, but lets it focus on a God who commands me to be for the other. To say to another, “I do this because I am responsible for you,” is rather demeaning in contrast to “I, loving you, do this because you are beautiful.” Is responsibility the sense of agape? Yes, and . . . No. It is a caring love of a singular self for the singularity of others and for justice. Plato introduces the idea of the Good through the image of the sun, the cause of vision and growth (Rep., 507A); thus one might imagine that there would be an access to it in visual metaphors, for example, by replacing Being in the Ontological Difference with the Good’s lighting in an analogous axiological difference, or by Good’s gift of being in life-giving metaphors. Levinas has gone a long way toward enriching the “visual” metaphors by beginning with satisfaction and dwelling rather than, like Heidegger, with techne. But, like the sun, the giver of light that cannot be seen, the Good, though the cause of reason and the ideas, remains unknown (Rep., 508C). Saint Denys and Saint Maximus held that these metaphors founded on light through which we approach the Good lead only to its “vestibule” and not into its “dwelling,” where, Maximus says, “the simple, absolved, and unchanged mysteries of theology lie hidden in the darkness beyond light of the great mystical silence . . .” (Saint Maximus, DN, 998a). Since from time to time I will speak of the Divine Darkness, I must take a moment to situate this inquiry in relation to patristic and neo-Platonic thought. In neo-Platonism the ascent to the One is directed toward an object, the One, whose term is union with that One. Apophatic theology negates the properties of being; it is, as Plotinus says, a reduction of being to absolute simplicity. The end is a union in which subject and object disappear.63 “Then they come together, they are one” (Enneads., VI, ix, 3). Neither Plato nor Saint Denys and his followers were neo-Platonists but instead sought, in Vladimer Lossky’s words, to “go forth from being,” Now we will follow Denys beyond Plato for whom God is unknowable. Except he Deictic Metaphor

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reveal himself, not as a Parmenidian One but as a Trinity, he cannot even be named. Anything else is an idol. The Hindu god is also an ineffable one who is manifest in numberless “gods” and avatars, but none of these is “very God of very God, begotten not made, and homoousias with the Father,” born of woman, and wholly god and wholly man. If true, he is a unique but surely nonexclusive access to the otherwise unknowable. According to Saint Gregory Palamas, the super-essential nature of God is not a subject for speech or thought or even contemplation, for it is far from all that exists and more than unknowable . . . incomprehensible and ineffable to all for ever. There is no name whereby it can be named, neither in this age nor in the age to come, nor word found in the soul and uttered by the tongue, nor contact whether sensible or intellectual, nor yet any image that will afford any knowledge of its subject, if this is not the perfect incomprehensibility which one acknowledges in denying all that can be named. He is not being if all that is not God is being.64 Palamas goes on to say that the darkness denotes the Godhead, while light denotes His uncreated energies in, for example, creation and providence. Is Derrida correct in saying that apophatic theology’s darkness, which is “more than luminous [hyperphoton] darkness” (St. Denys, MT, 1:998a), promises an intuited presence?65 When Denys says the darkness is “beyond being” [hyperousian] (1:1000a), with the hyper prefix he transcends affirmation and negation and, as Marion says, denies all relevance to predication, “rejects the nominative function of names, and suspends the rule of truth’s two values.”66 What does it mean to reject the nominative function? The clue lies in aitia. “As the cause of all things, it itself is not one of them” (SD DN, I, 5,539c–d); “the ungraspable aitia comes from the total love beyond all things” (DN, IV, 16, 713c). Marion says that the language of mystical theology is mistakenly called negative theology, for it “refers names and their speaker to the unattainable yet inescapable interlocutor beyond every name and every designation of names . . . it acts by transporting itself in the direction of Him whom it denominates.”67 The resulting saturated experience may be “beyond Being.” In Orthodox Christianity, God is present in his energies, “outpourings of the divine nature that cannot set bounds to itself . . . the mode of existence of the Trinity that is outside its inaccessible essence.” In this “mode of existence outside the Trinity” we can see the beginnings of Bonaventure’s “reduction of the arts to theology” or “the 180

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mind’s route to God.” Even Plato’s ideas become dynamic and intentional, “volitional thoughts,” not Augustinian archetypes.68 Though the patristic God often appears as an artist imposing form on matter, a position certainly justified by “the works of reason” in Timaeus, I understand the matrix to be the source of these energies and creatures as self-forming, and thus I reject the impositional model of creativity. Since Plato introduces the Good with metaphors of light, life, and vision, it would make sense to speak of something being seen in the Good or of the new life, the birth in beauty, its desire may engender. No metaphors, only that given in revelation, such as “God is love,” can pass beyond the threshold into the darkness of God. The theme of rebirth is enriched when Levinas says that the Good brings it about. This is a reversal of Nietzsche who held that impulses arouse values. The Good and Beautiful can affect us and transform the ego’s reduction of relevant alterity to the facticality of self-interested sameness into a desire for the good of the Other. Something like metanoia (conversion) may occur in the Symposium with the discovery that the love of beauty in one “gives life to noble discourse” (210A), which, in turn, discloses beauty all can share (210B); having discovered the beauties of the soul, he will concern himself with “institutions and laws” that do justice to this beauty (210C). No doubt, Plato missed the transformation of the person, which in Kant’s jargon has a price, into Kearney’s persona seen as “the in-finite other in the other before me.” Nor did he have Marion’s sense of the other as a saturated icon. But don’t these auroras mark the beautiful other even without the proper benefit of an adequate language? Levinas says that love is one-one; to love is “to exist as if the lover and the loved one were alone in the world.” To those left out of the dialogue, love itself is wrong. 69 Far too many do get left out, but this is also true of the one-to-one relation with Alterity. But this is a choice that goes against the grain of each. The self that loves is a hypostasis, a social reality, and its milieu is society. Plato insists that the form of the self is justice (Rep., 444B–445B).

Deictic Metaphor

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6

Truth and Metaphor

Metaphor is, so to speak, a borrowed dwelling. Du Marsais

1. “The Thing Itself” When I was with some distinguished men recently, I asserted that the Socratic method of discussion . . . seemed to me outstanding. For not only are souls imbued with the truth through conversation, but one can see [it] in the order of meditation itself which proceeds from the unknown to the known. Leibniz

The movement away from predication toward an apprehensive of “the thing itself,” metaphor’s phenomenological task, was begun by Plato in the Seventh Epistle and as Leibniz saw, is the point of dialectic. This deictic movement was nipped in the bud by Aristotle’s De Categoria (1a 16–1b 9), where things ( pragma as primary ousia) and their indicators disappear to leave their linguistic traces in the such and such said about them by names and predicables (secondary ousia), meanings of these meant. Even these traces are gone from Aristotle’s discussion of signification in De Interpretatione. Husserl led the attempt to return to this “thing itself that showed itself from itself and in itself,” phenomenology’s Principle of 182

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Principles. The apparent loss of the thing in signification that occurred in the first of the Logical Investigations was picked up by Derrida and still clouds philosophy. Following Pierce, for example, it might be said that whatever is signified is itself a sign, and, as a consequence, we are as if trapped in a Klein bottle where there is no within or without. Giorgio Agamben has called this regress into question: the signified sign is, in so far as it is signified, not a sign; then it appears as an object, for example, in a metalanguage, and is no longer an unobtrusive opening on a world. He turns this on Plato to show that the idea, “the thing itself” (to pragma auto, 7th Ep., 341C) is not a “quid that might be sought as an extreme hypothesis beyond all hypotheses, as a final and absolute subject beyond all subjects, horribly or beautifully unreachable in its obscurity . . . The thing itself is not a thing; it is the very sayability, the very openness at issue in language.”1 If for Aristotle the thing enters thought only as a universal, an ens rationis, the situation with Plato is a little different and will, in fact, lead to epiphany, a point that can be made through Agamben’s illuminating study of Plato’s phrase. Plato says that this “thing” could never admit of “verbal expression like other disciplines” (mathe–mata); but then, “if one dwelt for a long time close to the thing itself and in communion with it, it is suddenly brought to birth in the human soul, as light that is kindled by a passing spark; and then it nourishes itself” (341C–D). As in a metaphor? Agamben asks: “What is the thing of thinking?” Aristotle’s De Interpretatione, the source of most subsequent thought on signification, answers that it is the concept, which has an almost accidental relation to language. Spoken sounds are signs of “affections in the soul,” and what is written is a sign of what is in the voice (16a3). The concept or mental affection is same for all men (16a5). We shall see that this expels the “thing itself” from signification, which is reduced to the usual concept (Sinn, sense), the signifier, and the signified (Bedeutung, referent) and, almost parenthetically, writing is added to the list. The letter interprets the voice, “which needs no other interpreter,”2 and is then the second substance sayable of, but not present in, the primary substance, the todi ti. (De Cat., 2a 11–2b 1) Plato, who was suspicious of the written word, which can never come to its own defense (Phaed., 278C), has a different answer and tells us how one gets to “the thing itself” as the object of thinking through four steps: (1) the name (signifier); (2) the definition (logos); (3) the image (sensible object or actual reference); and (4) knowledge Truth and Metaphor

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(“which exists neither in voices nor in corporeal figures but in souls”); and, finally, (5) the thing itself “by which each being is knowable and truly is” (7th Ep., 342B–C). The latter is Agamben’s revision of the usual “one must posit the thing itself, which is knowable and truly is” that makes the good point that the idea, the thing itself, is not to be confused with the image; however, Agamben is justified on better textual evidence.3 The first four mediations “make clear the quality of each thing no less than its real essence, [but] on account of the weakness of language,” one will never grasp the thing itself through them. There is the risk that the non-thematizability of the thing itself will be thematized and become a “speaking about which it is impossible to speak.” Though language is necessary, “no man of intelligence will ever entrust his thoughts to language, especially if that language is unalterable, like language written with letters” (7th Ep., 343A). Plato says that the knowledge of the thing itself suddenly emerges in “repeated use of these instruments, ascending and descending to each in turn,” and only then is it possible “for knowledge to be engendered of an object naturally good” (343E). In what seems to be a metaphor about metaphor, not unlike the Republic’s “rubbing fire sticks together” (Rep., 435A), “rubbing together names, definitions, visions, and sense perceptions, proving them in benevolent proofs and discussions without envy” (7th Ep., 344B) opens an eidetic horizon. The idea, the thing itself, is not something over and above the signified but is that thing as known in all its radiant splendor. Because it is seen through a nexus of linguistic elements, the name and definition, Agamben proposes that, although the thing exists independently, it is not simply unsayable, but it is not sayable “like other disciplines” for ethical reasons. This thing is the very knowability of the image “in the pure light of its self-manifestation and announcement to consciousness.”4 This dialectic movement from image to thing itself is epiphany. The logos cannot bring “this knowability and sameness to expression,” for language decomposes the thing, which is “announced in it and in it alone, into a being about which one speaks and a poion, a quality and determination, that one says of it.” Language is “always presup-positional and objectifying.” Is it possible to speak otherwise? The idea “remains unsaid in what is said and that about which something is said” so that the idea is “lost in what is known and in that about which something is known.” The task is to restore the transcendent thing itself to language and openness to human speech and knowledge. Agamben speaks of this as revelation. When the soul is 184

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attuned to the idea that reveals itself, then words can express what cannot be described, even as music expresses the secret designs of the soul. Can language say what the name has expressed even if the referent is, like the Good, never present? Or is there a way of saying that can show the idea or, perhaps more appropriately, express the experience of the Good in a non-objectifying language? Or are we to fall back on Aristotle and abandon to pragma auto? This is the problem we encounter in Heidegger’s “other thinking” that would avoid bringing presence into discussions of art, or Derrida’s différance, pharmacon, and the like, where, with the mystics, we say that it, chora or God, is ineffable. Plato’s Good, on being named is objectified, but is nevertheless not a being. Just as Plato approached the Good through the sun, so too we can employ metaphors if, at least by faith, there is something that makes everything else seeable. Agamben says that Plato’s own response was not based on the weakness of the logos but on its founding the possibility of speech as speech, “for the sake of helping speech” (Phaed., 278C). Though there is a risk that the unthematizable idea will be thematized, the thing itself is not a quid that might be sought in an extreme hypothesis beyond all hypotheses, as a final and absolute subject beyond all subjects, horribly or beautifully reachable in its obscurity. We can conceive of such a nonlinguistic thing only in language, through the idea of a language without relation to things. It is a chimera in the Spinozian sense of the term, that is, a purely verbal being. The thing itself is not a thing; it is the very sayability, the very openness at issue in language which, in language, we always presuppose and forget, perhaps because it is at bottom its own oblivion and abandonment . . . The task of philosophical presentation is to come with speech to help speech so that, in speech, speech does not remain presupposed but instead comes to speech. At this point the presuppositional power of language touches its limit and its end; language says presuppositions as presuppositions [the hypotheses that are seen as hypotheses, as underpinnings, to be used as springboards by which mind is to reach the idea (Rep., 511B)] and, in this way, reaches the unpresupposable and unpresupposed principle that, as such, constitutes authentic human community and communion.5 Here we must part company with Agamben and go our way to the ineffable in song, encomia, or prayer, which rely on the affectivity Truth and Metaphor

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that, as Bradley said, is always with us in all of its expressions that I, though neither Agamben nor Plato, evoke in approaching the Good, “an extreme hypothesis.” An alternative approach is suggested by a discussion of medieval linguistics in Agamben’s earlier Language and Death; it too relies on a variant of “saying.” Modern linguists have given us a new understanding of pronouns and other indicators, which enables us to deal with the problem Plato encountered with the thing itself. Emile Benveniste approaches these as “indicators of the utterance.” What is the reality to which I or you refers? Only a “reality of discourse” that is something quite singular. I can only be defined in terms of “locutions,” not in objective terms, as is possible for a nominal sign . . . There is no point in defining these terms and demonstratives in general through deixis, if we do not add that deixis is contemporaneous with the instance of discourse that bears the indication of the person; from this reference the demonstrative derives its unique and particular character . . . as soon as, though the same expression, this relation of the indicator to the single instance that reveals it is no longer in sight, language looks to a number of distinct terms that correspond symmetrically to the first. These no longer refer to the instance of discourse, but to real objects, times, and historical places. Hence the correlatives: I, he, then, there, now, today, that same day.6 Roman Jakobson, acknowledging a debt to Benveniste, called these adverbs and pronouns “shifters.” Following a suggestion by Peirce, he situated them between symbols, conventionally associated with the represented object, and indices whose relation is existential. Shifters combine both functions and therefore belong to the class of indexical symbols. The sign I can relate to its object only within English conventions; however, as an index, it is in an “existential relation with this object: the word I distinguishing the utterer is existentially related to his utterance . . . Thus I means the addressor (and you, the addressee) of the message to which it belongs.”7 Saying is the primordial existential relation with another in which, granted certain conditions, the Good’s deflection and/or Incarnation lets us see the other as Other. There is a less deflected and more immediate approach to be found in citations from medieval linguists that employ something like shifters. The reference of nouns (God) and pronouns (He) is not 186

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present or, as in the Good, there is no object; yet we treat them as if they were. Alain de Lille says that in apophanesis “every noun, given by the form, said by the form, falls away from the form. . . . Since every noun following first institution has been given by property or form, when it is translated to signify divine form, it falls away from the form from which it was given. And thus in some way it becomes formless. A noun is translated into a pronoun when it signifies the divine. . . . Whenever a demonstrative pronoun refers to God, it falls away from demonstration.”8 Faith, presumably an infused virtue, promises to retain reference. Just as Plato left a place for the idea beyond language, so here the “ostensive function of the pronoun is maintained through recourse to that particular experience of the word that is faith, conceived as the place of an indication that is neither sensible nor intellectual.” This is an experience realized solely in the instance of discourse. Is this a case of Plato’s “speech coming to the aid of speech?” Suppose we say, “God is ineffable.” Is the apparent predication of ineffable of “God,” or really of agape, which is not a being, a same with, or neighbor of “ineffable” and thus as hermeneutical? I am invited to see love as ineffable, as a surplus beyond intention, so that to say this of love is no great mystery. Is the experience of saying even if nothing is said the place of indication where we are beyond being and experience the ineffable? Especially when what we say and seek to express establish a sacred opalescence. An immediate consequence of God’s withdrawal or distancing from beings is that the lighting that unconceals or discloses is no longer Being’s but the “opalescence” of the supplements. Anything hypostasized by the Good, now taken to be Love, will go out from itself. Eros is ecstasis toward the Good, while agape is the Good’s expression. The Logos “by which everything was made that was made” (John 1:3) is such an expression, and as such is distanced; “On his face as Christ,” Marion says, “the Son does not always reveal the father so much as God himself is always received as son”9 and, we may add, on her face Mary lets us receive God as mother. What would have been an unapproachable, divine hypostasis is incarnate and determines distance as proximity and absence as withdrawal. To receive the Son is to receive the measure, the logos, and the meaning that sets the terms of this withdrawal. I take the sense of this withdrawal to be a reversal of the usual scheme of participation. Instead of the intention to reduce the transcending other to a same who, as person or form, remains other (patristic metoche), the initiative is with transcendent alterity, God or the Good (patristic koinonia). The Truth and Metaphor

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“elevation to that [which] is beyond being and knowledge” (St. Denys, DN, 1.988b), the union with God often proposed as the end of apophanesis is now the distancing of koinonia. Levinas’s “proximity” is appropriate to these situations in which the Good’s initiative is evident, such as grace or kenosis. It is possible because what was not a being, the Good understood as eros/agapé, has hypostasized itself as three persons (prosopon). Marion suggests, even if he does not quite say so, that withdrawal makes possible the open (Rilke) or clearing (Heidegger’s earth and sky) that lets things be. In Hölderlin’s scheme, the pure participate in the image through the figure, where the figure is like an icon in which the withdrawn image is revealed. The result is a sort of naturalized koinonia that gathers our gaze into its mystery. “Naming that respects withdrawal can alone inspect the image . . . In a lordly manner [poetic speech] keeps its distances, or rather preserves distance: not allowing man to take possession of the thing, it delivers the thing and man into an intimately and silently harmonized dialogue. That is what Hölderlin meant by “dwelling.”10 Distance, apparently overcome in mysticism, is retained in apophanesis. Why? Because the receptacle is its condition and, as the nothing that nothings, the ground that in its jutting out bears the trace of the Good, the place where “in a lordly manner” prayer, liturgy, and ecstasy begin. It is close to what Rilke meant when he said “song is existence,” but unless there is the focus of a real presence against which to take our measure, which is not time’s gift, experience is a bacchanalia. The gift plays the role of the material substance in Kant’s “Refutation of Idealism.” 2. The Truth of Metaphor? Truth did not come into the world naked, but came in types and images . . . The bridegroom must enter through the image into truth. The Gospel of Saint Philip

In Aristotle being has the sense of being true (on hos alethes, Meta.,1026a 35), where “true” came to mean adequation to or correspondence between concepts and objects. Franz Brentano’s On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle in which this was said to be the primary meaning of being made a considerable mark on the young Heidegger. Of these senses—the accidental, the figures of predication, the potential and actual, and the true (Meta.,1025a 29–1026b 4)—the latter’s “combination in and affection of thought” (1065a21) was 188

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central for Heidegger. But he took this as aletheia that we are called in wonder to experience and sustain “as the primordial essence of Being itself.” How beings are experienced in their Being, the wonder in which we hear Leibniz’s “why is there something rather than nothing?” is an acknowledgement of what has erupted, come forth from hiddenness into disclosure, and not a simple gawking; it is a “productive seeing.”11 Techne is the instrument of this productive and, yes, protective seeing, in which nature (physis) shows herself as that which gathers itself and stands forth in our keeping. This is contrary to our own sense of nature, “Kant’s existence of things as determined by universal laws,” in which, as Heidegger says in The Question Concerning Technology, we set upon nature as a Gestell, a standing reserve to be challenged forth into this or that distribution grid. In what Heidegger takes to be the Greek sense, beings are grasped “in such a way as to be released to their own essence in order to hold sway in themselves . . . to stand in aletheia.” But then the eidos into which a being gathers itself becomes with Plato an idea, a universal in the mind through which beings are sighted, the “truth of being as a whole is metaphysics.” After Nietzsche, Heidegger continues to maintain that God “stands for the ‘transcendent’ in general in its various meanings—‘ideals’ and ‘norms,’ ‘principles’ and ‘rules,’ ‘ends’ and ‘values,’ which are set ‘above’ being itself,” but with his death, the issue of this history is nihilism.12 Can we save truth from nihilism? Heidegger’s questionable, though always hedged, interpretation of truth as aletheia, “unconcealment,” is an important step along the way. In Being and Time he proposed that aesthesis, the sheer sensory perception of something, is “true” in the Greek sense, and indeed more primordially than the logos . . . Just as seeing aims at colors, any aesthesis aims at its idea (those entities that are genuinely accessible through it and for it); and to that extent this perception is always true. Pure noein is the perception of the simplest determinate ways of Being which entities as such may possess, and it perceives them by just looking at them. This noein is what is true in the purest and most primordial sense; that is to say, it merely discovers, and does this in a way that it can never cover up.13 We recognize things as a kind in a hermeneutical and eidetic “seeing as.” Though there are exceptions, nothing much is discovered beyond the appearing unless it is provoked into showing itself within posits Truth and Metaphor

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of an archival matrix. Truth is first a mapping of the unknown into the known, of the state into the individual and conversely, the notes of the musical scale into number, or electricity into fluid mechanics; and though it begins and ends in a seeing, the initial seeing occurs when we rub images together to gain the “thing itself” (7th Ep., 341C–344B). Recognition in metaphor is like catching the point of a joke or seeing the image of a woman who is simultaneously beautiful and a hag. Once seen, it can’t be hidden behind its appearing. One sense of the true, Heidegger says, “comes down to being, being real, the truth-making matter, the entity itself.” Metaphor’s disclosive provocation is within hermeneutical parameters. Metaphor assures that what is seen is encountered within categorial structures, “is there through and for legein, for conceptual exposition and interpretation . . .”; “phenomenology deals with intentionality in its a priori.”14 Though not all poetic metaphors lend themselves to “conceptual exposition and interpretation,” situating truth within intuition is unwittingly a gift of metaphor and only secondarily determined in the idealities of judgment. World reveals itself, not as a collection of subjects determined by predicates, but as a nexus of significant structures. Heidegger pulls this off by making the subject-object relation subordinate to the relation of the object to light, which is not an object. For Heidegger the object is “unconcealed” by Being’s lighting, that is, by our primordial ontological understanding and is always already within its horizon. In understanding, as Levinas notes, one goes beyond the being into openness, into the horizon of being.15 But isn’t what is said to be a primordial ontological understanding a function of a certain historical grammar, the heritage of einai, and isn’t the lighting filched from Plato’s sun and Good? Let us restore lighting to the Good. Like Kant, we must put the question to things and then act upon them to compel them to answer within “leading strings of reason’s own devising.” Or, fascinated, respond to their beauty. Heidegger says that with Plato, “truth gave up its fundamental trait of unhiddenness [aletheia] in favor of correctness [orthotes], the “agreement of the act of knowing with the thing itself” (MH P, 176–177); but does this do justice to Plato?16 Plato may have been guided by intuitions similar to Heidegger’s concerning logos as aletheia, “unconcealment.” In the context of his dramatic dialogues, it often makes more sense to speak of “unconcealment” than “truth,” though correctness is sometimes appropriate, as in the cave metaphor (Rep., 515C, 515D, 516A, 517B). “The good is responsible for knowledge and truth” seems more to the point as a translation than Heidegger’s 190

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“that which provides unhiddenness to the thing known and also gives the power of knowing to the knower” (508E). Why? Plato’s statement is about knowledge and truth, and the former preserves the parity between the Good and the sun (507C–509C). The sun is the generative cause of the existence of the eye and thing seen, as well as the cause of vision. Seeing is a relation possible only in light. The sunlike eye illuminates, brings its interpretative power to the perceived. The sense object is the issue of this mingling of eye and object which, though said of either, as in “I see white” or “the stone is white,” pertains to neither (Theaet., 152D–158E). They are one in receiving and giving the eidos, the form of their union, as in “I see a white stone.” So too the idea known is occasioned by an analogous mingling. In short, the Good is the cause of the being of the known and of the knower, whose agathon-like interpretative formalities, such as justice or mathematics, let the things be seen eidetically. Just as we see the color in the sensible thing, so we “see” the idea in the thing through the Good’s lighting. The subject’s contribution will appear in Husserl’s phenomenology as constitution, not construction, even if Husserl’s idealism pushes it in this Kantian direction. Constitution means that objectivity is given only under a certain comportment. What gives or shows itself, the medial phainesthai, is always under a noetic comportment to the noema that reflects the Good and determines the context in which the many-layered phenomenon appears. Dialogue is Plato’s usual context. He may have been more concerned with the genuine or authentic, the “true x,” or the veracity of a speaker (Rep., 331B–E) than the truth of statements or judgments. In the dialogues, what is unconcealed is often a sophist who, like Gorgias, hides in empty rhetoric and, when unconcealed, withdraws; but what gets unconcealed are deceptions, lack of self-knowledge, and bad faith. The action of the dialogue lets them be seen from and in themselves in the Good’s lighting, not Being’s. That upon which one is willing to take a stand, one’s framework (Taylor) or life style (Plato), is at stake, not a proposition.17 Put otherwise, these deliverances are like what is given to a theoria qualified to see and speak for others not present. In the dialogues, character is revealed in the movement of the plot—as is the treacherous Meno’s attempt to ingratiate himself and use Socrates, or as in Critias’s and Charmides’ flattering exploitation of Socrates, which discloses their impending treachery as members of the thirty (Charmides). Consciousness and its intentional objects— sensible, cultural, and intellectual—are chiasmatic. As reciprocally both active and passive, they change places. The logos oscillates. Truth and Metaphor

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There is, as Parmenides said, a “same for noein and einai” (Frag. 3); the “seen” is born of their union. Nietzsche almost got it right: “Truth is a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, embellished rhetorically and poetically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are: metaphors that have lost their picture and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.”18 But if we can overcome the sensible/ intelligible bifurcation with deictic metaphors and place the supplements beyond being, then metaphor is unconcealing and a chief vehicle of truth. The philosophical quest for truth began in earnest with Socrates’ questions and with Plato’s sun and line metaphors, which gave the form of an answer; but isn’t this what truth is, a metaphor? “Participation” is not Plato’s term for phenomena expressed in a metaphorical nexus that shows his primary meaning of being.19 Our term “participation” suggests the part/whole relation rejected by Plato (Par., 131A–E), but we need a logos, and “participation” is well established to gather a legion of metaphors in which something like koinos (“communion,” “communication” and “community”) is possible. Mimesis, “imitation,” is a metaphor that expresses the separationism of the middle dialogues (Rep., 500C), but the meta prefix, ambivalently beyond and amid, suggests the belonging together of difference, such as that between being and becoming, and is heard in such metaphors for participation as metaskesis, “change to a beyond state” or “disclosure of the beyond amid” (Phaedo, 101C; Phaedrus, 252E); metalambano, “taking from beyond,” “receiving amid” or “sharing the beyond amid” (Par., 131A, 131E, 133A); and methexis, combining meta as “beyond/amid” and echô, “holding,” “sustaining” and thus “holding or sustaining the beyond amid.” Participation is also harmonia, “attunement” (Phaedo, 92B) and parousia, “being with” or “presence” (100D). We could also add “image” (eikon, Tim., 37D) and its primary instance, the sun whose life-giving radiance is an icon of the Good (Par., 131E). Platonic metaphor draws strength from such ambiguities. Metaphor, rather than carrying over terms as its name implies, is a crossing that lets one see form in the thing. In its chiasmus, the intelligible is the visible and the visible the intelligible (Tim., 34C–38B). Participation is a metaphor for how the world is. Two texts on metaphor, one by Whitehead and the other by Eugene Gendlin, are central to this inquiry. Though Whitehead began 192

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with the homologies already generated by metaphor and so missed its creative possibilities, he nevertheless saw in it the form of the “truth relation” and the prototype of a generalized theory of participation and interpretation. Two objects may be such that (1) neither is a component in the other, and (2) their composite natures may contain a common factor, though in the full sense of the term, their “essences” are different. The two objects can then be said to have a “truth relation” to each other. The examination of one of them can disclose some factor belonging to the essence of the other. In other words, an abstraction can be made and some of the element can be omitted . . . a truth relation will be said to connect the objective contents of the two prehensions [Whitehead’s term of art for participation] when one and the same partial pattern can be abstracted from both. . . . Plato used the word “participation” [sic] to express the relation of a composite fact to some partial pattern which it illustrates. . . . With this enlargement of meaning, two objective elements are placed in a truth relation when they severally participate in the same pattern. Each illustrates what the other is. Thus they interpret each other.20 In metaphor each term interprets the other, the wolf the man and the man the wolf. Though the emphasis is on the shown rather than the imaginative dynamics of a showing that constitutes what it discloses, Whitehead’s de re approach eliminates the universal/particular distinction and permits the identification of truth with what is seen through metaphor. More important, he proposes that, rather than being a direct encounter with something, truth is interpretation mediated by an alterity that exhibits, if only partially, its pattern. However, he did not make a transition from a cosmological to an ethical perspective. Levinas credits this move to Kant. Could it be, he asks in an appreciation of Marx, that ethical conscience, not theoretical consciousness, cuts through the “ontological identification” of truth with an “ideal intelligibility,” and that the possibility of knowledge is founded in a participatory concern for others?21 To understand something, we map what is questionable unto what is already known. To see my love in a rose, aside from the symbolic conventions that hover around color, is to see her as enfolded, harboring a secret, fragrant, intensely fragile, and at the same time prickly, to be handled with care. The presumed isomorphism in metaphor in which the second term interprets the first is the truth Truth and Metaphor

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relation. The sublime mystery of the world’s self-showing lies in its being mapped in ordered marks and sounds we can make and order, while number lets us see it as if sub specie aeternitatis. Eugene Gendlin makes the case for metaphor’s creative possibilities in a critique of Max Black’s admirable distinction between focus and frame. Terms in a frame as seen through the focus of another term have the merit of interpreting metaphor as structural rather than as a substitution of terms and thus eliminate the literal/figurative distinction; but Black overlooked creativity. Black’s theory emphasizes the novelty of metaphors, [it] still uses the old order [in] emphasizing that metaphors create a new meaning and pattern . . . [he] explains them this way: If a smoked glass has a pattern drawn with the fingers on it so that the pattern is the only transparent part and this is held up to the stars, a unique new star pattern emerges, neither the usual star pattern or the one drawn on the glass. Here we see that only a selection of the otherwise fixed stars is possible. The new pattern from the poetry must be explained in terms of what was already there . . . the theorists of metaphors have not thought that the world might be ordered more like metaphors . . . Instead, even the most noveltyconcerned theory assumes that what it studies are fixed, preexistent units. A new theory of metaphor follows if we “open” metaphor to itself. It makes/finds in a poetizing that is a dwelling in and beyond the old units—[not a] trace through pre-existent similarities, pre-existent respects of comparison, arrangements of fixed units.22 Being, in its aspectual sense of “permanent presence,” grants insight only into fixed constellations holding the future in bondage to the past. Wouldn’t these be the constellations that metaphor would show were nature closed under understanding? Its alterities would be variant understandings, not poetizations, of being. Unless the world is to be closed under intentionality and its alterities assimilated to a same, we must show that the text has its source beyond being, even if it is larded with variants of “to be,” with proper names and predicates. Doesn’t naming strip beings from their place and make them transportable, as if they carried place with them? But metaphor is a naming seeing, and every text has its source beyond being in you for and through whom I am there. Moreover, no name is proper, not a propria that follows on essence. There is a shared there beyond being that opens onto a world in the making. It can be 194

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a sacred place where wonder unconceals inassimilable alterities, beauty and the holy, the Other. Nevertheless, the “other thinking” offered as an alternative seems laced with the metaphors it would avoid.23 Though Heidegger denies it, what else is Hölderlin’s “words, like flowers” but a metaphor for metaphor? Can this rather stultifying situation be avoided if metaphor can be shown to have a form that will meet and even appropriate such criticisms? Yes, for it is still possible to look beyond being to the Good for light, which, though within beings, is the possibility of detachment from Being, and to chora for an anarchical ground. Then one may build an account of metaphor on “dwelling [or other] thinking.” But our approach to the Good, if it is to avoid Being, must go beyond the limits of intentionality and find its paradigms—not in linguistic formations, but in contexts where thinking flounders before something that nevertheless beckons. We need any help we can get from Platonists and neo-Platonists alike in thinking the Good beyond the Ontological Difference. If metaphor functions along this way, for example as a vehicle of revelation in sacred scripture, it will be icon, a way of knowing in the Hebrew sense which expresses the beyond to faith; otherwise it is an idol. While we must erect the edifice for an “other beginning” on these supplements, the creativity of metaphor must also be demonstrated; since this pertains to the matrix, we must differ with Derrida, Levinas, and Blanchot and show her to be procreative (see 15:3 below). The creativity of the supplements is suggested by the Hebrew Makon, place, which I am told is a synonym for God. If the matrix and the Good are to cross and exchange roles, isn’t a mutual vulnerability necessary? A variant of Patripassianism is unavoidable. That welcoming mutuality entails “passivity beyond passivity” on the part of each. A similar chiasmus is apparent in Whitehead’s account of creativity, his “category of categories,” where God and creatures are involved in a chiasmatic solicitation and response. We find the sources of such understanding in Plato’s Timaeus—the matrix, the receptacle, and chora (place)—and in Husserl and Heidegger, who showed how this could also be a phenomenological beginning, that is, concerned with meanings and not beings per se.24 We must think place not only—as Heidegger says in reference to Aristotle—as “constitutive of the presence of the being,”25 but also as “economic,” that is, dwelling, and as the Patriarchs extended this to express the way God dwells with us, i.e., providence. Thus we must think place through its supplement, the Good, in a manner that depends on Truth and Metaphor

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Levinas’s use of Greek philosophical resources to say something profoundly Hebrew. I approach the Jew-Greek neighborhood from a Christian domicile, and though I am deeply attracted to Levinas’s way to the Good through the other, the Other is obscured by the other at the expense of God and, perhaps, at the expense of the incarnate hypostasis. Because the Good is incarnate in the Christ, it is more directly approached by the Greek Christian mystics, and here the way is facilitated by Saint Denys and Saint Maximus the Confessor, as well as our contemporaries who have given us a vision of a God beyond being. Whatever the difficulties in this concept, we know that He became one with us and by his death made it possible for us to dwell in Him. To think a Triune and hypostatic Good as a “Holy Family,” Father/Mother/Son as hypostasizations of Love, is a more acceptable Trinity than the Chalcedonian version. The Son is born of the Father and the Holy Spirit. “Common spiration” must be eliminated.26 Though the Good is beyond Being (epekeina tes ousais), which it far surpasses in dignity, antiquity, and power (Rep., 509B), and though it lacks ontological predicates, its offspring, the sun, stands in proportion to beings (508B), and the excess is not so alien to it, as Derrida notes, that it cannot be described in terms of that which it exceeds. Thanks to the supplements, being and knowing are neighbors. If we can show that the da, “there,” is no longer bound to sein, “being,” then metaphor can move into the Good’s lighting. Metaphor will be its fecund and welcoming mistress whose reception of the Other is reciprocated by the Other’s gift of the self. If beings are to be disclosed in their truth and truth is mediated though another, a mapping into number, a gesture into behavior, or the world into language, where else than in metaphor would one look for it? However, not all metaphorical formations are immediately disclosive. At this point we might consider Paul Ricoeur’s thesis that metaphor is “that strategy of discourse by which language divests itself of its function of direct description in order to reach the mythic level where its function of discovery is set free . . . we can speak of metaphorical truth in order to designate the redescriptive power of poetic language.”27 If the aim is to achieve a mythic level in which the mundane is invested with something more sublime, as when Yeats invests his old age with the golden glories of Byzantium, that may be true, but myth usually weaves a formulaic story, which is not the speaker’s own and can be told over and over by any one of a number of persons. Does it then release the creative power of thought and lead us to a higher truth? 196

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Sometimes. However, is not the usual purpose of the “mythic level” in its native, if not its literary, landscape to prepare us to enter sacred precincts or to receive the God? Then it is everybody’s and nobody’s tale, and what it opens is closer to Blanchot’s barren literary landscape beyond being and truth than Ricoeur’s free space in which one discovers and unconceals alterity. If metaphor is to open this free space, would this be through redescription? These rites use metaphors in which terms cross over and dwell in one another in impossible concatenations to point to a beyond and seldom bear the veridical or assertive sense of the Greek einai. Paul Ricoeur’s thesis that metaphor is a redescription commits one to the priority of literal discourse. Of course, the truth claims of definite descriptions or Tarski’s semantical “p if and only if p” are not to be dismissed; there may even be a point to saying that some metaphor is redescriptive. But this may hinge on ephemeral resemblances and, though it might make one pause, it never makes an ontological claim or opens an eidetic horizon. Even if Plato would throw away its images at its highest levels, metaphor is implicit in his analytic dialectic, his method of “speculative demonstration,” which Kant calls the method of discovery that goes from the unknown, that is, from hypotheses treated as if known, to (disclose) the known. It is only in the downward or synthetic moment, familiar from Euclid’s Elements, that the method of logical proof comes into its own. Its univocal ideal may well require redescription. This having been acknowledged, does the copula in metaphor express a tension between the “is ϕ ” of literal description and “is not ϕ ” of a “semantically impertinent redescription”? Redescription is likely to obscure the real issue, which is phenomenological, and, to put it briefly, this is the work of the hermeneutical “is” in which something is “seen as . . .,” rather than the predicative uses of the copula, in which one says something “semantically impertinent” about something. Whitehead identified the truth relation with the isomorphism common to metaphor, participation, and interpretation. Metaphor offers a corrigible intuition of an identical partial pattern in two or more entities; this identity can often be abstracted and stated as the truth of this relation. Moreover, these patterns can interpret one another. If in addition we accommodate the questions or activities that determine the interpreter’s horizons, then truth lies with the constituted pattern, if any, disclosed. This pragmatic perspective construes the good instrumentally. But to see things in the Good is to move up a notch from instrumental to intrinsic value, such as seeing them in Truth and Metaphor

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beauty. In this sense, truth is beyond being and requires an icon or a revelation through which the Other beyond others makes itself manifest. This saying and showing is prior to the work of metaphor in unconcealing structure (logos) in the identity of logoi, i.e., ana logion. 3. Metaphysical Neighborhoods28 Though Nietzsche’s “death of God” may mean that the supersensible is an unstable product of the sensible, I hope to muffle a bit of his thunder and show how through “neighborhood” the supersensible and sensible mutually found one another. By the “supersensible” was doubtlessly meant not the law-like structure of nature, but the lifedenying ascetic ideal. But you really can’t have a natural order without the (historically prior) moral order, for both seek to disclose the meaning of experience by interpreting it in an alterity, that is, through metaphor. The moral order Aeschylus knew was a foundation for Newton. To exclude one in favor of the other seems arbitrary. Isn’t the “will to power” such a supersensible venture? To object that this is not so would ignore the fact that, like Plato’s good, it is not sensible and generates values. Thanks to the (hypothetical) necessities of the generative matrix and the suasive role of the Good, “works of reason” are neither more nor less stable than the paths of the stars, the various physical constants, or the invariants of human history. Considered phenomenologically, saying is the neighborhood between the Good and the matrix that ultimately makes metaphor possible. “Neighborhood” and “saying” are among the most complex and, to me, difficult terms in Heidegger’s arsenal. In this stage of our inquiry we cannot eliminate all that is obscure and puzzling in their development. Since “saying” is also Levinas’s term and will receive its due attention in the sequel, our focus will be mostly on “neighborhood.” Neighborhood and saying will enable us to approach chora asymptotically. Myth and mystery cannot be exhausted in language, but there is also a language defying chthonic or uranian surplus, which art appropriates. This inexhaustibility that defies literal description is prominent in twentieth-century art, as in Dada, the gnomic poetry of Paul Celan, or Marc Rothko’s more or less uniformly painted surfaces. This does not mean that it cannot be experienced and understood. Thanks to Hans-Georg Gadamer, we can give “experience”29 and “understanding”30 and even “truth” a sense that they often lack in rationalistic and analytic circles. “Experience” should be read as 198

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the French expérience, “experiment,” in which one actively sets up conditions within which one receives. The eye never comes innocent to its task but, as Dewey said, is always funded. Perhaps more to our point is the German Erfahrung, experience as a journey during which one receives only what one has actively or interpretatively made way for. Such simultaneously passive and active terms suggest a medial interpretation. “Understanding” is hardly Plato’s mathematically saturated dianoia or even Hume’s empirical habituations. Gadamer finds Baumgarten’s definition of aesthetics as “sensuous knowledge” (cognitio sensitive) helpful, for it points to beauty’s resistance to generalization and how it compels us to dwell with it. Even better is Llewelyn’s “feeling intellect.” It is not a matter of saying with E. E. Cummings that “since feeling is first, who pays any attention of the syntax of things,” for feeling has its own syntax. “Existence is song”; music is deeper than words and beyond description and observation, beyond anything words and rational understanding provides. Thomas Nagel puts it very well indeed when, in a review article on Nietzsche, he said that “in music the deepest reality penetrates us and we become conscious parts of it.” But beware: art, like any epoché, abandons the natural standpoint for a synchrony that subordinates time to eternity, and ignores the inexpressible and “indispensable durée” for an idol’s virtual reality.31 As a cavalryman in the early days of WWII, I was entrained in such an epoché by the music as we passed in review at a walk, trot, and gallop. We were invincible and would have emulated the Polish cavalry: that is, until someone had the sense to take away our horses and put us in the infantry. If in the past philosophers turned to science and mathematics for their constitutive insights, all this changed after Heidegger’s “Origin of the Work of Art.” In this wonderful essay, Heidegger brought us to see art as a happening, not a being, in which Being is unconcealed. We have given this a rather negative reading, but now we must recognize with him that art opens a world without quite being a part of it and is then a prototype for events which, though not beings, nevertheless presence beings, such as his Ereignis or es gibt, and Levinas’s il y a. “The more essentially the work opens itself, the more luminous becomes the fact that it is rather than is not. The more essentially this thrust [that it is and is material] comes into the open, the stranger and more solitary the work becomes . . . Towering up within itself, the work opens a world and keeps it abidingly in force.”32 Since the work is temporal, we should think it medially, as something we effect even as it effects us; but “work” is a bit austere and “play” could be more Truth and Metaphor

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appropriate, if only to set the stage for his more obviously medial “releasement” later. Though Kant is far too enthralled by inner sense and its representations, one must preserve his insight that in aesthetics one experiences the free play of the imagination that never gets taken up into a concept. “The cognitive powers that are involved in this representation are here in free play, because no concept limits them to a definite rule of cognition. Hence the state of mind in this representation must be a free play of the representative powers . . . and can refer to nothing else than the state of mind in the free play of the imagination and the understanding.” (IK CAJ, sec. 9) Feeling is in search of an elusive concept. With this sense that these can never be objectified, we are on the way to the objectless intuition of saturated phenomena. If we may revise this anthropology to reflect the coherent and supplementary nature of sense and intellect, the art work is the free play of the feeling intellect (understanding) as taken up into and determining as it is determined by intellectual feelings (imagination).33 In the 1781 edition of the first Critique, Kant took imagination to be the single root of sensibility and understanding. Taken in itself, the imagination is both, without quite being either. Coleridge discovered that a fictive world could be deictic, while Wordsworth, in their Lyrical Ballads, took the converse route. With apologies to John Llewelyn and Heidegger, I also assume that intellectual feeling, which Heidegger seems to symbolize as earth, is in a two-way ring dance with the feeling intellect, his sky. In the third Critique, Kant wants us to see reason as transcending its empirical limits and determining sense as a hypotyposis of an eternal archetype; the eternal is given a “foothold” in a symbolic presentation or, as I prefer, an icon (IK CAJ, 352). Assuming that both the upward and downward are affective and can harmonize, we may say that imagination is grounded in the matrix and that the feeling intellect, the last glimmer of constitutive reason, may persuade these more deictic feelings to a transcendent patiency. In this way the feeling of an incarnate being participates in both the numinous and phenomenal. The accord reached between intellectual feelings and those of the persuasive, feeling intellect is a sort of sense-making nexus. In the dynamic unity of this experience we experience the possibility of our unicity. The questions asked by the feeling intellect may be answered, not always by a proposition or concept, but by making perspicuous an old feeling, or provoking a new one, or the discovery of a new way of feeling. The converse relation also obtains. Thought may gain discursive 200

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insights, even epiphanies, as it deals with feeling’s paradoxes, puzzles, and incongruities. In this give-and-take of question and response, art may show what is asked of it, horizons may be broadened, or the work deconstructed as it changes. The synthetic possibilities for the feeling intellect and intellectual feeling govern interpretation. They are analogous to Heidegger’s transposition from poet (Dichter) to thinker (Denker), a division of labor that obscures the play between these affective modalities. Art opens and holds open a clearing through the struggle between the world set up by the work, and the earth, the contingent-ridden materiality of the “medium.” To borrow the Timaeus’s distinction and adapt it, perhaps too preciously, to affectivity, the clearing opens in the struggle between the feeling intellect, a work of reason, and the chthonic necessities of intellectual feelings. In Heidegger’s “Origin of the Work of Art,” the worlds opened by Van Gogh’s “Peasant’s Shoes” and the Greek temple present conservation problems and make one aware of their contingent, perishable beauty. Matter is ostentatious in the way Flemish painters used oil and the nuances of mixing pigments to give their work a dazzling surface, while Florentine painters of the same period used tempera to give depth and solidity to their figures. Materiality, its reworking, weathering, or fading, its permanence, loss or destruction, and the like, is the origin of time and history and, under the rubric “earth,” limits the work’s horizons and challenges art and life into making a further creative advance. Life is, Bergson says, “a tendency to act on inert matter. The direction of this action [“which presents the element of contingency”] is not predetermined; hence, the unforeseeable variety of forms which life, in evolving, sows along its path.”34 In poem, we are aware of the word as a word; in music, of the sound as a sound; in painting, of the color as a color . . . and not as conceptually determinate meanings. Heidegger might have said that the matrix gives the word,35 which, as he does say, the poet uses “not like ordinary speakers and writers that have to use them up, but rather in such a way that the word only now becomes and remains truly a word.” Does not all great art address us in ways that resist discursive reason? When is a word a word? When it gathers all the resources of language, which Heidegger does better than anyone else, and calls us to gaze into the beauty and unfathomable mystery of things. Through the word, we not only see as never before, but we listen. Things speak, and we hear them as if for the first time. In this transmutation, the word is no longer a sign, no longer a distanced substitute for its Truth and Metaphor

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reference. While this may explain why art is withdrawn from intentionality, to deny reference to a word is to deny that it is a word, and this is contrary to all that we know about language. Except for syncategorematic terms, isn’t to signify what it is to be a word? Yes, but perhaps, as Froment-Meurice says, it could be “a sign that would not have its sense in the signified but only in the fact of making a sign, in calling.” To what? Not to a what, but rather from a where, and “precisely that ‘where’ from where it makes a sign.”36 One is drawn in this where, the space of the poem. In his late lectures on “The Nature of Language,” Heidegger said that to understand its nature, we must experience language as language, which in fact is to be overcome by it. We must “endure it, suffer it, receive it as it strikes us, and submit to it . . . entering into and submitting to [the claim it makes upon us] . . . man finds the proper abode of his existence in language.”37 The poet’s experience of language is an ontological event, somewhere in the neighborhood of an annunciation where the word, and nothing more, is announced. What promise can such a word hold out if nothing is meant, nothing summoned into presence? But suppose the word is vocative and summons me, not into presence, but into proximity with another. In this case the other addresses us, and this may include the poet, by the poem, which, like Heidegger’s thing, gathers us into its presence. Poetry is annunciation. Plato offered Levinas an absolute Good and the liberation of truth from its cultural presuppositions: The saraband of innumerable and equivalent cultures, each identifying itself in its own context, creates a world which is . . . de-occidentalized, but also disoriented. To catch sight, in meaning, of a situation that precedes culture, to envisage language out of the revelation of the other (which at the same time is the birth of morality) in the gaze of man aiming at man precisely as abstract man, disengaged from all culture, in the nakedness of his face, is to return to Platonism in a new way. Meaning, the intelligible, consists in a being showing itself in its nonhistorical simplicity, in its irreducible and unqualifiable nakedness, existing “prior to” history and culture.38 Plato and his followers never forget that God, not man, is wise and is the final measure (Apol., 23A). Does this require the ab-soluteness of the Good? Not if God is Good and humbles himself to be one of us (kenosis) and loves us, not simply as instantiated humanity, but as we 202

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are together in the midst of the world, eating, sleeping, and dying, warts and all. We are to love the other as God loves us, not as an absolute “abstract man in men” but as another. The God we have come to see through the centuries in the face of Christ would be sensitive to each and every context. We want to find a way to give language a holiday from the ontological and logical parameters clustering around “presence,” such as sense (Sinn), meaning (Bedeutung), naming, describing, and the like. I am engaged in language even if I don’t know what I am engaged in, what I am looking at or understand what you are saying or I am reading. Like the other, the beautiful poem is also a reciprocal welcoming. Into an “I know not what.” Is it a desert place in which to search for a trace of an other in the stirring of the intellectual feeling? Or am I swept away by beauty? Levinas thinks that Beauty is cold. And indeed my easy assimilation of the Good and Beautiful, which to me has a hands-off quality lacking to the Good, may overlook their nonequivalence. To return to our theme: what can Heidegger tell us? He was never one to think language within the Russell/Frege logical framework preferred by most Anglo-American philosophers. Nor does he follow J. L. Austin into our common world and how we relate to it and to one another in various locutionary and illocutionary acts. Instead, Being and Time initializes a hermeneutic approach to the translation of Greek, even though Greek had no word for language. He offers Rede, “conversation,” as a translation of logos. A strange state of affairs comes about if logos, which is generally said to mean “word,” “order,” “ratio,” “form,” “gather,” “science,” “discursive account,” and “assertion” or “judgment,” is translated as Rede, which, in turn, is retranslated into Greek as apophainesthai, “taking entities out of their hiddenness and letting them be seen.”39 Truth is mediated, but is the truth of Greek mediated by German and only then seen again in Greek in its truth? The Greek logos is no longer “the kind of thing that can be considered the primary ‘locus’ of truth,” which is now what “sight” unconceals, aletheia. Yes, but only if mapped onto a sound, a mark, a picture, a number. Heidegger’s discussion of the relation between the poet and the thinker opens the between as it figures in the title of this text and, even as we disagree with him, much can be learned from his approach to an “other thinking.” With Hölderlin in mind, he proposed that poetry and thinking occupy the same neighborhood,40 where the latter is described in terms applicable to the receptacle. This neighborhood, Truth and Metaphor

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which he calls “saying,” assures both community (intimacy) and distance (strangeness), and is the originary experience of language as language. To be more specific, this saying lies between the weighty Germanic Dichter (a term in which we hear George’s “where the word breaks off no thing may be” or Hölderlin’s “But where the danger is, grows/ The saving power also”) and the equally elevated Denker. Saying is crossed when Denker nonrepresentationally interprets or translates Dichter; correspondences, representations, and the machinery of logical discourse have long since given way to unconcealment, aletheia; so thinking is now the other through which poetry makes itself affectively understood in nondiscursive connaturality. Marc Froment-Meruice remarks that this is to be expected, since the logos is no longer saddled with anything the Greeks might understand it to mean when translated as Rede, “the pure path to sense.” When Dasein speaks in Rede, this is not a language but “a manner of being there.”41 What is the nature of this path, this manner of being there? The way does not seem to lead anywhere, not to anything that can be named or understood, but rather to the possibility of language, “the free and sheltering character of this region [that] lies in the waymaking movement, that yields these ways that belong to this region.” Heidegger then says that “saying,” the between, retains the sense of the older Saga [“showing”], and is the guide word to this path that brings poetry and thinking together. Showing is latent in Heidegger’s es gibt or Levinas’s il y a, and is the possibility of the there, the da. But this also is the way of the Tao “that moves all things along and makes way for everything.”42 Can showing that cannot be represented be “true”? One might interpose thought, Denken. If thought is the other that receives the poet’s gift, however, would this not be the gift of being? In order “to carry language as language to language,” the program announced at the beginning of “The Way to Language,” one returns to language as language, where the as marks this return. However, the language to which one returns is not the same as that from which one departed. Does Heidegger essentialize language? Maybe not. Froment-Meruice says that as is the “marker or distinctive sign of meaning,” but perhaps this saying “as language” leads not to what but to where. Could it be “precisely that where from whence it makes a sign?”43 We wish to cross over to the other side of being, to a where beyond Being, to a where that makes a sign. The greatly admired Paul Celan was the poet of the other side of the “way to language.” Since there are several approaches to this 204

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other side, known to Heidegger through the es gibt, to Levinas by the il y a, to Blanchot as “the space of literature,” and to Plato and Derrida—though understanding it differently—as chora, it can not be an artifact of a single method. Different life experiences lead to different interpretations, which, after Auschwitz and the “death of God,” tend to be autochthonic, but Plato and Levinas see in the other side, the matrix, clear traces of an Alterity, the transcendent Good. We will begin the journey with Celan who found its traces, if not the Good itself. Levinas’s “From Being to the Other” will be our translator. In Paul Celan’s short prose piece, “Conversation in the Mountains,” two Jews who are “strangers to nature” walk along a mountain path as if a veil covered their eyes. They do not see that, on the right, “the Turk’s-cap lily blooms, blooms wildly, blooms like nowhere else. And on the left, corn salad, and dianthus superbus, the maden pink, not far off.” This is Heidegger’s way among the forest paths. It is not the way of European Jews. They speak of having come a long way. One says, in language as cold and barren of humanity as a geologist’s, that You know and see: The earth folded up there, folded once and twice and three times and opened up in the middle, and in the middle there is water, and the water is green, and the green is white, and the white comes from even farther up, from the glaciers, and one could say, but one shouldn’t, that this is the language that counts here, the green with the white in it, a language not for you or me—because, I ask you, for whom is it meant, the earth, not for you, I say, is it meant, and not for me— a language, well, without I and without You, nothing but He, nothing but It, you understand, and She, nothing but that.44 This impersonal He and It suggests what Blanchot will call the “space of writing,” a rather barren and frightful “manner of being ‘there’” with no exit, no trace of the transcendent. This approach to the matrix “from where it makes a sign” is apparent, to cite only one example, in a poem written among the sand dunes on the sea shore, “the sand patterns over/ the smoke of the smoke of fountain songs./ An ear, severed listens./ An eye cut into strips/ copes with it all.”45 Gadamer says that “the vulgar images of the cut-off ear and the eye cut into strips . . . [leads one to feel] a kind of revulsion at these vulgarities, which challenge the reader to subdue them by understanding. But what is to be Truth and Metaphor

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understood here? No ear opens to the world’s melodies, no allencompassing view inebriated with the world’s golden overflow, corresponds accurately to what is.” After noting the loneliness of the seascape where “what has been laid bare reaches into the depths of feeling as if an abyss,” one turns landwards with “something like an expectation, as if the barren loneliness of excavated feelings could be relieved by the resonating tones of humanness.” We are, however, not far from the “desolation of the beach.” The creeping dunes describe a world becoming uniform, in which nothing human is manifest any more, and in which the song of the fountains is almost covered out. This song, this self-proclaiming of humanness in a world covered over with sand, remains audible only to the most intense listening. The vulgar horror of the concluding eye and ear metaphors permits us to sense the excessive indigence of the world, in which feeling can scarcely accomplish anything.46 Is this the matrix that appears in Levinas’s “Paul Celan: From Being to the Other”?47 Relying for the most part on the Meridian, Celan’s approach to his own poetry through the plays of Büchner, Levinas begins by noting that he once said a poem was a handshake. He is quite within his rights to understand this matrix as the condition for proximity, for the face-to-face presence of the other: “Poetry requires,” Celan said, “that we travel a certain space in a certain direction,” to a space “where it can speak on behalf of the stranger—no, I cannot use this word here—on behalf of the other, who knows, perhaps of an altogether other.”48 Levinas says that Celan situates a poem in a pre-syntactical, pre-logical level that also discloses at the moment of pure touching, pure contact, grasping, squeezing—which is, perhaps, a way of giving, right up to and including the hand that gives. A language of proximity for proximity’s sake, older than that of “the truth of being”—which it probably carries and sustains—the first of the languages, response preceding the question [for instance, accepting responsibility for the other before I am asked], responsibility for the neighbor, by its for the other.49 This is the vulnerability Descartes noticed and then ignored. Celan continues: “Poems intend another, need this other, need an opposite. It goes toward it, bespeaks it. . . . Poems are paths on which language becomes voice. They are encounters, paths from a voice to a listening You, natural paths, outlines for an existence, perhaps, for projecting ourselves into the search for ourselves . . . a kind of homecoming.”50 206

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One does not come home by the mountain road among the Turk’scap nor to a place where one can poetically dwell. That return to self marks idealism and the prevalence of presence. A path beyond Being is, as Celan says, an “impossible path to the Impossible.”51 It is, Levinas says, “as if in going toward the other I met myself in a land, henceforth native, and I was stripped of all the weight of my identity. A native land owing nothing to enrootedness, nothing to first occupancy, a land owing nothing to birth . . . This is a break with the naivety of the Herald, the Messenger or the Shepherd of Being. Dehiscence of the world which offers, to get through the night, not a resting place, but stones against which the beggars staff strikes, reverberating in mineral language. Insomnia in the bed of being.”52

Truth and Metaphor

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Aristotle: Poetry and the Proper

1. Aristotle: Rhetoric and Poetics In the Gorgias, Plato proposed that sophistry be purged from rhetoric, which could then be fashioned into a dialectical instrument (499A ff) that would incorporate the monstrative and persuasive potentials of metaphor and mythos.1 In the Republic (510B), however, he eliminated appeals to sense and its images in the “upward” movement of the dialectic for the sake of an eidetic intuition; on the other hand, we propose to enlist him in the countermovement of deictic metaphor, which discloses form in the fact rather than in an abstract and imageless thinking.2 This strange disclosive power is never more apparent than in Saint Denys’s statement that scripture has “the audacity” to use the passions, angers, and curses “to represent God, projecting outward and multiplying the visible appearance of the mystery, dividing the unique and indivisible, figuring in multiple forms what has neither form nor figure, so that one who could see the beauty hidden in their interior would find them entirely mystical, consistent with God, and full of a great theological light”(St. Denys, DN, 1105b). Plato’s dialogues within which metaphor’s resources were fully in play gave way in Aristotle to a theory about transporting terms (Rhet., 1404b 30). When his logic replaced dialectic, he had to find other homes for metaphor in the Rhetoric, De Poetica, and Topics. In the Topics, dialectical arguments are said to begin with “reasonable opinions 208

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about certain subjects” (100a 21) and not “true and primitive premises” (27). His distrust of dialectic led him to think of metaphor as persuading us “to accept reasonable opinions” even though it “sets things more intimately before our eyes” (Rhet., 1405b 12) by transporting meaning from genus to species, species to genus, species to species, or on the grounds of analogy (De Poet., 1457b 6–9).3 These restrictions rule out such heterogeneous carryovers as acceleration or Faraday’s “electricity flows.”4 The reducibility of some metaphors to an equality of ratios (analogia, proportion) obscures the fact that the discerned identities are often “created” by the metaphor. Poe’s “window of the soul” creates and persuades us to see functional identities between windows/rooms and eyes/souls. Analogy is never more creative than when it generates and then finds identities between lines and infinite sets of numbers by Dedekind cuts that stand in no ratio to their enabling empirical conditions. Aristotle seems unaware of the import of the theory of ratios and proportions, which made possible a theory of infinite magnitudes.5 He correctly assumed there was no ratio between the finite and infinite magnitudes, and his analogies were therefore finitistic, unlike those possible with the definitions of Euclid V.3 and 5 (which permits a ratio between the relative magnitudes of incommensurables) and that of Euclid X.5 (which says that incommensurable magnitudes can have to one another the same ratio that a number has to a number). Though Aristotle understood time as “the measure of motion” and so as a quantity, he did not think it could stand in a ratio to any other species of quantity, as it must in acceleration and dynamics. The justifiable piety inspired by Aristotle often worked against inquiry, and it was not until the Oxford calculators and Descartes’s precursor, Nicholas Oresme, that these restrictions on metaphor were abandoned and new developments made possible. Reading nature geometrically, even with the assistance of Brawardine and the Merton school, would never reveal the secrets of kinetics to Galileo. Alexander Koyré noted that until he abandoned geometrization and let his imagination play with time, he could not deal with velocity: “He saw the line, the space traversed, as the argument of the function, velocity, rather than time.”6 Doubtless these difficulties are irrelevant to the place of metaphor in metaphysics, as in pros hen predications (Meta., 1003a 32ff); but then the critique offered by the Ontological Difference comes into its own. Because of a misunderstanding that posits predication as an alternative to participation, Aristotle: Poetry and the Proper

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metaphysical metaphors conceal rather than disclose Being. Philosophical metaphor may have less to do with establishing a linguistic community between highest being and other beings—and in that process losing sight of Being—than with persuading the imagination to accept this or that word that appears the text’s slot and let truth appear. What is this text? Is it a narrative the wayfarer interprets on forming himself with memories or paradigms buried in the archives of generative chora? Is it an arché-writing, the play of signifying intentions where, Derrida says, “the signified already functions as a signifier” to destroy the concept of sign and its logic? “The advent of writing is the advent of this play; today such a play is coming into its own; effacing the limit starting from which one had thought to regulate the circulation of signs, drawing along with it all the reassuring signified, all the out-of-bounds shelters [such as the executing subject or ordering plot] that watched over the field of language . . . It is as if the Western concept of language in terms of what . . . attaches it in general to phonocentric glossematic production, to language, to voice, to hearing, were revealed today in the guise or disguise of an archéwriting.”7 Isn’t this language as a Klein bottle, that is, one whose inside is outside? Are signs mocking mirrors in which we see only other signs, never the world? Can one construct a text that recognizes that chains of signifiers terminate in a signified, that something beyond the text can govern the text? Yes, if the speaker is there to rescue it. 2. Saving the Sun Being on the way to making the planet unlivable as we fill the atmosphere with ozone-depleting substances and kill ourselves with excessive solar radiation, why worry about the sun? But there is more to the sun than that, for it is a powerful symbol of Spirit, of the light that was first of God’s creations and which, however much we grope about with touch (Levinas) or stumble when guided by hearing (Heidegger), is still the medium of aletheia, of truth. We loose the sun and we loose Aristotle, still the greatest who has been among us. Saving his epistemology presents an even greater challenge; his objects were, in the last analysis, the unknowable, nonpredicable, and non-present first substances (De Cat., 1a 16–1b 24), clones of the conjectured everlasting species and filtered to the mind through “formulable essences,” beings of reason, rather than Plato’s 210

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living creatures interpreting and paradigmatically representing themselves through the ideas within the context of family, state, and cosmos. The methodology of dialectic and dialogue, the participatory gathering with others in the search for and showing of truth, is given over to a monadic predicate logic, and metaphor is confined to poetics and rhetoric, while imagination and mind are left to causally process and transform information into what we now know to have been an unattainable episteme. The separation of the middle dialogues was internalized, the imagination becoming the middle term between bifurcated sense and reason; by allowing them to fall apart, Aristotle began the process, which continues to this day, of denaturing nature. Though he saw metaphor as a transport, a crossing, he did not consider what is crossed, the metaxu as giving chora to the word. When internalized as a faculty, imagination is invoked to bridge the presumed gap between inner universals and sensible things. Is it not better to say that being and becoming are always already bridged by the dance of life in the ring-dance of the fourfold?8 Derrida’s “White Mythology” deconstructs the root metaphor of the sun, source of light, intelligibility, and life, which shaped the thought of Plato and Aristotle. Most metaphysical systems are founded on binary distinctions, such as visible/invisible or sensible/intelligible, which form graded hierarchies. When thought employs metaphor to pass beyond the visible realm and its polyvalent semantics to make its abode in the univocal, invisible, and intelligible realm and then, from this standpoint, begins to articulate being in terms of eternal or everlasting presences, ideas, matter, species, or gods, it will marginalize metaphor, banishing it and its sensible roots from the text of philosophy. Pure thought is left to think itself (Meta., 1047b 1–34)—in a metaphor about reflection! Doubtless all this begins with Plato’s divided line, where sense is effaced in the movement from the visible to the intelligible. This is the context in which we should receive Derrida’s claim that there can be no philosophical account of metaphor, since “metaphor” itself is a metaphor. Heidegger said that if Hölderlin’s trope, “words, like flowers” were taken as a metaphor, we would remain “bogged down in metaphysics.”9 John Llewelyn adds that in metaphor there is a “movement by which Being is concealed by being conceived as a being . . . The thinking of Being cannot be metaphorical.”10 Though the case against metaphor is very good, ours is not an ontological squirrel cage and, moreover, excluding metaphor for the sake of avoiding metaphysics is useless; the excluded Being is not eliminated but Aristotle: Poetry and the Proper

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“traverses the text, marked in its interior by the multiple furrow of its margin . . . the trace simultaneously traced and erased, simultaneously living and dead.”11 But if the supplements are also marginal, can they leave such traces in beings as to let us free them from bondage to Being? Let us look more closely at Derrida’s critique of Aristotle, for something can still be said on his behalf. Though the way to Good ends in darkness, to arrive one must follow its traces through the sun’s lighting that Derrida would extinguish. Platonists are often loath to defend Aristotle. In Aristotle’s naturalistic mood, the sun, though a sensible individual and as such unknowable, is an external cause of life (De Phy., 194b 15; Meta., 1070b 21ff); he then internalizes this image as the agent or creative intellect, which is, “in a certain sense, like light.” This illuminates the crossing of the imaginary datum qua potential intellect and the poetic or agent intellect to create knowledge and its object (De Anima, 430a 14–18). With this the sun’s public world of dialogue is internalized and then the Good, as agent intellect, illuminates being and knowing (Rep. 507B–509D). Still, the poetic intellect is a marvelous metaphor for metaphor’s creative power. But when we turn to the sun, “the brightest star that moves over the surface of the earth” (Top., 131b 26) and the analagon that renders intelligible the agent intellect, this cause of intelligibility threatens to become unintelligible. The sun, the “brightest star,” would not be a proper name on either Russell’s theory of definite descriptions or on Saul Kripke’s baptismal account of naming. That which moves and gives life to creatures—not by contact, but as light—is, in turn, the medium of vision and is not the usual todi ti. Do we really see the sun? No, for it is an excess of light. We see light only through its lighting of others. Sad to say, the sun’s eclipse is not far away. In De Caelo, the sun is the external cause of sublunary motion through contact and is therefore, as Hegel would say, a mechanism; this priority of contact haunts Aristotle on change and finally eliminates the spontaneity of medial gignesthai (389a 31). Though Aristotle is not always consistent, when he shifts from his biological base in the epistemic-logisticastronomical mode, the verb “to be” (einai) is all but purged of its vitalistic sense. Life is relational or participatory, as he acknowledges when he says that “the activity of the sensible object and the percipient sense is one and the same activity” (De Anima, 425b 26–27); but when logic is restricted to one place predicates and relations become relational terms, and then the possibility of bridging differences such as mind/body, eternity/time, or intelligible/sensible is lost. One can no 212

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longer share love with one’s wife, but must become a member of her class of lovers. Solipsism is a logical outcome of a symbolism that parses relations as relational terms. Though Aristotle’s phronesis would have given him an alternative approach to singular beings, his logistic denatured nature. These logistical and antinaturalistic tendencies invited Derrida’s deconstruction of the distinction between nature and artifact and fueled the retreat from metaphor.12 Since friends of the forms, among whom Aristotle must be counted, need the sun, we must come to his aid. Derrida’s deconstruction begins with the following passage: Every sensible attribute, once it is taken beyond the sphere of sensation, becomes uncertain. For it is not clear that it still belongs because it is evidenced by sensation. This principle will be true of any attributes that do not always and necessarily follow. Thus anyone who has stated that it is a property of the sun to be “the brightest star that moves over the earth” has used in describing that property an expression of that kind, i.e., to move over the earth, which is evidenced by sensation, and so the sun’s property will not have been correctly rendered; for it will also be uncertain, whenever the sun sets, whether it continues to move over the earth, because sensation then fails us. (Top., 131b 21–30) Granted that the sun is an individual, are we supposed to believe that “brightest star . . .” denotes a property? In the Topics? The Topics deals with dialectical arguments, “a method by which we shall be able to argue about any proposed problem from probable premises and shall ourselves under examination avoid self-contradiction” (Top., 100a 18), and not with definitory statements that could serve as premises in demonstration. What “anyone” might say doesn’t mean that Aristotle endorses it. Just how polemical the Topics account is will be apparent when we take a serious look at some of Aristotle’s key terms. The text speaks of property, which is, with definition, genus, and accident, a predicable (Top., 102A 28) and thus pertains to the predicative order of second substances, those things that are not present in but are said of another (De Cat., 1a 20–1b 15). A primary being, a todi ti, such as the sun, cannot be defined (Meta., 1039b 28). As the “first principle” of the sensible world, it is simple and thus indefinable (De Anima, 430a 27– 430b 30). Aristotle concedes that specific terms, such as “star,” can be said of singular subjects, but only accidentally or unnaturally Aristotle: Poetry and the Proper

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(Anal. Post., 82b 36–83a 23). As for the sun, it is “unique and indefinable” (Meta., 1040a 28–30). If one were to say that it is the “brightest star that moves over the earth,” would it still be the sun were it to stand still (1040a33)? Its property of “moving over” would then be contingent, and thus not a property. Finally, properties do not have essences (Meta., 1031a 1 ff) and could not serve as premises in demonstrations. The sun rises and sets and is sometimes out of sight, itself a metaphor for sensory nature (physis); some see in these contradictory consequences that the sun is and is not natural. Since it vanishes and we cannot distinguish the singular, contingent sun by a necessary property, it follows that the sun is partly a construction and thus, to that extent, an artifact. If physis, nature, means to “emerge from itself—to do what comes naturally,” Llewelyn concludes that the most natural thing, the sun, is artifactual. Derrida then remarks that The very opposition of appearing and disappearing, the entire lexicon of phainesthai, of aletheia, etc. of night and day, of the visible and invisible, or the present and absent—all this is possible only under the sun. In so far as it structures the metaphysical space of philosophy, it represents what is natural in philosophical language. . . . Now following the same route, we must reverse the proposition; the literally, the properly named sun, the sensory sun, does not furnish poor knowledge simply because it furnishes poor metaphors; it itself is solely metaphorical. Since, as Aristotle tells us, we can no longer be certain of its sensory characteristics as its “properties,” the sun is never properly present in discourse—if the sun is metaphorical, it is no longer completely natural—one may say it is an artifactual construction.13 The natural/artifactual, sensible/intelligible oppositions, Derrida says, “construct the philosophical concept of metaphor, dividing it according to a law of ambiguity confirmed ceaselessly.”14 One reason for believing that metaphor lives on a law of opposition is that a perfect metaphor would not be a metaphor, for the resemblance, as in the case of the two Cratyluses (Crat., 422B) or Leibniz’s identity of indiscernibles, would collapse and the transported ascription would be univocal. But suppose the nominal resemblances mask real (partial) identities? Nominalism can speak of the use of terms, never of an eidetic intuition. In De Poetica the sun’s rays are said to be “sowing around a godcreated flame,” reminding us of that trace of the Good which, though 214

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beyond being, is among beings. He explains this by saying “that to cast forth seed corn is called ‘sowing,’ but to cast forth its flame, as said of the sun, has no special name . . . this nameless act [B] stands in the same relation to its object, sunlight [A], as sowing [D] to the seed corn [C]” (1457a 25). When seen as a casting forth of seed, the sun’s rays, hitherto a “nameless act,” are seen as procreative. However, Derrida says that rather than a metaphor, “Aristotle invokes an ‘enigma,’ a secret narrative . . . whose first link is difficult to exhibit . . . whose essential characteristic is to describe a fact in an impossible combination of words (1458a 26–27) . . . there is only one sun in this system. The proper name, here, is the nonmetaphorical prime mover of metaphor, the father of all figures. Everything turns around it, everything turns toward it.”15 But doesn’t the metaphor constitute this “nameless act” as a primal fecundity (B) by the discovery of a homology with the sower sowing and casting forth? Analogy can be irreducible and creative. Is B an artifact of an artifactual sun, or is it something seen through the sower and his seed as if for the first time? This constitutive usage occurs elsewhere in Aristotle; primary matter is created by a nameless resemblance to the matter of fire, earth, air, and water and has nothing to do with riddles or impossible combinations of names. His cosmological proof creates a God from an “impossible combination of words.” Nor is the sun image an impossible combination of names unless one begins by invoking its unknowability through the Topics text. As “that which brings something into the present in the proper sense,”16 the sun seems to be the heir to Plato’s Good. Aristotle uses analogy to demonstrate or show something about the sun, just as he uses analogy to demonstrate something about primary matter or God, and one is a mass term and the other refers to an individual. 3. The Creative Between Aristotle’s demonstrative use of metaphor, as in his demonstrations of God or primary matter, is in advance of his explicit theory. Wouldn’t it be more appropriate to deconstruct the predicables and the particular/universal distinction that generates the original difficulty? Wouldn’t we want to save the life-giving sun, the phenomena, from deconstruction? Is the autochthonic emergence favored by Nietzsche and perhaps by Heidegger the last word? We celebrate the mother in the medial matrix, but don’t we also need a father? “Men think of the Aristotle: Poetry and the Proper

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earth as a female and a mother, but address heaven and the sun and other like entities as progenitors and father” (De Gen. An., 716a 15). Though Aristotle abandoned Plato’s phenomenological open for an information-processing interiority, the mechanisms transforming and making sense of sense can help us understand how the Platonist can construct a metaphorical crossing that lets a same be seen in others, how to intend a same through alterity in hermeneutics, and how a participated same can also be other.17 Indeed, we could not go beyond Aristotle without first seeing how reflexive imagination, when fecundated by sense and crossed by the desire to know, is the matrix for the creative act of the poetic intellect. Were it epiphenomenal, then being would be like an enduring wave in the sea that is definite only through the constant interchanges of sustaining hydraulic forces. Unless there is something like a novel ingression of form in this linear system and thus a new differential gradient, such as that imposed by the God Chronos in Politicus (269C–270B), then, like entropy, this immanent order leads to relative disorder, to leveling down of difference, and to stasis. Though Timaeus borrows from autochthonic myth, Oceanus or Gaea, being as limit (eidos as peras) is not, like Uranus, an emergent and cannot be reduced to becoming. So too for the sun that lightens the gap; unlike the understanding of Being that lightens Dasein’s open, the Good that lightens is beyond beings and Being and an errant cause that deconstructs totalities. Edward Ballard noticed a connection between the Gaea/Timaeus gap and the crossing of hyletic data by context-forming intentionality.18 According to [Husserl’s] version, the stream from the object, which I call presentations, is present as hyle, the matter of perception. The stream from or in the eye, the intentional stream, is analyzed by Husserl into two factors. One is the noetic activity that originates in consciousness. This is the activity forming hyle into meanings. The second factor is the issue from this activity, the noema or meaning as such. In the Platonic marriage of the two streams, the presentations are the noemata, the object becomes the specific object that appears.19 Plato may have agreed with Plotinus and taken an eye’s ray to arise from an interior lighting (Ennead., V.5.7.24), but Emerson interprets it as the symbol’s ray and may have hit on an implicit truth, for what is this interior fire but understanding? One can apply this to Max Black’s focus/frame distinction. In “man is a wolf,” “man” is presented through the noetic focus, “wolf,” and conversely. In a more 216

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phenomenological vein, what is seen through a term framed by such reflexive acts as reading, hearing, or making metaphors is summoned to stand forth and be seen anew through the context-forming variations implicit in the eye’s streaming beam as it focuses through its frame. Like any word for Husserl, the focus is a semantic window and the focusing eye that interprets the frame “comes ancient to its task” (Nelson Goodman). Naming the state of affairs or object signified by A, the frame, is already an epoché; it has been imaginatively prescinded from the flux or built up from sense and, yes, intellectual intuitions. Granted the reflexivity of this process, the way this hyletic data A is worked up by the focus B’s animating intention results in the birth of metaphor, a way of seeing. This image unifies Plato and Husserl, though at the expense of the medial spin we hope to give generation. This medial spin can be extended to the Theaetetus gap in which the sense object, rather than being attached as a quality to one of its parents, the self (idealism) or its object (realism), is born when the interpretative stream from the eye, “fascinated with the world” (Heidegger), crosses and mingles with the object’s stream.20 An analogous birth occurs in participation when a fecund receptivity is crossed and solicited by an interpretative projection, a proposition in both the logical and erotic sense. “Perceiving,” and indeed most verbs describing cognitive and vital functions, was middle voiced in the Sanskrit, which lies behind Indo-European languages. “The eye was a sort of lantern from which rays of light leap forth,” and because seeing also presupposes, Jan Gonda continues, “a light reception [‘something comes to one’s eyes’], the middle form, was no anomaly.”21 These verb forms designate processes involving the willing agent (hekousios) who neither acts under compulsion nor reluctantly, but do not entail explicit choice and decision. One willingly sees the point of a joke or the duck as a rabbit; yet like Mary’s “let it be done to me according to Thy word” (Luke 1:38), this is not through an act of will. G. M. Hopkins, together with the late Schelling and Hölderlin, show us a Christ who inherits the gods of paganism or, as von Balthasar puts it, inherits the “splendor of their theophanies, which pass over to him.”22 The inheritance is especially manifest in Hopkins’s saturated Christophanic landscapes and “inscapes.” To have such a freely accepted, even welcomed, power pregnant with inexpressible meaning “come upon” or “come over” and call one as if on behalf and in the name of the idea of the Good and Beauty (Crat., 416C) is an annunciation (evangelismos). Aristotle: Poetry and the Proper

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Proust is a profound guide to the annunciations of the imagination and its metaphorical extensions. In Time Regained, the last volume of The Remembrance of Things Past, metaphor opens horizons in a manner strongly suggestive of Plato’s discussion of recollection in the Phaedo (72E–74A) and Husserl’s phenomenological reduction. At Combray I used to fix before my mind for its attention some image which had compelled me to look at it, a cloud, a triangle, a flower, a church spire, a stone, because I had the feeling that beneath these signs lay something of a quite different kind which I must try to discover, some thought which they translated after the fashion of hieroglyphic objects which one might at first suppose to represent only material objects. No doubt the process of decipherment was difficult, but only by accomplishing it could one arrive at whatever truth was there to read. For the truths the intellect apprehends in the world of full and unimpeded light have something less profound, less necessary than those which life communicates to us against our will in an impression which is material because it enters through the senses but has a spiritual meaning which it is possible for us to extract. In fact, in both the one case and the other, when I was concerned with impressions like the ones which I had received from the steeples of Martinville or with reminiscences like that of the unevenness of the two steps or the taste of the madeleine, the task was to interpret the given sensations as signs of so many laws and ideas, by trying to think—that is, as trying to draw forth from the shadow—what I had merely felt, by trying to convert it into its spiritual equivalent. And this method, which seemed to me to be the sole method, what was it but the creation of a work of art?23 Several processes are at work here, but first note how things, such as cakes and steeples, are seen as parts of a whole, not as instances of a species. The feature we notice, Robert Scholowski says, is not transformed into a universal, and its relational associations evoke similar experiences rather than universals;24 when a metaphorical epoché reduces that phenomenon, the associative nexus is raised to the level of an epiphany and becomes as if eternal, a structured moment out of time. This process invites a medial description of a gift we cannot constitute but which, as an annunciation, is also freely accepted. Worlds emerge from these secret depths with “the click of a spoon, the taste of the madeleine, or those truths written with the aid of 218

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shapes for whose meaning I searched in my brain, where—church steeples, wild grass growing in a wall—they composed a magical scrawl, complex and elaborate, their essential character was that I was not free to choose them, that such as they were they were given to me.”25 Think of Proust’s novel as a set of variations on “concrete universals,” epiphanies effected by the epoché of spoons, cracks in the pavement, steeples, and their intellectual feelings through which we as feeling intellects intuit a society in the last stages of decay. Proust continues with the theme that, in Heidegger’s words, making (creating) is finding: “I had come to the conclusion that in fashioning a work of art we are by no means free, that we do not choose how we will make it but that it pre-exists us, and therefore we are obliged, since it is both necessary and hidden, to do what we should have to do if it were a law of nature, that is to say, discover it.”26 These epiphanies bear an eerie resemblance to Husserl’s phenomenologically reduced world that is free from the toils of historical everydayness, which also has a sort of Platonic perfection and purity. Proust’s recollections, like Plato’s, depend on a sort of synecdoche. A segment of the world appears in its perfect ideality. Fragments of existence [are] withdrawn from Time . . . but the contemplation, though it was of eternity, had been fugitive. Yet I was vaguely aware that the pleasure that this contemplation had, at rare intervals in my life, given me the only genuine and fruitful pleasure that I had known. The unreality of the others is indicated clearly enough—is it not?—by their inability to satisfy us, as in the case of social pleasures . . . or with friendship, which is only a simulacrum, since, for whatever moral reason he may do it, the artist who gives up an hour of work for an hour of conversation with a friend knows that he is sacrificing a reality for something that does not exist. . . .”27 In Husserl’s Cartesian Meditation IV, the transcendental ego is discovered to be a monad which, in my early rush to judgment, seemed to be a solipsistic cul-de-sac. That may not be the last word. On Levinas’s inspired reading, reason discovers itself in its absolute freedom, not as a Heideggerian immersion in the world. Rather than eliminating the brackets and rejoining the world, we remain separated as by an impassible abyss. In the reduction I discover myself as a transcendental consciousness; the mind suspends any thoughts as to the validity of consciousness in the Aristotle: Poetry and the Proper

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natural standpoint, that is, naïve or scientific realism. The world is not a precondition for mind “that is no longer a part of the world but is prior to the world.” In this returning to primary self-evidence, I recover at once the origin and the significance of all my knowledge and the true meaning of my presence in the world.28 In an uncanny manner, this is what we can learn from Helen Keller: all she knew were the linguistic marks made on her hand from which she imaginatively constructed a world remarkably like ours. The cool stuff flowing across her hand was to the marks on her hand as water is to “w.a.t.e.r.” This deeper eidetic reality granted by the epoché can be the fruit of metaphor. Even where it is more or less chthonic, it is not any less ideal. What really is prior to the world? Saying. My being here to the other’s there who summons and shows me, who calls me out of myself to take up my responsibilities, a theme that begins with the child when he first feels another and then experiences her as other in empathy. This solicitation begins with the face that Levinas has accustomed us to see as an icon of the inassimilable Good that takes us beyond the closure of metaphysics. Plato and his tribe taught us that Beauty, which is also beyond being and is the Good as Desirable, solicits through the face. At the risk of repetition but in order to establish affectivity as the necessary condition for being overcome by the Other, I must emphasize Beauty’s deconstructive role (Crat., 4399D–E) in the movement from the singular Other to a love of justice. Beatrice, that entrancing beauty who led Dante to his new life, was his first instructor in love. To be solicited or propositioned by Beauty is to be passive beyond any passivity, a passivity that is a gift one must first receive from beyond being if one is to receive the gift of Beauty. If his preceptor instructs him correctly, then he will fall in love with one individual body so that his passion will give life to noble discourse. Next he must consider how nearly related the beauty of one individual body is to the beauty of any other . . . [and] must set himself to be the lover of every body and bring his passion for the one into due proportion by deeming it of little or no importance. Next he must grasp that the beauties of the body are as nothing to the beauties of the soul so that whenever it meets with spiritual loveliness, even in the husk of an unlovely body, he will find it beautiful enough to fall in love with and to cherish . . . And from this he will be led to contemplate the beauty of laws and institutions. (Sym., 210B–C) 220

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Do we love others because they are beautiful or because they are human and therefore beautiful? Led aright, the attraction is not to a being instancing beauty but rather to a singular being of unfathomable depth whose radiance is that of its cause. More than eidetic contemplation is entailed; for the real passion is for institutions that do justice, not to abstract beauty, but rather to the singular beauty of each. The higher ranges of Beauty, even rebirth, are for the sake of justice. Though like the Good in that it is for its own sake, beauty pertains to order, proportion, the fitting, the appropriate, all good measures of life lived in the care of souls. Thanks to eros, they too are measured by their response to the solicitations of beauty.29 Can we purge ourselves of late-nineteenth-century aestheticism that saw beauty as the last transcendentally signified bequeathed us by the dead God? Can we not see with Rilke that terror lurks in beauty? Picasso cited Raphael in Guernica. In the Symposium, the movement is from the beauty seen in one to beauty seen in all, and then to the love of those human orders that do justice to all, to the sciences and finally the beatific vision. None has spoken so bravely and nobly of this option than Iris Murdoch in her Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. She was fully aware that the issue of seeing this world under the formality of the Good without the consolation of redemption is, as in Oedipus or Lear, sublime, somehow beyond good and evil.30

Aristotle: Poetry and the Proper

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8

“To the Things Themselves”

When Being is thought, metaphor disappears because beings disappear, and with them the direct literal and indirect metaphorical presence to being. John Llewelyn

1. Metaphor in the Shackles of Being We hope to transport metaphor from its usual Aristotelian setting into a Platonic context where the Good, not Being, is supreme. If we are to displace being, what are we displacing? Aside from its vitalistic, durative, and fact-stating senses, einai (to be) has a locative power, a presence in the present. We shunt these senses over to the matrix, which, though beyond being, gives each being life, duration, a place, a present, and that facticity of a there to a here. “Existence” is not one of the meanings of einai. In his important study of the Greek verb “to be,” Charles Kahn says: The intrinsic and lasting character of Being in Greek . . . which makes it so appropriate as an object of knowing and correlative of truth, distinguishes it in a radical way from our modern notion of existence, at least in so far as the latter . . . has preserved the semantic flavor of the Latin exsistere. . . . Etymologically, the latter suggests a stepping forth, a coming into being, an emergence out of a dark background into the 222

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light of day . . . the sense of existence was originally acquired by the verb in the perfect: id quod exstitit. Now that which has emerged is literally the contingent, what might not have emerged and what might have disappeared once more. Under the influence of the Biblical notion of creation, and the more radical distinction of essence and existence that follows from it in the medieval doctrine of created beings, these linguistic connotations of exsistere were preserved and developed at the theoretical level in the concept of a being that is inherently provisional and precarious, hovering on the verge of nothingness.1 Kahn elsewhere suggests that existence may be an Arabic importation, since Arabs were the first to make a distinction between necessity and radical contingency (existing only in the mind of God).2 Being, as what is sought after in inquiry, has truth, not existence, as its primary sense. Scholastic exsistere, which leaves creatures precariously “hovering on the verge of nothingness,” is retained by Heidegger. Levinas also identifies “being” with existence, where the latter is the il y a, which is, in turn, close to Plato’s sempiternal gignesthai, becoming, the primordial diversification of the matrix. If so, then one could associate the economics of dwelling, which is, according to Heidegger, the basic character of human being, with Plato’s chora.3 The existent (ens, Seindes, l’existant) is not so precarious and, in virtue of its relation to becoming, is already durative; its existence is something to be enjoyed or suffered. Levinas said it very well indeed in a Talmud study: “The bare fact of life is never bare. Life is not the naked will to be, an ontological Sorge for life. . . . Life is a love of life, a relation with contents that are not my being but more dear than my being: thinking, eating, sleeping, reading, working, warming oneself in the sun. Distinct from my substance, but constituting it, these elements make up the worth of my life. When reduced to pure and naked existence, life lies in the existence of the shades Ulysses visits in Hades, life dissolves into shadow. Life is not an existence that precedes its essence. Its existence makes up its worth, and hence value constitutes being. The reality of life is already on the level of happiness, and in this sense beyond ontology. Happiness is not an accident of being, since being is risked for happiness.”4 By beginning with the affective and nonintentional side of life, Levinas is able to avoid pitfalls that entrap one in the closure of the Ontological Difference. But happiness is only half of the story. Prior to this self-coincidence, as Levinas sometimes calls the positional “To the Things Themselves”

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consciousness of decision, of yes and no, there is a primordial yes, the yes of “a response before it decides to be responsible.” It is also Nietzsche’s yes that welcomes a world “as it is, without subtraction, exception or selection.”5 Plato’s “true world” having been rejected, can this world really be welcomed? It is a noonday world without shadows “which puts things in relief, delimits form, puts things in place.”6 All is blanched by the white light, without perspectives, in “a lunatic and solar platitude of infinite equivalences.” Can we say yes to this? Neither Zarathustra nor Nietzsche himself, even in his last days when he was taken up, consumed, and plunged into the abyss, could say so. Was this abyss, these ten years of darkness, the result of divine possession? Did this madness, as Marion suggests, result from a lack of distance? The Good is beyond being and appears, if it appears, only in Christ’s kenosis, an icon of the withdrawn Father He reveals or, to give Levinas his due, in its deflection onto an other. The real world makes perspectives possible, just as the Good establishes distance, difference, alterity between God and humans. Franz Rosenzweig’s yes is more primordial and reflects through creation ex nihilo, an even greater distance between God and man: “But in creation what is called to being answers to a call that could not have reached it since, brought out of nothingness, it obeyed before hearing the order. Thus in the concept of creation ex nihilo, if it is not a pure nonsense, there is the concept of a passivity that cannot revert into an assumption. The self as a creature is conceived in a passivity more passive than the passivity of matter, that is, prior to the virtual coincidence of a term with itself.”7 The promise of happiness, founded on the reflexive closure of need, is only a virtual reality, a dream. In Desire “affirmed across the idea of creation ex nihilo . . . the needy being, avid for its complements, vanishes and the possibility of a sabbatical existence, whose existence suspends the necessities of existence, is inaugurated.”8 John Llewelyn touches the heart of the problem when he says, “I am not a product emanating from the One . . . the created being is one whose obligation to the other arises from nothing . . . it is in this responsibility ex nihilo for the other that my being created consists.”9 But it is also more, for instead of being within a totality with its attendant dependencies, ex nihilo expresses a multiplicity not united in a totality; the creature is an existence which does indeed depend on an other, but not as a part that is separated from it. Creation ex nihilo breaks 224

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with system, posits a being that is outside any system, that is, where its freedom is possible. Creation leaves to the creature a trace of dependence: the dependent being draws from this exceptional dependence, from this relationship, its very independence, its exteriority to the system.10 Though Heidegger’s journey behind Parmenides to discover a more primordial understanding of on, being, may have proved fruitless, metaphor is enlivened when “to be” is seen in the perspectives of the archaic roots he discerned. An Introduction to Metaphysics proposed that we should not begin with the infinitive “to be” but with its third person singular. The first example is the Sanskrit asus (es, esti, estin, est, and so forth), “life, the living, that which stands from out of itself and moves and rests in itself . . .” The other Indo-European radical is bhu, bheu. To it belong the Greek phuo, “to emerge, to hold sway, to come to stand from out of itself and remain standing . . .” Physis would then be “that which emerges into the light to illuminate; to shine forth,” and therefore “to appear.” Also deriving from this stem are the Latin perfect fui, fuo as well as our German bin, bist. . . . The third stem survives only in the inflection of the Germanic verb sein: wes . . . wesan, “to dwell, to sojourn . . .” [means] enduring as presence, presence, and absence. The sens in the Latin prae-sens and ab-sens has been lost.11 Concretely, being means to live, to emerge, and to linger or endure; but these are gifts to beings by the matrix beyond being. Being is what and who we are; why go beyond? Because living, lingering, and enduring are not enough. We willingly sacrifice being: we are also creative, breakers of being’s irremediable ties to what is for the sake of fortune, satisfaction, adventure, love, and the like. Our concern is not just with Being’s closure. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein says that the world is the totality of facts, not things (1.1), where facts are posits of true propositions. Things give way to meanings and we have the dreary array of facts so dear to the empiricist. Derrida says that there is no going outside the text. In each case language assembles a world for the speaker, and Husserl’s injunction, “to the things themselves that show themselves from themselves and in themselves,” which we see through window-like words, would, alas, lead to signs signifying signs . . . But if we see them through the “I can” rather than “what is . . .?,” would we not be taking up positions “To the Things Themselves”

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in the world through the word’s meaning?12 But this could be taking up a stand in Don Quixote’s world. Only the hermeneutics of being underway within the world can shatter these illusions. Otherwise the solipsism of Cartesian Meditations is just down the road. The “I can” of motile activity under a certain intention that is itself sub specie bonum releases world to engagements prior to the epistemic gestures of spectator consciousness. We need intention as both meaning and embodied act-desire (urge, impulse, feeling impelled to act, and so forth); the latter can exist without phenomenological and linguistic formations. Needless to say, without language we would be world-poor, like my dog or the young deaf and blind Helen Keller. Structuralism and neostructuralism to the contrary, significance and its signs transcend language. With recognition, significance is a natural relation coextensive with animal life. E. coli recognizes the difference between a nutritional and a lethal gradient and behaves accordingly. “I can . . .” transforms a Versailles-like system of signs signifying signs into signs whose termini are life threatening or enhancing. Significance is a natural relation and should replace Hume’s contingent habitualities as the foundation of natural knowledge. Whitehead defines it as the disclosure of an entity “as a relatum without further specific discrimination of quality.”13 The fire I withdraw from is a natural sign. So too is the recognition of the part of a whole, that a sphere has a center, that our physical states mean hunger or fatigue. Signs can be instituted by saying where nothing need be said, as when the egological, nominative “I” deconstructs in the face of the other to become the accusative “me.” Each is beyond being and its intentional structure.14 2. Metaphor: Apophatic or Semantic? Since Saint Paul spoke of knowing things above from things below (Rom., 1:20), analogy has been an essential element in theology. What is said of God, for example his infinite wisdom, is brought within the range of our understanding by human wisdom. The same said of God and creatures is justified by their resemblance or by some metaphysical relation, such as creaturely perfections attributed to God as their non-univocal cause (ST Q4, a3). Does this raise the issue of the so-called ontotheology? I think not. It may be true of Cajatan’s interpretation of Aquinas in the Analogy of Names that distinguishes between being said in pros hen, attributive, unequal, or properly proportional analogies.15 But if Fabrio and more recent Thomists are correct and we are concerned with unequal participation 226

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in esse, this could be a mistaken reading. Most philosophers in the phenomenological tradition follow Aristotle, who spoke of transporting the sense of one term to another (De Rhet., 1406b 20–24). On the contrary, there is crossing but no transporting. In the metaphor A is B, B may have been generated when the as-yet-unfulfilled speech intention crossed A’s semantic field. Granted this consummation, then a copula is the hermeneutical “seeing something as something.” A opens a referential horizon fixed by its referent, its noesis or Bedeutung, which is, in turn, crossed and fused with those of B. A’s world is B’s because, for all their differences, B constitutes or presumes identity. Sometimes the converse holds. Claude Shannon crossed electrical circuits with Leibniz’s binary number system, and the digital computer was born. Pierre Bonnard saw his aged wife bathing as such a matrix and gave us the dazzling image of her transmutation into light and color. As in Aristotle’s partitive modes of analysis, metaphor can take the formal path and exhibit placeless essence and its logical entailments, or it can take the deictic route and show what lies hidden in its maternal mysteries (chora). Finally, it can take the path of eros and, as in Aristotle’s substantial mode, show the thing in its integral reality. In his study of Hölderlin’s hymn “The Ister,” Heidegger says that though “the rivers and waters that are sung in poetic works are customarily grasped as perceivable events in ‘nature’ . . . [which] offer a view and present an image,” such images “present not only themselves but also a non-sensuous meaning. They mean something . . . [and] point toward a spiritual content. The river that is named and that appears in the image is a ‘symbolic image.’ ”16 In every metaphor the distinction is made between the sensuous and nonsensuous, a distinction he unjustly attributes to Plato. If, however, the individual a this (todi ti) is an image, this accrues to it through interpretations. Even the is of predication may be, on Heidegger reading, hermeneutical. But if sensuous and nonsensuous are considered as Aristotle’s partitive modes of ousia,17 then truth requires that we do justice to both together and apart. That is a great challenge to Aristotelian metaphor. In The Languages of Art, Nelson Goodman grasps metaphor’s deictic possibilities, yet takes it to be a transport of terms and ignores its apophatic claims. Apophanesis means to make something manifest to another; in mutual awareness of the Otherness of each other, discourse also teaches and shows, clarifies and lets us enjoy what is seen and known. Apophanesis lets apophanesthai happen, where the latter “To the Things Themselves”

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means, Heidegger says, to let something be seen from itself. Only disclosure can make possible the predicative ties of synthesis, where the prefix syn means letting it be seen together with something else. Metaphor is a crossing that lets things that normally do not belong together be seen as dwelling together. But Goodman abandons any appeal to sharable intuitions; metaphor “is an affair between a predicate with a past and an object which yields while protesting . . . metaphorical application of a label to an object [which] defies a prior denial, tacit or explicit, of that label to that object.” Labels belong to families, to schema, and in metaphor the schemata is “detached from its home realm and is applied to the arranging and sorting of an alien realm.” There are no limits to transport except the admission or rejection by the subject term of the schematic predicate; and what is expressed by this transfer is said to be “metaphorically exemplified.”18 In the Greek, schema are seen shapes that disclose something unseen, morphe, like the drawn square that shows the square itself. Using schema as a predicate that behaves realistically, collecting a dissimilar many into unity, is a brilliant metaphor, but it takes Goodman into hermeneutics and beyond his nominalism: schema entail morphe, eidoi.19 So we look at a picture of destitute people among dark brown ruins, and say, “What a sad picture!” Assuming that we did not refer to the banality of its content, the picture seems literally to drip with sadness. Is sadness a sentient property detached from its home base and now metaphorically exemplified in the picture? What on earth is a “metaphorical exemplification”? We interpret the picture as participating in sadness, see that the picture’s sadness is legitimately “sad.” In acknowledging that he was deeply moved by the Adagio of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Igor Stravinsky denies that this is an instance of the Affective Fallacy. He distinguishes the activity of the object from the interpretative receptivity of the listener. Beethoven was conveying musical ideas, not expressing feeling, and these ideas qualify an affectivity that is neither subjective nor objective but pertains equally to both. Metaphor is interpretation, not transport. Transport could involve a tension, as one might exclaim, “Sad? What an odd thing to say about a picture.” Better to say that, though it is never quite at home, the sad rearranges some things her way and accommodates herself to others as she borrows the picture for a dwelling. That is how I see it. Hegel does better than Goodman. He says that “metaphorical expression does not linger directly with the object but proceeds to the 228

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description of a second different one through which the meaning of the first becomes clear and perceptible to us.”20 While this seems more appropriate to allegory and will reappear in Ricoeur’s thesis that metaphor is redescription, it misses the hermeneutical use of the copula, the sense that through mediation we see something as something. In the sense, through this second “seeing as,” the first seen becomes “clear and perceptible.” Though transport is Aristotle’s metaphor for metaphor, he also speaks of metaphors as allowing us “to see similar things together” (Top., 108a 14). The transfer is motivated by resemblance: “It’s an abbreviated or implicit comparison, an analogy from which the word ‘as’ or ‘like’ has been omitted.”21 But isn’t the resemblance often generated by the metaphor? Metaphor is an epoché that constitutes a horizon determined by the same, a one in many. This is the work of the noncomparative, hermeneutical “as” in which something is seen through the formality of another. The disclosure is, of course, always a corrigible, usually functional, and intuitiable identity, like the point of a joke. For all my rash talk about the ultimate untenability of the Ontological Difference, one must continue to speak in terms of being, even as one deconstructs the Difference. For example, Heidegger cites Nietzsche’s effort “to stamp becoming with Being, that is the highest expression of the will to power,” while he finds a way toward a verbal alternative to eon, being, in Anaximander; “the fate of the west hangs on the translation of the word eon,” which is “becoming present in unconcealment.”22 If this seems overly autochthonous, a more Apollonian approach is found in Jean-Luc Marion’s God Without Being. Marion turns to Eastern Orthodox theology to define the difference between this realm of being, the theme of idolatry, and the beyond through the phenomenology of the icon. He proposes to avoid the “Ontological Impediment”—in words that bespeak a medial bias—by liberating Being, not by an emancipation, but by rendering it free so that in “passing from a captive theft [of beings] to free flight, it can liberate its play, liberate itself—like a player who lets his own moves occur instinctively with an unforeseeable and meticulous precision, in short, so he can let himself go.”23 Though he begins with phenomenological examples, such as boredom or vanity, his argument and examples fail to make explicit their resonance with chora. One cannot begin with a clean slate; many unintended presuppositions may never come into the light, and among these are ontological “To the Things Themselves”

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imputations unconsciously invoked. If one shuns the use of terms that have an established ontic loading, such as universal/particular, literal/metaphorical, inner/outer, agent/patient, and the like, as well as the concept of resemblance, which rests on a binary logic of terms and approaches metaphor in a context more or less innocent of metaphysics, the resulting interpretation may or may not escape some criticisms to which metaphor has been subjected in this post-Kantian era. 3. Intention: Signifying and Fulfilling Focusing on terms, not sentences, and resemblances, not identities, concedes too much to Ockham’s nominalism. Ockham was probably correct in taking Aristotle’s De Categoria to be a treatise on the signification of terms and their reference as against Porphyry who believed it to be about predication or judgments about facts. The concepts employed in these judgments could then, as second intensions, be further articulated as genus, species, property, accident, and the like. Porphyry added individual to Aristotle’s list and understood that naming obliquely refers to a universal; this would be a predication and result in a confusion of things with facts. If “individual” is a predicable, then one recognizes individuals under concepts in subsumptive judgments. The resulting ens rationis, not the individual, is the object of science; but objects and only objects, the termini of thinking, explain. Though Aristotelians taught that being is included in whatever is apprehended, the apprehended ens is present in a phantastic image formed by the synthesis of the sensus communis from memory, desire, sense, and the like: “The faculty of thinking thinks forms in the image” (De Anima, 431b 2). Scotus said, “This is a distinction of which I know nothing” (DS Oxon. IV, d.11, q.s., n.46) and that, rather than being lost in a maze of mental fictions, we possess “the knowledge of a present object as present and an existing object as existing” (DS Quodl., Q.7). The Aristotelian “a this” is given only in images, in turn mostly derived from “affective qualities” (Cat., 9a 30–9b 9) whose relation to reality is questionable. Aquinas’s direct realism (ST 1, q.84, a.1) is also suspect. Thus we know the common nature “as having no universality as it exists in the intellect, but according as it is referred to things as their likeness” (ST, Ente et Essentia, 3). But wouldn’t the likeness deny the unity claimed for knowledge and then, to borrow Whitehead’s aphorism, science would be the conjecture and nature the dream? Though Scotus would agree that sensory knowledge lacks the virtue of science, the individual is still intelligible 230

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in sense whose perfection is to attain to “an object as existing and present in its real existence, and not just diminutively in a kind of imperfect likeness of itself” (DS Quodl., Q.6, 6, 6.19). There is thus the possibility of a realistic analogue of Husserl, if only we can divest him of his tendency to grant too much to judgment. Husserl speaks of significative intentions, such as golden mountains, which cannot be fulfilled in sense. Categorial intuitions, such as thing in “red thing,” are empirically founded but have no direct sensuous correlate. “Thing” means to gather and is to the real order what logos is to the conceptual order. In naming we see a thing, not a constellation of sensa; but as used, not mentioned, the word is not sensible. Though most thought can issue in a fulfilling recognition, both Levinas and Heidegger have stressed that there are recognitions in which judgment is, at best, negligible. Though it is difficult to approach the problems raised by signification without getting entrapped in Scholastic subtleties, the bias toward terms rather than expressions which dominates accounts of metaphor invites a scholastic detour that leads through Scotus’s genius. Making “individual” a predicable makes a kind of sense. Apparently Aristotle thought terms were meaningful apart from sentences, for he opened De Interpretatione with the expressivist thesis that “a spoken word is a symbol of a mental affection” (16a 4); in his Commentary on this text, Saint Thomas says that these are concepts. The neo-Platonic Porphyry transformed what was probably intended by Aristotle to be a theory of signification into an account of judgment and its posited fact, the p in Tarski’s “p if and only if p.” In Ockham, signification is effected by concepts, a natural sign of the thing signified, and by words, conventional written and verbal signs. The concept, an act of understanding or habit of meaning things, is not signified by the word; words signify things signified by the concept.24 The things existing by nature are said to be signified in the first intention, while those pertaining to the apparatus of signification, such as “word,” “proposition,” “genus,” and the like, are second intentions. According to Earnest Moody, the transcendentals, ens, res, aliquid, unum, bonum, and verum apply to both intentions. Ockham thought that this priority of signification over meaning, assertion, or judgment freed logic from the realistic commitments of the positive sciences and gave a unique primacy to the individual and his faith. Instead of recognizing something that might terminate reference, however, significance terminates in a sign . . . of a sign . . . of a sign . . . , but if Agamben is right, there is termination, because what is a first “To the Things Themselves”

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intention is never a sign except for another act. Ockham’s second intensions were mental fictions, even though he may have conceded Aristotelian realism to the sciences. When, however, judgment becomes primary, “truth” cannot be detached from signification. Does that mean that my dog has a concept when she recognizes me, an individual, and other humans, a kind? With the primary of judgment, Ockham thought that sciences lost their demonstrative power. His foil was Duns Scotus, a perplexing guide to perplexities. Writing from within the Platonic tradition of Augustine, Bonaventure, and, especially, Avicenna, Scotus thought that the common nature, such as “humanity,” exists apart from the mind and is individuated by “contraction”; therefore the form humanity designates what Socrates is, but not insofar as he is an individual and not insofar as he is recognized as a man.25 The concrete term “man” signifies something that he is as well as the contracted form, humanity. Scotus anticipates Husserl by making intuition primary; esse manifestativum sui (Meta., q.s, n.4). Recognition does not necessarily entail judgments or concepts, but as a primitive relation to the thing itself it is also the occasion for grasping the separated form which gives existence to the individual and is the object of understanding and predication. Except for God whose infinity is implicitly known in every act of discursive thought, the form per se signifies existing (Op. Oxon. I, Dist. II, Q. 2). Ockham argued, on the contrary, that the individual is something that Socrates is; if “humanity” signifies Socrates, then it is individual.26 “Humanity” is reduplicative; it says nothing in addition to “man”; thus to say “men are human” is to say “man insofar as he is man.” In other words, “man” signifies individuals disjunctively, while “humanity” signifies them collectively. The famous razor seems to have eliminated Plato’s ideas. One might expect a significative intention to be fulfilled by something recognized in a concept; but what if that concept would itself be a sign and point to others in an unending series or within an internally related nexus?27 This threatens the very possibility of finite truth, for the meaning of an expression is always in or through others. How can we escape this “bad infinite”? First, the sign itself, insofar as it is signified, is not a signifier. Secondly, Duns Scotus’s haecceitas, a “formal objective distinction a parte rei,” grounds signification in the receptacle, which is not something that can be signified. Third, the address is to another, who is not a sign. Saying is primary. This could be a happy consequence for phenomenology.

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We have insisted that discourse is first apophatic; that is, it lets something eidetic be seen through the sensuous, the shape through a color or humanity through a man; but disclosure also means that the disclosed (“true,” aletheia) may obscure other things (Heidegger’s “errancy”). What prevents phenomenology from being another infinite sequence of signifying acts? How is the demonstrative role of science possible? The answer lies in the other as Other, never a sign, who speaks and shows me. “The calling into question of the I, coextensive with the manifestation of the Other in the face, we call language. The height from which language comes . . . [is] teaching.”28 Language begins with monstration; you, who teach me with the authority and good faith of the Other as if from on high, are trying to show me something within a common region that can be progressively narrowed by demonstrative phrases. Like the demonstrative adverbs of the opening pages of Hegel’s Phenomenology, these are not part of the sense of the expression in which they occur. If I, a stranger to your campus, were to say, “This park is beautiful—there are museums everywhere,” and you were to reply, “This isn’t a park, and these are administrative buildings,” I would know that you and I focused through the same region on the same things. “Park,” “this,” my gestures, or “that” are not predicates of a region and are not truth functional. With both Levinas’s il y a and Heidegger’s es gibt there is the recognition that what may show itself appears from situating something that is neither a being nor non-being. Demonstrative phrases, which progressively narrow the domain in which the elicited entity inheres, are implicit in apophatic discourse. They let something be recognized which can then be characterized. As Whitehead once said, “All thought has to be about things”; the laws of nature are not about their concepts but are the outcome of their characteristics.29 Platonic metaphor requires a semantic modification in the way ideas are interpreted as paradigms and explanatory principles. We must show that Plato’s theory of ideas can also be a theory of meaning compatible with phenomenology. As Levinas remarked, the phenomenological reduction is “a violence in which man—a being among other beings—does to himself in order to find himself again in pure thought” (EL DE 72), but I am no more comfortable with this separated world of meanings enclosed in a monadic ego than I am with Plato’s separated ideas. The freedom this reduction gains for us from a Heideggerian fall into the world’s history is bought at a terrible price. “To the Things Themselves”

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In spite of this detachment, none has put us in a better position to be aware of the richness of sense than Husserl. How could it be otherwise when his guiding ideal was to go to the things themselves that show themselves in themselves and from themselves? “Every intention is,” Levinas says, “a self-evidence being sought”30; and while not every intention finds its fulfillment in sensory objects, sense is nevertheless infinitely fecund and even foundational. Among his virtues is the so-called categorial intuition, which, breaking with empiricism, carries intuition over into the eidetic so that, as Levinas puts it, “intuition remains the source of all intelligibility.” Leaving aside the masterful analysis of parts and whole in the third Logical Investigation which underlies all these analyses, we can say that objects are informed as individuals, members of sets, genera, substitution instances in logical formulae, and the like; as in Kant, this intelligibility, especially that which makes an a priori claim, is the result of constitution. Constitution, which is neither a construction nor projection, though these may make it evident, concerns how a formality—empirical, intellectual, or categorical—is intuited in an object in virtue of its meaning and the way it is intended. You cannot hear a color nor taste music. Though none intuits the states of affairs signified by the conjunctive “and” or disjunctive “or,” we can perform a single act of conjunction or disjunction based on the two single acts and “so mean the aggregate.”31 In such cases one intends objects (in the “second degree”) that could not be given straightaway. An act of meaning is plainly “founded” on underlying apprehensions; a new mode of apprehension has been built on the individual house constitutive of the intuitive presence of the Idea of Red. And as the character of this mode of apprehension sets the Species before us as a universal object, so too there develops, in intimate connection with such an object, formations like “red thing” (thing containing an instance of red), “this case of red” (the red of this house), etc. This relation between the intention and its self-evidencing object—sensuous, categorial, or intellectual—is unique . . . while receiving something foreign, the mind is the origin of what it receives.32 Whatever the affinities between Husserl and Plato, there seems to be a fundamental difference. Ideas are absolute and exist independently of any language that might express or access them. Husserl is a Platonist, but his is a phenomenological, not a metaphysical, realism. 234

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The idea must now be understood “from reflection on the intention that intends the ideal object”; its transcendence is not a fact about it but a meaning given in and by the intention. Though, for example, meaning intentions culminate in a correlative confirming or disconfirming fulfillment, this is not always sensuous. The objects of mathematical intuitions are, for example, self-evidencing, but this is the evidence of a rule-governed domain, the sort of thing one sees in a recursive proof. Every objective truth, Levinas explains, is “set back into the context of the real intention that constitutes it.”33 Husserl brings all objects, sensuous and supersensuous, within the scope of self-evidencing “perception.” There must at least be an act which renders identical services to the categorial elements of meaning and the merely sensuous perception renders to the empirical elements. . . . Plainly the connection between the wider and the narrower, the supersensuous (i.e., raised above sense, or categorial) and sensuous concept of perception, is not contingent or external matter. It falls within the great class of acts whose peculiarity it is that in them something appears as “actual,” as “self-given.” Plainly this appearance of actuality and self-givenness (which may very well be delusive) is throughout characterized by its difference from essentially related acts through which alone it attains full clarity—its difference from an imaginative “making present” or significative “thinking of”—though not excluding the belief in being.34 Even if numbers do “not spring forth or vanish from the act of enumeration” and constitute “an ideally closed set of general objects,” a new concept results in the realization of a new set of meanings.35 How is realization to be understood? The new set is already eidetic. The real numbers are “realized” in the rationals. Phenomenology tells us that metaphor need no longer go beyond sense to make sense of sense. If sense is not effaced in the universal, then much of Derrida’s criticism in “The White Mythology,” which hinges on the image of effaced coinage, will be obviated. Even though Derrida avoids the Aristotelian thesis that written or spoken terms are subordinate to concepts, the focus remains on terms (De Int., 16a 3). Husserl rejects both conceptualism,36 for a plurality of intentional acts will not constitute the objective unity of the idea, and nominalism,37 for names do not support the nomological ties in the sciences. At the same time he does not quite embrace Platonism. Can we find a way into Platonism that, though it satisfies cosmological intuitions, “To the Things Themselves”

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will also give “pure thought” its self-evidencing meanings and thus its due? Can we find a way of construing this meaningful world, whose necessary and sometimes sufficient conditions lie in a physical world, without falling into naturalism, functionalism, dualism, or some other equally unattractive reduction? The answer lies in time and the way an affective duration generates the bifurcation between thought and being. The clue lies in Plato’s instant (infra, 11.5).

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9

The Hypostasis: Its Thisness and Its There

1. The Hypostasis1 Interpreting Plato’s “living creature” (Tim., 30B–D) as a hypostasis goes beyond his letter, if not his spirit; it takes us a long way toward unraveling something of the mystery of incarnation. Plato saw that the separationist account in the Phaedo defined soul through its relation to the ideas, but then it left no place for “change, life, soul, and understanding” and condemned us “to stand immutable in solemn aloofness, devoid of intelligence” (Sop., 249A). The hypostasis as developed in Greek patristic usage can begin to put these together and to correct the mistaken view that Platonism, if not Plato himself, had no way of accounting for creatures’ individuality.2 With apologies to my dog Philippe, “hypostasis” will be restricted to persons who may also be experienced as persona or prosopon. It is more useful in accounting for the haecceitas because its medial root can express the dynamics of its self-formation. If we can account for self-individuating haecceitas, then we can speak of individuals as hypostases, not just in the barbarism “concrete universal.” The concrete universal may be the what of an appropriating eros and other contractual forms of philia, but it falls short of having the iconic surplus and facticality of the hypostasis, the persona or prosopon, I see and love (see above, 4:36n). Saint Maximus, working from an incarnational paradigm, says that “objects of sense are a type of body, while the human body 237

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stands for the world of sensible things. Spiritual things are the soul of sense objects; sense objects are embodiments of thoughts. The spiritual world is in the material like the presence of the soul in the body, and the material world is fused with the spiritual like a body with its soul; as soul and body make one man, the two make one world. Neither repudiates or rejects the other, for their union has assimilated them to each other” (St. Maximus M, 84). The human hypostasis is an incarnation of form, a creature of the between (Sym., 202C–204B) always in a process of creating and being made (poiesis), we remake ourselves each moment in a passage from non-being to being (205C; 207D–E) under the governance of eros.3 Eros engenders on Beauty (206C; 211A), the primary mode of the Good’s solicitation (204D). Like the Good, which is not the name of anything but opens a world in the making, Beauty names nothing yet calls us into the very fabric of being.4 Saint Denys says that the Good is “celebrated as beautiful and beauty, as agape and beloved. That beautiful beyond being is said to be beauty . . . [and in a play on Cratylus (416C)] it calls (kalesin) all to itself, whence it is called Beauty (kalon)” (St. Denys, DN, 980,138). The hypostasis is a victory, however short lived, over existence—becoming or the il y a; it arises from and stands out against the flux to give it eyes, consciousness, direction, and meaning. This affective flux can double back on itself to be an object for itself, as in Michel Henry’s interpretation of Descartes’s videre videor, and then superimpose on this reflexivity the intending I that distinguishes the feeling from the felt. But this means, as Levinas says of the atheistic satisfactions of the “I can,” that intentionality is often foreign to man in his everydayness. John Llewelyn, reflecting on the success of Levinas’s deduction of the hypostasis, says with his usual elegance that the hypostasis is “an interruption of being and recommencement that makes possible time, and with time being, which would turn into non-being if there were no more to the present than the evanescence it undergoes when it appears to be absorbed into the past or what is ‘presently’ to come. Because this rescue of being is a rescue from being’s anonymity by the hypostasis of a substantive subject, a being that can bear an identifying name, and because being or existence is unnegatable even by nothing and death, Levinas has indeed deduced the existent from existence.”5 In approaching the hypostasis through Scotus as a verbal/adverbial dyad, in the next section I may be able to show—these claims are always highly questionable—that I can avoid the Ontological Difference. 238

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Leibniz thought that continuity and discreteness presented philosophy with its greatest problem. His solution was to take the atomistic monad as primary and to reduce continuity to its representations. By beginning with the hypostasis or the receptacle, Levinas and Plato appear to take the contrary tack. In the final analysis, both opt for a granular temporality and a monadic interpretation of time. The hypothesis is reflexive and its ecstasies are directed to past and future; but it erupts into being in the “evanescent present” whose potentials are drawn from the archives, such as David Bohm’s implicate order or God’s consequent nature, and focused through amplifying chora. This order is holographic, not unlike the manner in which the monad perceives the universe from its own locus standi. This is another way of stating the principle that everything is related to everything else, but the fate of atomicity in these internal relations is to dissolve and leave nothing to relate.6 The hypostasis’s “rescue of being from anonymity” is also a solution on behalf of the actuality of discreteness and the potentiality of continuity by a subject whose “perceptions” are not representations of a knower but possible ways the relational “I can” may factor, direct, and vector becoming. Like the creation of a work of art, it requires no goal or compulsion beyond itself but is a coherent wholeness of value in itself. But this “in itself” is that of an erotic being whose meaning is for the sake of being to be. The present is a Platonic instant (Par., 155E–159B; see above, 11:5) or, if one prefers Whitehead’s jargon, an occasion of experience that is a cut, a decision, from what on reflection appears to be a continuous retained past and protended future (Husserl). We are like Janus in Poussain’s “Dance to the Music of Time” in the Courtland Gallery, we see a frozen past and future and are oblivious to the present’s bacchanal. By mechanisms we will make explicit, this dance, a cut in the apparent continuum of time, opens a being to novel alterity so it can be for itself. Eros is the dance’s name. By freeing the instant from bondage to being— the internal bond that, through the hypodoche, binds it to every relevant other—this gap is the instant’s decisiveness that either grades this relevance so as to accept or dismiss what conflicts with its aim or permits it to entertain the propositional lures of the Good. With this there can be a partial break away from the conformal necessities laid down on the instant by its immanent past. There are some creatures, those who participate with us in eternity, for whom there is transcendent possibility. Their aim is the gift of the Good. If the hypostasis is primary, then metaphorical language names or invites reflection upon something arising and standing out through The Hypostasis: Its Thisness and Its There

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presencing rather than a permanent presence, which is the subject of change; the use of hypostasis eliminates some of those features of metaphor which, according to Heidegger, insures that it “obtains only within metaphysics.”7 However, the way beyond will not open until we can overcome the “vulgar notion of time” and, with some help from Jean-Luc Marion, find a meaning of the present, which does not “deliver to consciousness each being that can become an object to it.”8 Moreover, the “primal flow” is not “something in objective time . . . it is absolute subjectivity.”9 Levinas quite rightly condemns Husserl for “expressing time in terms of presence and simultaneity . . . as if time were reducible to its way of making itself known, or its manner of conforming to the requirements of its manifestation.”10 Time is an abstraction from events whose form it is. We can see this at work in the self-assembling hypostasis. But there is the possibility that the form into which it gathers itself may, like the form of a wave, be an eject of its own dynamics. The term hypostasis seems to have entered philosophical usage with the neo-Platonists as the name for the One’s emanations; only with hyposthenia and its close Latin cognate, exsistere, did something like “existence” enter philosophy. Charles Kahn says the concept may have originated in Islamic philosophy’s modal distinction between possible and necessary existence.11 In the early Christian era, hypostasis was used synonymously with “substance” (ousia) and meant, in its active form, something that stands out or supports, and in its medial form, a process, the flow of a river, that constitutes a determinate being, a delta that can control its flow. It also meant a hidden aspect, such as the dregs of wine or its matter or raw material, and finally its seat or station.12 This latter notion is related to hedra, one of Plato’s nexus of terms referring to space or the receptacle, and suggests an ontological tie to the earth. Hypostasis derives from medial hyphistemi and thus suggests a transformation of a verbal process into a nominal presence. In the Latin West it became synonymous with a nominalized ousia and the Latin substantia, even though ousia is a “participle” which was for Aristotle almost synonymous with physis; like his physician who heals himself, it integrally “partakes” of being and becoming. However, these verbal aspects are lost in later Greek and, especially, Latin formations. For example, the root ousia in homousion, “one in being with” as said of the persons in the Trinity, was nominalized in Athenasius’s creedal formulation. Though he understood ousia relationally, it already had the sense of substantia, substance as subject or substrate. 240

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Levinas found the hypothesis’s non-Parmenidian implications useful in avoiding, and even going beyond, being. Rather than founding personal life on a relatively enduring substrate, form, or subject, the person as hypostasis is to be understood as self-forming and interpreting. All this is, of course, under the constraints of creation ex nihilo. Life is like a surfer riding a wave, sustaining itself by a reflexive awareness of its own existence. As Levinas said of Husserl’s ego, it is “a way of living the intentions that relate to it in diverse ways . . . a form and way of being.”13 Consciousness is life’s opening on a world that permits one to be a responsible “agent” of personal life; it arises from to then stand reflexively over and even against the flux of bodily life through its constituting chora, or—as suggested by Ricoeur and Kearney14—its thisness (heacceity or persona). Chora is the deictic and transcendent demiourgos that puts life together and is a surplus that eludes intentionality. In the reflexive hypothesis as the formed and realized persona grants time that is out of phase with the diachronic time of becoming whose processes it seeks to vector.15 This personal “I,” the achieved being of becoming, is its product, like the said arising from saying; but unlike an epiphenomenon, it also exercises a measure of control on becoming, as a theme or context imposes parameters on saying. Becoming, a nexus of physical, biological, psychological, social, and cultural processes, is gathered into and makes a place for the freedom of the “I think . . .” so hazardously perched between the abysses of past and future. “Hypostasis” underwent further refinement in Orthodox theology and finally came to mean “person,” but I take liberties and extend it to all of life (the biological hypostasis). All living creatures are precipitates of a medial becoming, which then, qua being and within the limits of the necessities, they reflexively control, order, and govern. The metabolism of enzymes that then control metabolism is a useful biological model of life as a medial doublet, that is, life through living that in turn vectors living. This may prejudice the uniquely human face-to-fact relation, but it is a risk worthy taking. My pup has a face but hardly a persona. In the vulnerabilities of medial experience, the distinctions between soul and body, interior and exterior, I and the other, are minimal, if not altogether absent. But this is not a haphazard happening, and the governing rule is like the relation between a speaker and his native language or the skilled player and the game she plays; and though this executive function is usually said to depend on psychic faculties, such as reason or will, it is only when thought is out of phase or fails to consort with our bodies that these The Hypostasis: Its Thisness and Its There

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powers of the old faculty psychology have a legitimate place. It is, however, hopeless to try to capture “experience” in these terms; what one experiences is the order of events, their meaningfulness without being intended within a logos, which requires that we, like the players, be one with it. Not eating certain things requires my act of will, but that is because I have bad habits. The dance dances us, the play plays us, the language languages us, and the like; these states have a strong family resemblance with Zazen, a Zen meditation technique, where the controlling powers join with the body in unostentatiously monitoring experience. Unlike the mysticism that derives from Plato’s Phaedo in which the body is a hindrance, Zen originated among warriors ready to spring into action. This reflexive interiority, lacking to nominalized ousia, is necessarily related or directed to exteriority. This non-substantial interiority was a development in the patristic tradition. Though Athanasius may have been the first to employ hypostasis as synonymous with ousia, Cyril of Alexandria thought it was more concrete than ousia and therefore more properly applied to the persons in the Trinity. It was then, John Zizioulas says, “disassociated from ousia and identified with prosopon . . . to be and to be in relation became identical.”16 The development in which hypostasis replaced prosopon, which, like the Latin persona, meant face, actor’s mask, and also primary substance, begins as early as Origin, but its full explication was due to the great Cappadocian Fathers, Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianzus, who were attracted by its personal implications. Ousia and not agape was used to designate God’s nature, and in the Councils at Constantinople (381) and Chalcedon (451) hypostasis was used to refer to the individuated persons in the Trinity. Unlike the Latin persona, which, granted the profundity of Kearney’s analysis, nevertheless suggests the mask behind which someone is hidden, the self’s privacy and role playing, as well as something accidental to being, the hypostasis has the ontological priority of “substance” and is always and already a nexus of social relations. This relational and social possibility was never apparent in the Latin West where Saint Thomas, for example, said that a hypostasis was a substance “underlying accidents” (S.T., q.29, a.2) and not a person, “a substance of a rational nature” (q.39, a.1, ad.1). The sense we attach to “person” should preserve its origin in hypostasis. If persona is a mask and thus suggests the private person as a determination of Aristotelian “substance” which is “nonrelational” and “not present in” anything and 242

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thus capable of existing apart” (De Cat., 2a 15), the hypostasis is a creature arising from and sustained by physical, biological, and social relationships and is thus, unlike substance (ousia), dependent on alterity, rooted in the world. There is no place for a relational reality in Aristotle, and when his account is taken seriously (which he had sense enough to ignore in natural science), as it was by Leibniz, the result is a disastrous monadology in which all apparent real relations are internal and analytic. Because there are only relational terms, one-place predicates, then the inference “if aRb and bRc, then aRc” would be invalid. God as hypostatic is by necessity in relations—a mother, son, father, friend, and so forth. Plato has such a theory, as we showed in the relational structure of participation and as Paul Ricoeur noted,17 but it was not until Scotus and then Peirce it found its logic. John Zizioulas picks up on this insight and notes that the expression “God is love” (I John 4:16) signifies that God exists as Trinity, that is, as person and not substance. Love is not an emanation or property of the substance of God but is constitutive of His substance, i.e., it is what makes God what He is, the one God. This love ceases to be a qualifying property of Being and becomes the supreme ontological predicate. Love as God’s mode of existence “hypostasizes” God . . . Therefore as a result of love, God is not subject to the necessity of his substance.18 Is “love” an ontological predicate? I think not. Love does not qualify being but is its cause. Love does not have a substance to whose necessities it is subject. Eros and agape are ecstatic. God is God only in ecstasis, in an agapatic love that creates himself necessarily and creatures contingently who then participate with him in worldengendering eros. We will soon come to Levinas’s deduction of the hypostasis from a sexual il y a (see 10:3 below), which can then be a model for the hypostazation of a personal God from love (see 16:3 below). The concluding chapter will suggest how the persons in the Trinity could be hypostatic expressions of this love. The Good beyond being has being only when posited by love. Whatever Plato might have meant by the Good, it is possible to see it as ecstatic love, as self-constituting ecstasy and as the ecstasy by which we are. But we also see God erotically responding to us in constituting the lures that drive creation. In Existence and Existents Levinas “approached the idea of Being in its impersonality so as to then be able to analyze the notion of the present and of the position in which a being, a subject, an existent, arises in impersonal Being through an hypostasis.”19 Had he been The Hypostasis: Its Thisness and Its There

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aware of this possibility, Plato might have used hypostasis to refer to his “living creature” (zoon hempsuchon; Tim., 30B) or, in his suggestive formula for temporality, the “image” in the “moving image of aion” (37D). The image (eidolon) is a representation of the idea. As “moving,” this could mean that the image is a changing perspective on the everlasting ideas and that time is the timeless linear time, the time of reversible processes and of classical physics, where times are related by earlier than or later than, like the before and after of points on a line. This meaning of time is justly attributed to Plato. But it also could mean that, since the hypostasis is self-imaging, the eidolon is either an eikon, “in the same proportions” as the idea, or a phantasma in which these are distorted to accommodate the spectator (Sop., 236C). It is of the very nature of an image qua instant to iterate itself. Only the phantasma merges into the mental, a movement completed on its internalization by Aristotle. Thinking thereafter tends to become representative, and time lends itself to its expression virtualities, as a line, in a movie, novel, and the like. The eikon is a determination of the nonlinear, irreversible time of self-organizing systems in which the creature is an eschaton. The virtualities that haunt linear or reversible time, the time of classical physics, can be made to vanish. Time’s arrow was an anomaly in Boltzmann’s formulation of the second law of thermodynamics, for the entropic system was thought to return to equilibrium. Prigogine and his associates have shown reversibility, such as the movement of the moon, may be ideal or virtual. The real world is disclosed in dialogue whose sifters enable speakers to identify themselves, and these are irreversible, actual experiences. The hypostasis shares with Heidegger’s Dasein its nonsubstantial, reflexive, and quasi-transcendental open, “the here and now whereby consciousness assures itself of being”20 which is rooted in other irreversible processes—biological, physical, social, and the like—where this condition for being appeared to is a function of the contextually appropriate form of chora. Even the lowest organisms must make sense from here to there and now to then if they are to prosper. The hypostasis is a medial emergent through processes (becoming) that are reciprocally its cause (aitia, “responsible for”) and effect by its nominal or enduring aspect (being, presence). To take certain liberties, this latter may be thought of as a fold in or turning back on itself of becoming. In the slot formed by this reflexivity we have the germ of “consciousness.” The first idea of the human mind, Spinoza said, is the idea of the human body (Ethics II, props. 11, 13). One first turns 244

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back onto the body that is to the self what God’s sensorium, space, was for Newton. Embodied thinking will be “dwelling thinking,” thinking through a naked body that is vulnerable, exposed all over itself to alterity.21 In our post-Cartesian era, abstract thinking, like Parmenides’ “well-rounded sphere” seen from everywhere and thus nowhere, that is, as perspectivally invariant, has provided the philosopher with his paradigm. We have mostly abandoned the emplacement of the body and learned forms of conscious detachment that will in turn be reflected in various time formations. Something must be said on this most difficult subject if we are to understand those experiences that may lead beyond Being into the proximity of the Good. The hypostatic turning back upon itself as if a fold in diachronic time marks the transition from the diachronic time of process, the time of becoming, of duration without an articulated sense of transition whose present is specious, to the lived time of tasks and ventures, the time of positional if not reflexive consciousness. In “positional consciousness” (Sartre) one can give an account of what one is doing even if, in the doing, attention is directed to and taken up with its objects. “Every positional consciousness of an object is at the same time a nonpositional consciousness of itself.”22 The time of this nonpositional consciousness can turn back to its past in order to understand or, as in psychoanalysis or liturgy, to found this present. This time to oneself and away from directedness, away from taking up a position in a project, is also away from the course of the chronological order of history, the history of Being, or even the time of Kant’s threefold synthesis that runs from past to present to future and sees causality in the well-ordering of this sequence. This is the timeless time of space, the time in which I can speak of events yesterday in relation to tomorrow. As Levinas says, the after or effect now conditions its before, its cause.23 In turning back to the past as “what was already accomplished,” consciousness can suspend its projects, which can now be variously regarded as, for example, illusions, imaginary, successful, or even right; the time of consciousness through this reversal can prescind both itself and the being entertained from their historical sites and, in this timeless space, range freely over self and others, even beyond history. One first prescinds from affectivity’s medial becoming in which the sensed and sensing, the datum and the how of its entertainment, are distinct and yet inseparable.24 This is an epoché of a more primordial affectivity that, qua affectivity, is open to others, a regioning from which the consciousness The Hypostasis: Its Thisness and Its There

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and sense reciprocally arise and manifest their several modalizations. Michel Henry objects on the basis of Cartesian texts to this identification of sensibility and affectivity, but fidelity to a text is one thing and to truth another, and I am persuaded by Rilke’s open and Whitehead’s thesis in the Concept of Nature that sense terminates in the awareness of something going on which is prior to both thought and its inner/outer distinctions. Levinas speaks approvingly in Beyond Essence of Husserl’s thesis that “sensorial qualities are not only the sensed; as affective states they are the sensing.” Feeling is so much what I am and how I am modified by things that I cannot peel myself away from it; yet if something is manifest through it, recognized and represented, consciousness goes on a holiday from its deictic origins in chora. The sensed redly redding becomes, with language, the signified red separated from the signifying “red.” This fundamental bifurcation in which the affects and sensa are distanced is linguistic. Discourse is a reflexive break with becoming and entails a prior separation in which I am me to myself and which occurs in a saying; the interlocutor is my master, an other and also Other. She will not fit into the categories or classes or kinds with which I order my experience, into the totalities, which are the fruits of language, but her gaze and word transforms I into me. I am now a consciousness, which, because I know myself as separate, can also enjoy, like Descartes’s cogito, the illusion of an autonomous existence. Language is first of all dialogue, the expression of the other, and only then the expression of “me” to another. 2. On Being “A This Such” Duns Scotus, the Subtle Doctor, is the despair of all who enter his argumentative labyrinth, and while I will not make the foolish claim that I will lead you into the light, I will try to explain some of his endless distinctions in order to show that he can, better perhaps than any other, give an account of the this, the haecceitas, of integral, singular being and how it stands to its there, its place.25 Though I will try to make Scotus talk like a Platonist and accentuate the eventual possibilities in his thinking, his Plato comes mostly through Augustine and Avicenna and he had to address his problems within the rubric of the scholastic Aristotle. According to Richard McKeon, “the highly technical terminology which he evolved for the statement of his philosophy can be worked with apparent cogency into a variety of interpretations . . . no modern language is 246

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constructed to carry the force of his distinctions; and in restatement, therefore, distinctions have to be blunted by approximate translations, or new expressions must be invented as strange and difficult as the Latin terms of Duns.”26 Scotus’s Latin terms will be even more confusing when, following Heidegger and Llewelyn, I make his nominal being verbal, and its adjectival determinates adverbial. What I will not do (but leave to the reader who can tolerate confusion) is the task of imposing persona on his haecceitas, the process and self-interpretative aspect of the medial hypothesis. I am cautioned by the fact that Scotus’s endless Latin distinctions won him the sobriquet “dunce.” Scotus’s philosophy is developed around the transcendentals. It was necessary that there be a universal science that considers the transcendentals as such for the analysis of things and not as a way to reach up to transcending conceptual regions. According to McKeon, “The ultimate reality of the thing [the in quod ens] contracts the specific form. This is the doctrine of heacceity, according to which the characteristics of individuation are not to be found in quantity or any other attribute of body, as Saint Thomas’s doctrine seems to state, but in a formal [and inseparable] distinction derived from the thing [a parte rei] . . . The characteristics of individual things are intelligibly different.” Through its haecceitas, the creature and its cells are wholes that, unlike a monad, are open to their environment and both structure and modify it and themselves “by simultaneously ‘enfolding’ their external environment and spontaneously ‘unfolding’ its potential into highly reproducible or dynamically stable forms.”27 Can Husserl’s phenomenology be redeemed from egological virtuality by the infusion of a robust sense of reality from Scotus’s metaphysics? Doesn’t the “intelligible difference” of individual things, and not just the differentia of species, secure the intelligibility of individuals? Metaphysics is a transcending science because it deals with transcendentals (Meta., prol. N.5, VIII, 5a). Besides those terms that are convertible with being, such as one, true, and good, Scotus follows Bonaventure by including such disjunctions as finite/infinite, necessary/possible, act/potency, and the like, one member of which is predicable of every being. Since God transcends categories, these terms apply both to what is proper to God, such as omnipotent, or common to God and some creatures, such as wisdom. These are real, not just conceptual, distinctions. As in the Latin Aristotle, ens (being) is “applied formally and properly to the primary subject of existence.”28 As the primary transcendental, it is a proxy for res and aliquid. The Hypostasis: Its Thisness and Its There

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The ways the transcendental term “being” is said is the next topic to give us pause. Being either denotes a determinable, in which case it is said in quid, or one of its determinates, and then it is said in qual. I see in these terms traces of Plato’s peras/apeiron distinction from Philebus. Among the in quid terms are denominatives that signify modifications of being as white, living, and rational modify the in quid determinable “man.” To take Aristotle’s example (Meta., 1030b 15–1031a 1), if “white” meant the determinable white surface, being would be predicated of “white” in quid. In other words, ens is predicated in quid of a primary determinable, of the thing itself, and what these primarily have in common; it is said in qual, denominatively, or “virtually” of the determinates by which it is qualitatively determinate (Cat., 3b 20), such as the thing’s being, though not being as such; its transcendental determinations and ultimate differences, such as haecceitas and the simple specific differences; as well as the disjunctive and coextensive transcendentals.29 “Things that are diverse in the most fundamental sense are diverse, [but] only in the most fundamental sense, through first and ultimate differentiae; of such things ens is not said quidditatively, but denominatively. Of other differentiae it is said quidditatively. And (the former) do not agree in ens taken quidditatively, but only accidentally and denominatively, and are predicated formally in the qualitative mode. Ens [on the other hand] is said in the quidditative mode, or included the quidditative mode; of this sort are the differentiae interposed between the first or ultimate species, and as such included two concepts, that is, in quid and in qual. (DS, Collationes, q.3) In his Oxford commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard (DS, Oxon. I, d.3, 5), Scotus says “being is the first object of the intellect, because in it a twofold primacy occurs, a primacy of commonness (in quid common nature) and a primacy of virtuality (an essential in qual determinate, such as haecceitas). According to Alan Wolter, these virtual or denominative terms designate the subject and connote in oblique the formal ratio from which they are derived.30 “White” denotes the thing and says obliquely that it possesses “whiteness”; though this may not have been his intention, Wolter’s suggestion reduces in qual determinations to accidental or attributive predications. Unless we are to understand a thing as Aristotle’s heap (Meta., 1041b 12), something stronger is required that can integrally tie the virtual, in qual determinate to its in quid determinable. “If ‘whiteness’ were primarily designated by the predicate ‘white,’” Dr. Wolter adds, “the proposition would be false.” Yes. But assume for a 248

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moment that man’s essence is whiteness; that as a wayfarer he is thematizing whiteness in a variety of contexts. What else is a man than an incommunicable contraction of this communicable whiteness? Surely he is not just a likeness of whiteness and so a diminutively present white. Whiteness qua common nature would be communicable, but not the whiteness that is uniquely his. To the Platonist he would be this whiteness, all that white as white can be. This whiteness is a many contextualized by the sustaining matrix conditions from which it arises in the order of existence; it is a same white in the order of being and the identity intended in various noetic modalities. Scotus calls us “wayfarers,” and as underway, our unity is narrative; as temporal, our stories accommodate what would otherwise be contradictory or incompatible. We constitute this story by the way the chthonic and chorastic haecceitas interpretatively thematizes from its archival resources the common nature in this or that context or situation. Haecceitas gathers through its place, chora, the deictic conditions that make possible its being white. Why so much attention to haecceity? I know of no other way of conveying the basis for the orienting and existential characteristics of most metaphors. Moreover, the beings mostly addressed are hypostases, and here again I know of no other way of expressing their self-formation than through the matrix, the here from which arises the todi ti and from which it addresses and is addressed by the others there. Scotus offers us in haecceity a ground of affectivity and the basis for community, communion, and communication. Until now I have been guided by Ockham’s approach to Scotus, but here I must part company. He thought that these qualifying terms were analytic; I think that at least some are synthetic. Being is said virtually of haecceitas; short of the ontological argument, it could not be deduced from the essence or common nature, and this virtual attribution obtains only when that of which it is said is other than the being it denominates. Wolter says that this ascription applies to differences in the concrete object ultimate in the order of uniqueness and individuality.31 In order that this participated form be a same over both the in quid determinable being and the in qual individual thing, this almost imperceptible difference, the difference between the manning and its “third-man” avoiding “manly,” is one in the selfdifferentiating thinging. Ontological predicates can be given a process, if not medial, gloss through Roderick Chisholm’s distinction between the comparative and noncomparative use of terms, such as that between degree The Hypostasis: Its Thisness and Its There

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admitting red and being appeared to redly. Would he not be redness (risking a barbarism, “redding”) redly appearing? The denominative in quid redness is redding, while the agent of its in qual contracting is the adverbial redly. This individuated formality is denominatively singular “and does not agree in ens taken quidditatively [the common nature as common] but only accidentally [as contingently contracted] and denominatively [in qual]” (DS, Collationes, q.3). We have been converging on haecceitas as the adverbial interpretant of the verbal common nature, such as wesen or essance; but what if there is no such nature to interpret? That seems to be the approach in current complexity theory, which, though nonreductive, understands form as the eject of stochastic processes,32 such as the orderly structure of heated water that will form relatively stable Bénard cells which could not be deducted from microscopic descriptions of water in its original, disorganized state. There is no transcendent Bénard idea into which water molecules collect themselves. Nevertheless, there is universality in these results. According to Solé and Goodwin, “disparate systems sharing some microscopic properties (essentially related to the symmetry and dimensions of the system) will behave in the same way close to their critical points. The idea is called universality. Simple rules can generate very complex patterns of behavior, and the interactions among the different parts of a very complex system—and not the detailed properties of their component parts—are the relevant part of the story.”33 We have assumed that an immanent idea is the form of a dynamical field and can thus govern a whole array of phenomena, such as the fractical forms that iron filing can exhibit in a magnetic field. This may be all right for nonliving systems, but life cuts becoming into instants and uses their relative freedom creatively (see 12:2 below). Classical physics focused on the individual entity; it assumed the reversibility of the basic laws of nature and was, as Nicolis and Prigogine say, the “stronghold for determinism and reversibility for such a long time,” but now “dynamism has to be embedded in a wider formalism that includes stochasticity and irreversibility.”34 Haecceitas should be understood within a complexity theory that does not abandon eidetic determinants. It would be misleading to translate Scotus into complexity theory unless we provide coming to be with an archetypal field, as Michael Comforti proposes, that will imbed its rules in coming to be. If an idea is the form of a process, that can be broken down into a set of sequential rules that never mention the idea. Though haecceitas is seldom used by Scotus and never in his principal work, the Oxford Commentary, it denotes a most salient feature of 250

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his thinking. He usually says, “something is determined to be just this, hujus singularitas in speciali signatae” (PW, 105). Having loosened ties with nominal ens, we can accommodate this concept to the medial hypostasis. The hypostasis emerges when a diachronic process has become reflexive, folding back on itself as a cogito; in this opening, the processes that link it to environing nature can become the object of its understanding. There is a same for knowing and being because both knower and known have the same ontological structure; they are processes that achieve and sustain a meaning of being by becoming, where this being/becoming doublet is the sense of the participle. A good clue to the presence of hypostatic phenomena is found in such doublets as Spinoza’s natura naturans, Wittgenstein’s play plays, Aristotle’s “nature is like the doctor doctoring himself” (De Physica, 199b 30), “manning manly,” and the like. And isn’t this participation? Living beings, as we now know, individuate a “common nature,” a “substantial” scenario that is more or less a parameter on the possibilities for change and transformation of a particular species of life taken over from parents, which it individuates by its act of existing (esse). Scotus would say that this act (and here I risk violating the medial spirit of this discussion) is “the same sort of thing as the contracted nature and pertains to the genius or category of substance” (Quodl., q.3, 3.50). Haecceitas interprets essence (“essance”) in the way a player interprets the game being played, the play being played. It may now be possible to break out of the Ontological Difference. To adopt the style if not substance of Llewelyn’s example, which is based on Quine’s distinction between long and short forms of copulative expressions, one can say “Bush is president” as “the president Bushes,” where the noun has become a verb.35 If we, in turn, make “president” an adverbial modifier, we could say, “Bushes presidently,” but now “he” is implied and preserves a sense of being. More to the point, it is a statement about a being in time. “Bushes” is a determinate event, a being, and its modifier is also a determinate event, and though a sort of proxy for chora and the matrix, it will hardly qualify as an opening beyond Being. Nevertheless, “Bushes” is the surface structure of a deeper becoming, the matrix, that is not a being and has no ontic features. To play fast and loose with grammar, the dynamics, interpretative or otherwise, of the adverbial haecceitas allows wesen to hold sway. This deep structure is an analogue of Levinas’s saying, which Llewelyn reminds us, and is a possession by or obsession with others, the call to responsibility. This “deep dire is therefore different from both the pair of correlative dictions [dire/dit] The Hypostasis: Its Thisness and Its There

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and from the pair opposed [being and beings] in the Ontological Difference.”36 This gives and is not any kind of it, linguistically, ontologically, or cosmologically. We will take up again this deep structure that makes possible the eventuality of the hypostasis and saying/said with Whitehead and Plato in Chapter 11. We can appreciate the individuating work of haecceitas if we begin with the primal bodily affectivity that reigns before the consciousness of an embodied self opens a gap with the world. Both Michel Henry and Jean-Luc Marion assume a prior self-affection if we are to receive impressions as significant.37 However, experimental results appear to eliminate this last vestige of Cartesianism by showing that affectivity becomes self-affective and responsive to the feelings of others during the second and third year of life and only thereafter can one experience individuating emotions, grief, joy, desire, orgasm, suffering, fear and trembling, the call of conscience, and the like. These states originate in a more primal (or originary and nonreflexive) affectivity in which another is the agent of transformation. That the other cannot experience my self-affectivity does not mean that selfaffection is inherently solipsistic. Even if I alone can feel my grief, joy, and the like, these individuating emotions are inherently social. Hang around with depressed persons and you will know what I mean. To be is to be in relation. Relations individuate and our original emotions entrain with others. This being said, I am in full agreement with Marion when he says that “it belongs only to my flesh [the flesh of the incarnate hypostasis] to individualize me by letting the immanent succession of my affections, or rather the affections that make me irreducible identical to myself alone, be inscribed in it.”38 Jacques Maritain and other modern Thomists have taken esse to be the act of existing; ens is derived from esse as noted by Scotus (Collationes; q.3). I also accept a possibility advanced, only to be rejected, by Levinas in which “essence” be taken as the medial essance to bring out its process sense. Being is said in quid of the essance, in qual of its contraction. The assertion of an in qual determinant that qualifies an in quid determinable by which a thing is just this by its self-selective, apportioned interpretations of a verbal form is no more counterintuitive than asserting an adjectival being of haecceitas: ens denominateur esse (Col. q.3). Scotus appeals to relations and contraction in discussing individuation. Relations individuate by a relation to origin; this is uniquely relevant to the persons of the Trinity where the divine nature is wholly communicated, each person being wholly God and yet there 252

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is only one and not three Gods. But this can also function in creatures. In this Platonic context, an individuating relation to the origin (arche, meaning both “principle” and “originary source”) is ultimately to the Good and the receptacle. The former is the ground of those responsibilities to the other as Other that none but I can bear, while the latter relates one to the archival and affective conditions that will be conditions for responding to the Other. To explain this relational structure of individuation, Alan Wolter gives a different reading through a notational device that Russell attributed to Whitehead: Whenever there is a relation, of which there are instances, which has the properties of being symmetrical and transitive, then the relation is not primitive, but is analyzed into sameness of relation to some other term . . . Heacceity is just such a construct that lumps together formalities that have nothing in common absolutely [which challenges the account just given] . . . their community is purely relational, being described in the common way in which each unique haecceitas is related to the natura communis or essentially sortal features shared by an individual of a specific class.39 This cannot be, for if the heap of formalities is given its due, we are robbed of the thing as a unity for itself, for the relation mentioned is attributive and extensional, one major ground for realism. Only beings sometimes self-sovereign can be individuated, and sometimes this is creative. Let me give an example. If E. coli’s carbon supply is depleted so that the production of cyclic adenosine monophosphate (AMP) is suppressed, the bacterium attaches AMP to its DNA, which can now code for an extra protein. This will shortly produce extra flagella so that E. coli can migrate to a carbonrich environment. Getting its DNA, its motility, and its gradientsensitive receptors right requires a proto-consciousness of self and environment, as if to find and make a place for itself. This is a process of interpretatively gathering the environment to make it available to the living being. Adverbial modification of the “common nature” by what is a determinate of that nature, for example, an enzyme, which integrates alterity into the purposes of life, is the work of the inseparable haecceitas. The scholastic philosophers brought place, and by inference chora, back into focus by characterizing individuation in terms of “relations of origin.” John Duns Scotus was probably from Duns, a border The Hypostasis: Its Thisness and Its There

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town in Scotland, while my surname Bigger is a corruption of the border town Biggar. Place is that from which something shows itself, where it belongs, where it should have been, where “been” carries the archaic sense of dwelling. Aquinas had recognized that matter could not individuate: “Just as the Seine River is not this river because of the flowing water, but because this origin and this bed whence it is always called the same river although different water is flowing down it. So there is the same people, not because of the identity of soul or that of men but because of the same habitat or rather because of the same laws and style of life” (De Spirit., a. XI, ad.10). What Aquinas says of a river is true of us. Individuation is immanent and genetic. The hypostasis is a process whose identity bears no resemblance with anything subject to Leibniz’s law; aside from the trivial crossgenerational identity of DNA, we are wayfarers whose identity is gained through alterities found among the resources given by the various special determinations of the receptacle which, thanks to the moral orientations of our frameworks and the collateral work of Spirit, make experience possible. Unlike that of the Seine, our origins are too deep to be found. Relations of origin individuate persons in the Trinity, who could not individuate by the contraction of a nature wholly communicable, but these relations also individuate us, for “it is clear that he cannot be numerically the same man from another father or mother” (Quasest Quod. V, q.V, a.1). In what is even for him an oracular statement, Scotus says that “the relation [individuating relations of origin between the persons of the Trinity] as related to the essence [essance] is a thing” (Quod. 1, q.3, 3.18), where I intend the -ance suffix as a medial marker. In the creaturely sense, this means “the relation to the arche as related to the essance is a thing.” In the theological sense, the relation to the Father, the arche, by which the Son is a son, is the relation to essance, love, which constitutes the Son. The hypostasis through its incarnate relation to both being as father and becoming as mother is that interpretative relation.40 In general, we can say that relation to an arche, origin and principle, “insofar as it is considered as related to the essance or insofar as it is in the essence, is a thing” (Quod., 3.30). Scotus will use these relations to individuate the Trinity and, with contraction, to individuate creatures. Real relations “require these three conditions: (1) that the foundations be real, viz., in something extramental to the thing; (2) that the terms be real and really distinct; and (3) that the relation inhere in things extramentally, i.e., independently of any intellectual consideration or the operation of 254

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any extrinsic power” (Quod., q.6, 6.82). In an event ontology, unity results from synthesis and is never complete. Scotus says, for example, that humanity is only denominatively one, “less than numerical unity,” while the creature is “undivided in itself and divided from all others” (Oxon. IV, d.6, q.1, n.4). The more familiar Timaeus model, even if chauvinistic, makes things clearer. Relation to the arche, the mother, through hypostatic archical interpretations of essance, is the arising creature, the son. That essence is “contracted” when the father crosses and, through a formal solicitation, determines the play of différance in the nurturing womb of the mother; it is she who gives the possibility of thinging, haecceitas, to essance. Her genetic code is the archival posit solicited by the sperm so that it also determines the fecundity of chora. The nurturing and sustaining mother is the place “from which” a hypostasis gathers (logos) itself by self-limiting eidos (peras) and transmutes the dynamical powers of the apeiron into the directedness of a being. Though an arche is a principle, as origin it is also a nothing, a nonbeing, the possibility of the gift of “essence” in Scotus’s formula upon which this real relation of filiation is founded. This suggests the following reflections that, I trust, will set up this relation of origin and contraction as the formula for individuation. The former will enable us to relate the hypostasis to chora, the latter to contextualized ideas. In the light of its neo-Platonic origins in Avicenna and its fate in Saint Thomas’s De Ente et Essentia, the “common nature” as contracted or instanced is an unlikely source of integral individuality. But this is as good a place as any to begin the transcendental dialectic of “being” and “unity” that will take us behind Plotinus and the middle Academy to Plato. “A nature is not of itself one with numerical unity, nor many with a plurality opposed to that many . . . it is of itself indifferent to existence in the intellect and in a particular, and hence to universal and singular existence” (Oxon. II, d.3, q.1). This form taken in itself is externally related (Aquinas’s “in idea only”) to its instances. On the other hand, the A-natured singular a that acts is such that the separated A is said in quid, while as a’s very own mode of operation and action it is said in qual. If A is all that a is, then the common nature A is a “unity less than numerical,” which as the one a is unifying unity “undivided from itself and divided from all others.” Were there only instantiation, the realist thesis would obtain at the expense of the existing individual, while without the common nature there is a degeneration into nominalism and would be said of individuals equivocally or by reason of likeness. The Hypostasis: Its Thisness and Its There

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In his discussion of individuation, Scotus said that, contrasted to the communicable common nature, the incommunicable individual is an intrinsic unity. In fact, the individual excludes “all division into substantial parts of any kind,” though considered abstractly, that nature has parts that permit both in qual and in quid predication. Just as the simple difference constitutes species by contracting the genus as an in quid potential for individuation, so the simple heacceity, through its relation of origin to the trace, e.g., DNA, contracts the species into the unity of interpretative act. Unlike the differentia, it contracts by no real addition and is purely determining or denominative. “When it is concluded that every individual in which the nature is contractible is more composed than that nature, I say that the composition can be understood properly as of actual and potential reality in the same thing.” (Oxon. II, d.3, p.1, q.6) Let us turn to a text that attributes individuation both to contraction, its affective basis and a possible candidate for contextualizing ideas, and to relations or origin, which in orthodox versions of the Trinity will be without those chthonic dimensions I so greatly favor. Rather than risk further confusion, I will let orthodoxy provide a formal paradigm. Understanding incommunicability as it pertains to that first substance, viz., the incommunicability characteristic of singularity, we may say that the minor [incommunicability which is there solely in virtue of a relation (is something that pertains to first substance)] is solely true of creatures, not of God. The reason is that in creatures that which ultimately contracts the nature to singularity or incommunicability is the same sort of thing as the contracted nature, and hence taken in its formal meaning it pertains to the genus or category of substance. In God this is not so; nothing that belongs to the genus or quasigenus of substance can contract the divine nature to incommunicability, since nothing substantial in God is communicable. (Quod. q.3, 3.50) Scotus seems to be saying that God, whose nature is wholly communicated among the persons, is individuated by these personal “relations of origin.” Contraction of the divine nature would result in three substances, not the one ousia of creedal formulae. Other beings are individuated by both contraction and by relations and can have, without evident heresy, both chthonic and uranian relations of origin. Contraction secures instantiation only if there is no communicable 256

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nature, but, were it an individuating principle, this would transform an essential into an attributive predication. As noted earlier, relations to an arche would be to a principle, a common nature, and to the contextualizing receptacle/chora complex which is, as a being’s place “the same sort of thing as this contracted nature.” In Plato this is a relation to being and to becoming through soul, the demiourgos of life, which combines and mingles opposites. In Scotus’s “proper” or Trinitarian account of individuation, both form and individual difference would be said in quid or as denominative, the act of differing determining this potentiality to this act, as if proportionately. Rather than speaking of something being individuated, as if that were something that just happened to a being, we should say that the individual in quid being individuates the common nature by the relation of origin [arche in its double sense] as related to oppositions that distinguish (Quod., q.3, 3.18), to freely adapt Scotus. The composition of “actual and potential reality in the same thing” is like Aristotle’s “doctor doctoring himself.” Mary Sirridge calls attention to the fact that on the proper account, individuation and instantiation are the same. She suggests that Scotus thinks it proper because it pertains to the persons of the Trinity. Then turning to us, Scotus gives his “less proper” way of understanding the problem in which they are distinct: . . . less properly as of reality and of actual and potential reality in the same thing. In the first way, the individual is not composite with respect to specific nature because it adds no reality— since it adds neither matter, nor form, nor the composite . . . In the second way it is necessarily composite since the reality from which it gets its specific difference is potential with respect to that reality from which it gets its individual difference—as if they were thing and thing. For specific reality does not have ex se that whence it includes by identity individual reality, but merely some third [thing] includes both of them by identity. (Quod., q.3, 3.18) In this “second way,” Scotus wants to show that specific difference is to genus as heacceity is to common nature. This nature is an in quid potential for instantiation by reason of this individuating difference. The individual “as some third [thing]” includes the nature and the heacceity; the individual is natura naturans. Thus the nature is instantiated as a unity. If we look at “being” through the convertible transcendental “unity,” we will see how integral being is possible, a The Hypostasis: Its Thisness and Its There

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phenomenon which, for all the supposita, can be taken only on faith in Aquinas. If instead of thinking of what is instanced under the formality of the nature, we regard it as in its instances, that nature will be predicated in qual with a “unity less than numerical.” Sirridge remarks that though Scotus did not argue this as a necessity for multiple instantiation, one might have expected him to. The transcendental term one (unum), though negatively expressed as “undivided in itself and divided from all else” (Oxon. 4, d.6, q.1, n.4) is an in qual perfection of a being (Meta. 4, q.2 n.13), not a numerical limitation (category of quantity), for otherwise it could not be said of God. Singularity is the most perfect form of transcendental unity (Oxon. 1, d.23, n.2) and implies, Dr. Wolter remarks, a “repugnance to being multiplied.”41 That which individuates determines the common nature to be “just this” (Oxon. 2, d.3, q.4, n.3), a positive entity that adds ens per se and unum per se to being; but could it be that this most perfect unity is through a loving relation to the transcendent Good and thus to other transcending beings? Scotus seems to say that “specific reality” does not have “from itself” that which, as individual reality, it included by identity. It has and does not have numerical unity. Conferring existence, esse, apportioned or otherwise on these formalities cannot give an it, an a this; the in qual unity it grants when it includes them as individuated by its identity constituting activity. Only the individual is properly one and the nature as “separated” has a unity less than numerical. Thus the “specific reality does not have from itself” what it now has in its in qual being as a relationally individuated existence, namely unity. “In the first way [‘the composition of actual and potential reality in the same thing’] the individual is not composite with respect to specific nature because it adds no reality . . .” The x to which nature and difference are attributed on the instantiated reading is through their participation. It is through its chora, its place, that the hypostasis has access to the resources of the receptacle. Heacceity is through its place, a place it is and has made for itself, a mode of dwelling, from which it can stand forth. But thisness is beingness, so what gives Being? Plato identifies this with place, whence a being stands forth in gathering itself into unity. Can we bring Scotus into this focus? I think so. 3. Da (Here and There) Both Heidegger and Levinas acknowledge that showing is of the essence of “saying,” which is to the social hypostasis what “to the 258

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things themselves” was to Husserl’s solitary ego. One points to elicit another’s attention to something there, “that such there,” by directing attention to its place through its containing regions, as one points to irrational numbers through the rationals. Plato thought these mathematicals lay between being and becoming, a virtual world that is also the world of the gramma, the written text, but not “saying.” If the act of pointing rather than asserting or judging is primary, then the factorable region will be that through which the object appears. What is common to my place (chora) and yours and binds us into the things shown is topos, space. Something is shown to another by successively narrowing focus through overlapping regions. “Here?” “No, nearer the desk.” “Is this it?” “No, just a bit to the right. There, you have it.” Place is the final determinable, the least vague region, of per se determinable extensivity. You see it or you don’t. We can never really capture it with demonstrative adverbs, because, as Hegel showed but Russell’s definite descriptions forgot, these are universals. Even pointing is a convention that may or may not succeed in determining an object. I am told that in Tibet one points by looking along the arm from the hand to the elbow, while in Turkey pointing is a highly insulting gesture. Yet it works, sometimes. Dialectic is a method of pointing, of passing through images or hypotheses to an idea (Rep., 510D–511D) where, as in metaphor, we rub images together and arrive “at the thing itself” (7th Ep., 133B)—or a wind-egg. Regions could be linguistic, historical, geographic, conceptual, or topological, and through monstration their various resources are brought into effective focus. The receptacle is determinable because it gives any this its here, where this is first in the order of determinates. What does a such and such “here” tell you except to direct or to acknowledge monstration? A lot. The “this-here” is the locus of Husserl’s “syntactical objectivities” which, like relation, order, numerical quantity, ordinal number, or plurality, are derived from other objectivities by means of syntactical forms or categories and hold for any object in general, any something or other. It includes “the positive contents belonging to pure Logic as mathesis universalis with all the categorial objectivities out of which some [objectivities] build themselves up. Thus every subject matter which expresses any syllogistic or arithmetical axiom or theorem, every form of inference, every numerical digit, every number complex, every function of pure analysis . . .”42 A being first discerned as an otherwise undetermined heacceity can be pointed out, as Scotus insisted, even in the absence or The Hypostasis: Its Thisness and Its There

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in confusion of knowledge. An “a this” is formally determinate. Granted its emergence, extensivity is the formal or abstractive condition for “disseverance,” for the closeness and distance required for the graded envisagement of power and the elimination of ambiguity. Saying is a welcome to dwelling that offers sheltering and nourishing interiority, that grants being. Suppose I say, look at this and you answer, “Where?” “Over there by the wall.” You then ask, “This is the cabinet Grandmother gave you?” “No, I bought it.” We can find something in a place and be quite wrong about its description. Though both apparent and originating places are usually same, mirrors and other typical illusions remind us that this coincidence is not necessary. If “about there” is fuzzy, then we can point to the place of the todi ti, its here from which it answers the call, or fascination of alterity in their countless “there”s. “Here” is a limit of overlapping regions, of possible places, which we can factor with the help of demonstrative phrases, which narrow ambiguity—but hardly eliminate its possibility—by narrowing focus. Even descriptions can be monstrative.43 I ignore the fact that each living being that appears is, as living, itself a clearing and the “there” of kinematical relativity. The matrix has a determinate role in group theory and its physical extensions. Concretely, extensivity (receptacle) is required for the expression of a being, like the heat from a fire, and is the possibility of pointing and gathering (logos). At the same time, “this,” a haecceitas, is the first determinate in the order of being and constitutes the first determinable in the order of knowing. This is the determination of a nature—not a bare objectivity—that can respond to, if finally to reject, projections. Place and thisness, haecceitas, are the extensive and integral conditions for the in quid ascription of “being.” Granted the context of “saying,” the determination of the determinable (matrix) is first in the order of language, not as the predication or context-forming intention determines a determinable, but rather as a term is used to monstratively factor a region where something is going on. The determinable is an apeiron plethos region within which, by naming or by some other monstrative gesture, one points to this, its first determination. Pointing is an epoché. Naming makes ostentatious through a region an inherent entity, which is then the potential for conceptual articulation, characterization, and other determining acts. This monstrative act presupposes the determinability of spatial and temporal regions. What is elicited can then function as a region in an abstractive hierarchy; concepts (genera in coordinate 260

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division) can serve as regions for further monstration, all of which presuppose the locatable as such (one of the marks of einai, “presence”) or being demonstrably discernible as such. The potential of which Scotus speaks in the name of matter is medial, having form if not act (Oxon. 2, 12, 1, n.10) and, like the sea, it cannot individuate, because it is indistinct and indeterminate (Oxon. 2, 3, 5, n.1). It is an apeiron plethos apt for determination, which in turn depends on being crossed by the first determinate, the peras appearing as “that.” If something is successfully elicited for you by pointing, then the other’s welcome enables you to receive the gift of a presencing present. That to which we are oriented terminates the intention to a being and is “first in the apprehension” so as to open it to a conceptual or predicative determination of being. The priority of pointing to description justifies a phenomenological approach to the a parte rei inseparability of the a this from its proximate place; the conceptual is founded on the ontological order. Let’s look again at Scotus’s assertion that the composition of the individual “can be understood as the reality of actual and potential reality in the same thing” (Oxon. II, d.3, q.6). The potential is not that of a body to soul, matter to a form, genus to species, etc., but rather of the determinable possibility of a gathering of this apeiron into being (peras) as such, into its most simply simple determinate, the singular being, i.e., the transmutation of the uncanny il y a into an hypostasis that dwells meaningfully on the earth.44 The logos of this gathering into unity, a gathering almost beyond knowing, can be grasped only by a “bastard reasoning” (Tim., 48C). Things present themselves through this matrix in an excess that threatens the determinate ways in which they are taken up into thought. Nietzsche remarked that our nominalizing language is altogether inadequate for expressing becoming. What grants determinable becoming its determinability? Place? Like light it can be shown only through another. Place, “this place,” the “here” of the todi ti, is the possibility of presencingpresence, the sense of the participle “being,” and so is the first determinate of the matrix, in turn the mother of the “that,” unconcealed as a “what,” and so of the entire that/such, determinable/determinate hierarchy of language and being.45 The regions that converge on a this/here that gives that such and such to a recognition terminating monstration are beyond or otherwise than being. This feature of saying is common to Levinas and Heidegger. We will show that this termination is in the Platonic instant that, without being spatial or temporal, gives esse, an existing that such, its space and time. The Hypostasis: Its Thisness and Its There

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Though we have toyed with Heidegger’s Dasein, his intention is far from ours. Dasein is the heir of Hegel’s negation, the non-being which inaugurates the dialectic in the Logic and the “this” and other demonstrative adverbs that are immediately valorized in the opening pages of the Phenomenology. Giorgio Agamben notes that this new beginning privileges Dasein over subjectivity’s I and the medieval haecceitas. Such remarks seem very regressive. The hypostasis is a fold in time that accepts presence. Presencing, medial gignesthai, is not the gift of being. Though Befindlichkeit, discourse, and understanding or interpretation are said by Heidegger to be equiprimordial in the existential constitution of Dasein’s Da, in this proposed beginning Befindlichkeit is a determination of the more primordial affective hypodoche. Through this field monstration, an epoché makes determinate being as such and such for discourse and remains as a felt surplus that resists valorization.

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10

Elementals

It is the incarnation of human subjectivity that guarantees its spirituality. Levinas

1. The Place of the Placeless1 If Rilke, Hölderlin, George, and Trakl are among the poets who set truth to work for Heidegger, something like this happened for me through an obscure Byzantine icon representing the Virgin Mary as the Zoodochus Pege and another calling her “the place of the placeless.” In her welcome, “matter shows itself for the first time in its materiality.”2 Llewelyn has it that “maternity is the mother of materiality because it is the in-vention of the other . . . a pre-naissance of pre-nature.”3 The mother who intervenes must be seen in the God who is “loving love.” While a loving could hypostasize itself as a God who is love and meet the strict monotheistic requirements of Islam and the Jews, Trinitarian pluralism can better accommodate Plato’s Holy Family. Mary in this icon is a revelation of a God who is, with the world, in the making. According to Plato’s Agathon, the birth of love meant that it replaced the gods’ strife; so too with Mary— through her invention the waters, which symbolize the Earth Mother and which express the threatening il y a, become healing waters, the waters of 263

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life. Is she Spirit incarnate? No. She who is properly adored as an icon that reveals the role of Spirit in the world is too often worshiped as an idol. As an idol, she is Spirit and entitled to a Trinitarian habit. Garry Wills suggests that rather than giving Mary a place in the deity, we should consider her as a symbol and human analogue of the Holy Ghost that, in G. M. Hopkins’s words, “over the bent world broods with ah! Bright wings.” Symbols are efficacious, participating in what they represent; that may be enough, but I prefer icon, which, as Plato said, preserves the proportions of the original, Whitehead’s truth condition (see 6:2 above) without ordering the representation to flatter human taste and sensibility ( phantasma) (Sop., 334B–336D). We have tried to express her role in the world by using his concept of God’s consequent nature, which respects the stochastic nature of change and the interior life of man. Levinas is leery of representations. The Incarnation, a perfect representation of the Father, is an affront to his faith and reason. To reason, for it involves giving the pagan earth mother a place in heaven and the Good a human form; and to faith, for the Good becomes a triune hypostasis one member of which—wholly God—is incarnate in a human person. I understand, moreover, the Good to be, for all its absoluteness, responsive to this or that context and thus as vulnerable.4 Finding a place, chora, for this placeless Good in Levinas might take some doing, yet no one else has made us so aware of our incarnate life, dwelling, from the elemental. Levinas interprets the il y a, or elemental flux over which we precariously and blindly dwell, as the threatening suffocation of an existence without existents or, again, as expressed in catastrophes such as flood, earthquake, war, and famine. The uncertainty of this il y a, Plato’s errant cause and not death over which life hovers and which threatens to break into and destroy dwelling, is both singularizing and the sign of our contingent dependence. I am reminded by François Raffoul that, unlike Heidegger’s es gibt that gives personhood, the more impersonal il y a is for Levinas a threat. Like Descartes, we discover that we are not causi sui and experience ourselves, in Kierkegaard’s example, as if thrown into a sea thirty thousand fathoms deep with no support. This is the sea of existence, not the nonBeing of the abyss which angst and ex nihilo accounts are thought to posit. But such attitudes are not quite appropriate to Plato’s receptacle in which, though not always benign and often threatening, these aspects begin to fade when it is modified as chora, a nurturing if vagrant arché. 264

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Augustine said that the law of God does not change; what changes are situations that make different parts relevant. However, Rudi Visker’s commentary on the killing of Abel by Cain puts a different spin on this by giving an example of divinity in the making. He calls attention to “a constant opposition in Levinas between the letter (of the Torah), the spirit (of Christianity that sees in Judaism only the yoke of the law, the dead letter), and the soil (paganism).”5 Levinas believed that the il y a/hypodoche bespeaks of paganism, which he associated with an autochthonic attitude to the faceless earth. Before Abel’s death, man was as if autochthonic and justifiably wrapped up in his own affairs, the program of the pleasure principle, the drive of his conatus essendi. After the “murder,” God said: “What have you done? Your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground. Now you are accursed and are banished from the very ground that has opened its mouth to receive the blood you have shed. When you till the ground, it will no longer yield to you its produce. You shall be a wanderer, a fugitive upon the earth” (Gen. 4:10–12). Then God gave him a face and, by marking it with a sign, established the possibility of brotherhood; no one, coming upon him, should kill him. With this, a moral sense is born and creation is as if completed. But the result is that earth is now a sterile place, a theme that will recur when this hypodochic matrix becomes Levinas’s “space of images,” Blanchot’s “space of literature,” and Derrida’s chora. In Difficult Freedom, Levinas says: . . . the constitution of a real society is an uprooting—the term of an existence in which being at home is absolute and everything comes from within. Paganism is a putting down roots, almost in the etymological sense of the term. The advent of the scriptures is not the subordination of the spirit to the letter, but the substitution of the letter for the soil. The spirit is free within the letter and is enslaved within the root. It is on the desert, where nothing is fixed, that the true spirit descended into a text in order to be universally fulfilled . . . What Christian theologians present as a stubborn attachment to the letter is a refusal of that which is too easily called spirit . . . humanity with roots that possesses God inwardly, with sap rising from the earth, is a forest or a prehuman humanity. . . . If Europe had been spiritually uprooted by Christianity, as Simone Weil complains, the evil would not be great . . . but is Europe’s unhappiness not due to the fact that Christianity did not sufficiently uproot it?6 Elementals

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The matrix is stripped of its life-giving power, and the Good, which in its Christian variant took on a body and a face and dwelt among us, is accessible only through the mark—“Thou shall not murder”— that God left on our faces. What seemed to promise an incarnational spirituality that began with enjoyment and then, moved by Grace, discovered the persona/prosopon in sexual ecstasy threatens to become life-denying. Rudi Visker finds problems in Levinas concerning the necessity and sufficiency of various episodes in the drama of conversion from the life for self to life for the Other relevant to our aim to give singularity a more Platonic and Christian interpretation.7 This story begins with creation ex nihilo, with a past that has never been present (for we were not there to receive the gift of creation); continues with this dependency concealed from us in the more narcissistic life of enjoyment; and culminates in a traumatic passivity beyond passivity that marks the break-in of the Other that calls us to a life for others, even as it gives the freedom to fall back into old ways. This trauma transforming the nominative I into the accusative me occasions shame for the selfish life I led and a fathomless guilt for eating bread that the other needs, taking up space that should be his, and the like. The more I take up responsibilities for the other(s), the greater the shame and guilt that informs my existence before the face of the other, which is out of all proportion to the invention of another, the widow, the stranger, the lost child. And this apparent disproportion between deeds and guilt is how it should be; for the infinite Good that wounds and frees me is the infinite Good that made me and then abandoned me to rediscover him in the other’s face. What is missing is the larger cosmological vision so central to suffering and death, to tragedy or the sublime, which one may choose even as one is chosen by and freely obeys it. As Iris Murdoch observes in Simone Weil, “Obedience is the freedom wherein the good man spontaneously helps and serves others. Suffering remains but accompanied by a kind of passion, a high eros, or purified joy, which is the vision of the Good itself that comes about when, or brings it about that, selfish desires, and the distress involved in their frustration, is removed. We can then see the world, nature and its laws, in the light of the Good, and experience a purified suffering which is a unique form of rapture. In obedience we can see the whole cosmos in this light and take an inspired joy in its obedience.”8 266

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2. Situations Justin Martyr (c155AD) proposed that there are two Old Testaments: the law of the Jew and the Logos of the Greek. Hans Jonas made a somewhat similar and more insightful distinction. For the Jew, God is the God of history who cannot be known except He reveal himself to particular people in particular contexts. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob at Sinai or Bethel who determines a time for this and a time for that (keiros) is not the Greek philosopher’s God, who is related to the world as consequences or as instances are related to a principle. With Hegel and, more to the point, Darwin, history came into its own; the concern is with change of form rather than with a form of change. In trying to adapt Plato to a radical history, I put him in Hegel’s camp by contextualizing form; as an analogue of his Absolute I offer the Good as agape. Out of the Derrida/ Levinas Greek/Jew nexus and in the spirit of Justin, I propose this Christian synthesis. In spite of fashionable relativisms, we must preserve the Good’s absoluteness against the threat of nihilism, radical historism, and, yes, sophistry. Levinas’s short “The Thinking of Being” is his most impressive, even inspiring, defense of something very close to Platonic absolutism. Husserl sought to find his absolute in the selfgiving presence to me of phenomena, and if horizontal structures transcend the “I can” of an evidential grasp, in principle there is still a possible “I could have” or “I will be able” that preserves Cartesian apodicity for the “I think.” After Derrida’s Speech and Phenomena, however, it is as if the “world behind our world” is meaningless and even our “spread-out world escapes meaning . . . Lived experience would be repressed by the linguistic signs creating the texture of its apparent presence: an interminable play of signifiers postponing forever—repressing—the signified.”9 But Derrida’s critique already assumes the “gnoseological signification of meaning.” Conventional signs are exterior and signify an improvised, empirical meaning of being, that is, one relative to a voluntary intention, a “meaning to say.” “Does not,” Levinas asks, “the extraneousness of the terms . . . go back to a system of meaning, an intelligibility not reducible to a manifestation of “a content of being,” or to a thought?” Taking a clue from Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption, one should consider “the direction given the word by the primal yes” which, as an analogue of God’s primal yes, his initial “thus,” endows the moment with permanence, lets it “hover in vacillating appearances.”10 Were it a mere sign, it Elementals

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would be lost in infinite chains of signifiers. This moment is the silence of a saying in face-to-face proximity, which is the “the preresponse of a human being as such to another human being as such” and, Llewelyn continues, an absolute relation, absolved from other relations, properties, or qualities.11 This gives a meaning of presence from being’s beyond to what is said, which makes possible the yes and no of discourse. But who speaks to me? To whom do I speak? Situations give a factical determination to ideas, but this would not come easily in Levinas. Though there is a phenomenological dimension in the other’s welcome, a “category” different from knowledge is thought about. The principal task behind all these efforts consists in thinking the Other-in-the-Same without thinking the Other as an Other Same. The in does not signify an assimilation [as in Platonic participation]: the Other disturbs the Same, awakens the Same; the Other troubles the Same, or inspires the Same, or the Same desires the Other, or awaits him. . . . But do we desire the Other as other, or is it the other as Other? Granted that we can desire or, if you will, love the Good only through an alterity, is this the other person or the Other as an hypositization of the Good? Is the other an icon of the Other through the Other’s deflection? Suppose, however, that this is not a deflection of the Good but that this infinite Good beyond being is a person who loves us. God did not become man as if to repay an infinite sexually contracted debt, but to desediment a covenant made at Sinai and to give it a new meaning and a new extent, namely, that we are all of one family in the love of God. Through this loving love my responsibility is to or for the other as such who is not just a substitution instance of the desirable about which no more can be said. Each of these would engender ontic totalities and would, in patristic terms, be instances of participation as metoche, while the ethical participation of hypostases is said to be koinonia; “a Same-in-the-Other without thinking the Other as an Other Same.” In “Notes on Meaning” Levinas says that the “Same is destined irrevocably to the Other; this is an ethical thought, a sociality that is proximity or fraternity, and not synthesis.”12 But if we are participation, we need an incarnate Alterity, an Other such as posited by faith and found in the beloved that can inspire, disturb, and deconstruct my Same, because she, like Christ, is also an Other Same. That is the point of the incarnation and our divination; Christ was not just Other; he was our same, the son of man. If the smile on the face of Apollo humanized man, we were divinized by Christ. Through Mary we discovered that the awesome Pantocrator was a man who, if he did not laugh, wept. 268

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3. Deductions We must now span the gap between the face-to-face and sensibility with a deduction. With perhaps a glance at Kant’s de juro deductions, Levinas will show how higher-order concepts, such as the self or the face-to-face relation, can be deduced from conditions closer to the matrix, as if “from below,” and conversely. For example, there is the movement from the impersonality of the il and the anywhere of the y to a determinate, posited ici, “where the ego finds itself tied irremissibly to itself.”13 Edith Wyschogrod, using the vocabulary of speech acts, says that this happens “with the occurrence of an instance of discourse such that the deictic aspect of an indicative utterance manifests itself, that is, the I shows itself in an act of speech.”14 The promised deictic tie to an event-ing, a saying, that cannot be said but can perhaps be non-phenomenologically shown, requires more than “pronouns and other indicators of the utterance” which show only that language takes place. This something more is the saying that binds me to the Other, who in the process of addressing me eliminates the foundational role of expressivism and dephenomenalizes speech. The deduction goes both ways, because the singular hypostasis, a process of fusing immanent necessities with transcendent possibilities, has both chthonic and uranian roots. In a deduction of the face-to-face, the economics of the koinos facilitating matrix, already implicitly a saying, is transformed into an ethical responsibility for the other. The two terms of a deduction arrived at as from above (the face-to-face) and below (the erotic il y a), exhibit its singularity. Though Levinas wishes to restrict the conditions for singularity to my responsibility for the other, even to the point of death that none can assume for me, beauty and its affective, deictic conditions can also singularize. As Aristotle advised, one should be brought up in moral habits, which, together with the empathy implicit in phronesis, have a strong affective component; apart from any radical harrowing of the self by Alterity, these may in their self-closure include obligations and the desire to do justice to others. Didn’t Plato show through the “deductions” of the Symposium that sexuality, and not lust, can combine both affective and transcendent alterity? Singularity is not a mere repugnance to multiplication; it implies that the always already social hypostasis in the facticity of its intellectual feelings and as a feeling intellect willingly participates in a responsible life for others. Any deduction of this face-to-face relation and its singularizing responsibilities should begin with its prefiguration in dwelling (matrix). Elementals

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There is something there, il y a. What Edith Wyschogrod mistakenly says of chora is true of the receptacle: it is a “cosmological archive of forms and shapes,” of texts to be read and interpreted. The chthonic roots of singularity lie in these archival conditions—linguistic, cultural, affective, religious, psychological, social, and the like—from which frameworks develop and through which we have access to the ideas. The deduction begins when elemental existence is domesticated by making a dwelling, the condition for the “discrete and gentle presence of the feminine,” our first encounter with the face of the other. If indeed dwelling replaces Kant’s transcendental apperception as the necessary condition for reflective conscious, it is also “the primordial event relative to which the unfolding of physico-geometrical extension must be understood.”15 To dwell, the sense of the English “been” and the German bin, is to be, to be emplaced where things are near or far, close or missing; and if we extract the person at the center, then we can speak of mere extension. Our hands that reach out and discover how to grasp things provide the prototype for intentionality, but orientation originates in dwelling, not the intuition of our hands. In being at home with oneself, however, there is the threat of collapse into the fearsome il y a. Satisfactions are haunted by insecurity, vulnerability, suffering, loss, sickness, destruction, and death. A deduction of the self (an existent) from existence, the il y a would also be a production, a term designating both the “effectuation of being . . . and its being brought to light.” But there is also an irremissible tie, not just to oneself but also to another in the erotic “production” of voluptuosity. Levinas denies that he uses metaphor in his deduction of the erotic that leads beyond the phenomenological to the chthonic roots of our being; yet this seems belied by his descriptions of the erotic darkness beyond the face, of an existence without existents that no “as” nor metaphor can express, that is extended by the medial “rustle of the anonymous il y a.” The drama begins with the face-to-face, with significance.16 From this beginning, a “downward” deduction would culminate in the voluptuous in the il y a whose archival repertoire undergirds a relation with the most significant other, the beloved. Its converse is the upward movement from the caress to the face-to-face and paternity. In a note on production/ deduction, Levinas says that in his “conjectures” concerning “relations beyond the face . . . the term drama would be most suitable” were not “drama,” as Nietzsche observed, “wrongly translated by action,” and he suggests it be translated as “event” or “history” and that “both words be taken in a hieratic sense.”17 Llewelyn advises the 270

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reader that she is being invited to witness a medial intervention. In the caress, for example, the face of the Other undergoes a transformation from signifyingness to non-signifyingness as the Other “quits the status of an existent” and the “anonymous rustling of the il y a extends the night of the erotic . . . The feminine presents a face that goes beyond the face,” which remains, even in the midst of passion where each is for the other, “in the common action of the sentient and sensed”18 and is alternatively aggressively masculine and receptively feminine. Tactility, not sensory perception, is the ground of ethics. In her response, the other is sensed as sensing, as “though one and the same sentiment were substantially common to me and to the other” in a community that is due to the “identity of the feeling . . ., I possess the Other in as much as he possesses me; I am both slave and master.”19 Though Iris Murdoch, wiser from her own experiences, cautions against the easy move from perversity to salvation, it is difficult to think of any deeply spiritual or mystical experience except in these terms.20 These are individuating satisfactions. But does this individuation always require the rupture by the Other’s in-vention? The hypostasis arises from “a rupture in the anonymous vigilance of existence [il y a] . . . and an existent is put in touch with its existing.”21 Prior to the Other’s rupture of its satisfaction, the hypostasis who dwells with others, a wife, parent, child, or friend is already ruptured. Apparently Levinas ignores this possibility: “On the celebrated question ‘Is man individuated by matter or by form?’ I am for individuation by responsibility for the other.”22 But I contend that sensuousness and its intellectual feeling are also self-interpretatively worked over and individuate; moreover, the appearance of the beautiful other can motivate the face-to-face relation with her as Other. The trauma of an invading and rupturing Alterity is prefigured in sense whose nominative “I” endures even when, as the accusative me, there is a response to the Other. A movement toward the transcendent more attuned to Beauty than to the trauma of intervention can also underlie singularization. Levinas’s deduction of the Other from sensibility neglects ethical dimensions always present in the satisfactions of the socialized hypostasis. In Totality and Infinity and Existence and Existents the deduced subject is atheistically wrapped up in his satisfactions, almost as if in Hobbes’s state of nature. Granted this virtual solipsism, the face-to-face would be a radical rupture of this closure. But isn’t the face prefigured in the hypostasis’ sociality? The empirical conditions of encounter and the transforming receptivity of Elementals

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the face-to-face are like sense and understanding in Kant: they require one another. Our connection with existence is through dwelling, which, together with the trauma or some unmotivated, acausal, and “deconstructive” analogue of the in-vention of the Other, singularizes the hypostasis. A movement beyond could begin in the self-closure of satisfaction, in the form of a life lived from needs met as the elemental is worked over and possessed through labor. Existence is for itself. Satisfaction individuates a concept “whose comprehension and extension coincide; the individuation of the concept by self-identification constitutes the content of this concept.”23 Singularity also requires transcendent grounds, which can be woven into these immanent necessities to produce a fabric that befits our incarnate being; we can play them off against one another, or can claim to find freedom in either. Though satisfaction, which can entail living for others, lays a chthonic strand in singularity, Levinas focuses on our irreplaceable uniqueness given, not by death (Heidegger), but by responsibility for others, something that no one else can take on.24 “Before the neighbor I am summoned and do not just appear; from the first I am answering to an assignation . . . But the responsibility to which I am exposed in such a passivity does not apprehend me as an unchangeable being; for here no one can be substituted for me; in calling on me as someone accused who cannot reject the accusation, it obliges me as someone irreplaceable and unique, someone chosen.”25 The receptacle and its avatars, such as Levinas’s il y a, Derrida’s différance or the more stripped-down chora, and the es of Heidegger’s es gibt, are more or less hidden and singularizing nexus. This suggests that Husserl’s context-forming intentionality, which organizes hyletic data, is only part of the story; this so-called hyle has already been worked up and delivered to consciousness within cultural, linguistic, historical, economic, and deep psychological contexts, which we associate with the receptacle. Each of these relativizing forms has its own receptacle. However it may gather and domesticate itself as giving chora, the receptacle will always be spontaneous and the unpredictable, imaginative consort, not the slave, of reason. Though the il y a is said to be a “nocturnal dimension of the future,” might it not be something more than the future fate of the elemental and, instead, be that in which we are immersed and, through dwelling, that from which we live? As Levinas said of language, it is a confluence of various forces. While he sometimes speaks 272

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of the il y a as a sort of materiality, even as Aristotelian primary matter, so that the nameless fear it evokes is rather like Sartre’s nauseous response to the en soi, matter, I see it within the more creative context of chora. The receptacle of images is what remains when every qualifiable thing is negated, returning “intact behind every negation.” Something more needs to be said about the “mythical format,” which Levinas calls “pagan” and which we have come to know as the Platonic matrix. We are trying to force a path for deictic metaphor somewhere between this autochthonic matrix favored by complexity theory, Nietzsche, and Heidegger and the more restricted, protoethical aspect in Levinas’s saying. “The future, as insecurity, is already in the pure quality which lacks the category of substance, of something. It is not that the source escapes me in fact; in enjoyment the quality is lost in the nowhere. It is the apeiron distinct from the infinite, and which, by contrast with things, presents itself as a quality refractory to identification. Quality does not withstand identification because it would represent a flux and a duration; rather its elemental character, its coming forth from nothing, constitutes its fragility, the disintegration of becoming, the time prior to representation—which is menace and destruction.”26 Sense is fragile. Why does Levinas avoid letting it play across the matrix to find a place for its surplus in song? Is he squeamish about it, ignoring for the most part its creative powers, because the apeiron-like il y a is an infinite rivaling the Good? Apparently Husserl was in mind when he said that “quality would not withstand identification.” To be listening to music can be an example of unidentifiable quality, but this is also true of the wonder and fragility of any beautiful thing. However that may be, does Levinas ever internalize and existentialize the threat of the anonymous il y a?27 He says that it “transcends inwardness and exteriority.” If the hypostasis arises from this apeiron, the thesis of Existence and Existents, then the catabolic force of the il y a is already always with us.28 But so too are its procreative and metabolic possibilities which, as a matter of fact, Levinas brings to our attention in a deduction. The movement of the deduction from below is, to be simplistic, from the il y a (existence or being) to an existent, a being, and is rather like what happens when something is dropped into a supersaturated liquid and it crystallizes. Or when the protagonist of Proust’s novel eats a madeleine. The il y a persists in and undergirds these higher-order phenomena. Significance is not, at least primarily, attaching a sign to something, either within a referential totality or as intentional constitution: Elementals

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it is occasioned by the presence of the face whose “signification precedes Sinngebung.” Perhaps we should say the face of the significant Other precedes signification. “A meaningful behavior,” such as indicating something to another, “arises already in its light . . . every explanation begins with it.” I erupt from the il y a not as I show myself in an indicative utterance that makes a connection with things, but when “society with the Other marks the end of the absurd rumbling of [my] il y a.”29 This medial, erotic drama, which is a sort of Kantian deduction from “above” (of existence from the existent), begins face-to-face with the Other. In the second scene, we are transformed into an erotic and common there is, which, through “the chastity and decency of the face [which] abides at the limit of the obscene,” lets me return renewed to myself. The final act is paternity: “I love fully only if the Other loves me, not because I need the recognition of the Other, but because my voluptuosity delights in her voluptuosity, and because in this unparalleled conjunction of identification, in this trans-substantiation, the same and the other are not united but precisely—beyond any project, beyond every meaningful and intelligent power—engender the child.”30 In this almost Aristotelian celebration of fecundity, one begins in a symmetric, closed relation with another and then, with the birth of the child, transcends through her/him toward a non-solipsistic future in which parent and child are asymmetrically fused. The parent loves the child as one’s self, but the child has other fish to fry. Looked at from this sensuous root, can Levinas really say that the revelation of the Other strips the self of the contingencies by which we usually identify a person? It is true that in such annunciations one is receptive beyond receptivity, beyond the active/passive parameters of metaphysics, but is desire stripped of eros? Is Levinas correct in assuming that the welcome of the radiant persona/persopon who is as if co-emergent in my “transubstantiation” is traumatic? Or is it an epiphany of an incarnate other? The erotic deductions possible beyond the face present this possibility and with it give a new sense to the receptacle, the sacred bond of community and life-giving source (Zoodochus Pege) and, by inference, the Holy Spirit. Levinas seems to see fecundity as a messianic eschatology.31 But his name was Emmanuel, “God with us.” Singularizing differentia are rooted in dwelling, in the receptacle, whose powers they hoard and bind—to shadows, on the dark side of being among uncanny things, in dependencies whose roots, like the 274

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soul’s, are chthonic and uranian. Saying, even if there is no said, is the fundamental relation with another and seems to be the common root of dissociation and communion. It is, as Levinas has argued, a nonintentional proximity, which is different from my relation with things. Reduced to its essence, language is perhaps the fact that one sole word is always proffered, which does not designate a being, but accomplishments a movement beyond being, and beyond the thought that being looks at and reflects itself. More precisely, the proffering itself moves beyond thought. Saying is delirium. Thought straightaway denounces that extravagance or verbalism, and, opposing words with the stones it wrests from their foundations, imprisons them in the world they mean to go beyond. . . The transcendent cannot—qua transcendent—have come unless its coming is contested. Its epiphany is ambiguity or enigma, and may be just a word. . . . Language is the fact that always one sole word is proffered: God.32

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11

Time’s Arrow

Present-day physics is rediscovering time, not the old time, according to which the watch is eternally going on its own past, but an internal time which corresponds to activity and processes as envisaged by Whitehead. Ilya Prigogine

1. Whitehead and Zeno In 1910s and early 1920s Whitehead provided a phenomenological basis for the principles of natural knowledge and an alternative to Einstein;1 but in his cosmology, process is being and the phenomenological concern seemingly disappeared. What appears for the first time in the later work, however, is an assimilation of force and affectivity that was based on an interpretation of the Platonic matrix as diversified by vectors, which can be read as both physical forces and phenomenological affects. Derrida used the same interpretative freedom to gain an important insight into chora as loci of différance in the general text. It also provided Whitehead with the basis for his philosophy of creativity, which, as one might expect today, is inexorably temporal. Like Plato for whom time is the form of things and, with some stretching, song is existence, Whitehead understood time as an abstraction from the cellular forms and periodicities of nature. Time’s fine “genetic” structure, the manner in which a microentity 276

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inherits from the past and informs the future, was understood through the arrow paradox parsed in terms of the Parmenides scholium on time (155E–160B). This seems to have been his reason for proposing a becoming of continuity rather than the usual continuity of becoming, which thus freed the initial phase of coming to be from bondage to the past. In the second section we will explore participatory, holistic, and creative strands in quantum mechanics that both reinforce this position on continuity and its holistic implications and establish the relevance of participation for particle physics. The third section will examine the treatment of time in the Timaeus and neo-Platonism, in order to arrive at a Platonic theory. The neoPlatonist Damascus seems to have been the first to opt for time’s granular structure, familiar through Zeno’s arrow paradox, which Plato will develop around that “strange thing,” the epochal instant, in Parmenides’ scholium. If the first section advances and the third provides a historical basis for granular temporality, the first section (12:1) of the next chapter argues toward the instant, Plato’s originary, through Husserl and Levinas. The following section (12:2) will articulate the origin of time and being in the atemporal instant in the scholium on time in Plato’s Parmenides. With some help from Levinas and other commentators, our hope is to get to a likely story through an assemblage of Plato’s texts. Though Whitehead acknowledged that the Timaeus was a major philosophical inspiration, he did not mention the Parmenides scholium; yet its import is evident in his remarks on continuity: There is a becoming of continuity, but no continuity of becoming. The actual occasions are the creatures that become, and they constitute a continuously extensive world—extensiveness becomes, but becoming is not itself extensive. The ultimate metaphysical truth is atomism. The creatures are atomic. In this present cosmic epoch there is a creation of continuity; but this does not seem to be a necessary conclusion. Perhaps such creation is an ultimate metaphysical truth holding for all cosmic epochs. The most likely opinion is that continuity is a special condition arising from the society of creatures which constitute our immediate epoch. But atomism does not exclude complexity and universal relativity. Each atom is a system of all things.2 It is a system of all things because, like a hologram, the totality is present in each part. Some sense of the directedness of this complexity Time’s Arrow

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can be gained from the biophysicist Mae-Wan Ho who characterizes the living systems as catenated organic projections or propagations into the future. . . . They set up influences to determine how the system develops and responds in times to come. Typically, multiple series of activities emanate from the locus of excitation. The mere anticipation of muscular activity is accompanied by the secretion of adrenaline, which in turn causes the blood vessels to dilate, increasing the heart rate, and thus enhancing the aeration of the muscles and the synthesis of more ATP to supply the sustained activity of the muscle. While the array of changes in the positive direction is propagating, a series of negative-feedback process is also spreading which has the effect of dampening the change. It is necessary to think all these processes propagating and catenating in parallel in many dimensions of space and time. [If the disturbance is insignificant, then] a series of irreversible events bring the organism to a new “steady state” [“The steady state is not a state at all, but a conglomerate of processes which are spatiotemporally organized”] by developing or differentiating new tissues . . . or altering its environment appropriately. . . . The living system is so thoroughly dynamic that every cell in the body is simultaneous criss-crossed by many circuits of flow, each circuit with its own time domain and direction, specified by pumping, gating, and chemical transformation. Thus classical equilibrium constants are quite irrelevant for each “constant” is in reality a continuous function of variables including the flow rates, the electrical and mechanical field intensities— as the reaction products change all the components by altering all the variables, the equilibrium constants will also be functions of time.3 The times involved range from10−3 seconds (the time it takes for acetylcholine to open the sodium channels in a muscle cell membrane) to10−13 seconds (the time involved in resonant energy transfer in a chlorophyll molecule). The specious presents of consciousness are not commensurate with those in the organism’s microphysiology which are “enfolded” in its longer stretches.4 But Whitehead’s statement also holds open the possibility of a new nonlinear or irreversible approach to time and continuity. In a discussion of Zeno’s arrow paradox, he dismisses motion as irrelevant. “The arrow paradox brings out the principle that every act of becoming must have an 278

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immediate successor, if we admit that something becomes. . . . But we cannot, in the absence of some additional premise, infer that every act of becoming must have an immediate predecessor. The conclusion is that in every act of becoming there is the becoming of something with temporal extension; but the act itself is not extensive, in the sense that it is divisible into earlier and later act of becoming which correspond to the extensive divisibility of what has become.”5 Another way of stating the paradox is to acknowledge the complex internal relations that characterize the unitary event “arrow-at-t1” makes it a different event from the unitary event “arrow-at-t2” and thus the first must perish to be superceded by the second. In his Confessions, Augustine had taught that the past was a distention of the present. This could also be said for Whitehead for whom the past is given to the present through the critical focus of its predecessors, but the autopoietic present is as if ex nihilo and its predecessors are given as internal data. Let me clarify how I understand creation ex nihilo through the perspectival matrix offered by other accounts of creation. The null-case, represented by Hume, denies sufficient reason altogether and explains the furniture of the present by psychological associations based on resemblance, contiguity, and succession. “Tis easy for us to conceive any object to be nonexistent this moment and existent the next, without conjoining to it the idea of a cause or productive principle.”6 We also deny sufficient reason, if that is taken nomologically, for probability also reigns. This first appears in Lucretius’s unpredictable swerve, which reappears in the non-linearity of stochastic processes. Chance theories give a place for freedom, even if inadequate as a full account. Looked at through the thesis of preexistent stuff, the first theistic account of originations found in deism’s craftsman metaphor in which God is seen as imposing form on an otherwise recalcitrant matter. This will limit either the power of God or, in its mechanistic version, that of persons to shape their existence. On the first alternative, if once there is—if there ever was one—an initial creative act by the god and this is a field of forces, its future will be unpredictable. In the second case, which assumes a mechanism whose functions are continuous, we assume, on the contrary, an existential posit by the God whose initial stage is given under constraining physical, biological, economic, linguistic, and physiological conditions; these come not as hyalite data posited by an unfolding past but as meanings to be interpreted, supplemented, and even at times transformed. The fourth case is emanationism, a neo-Platonic favorite that reappears in Spinoza and perhaps Hegel, in which the all is taken to be an Time’s Arrow

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expression of God.7 Except God be (pardon my heresy), nothing would be, but if all is his expression, whence evil? In creation ex nihilo, the decentered self, the being that experiences itself as an independent dependency and dependent independence, exists in a stochastic world fraught with unpredictable disasters and unmerited suffering in the openness of a love that strives with us for our joy and offers us an erotic lure to proper, though apportioned, perfections. This is a promise of high adventure for one who receives his existence from God within various existential and unmerited parameters. Finally, we must say with Hume that the contingency of existence is radical, that no real explanation can be given, nor, apart from Revelation, purpose divined. Let us now consider our lot. Just what is given is determined by the entity to which it is given and the environment that provides its several vectors. The society of mutually participating instants in an embryo inherit a program they interpret and carry out in ways unique to each organ. You or I must construe what is given within the fixed formality of our species as playing across all the occasions in our lives. A woman playing a piano concerto in which her score is her inherited “species being” is attuned to and responds to what is given in each instant by the entire orchestra within the gesturing measures of the conductor through the focus of what the music requires of her; like an idea, the latter transcends the occasions of its performances. It is enfolded in the field, as Bohm might have it, only because it is expressed in and transcends all performers and all performances. Her movements and the sounding notes or pauses at each moment make sense through what has gone on even as they signal what is to come, and each movement is coupled with a change in emotional tone that structures her dynamical landscape: “the walker and the path are intrinsically linked.”8 Just as the nature and interpretations of the pianist determine what she plays, so in participation the recipient’s environment, nature, and interpretations determine what is received. This can be illustrated in the temporal complexity of ontogenesis in living systems. Professsors Maturana and Varela emphasize granularity in ontogenesis, which they define as the history of a structural change in a particular living being. In this history each living being begins with an initial structure [which] conditions the course of its interactions and restricts the structural changes that the interaction may trigger in it. At the same time, it is born at a particular place, in a medium that 280

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constitutes the ambiance in which it emerges and in which it interacts. This ambiance appears to have a structural dynamics of its own, operationally distinct from the living being. . . . The ongoing structural change occurs in the unity from moment to moment, either by a change triggered by interactions coming from the environment in which it exists or as a result of its internal dynamics. As regards the continuous interactions with the environment, the cell unity classifies them and sees them in accordance with its structure at every instant. . . . Two or more autopoietic unities can undergo coupled ontogenies when their interactions take on a recurrent or more stable nature . . . these interactions between unity and the environment consist in reciprocal perturbations . . . the structure of the environment only triggers structural changes in the autopoietic unities (it does not specify or direct them) and vice versa for the environment.9 We live in a participatory universe in which we, organisms, and each atom “are the system of all things.” Something is transpiring, taken up in a new way, modified, reiterated, and the like in each instant that inherits this pattern and passes it on. Ideas are scenarios, patterns, or programs that take time to unfold and gather as attractors from the hypodoche what is required for their “unfolding.” A symphony unfolds only because the players freely direct themselves by it; and here I part company with Bohm. I assume the pattern being enacted transcends the process it informs, even if it was formed by the process. Such is the case with an enzyme, which is created by the metabolic process it then controls. The possibility I have advanced of creating novel ideas runs counter to Bohm’s determinism, which was reinforced by years of working with Einstein. Furthermore, I treat the idea as an attractor that transcends the process, even if it was formed by this or a prior process. Someone wrote the music. The conductor of an orchestra organizes the skills and resources of the several players around the score so that their individual contributions can make one harmony. Assume that these players are physical instants operating only in an immanent order; then God or Spirit would be the conductor persuasively determining what is relevant to each player in the whole so that he can contribute from his unique locus. At this transitional point of rebirth in a physical system changing from one phase state to another, there is chaos, but this is also the creative moment. The soloist might experience something of that freedom. Quartets are more nearly self-organizing, coordinating themselves Time’s Arrow

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and their relation to one another with a higher degree of freedom (chaos) by the score. In each instant the score, like the idea, is a transcendent field condition that directs and measures attainment. Living systems are a mix. Their elements blindly play out a biophysical script that is also open, like the quartet, to the transcendent solicitation implicit in the pattern. At higher moments, again like the socially responsive self-organizing quartet, persons can organize themselves through the morphogenetic patterns and valuations in common frameworks. Bergson held that “the intellect represents becoming as a series of states, each of which is homogeneous with itself and consequently does not change,”10 but the instant, to use Plato’s term, is a unity of change with its receptive beginning, synthetic middle, and final perishing—to then enjoy an archival immortality. The hypodoche is the “information space” (Zeilinger) or nexus given in the instant’s initial phase which supplies the program-like text necessary for its emergence. Elsewhere we have spoken of the creature as gathering itself and arising from chora, but we now must take these to be internal potentials of the perishing and soon to be resurrected monadic creature. Monadic? Only in the sense that, like Leibniz’s monad (Monadology, Sec. 56), it perceives, envisages, prehends, or participates in the world from the locus and frames, physical and personal, of its own chora. The past of meaning is not a causal thrust, but is rather an energized focal meaning within an indefinite penumbra within which the present instant participates. Like a library in which we are working, the past is present now, not retained, seized, or reproductively present, nor is the future enfolded (Bohm) or virtually contained therein (Bergson/Deleuze). This is the force of Whitehead’s belief that there need be no immediate predecessor. There are many archival strands and influencing vectors at work in the initial phase that welcome the instant’s inheritance from the immediate past within a medial receptivity informed by a genetic code, a style, a culture, a skill, an interest, a form of life. Granted certain other conditions, such as a vast social complex of receptor instants in different time systems or cycles coordinated to yield a unique focus, she inherits the whole universe within a degree of freedom as to how it is to be interpreted. That coordination is the work of spirit who presents this past to the present as its formative matrix in a creation ex nihilo. Events that have a unique route, such as a pendulum or even the movement of the planets, seem to define a linear or reversible time. If 282

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there is a certain indeterminacy in what is to be taken over from the past and passed on, the time is nonlinear and processes are nonreversible. Since Whitehead’s bold metaphor identified the hypodoche with the “dynamical landscape” of feeling and its transmission, every occasion, even those devoid of the ability to supplement what is received with transcending increments, is an “emotional internalization of the environment.”11 Though immanent reality shapes those elementary entities that only become, the “living creature” has a transcendent aspect, which can respond to the lure of the Good. Whitehead was a panpsychist and thought every creature had both a physical and mental pole, but I am skeptical of the extension of conceptual supplementation and evaluation to beings without membranes. Membranes separate the hypostasis from its environment, limit its constructs that define and protect both the interior and exterior spaces necessary for its autonomous autopoiesis. Without the membrane, the cell’s components would be scattered and achieve nothing. In their Tree of Knowledge, Professors Maturana and Varela point out how the differentia of the living system is its participation in its membrane through which it interchanges with its environment. DNA is not the whole story of genesis; just as our macroscopic life shapes itself with ideas and archetypes, so too microscopic life assembles itself through programs that are expressed formally; and these formal expressions are species relative. Aristotle rightly called them ideas. Genetic order must be understood in terms of morphology, an intended whole in which each element has a geometrical and physical relation with every other. Brian Goodwin notes that “knowing the molecular structure of something is not sufficient to determine its form.” I doubt the claim of some complexity theorists that microelements are sufficient to determine the creature.12 Though I prefer the expression “participation in the archival hypodoche” to Rupert Sheldrake’s “morphic resonance in the remembered past,” the latter offers a suggestive account of how stable structures spanning epochs arise and prevail. From the standpoint of the philosophy of the organism and its variants, it no longer makes sense to speak of a law-like causal past: the past operates in the present as memory, and nature’s laws are her stable habits. Inheritance is through these habits, the heart and blood system that usually develops in animals, within holistic fields. DNA supplies the necessary proteins. For example, the embryo is attuned to the field specific to its species and develops through the chreodes (Waddington), the essancing (Levinas) pathways, that surround it and in which it is embedded. Heidegger’s Time’s Arrow

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Wesen makes a similar intuitive appeal. Aristotle’s formal cause is understood as a temporal pathway determining a developmental landscape. We could also speak of Bergson’s canalizations whose gradients are formal structures that determine an epigenetic landscape with eidetic attractors. These latter offer possibilities in these stochastic contexts, and this variety of routes may require valuation. Better or worse, survival or death is often the issue. These attractors and the pathways that they determine or that determine them are also paradigmatic, biochemical analogues of Taylor’s forms of life or Plato’s lifestyles, and like them, under the sovereign Good. In any case, what is inherited is a holistic epigenetic—and I add, chorastic— landscape with options, attractors, that can shape its teleological development. The living present (which in Plato has the form of the diatonic scale) is a composite of many such past fields with which it is attuned (a Platonic term for participation). We could speak of inheritance as a kind of resonance. Sheldrake said in a recent interview (www.transaction.net) that “the way morphic fields work . . . is by modifying probabalistic events. Most of nature is inherently chaotic. It’s not rigidly determined in the old sense. It’s not rigidly predictable. The breaking of waves, the weather patterns, the turbulent flow of liquids, the behavior of the rain—all these things are inherently indeterminate, as are quantum events in quantum theory. With the decay of a uranium atom, you can’t predict if the atom will decay today or in 50,000 years. It’s only statistical. Morphic fields work by modifying probabilities of truly random events. Instead of a wide spread of randomness, they sort of focus it, so that some things happen instead of others.” I assume such a focus through chora and that Spirit mitigates against the birth of most cow-headed rats and other such monsters In morphic resonance, Sheldrake says, there is a transfer of information and not energy as in most other fields. Wouldn’t it be better to speak of participation, which is noncausal and certainly lends itself to information theoretic modeling? Even exchange of information involves the dynamics “of clearly defined physical and chemical processes,” analogues of Plato’s stereometric elements, which are the dynamical field’s necessary conditions if structural change is to occur. Thus the vital information-sharing activities of a cell are disrupted and it perishes if the calcium level is allowed to increase above10−5 moles; this is a morphogenetic condition, a stable structure necessary for life and can be expressed, as Brian Goodwin shows, in equations 284

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that describe these necessary conditions. Since quantum mechanics can predict very little about simple chemical structures, their energetics tell us nothing about organic form.13 The physical and chemical conditions are determinables determined by a prior formal determinate or parametric idea, where a parametric idea determines a possible range of variation. This parametric order would be no less eidetic for having been constituted by the dynamics of the field. Its “efficient causes” are the physical and chemical forces canalized by the very forms these forces constitute. Form depends on “the play of physical forces” and, as D’Arcy Thompson discovered some years ago, the result is not essentially different from what is manifest in inanimate matter.14 This is the order we would expect from the hypostasis, which, as a meaning of being, arises from the very dynamical forces it controls. Jung said somewhere that Plato’s ideas are psychic gradients, and we can extend this developmental path beyond mind to all of nature. Whatever the mechanism, we must recognize that participation through the hypodoche assures the emergent creature of a morphological past that, like memory, is now formatively present. The Platonic errant cause guarantees that organic symmetry is dynamic and always changing, even breaking down: the future is open. Levinas’s appeal to creation ex nihilo also makes clear the break with the linear time of conservative systems; not every aspect of the creature is necessarily structured by its immediate predecessor.15 In orthodox physics time is linear, but linearity is challenged today by chaos theory in which complex self-organizing systems, or directional stochastic processes, give rise to unpredictable, durative structures. David Bohm, a distinguished proponent of classical determinism, finally acknowledged that the reversible laws of physics “leave no place for phenomena based on the actually observed irreversible nature of some large-scale physical processes”; while Prigogine has shown that a transformation is possible that “changes the reversible equations of classical physics into a form similar to that of irreversible (dissipative) systems.”16 Formulating these transformations requires Whitehead’s notion of internal time that describes the aging of a system and, Prigogine says, can be expressed by an operator on the distribution function. Something like reversible time which I have identified with virtual time appears in works of fiction and in model-theoretic scientific allegories; something similar was known to some neo-Platonists as “intellectual time.” Taking these to be primary is incompatible with Plato’s view that we are in a cosmos in the Time’s Arrow

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making and being made. Some wise man said that “whatever road you take, you will meet Plato coming back.” 2. Quantum Entanglements Now let’s look at quantum phenomena that noncausally inherit as if by a preestablished harmony. An example of this participatory mutuality is “quantum entanglement,” which, aside from its meaning that what happens here may be intimately linked with the nature of things over there, also means to beware of a trap into which I may have fallen. It is either a profound justification of the arguments I have given on participation or a painful wind-egg. In the phenomena of entanglement, the nature of a reality at a remote location may depend upon the choice an experimenter makes here and now. Anton Zeilinger and his colleagues at the University of Vienna have recently shown that one can transport the polarization state from one “entangled” photon to another, perhaps a galaxy apart (April, 2000, Scientific American). According to Sharon Begley (Wall Street Journal, 13 December, 2002), Zeilinger verified the transport phenomena by first placing in a beam of light a light splitter that would decide which path the light takes. Taking either the two routes passing through two apertures (as a wave) or a single path (as a particle) is determined by the presence of a splitter. This choice in turn determines the behavior of the beam before it reaches the splitter and, as Begley quotes Paul Davis, “the actions of an observer now determines the reality that was.” Earlier Pauli had argued for a participatory universe, one in which the object of experiment could not be detached from empirical, experimental conditions, and he intimated that community might be the work of the anima mundi.17 We earlier showed how the world soul of the Timaeus could possibly operate within the archival hypodoche, and we rooted this in turn in God’s consequent “multiple unifications of the universe.” Lest this be confused with Jung’s claims for synchronicity, the observer’s physical set up and organs, not his mind as such, is implicated in this holistic entanglement. Entanglement is involved in determining what is given by observations of an incarnate person through an apparatus; and while the experimenter’s intention determines the experimental setup, the appearances are not mere adjectives of mind. Experimentation is a form of life, and its changes of method, apparatus, personnel, and theory deliver new worlds. 286

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The objections to the Bohr “Copenhagen” interpretation of Heisenberg’s indeterminacy by Bohm or Einstein were based on a belief that quantum phenomena should be interpreted in terms of individual linear trajectories and not probabilities. The probabilities that occur in the second law of thermodynamics, understood as linear or reversible, and appear to lead to disorder were thought to be subjective, a feature of observed aggregates and not of the things themselves. With some justice it was often thought that Bohr and his colleagues were subjective idealists. However, in his Exploring Complexity, Ilya Prigogine has shown that nonlinear or irreversible laws can account for the emergence of order from chaos and that limited knowledge or other subjective anomalies that threaten the trajectories of classical physics are irrelevant to the law’s necessarily de re probabilities. But what Bohr did show was the untenability of the ideal of a detached or irrelevant observer. There are no such observers nor isolated quantum systems to observe. John Archibald Wheeler has proposed that life, and probably mind, are essential to the universe as we know it, so it must be understood from the standpoint of an anthropic principle; but this introduces human awareness into a universe that would otherwise have no meaning and the paradox that things would age only if being observed or measured. The universe has to be such as to permit awareness of that universe; otherwise the universe has no meaning. . . . Stronger than the anthropic principle is the participatory principle. According to it we could not even imagine a universe that did not somewhere and for some stretch of time contain observers, because the very building blocks of the universe are those acts of observerparticipancy. . . . The participatory principle takes for its foundation the absolutely central point of the quantum: No elementary phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is an observed (or registered) phenomenon.18 Prigogine objects to this Wheeler-Pauli thesis on the grounds that, if true, the “observer creates the history of the universe”; but is the situation really different from any setup in which initial conditions can be varied by the experimenter? These latter are physical facts entangled with other facts and relata in participatory relations. Wheeler verges on to George Berkeley, and Prigogine’s criticism of his subjectivist tendency is well taken, but in our participatory model there is always something receptive, a perceiver or a recording apparatus, Time’s Arrow

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and there is no need for the subjectivity of a subject to register the interaction. Whatever can participate in another will do. In participation, a form or phenomenon appears when an interpreting subject participates in its object; and the interpreter can be an observer, an instrument, or almost anything. In explaining Wheeler’s view that quantum phenomena are made up of both a measuring device and the quantum system, Zeilinger says that with the choice of a measuring device we decide which phenomenon becomes a reality and which not. The interpreting receptor receives according to its nature and this, not empirical subjectivity, is the determining factor. In recent work he identifies the determining factor as a bit of information that, in his binary information system, determines the value of the others. If, for example, spin is measured along the vertical axis and “found to be pointing up,” then no information is available to determine the spin on the other axes. This is the basis of uncertainty. If two electrons are entangled, they have no independent existence. The spin of one is the spin of the other. Nothing is said concerning the nature of electrons and the like; the only thing that counts is information and its correlations. Wheeler gives the example of a quasar of which we see two pictures through the lens of a galaxy that lies between the quasar and ourselves. In Anton Zeilinger’s words, By choosing which measuring device we use to observe light coming from the quasar, we can decide here and now whether the quantum phenomenon in which the protons take part is interference of amplitudes on both sides of the galaxy, or whether we determine the path the proton took on one side or the other of the galaxy. In both cases the individual process again contains an element that cannot be controlled. For example, if we decide to measure the path of the photon—let it become reality—we have no influence on which of the two paths of the photon will be observed. This is the reason why Wheeler labels the individual quantum phenomenon an elementary act of creation. We as observers play a significant role in this process since we decide by choosing the measuring device which quantum phenomenon is realized. Still we cannot influence the specific value obtained through the measurement. We are part of the universe [that] creates itself by observing itself through us.19 Zeilinger and his colleagues have recently asked, 288

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Why is our daily world described by classical physics? Why is quantum mechanics usually limited to the world of photons and small particles? One answer to these questions is decoherence— processes that limit the observability of quantum effects and turn them into classical phenomena. To be able to predict under which circumstances a system will behave according to quantum mechanics we have to study possible processes of decoherence. For macroscopic particles there are two main “natural” ways of decoherence: On the one hand collisions with other particles (more details), and on the other hand the thermal emission of radiation due to the internal heat of an object. The warm macroscopic bodies in our everyday “classical” world emit by far too many photons to behave like a quantum object, whereas atoms or molecules can be sufficiently isolated to show their quantum nature.20 Zeilinger continues with the latest experimental confirmation of his thesis. Participation may not satisfy Prigogine who proposes a solution that may eliminate relativity to the percipient through Poincaré resonances.21 Let him speak for himself: As long as we consider a merely few particles, we cannot say if they form a liquid or a gas. States of matter as well as phase transitions are ultimately defined by the thermodynamic limit. The existence of phase transitions shows that we have to be careful when we adopt a reductionist approach. Phase transitions correspond to emergent properties. They are meaningful only at the level of populations and not single particles. . . . Persistent interactions mean that you can’t take a part of the system and consider it in isolation. . . . If the arrow of time existed only because our human consciousness interfered with a world otherwise ruled by time-symmetric laws, the very acquisition of knowledge would become paradoxical, since any measure already implies irreversible laws.22 I see no reason why one cannot understand holism prehensively, that is, as participation, and this may or may not involve consciousness. In fact, Prigogine suggests as much. We perceive emergent properties through the synthesis of something like Leibniz’s “little perceptions” that are born of the union of the perceiver with non-wholes, such as gases, waves, and maybe quasars. The emergent has its own complex order. Time’s Arrow

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3. Time in the Timaeus and Neo-Platonism In one of the best-known and most difficult passages in the Timaeus (37C–38E), Plato says: When the father and creator saw the creature which he had made moving and living, the created image of the eternal gods, he rejoiced, and in his joy he determined to make the copy still more like the original, and as this was an eternal, living being, he sought to make the universe eternal, so far as might be. Now the nature of the ideal being [the eidetic paradigm] was everlasting, but to bestow this attribute on a creature was impossible. Therefore he resolved to make a moving image of eternity, and when he set in order the heaven, he made this image eternal but moving according to number, while eternity itself rests in unity, and this image we call time. . . . For there were no nights, months, and years before the heavens came into being. . . . All these are parts of time . . . we say that it was and is and shall be . . . are properly used of becoming [and not eternal being] which proceeds in time, for they are motions. For that which is forever in the same state cannot be becoming younger or older by lapse of time . . . and in general nothing belongs to it of all that becoming attaches to things of sense, for these have come into being as forms of time. Plato’s is a fractical or holographic cosmos in which the form of things from the god’s point of view is, within certain limits, homologous with ours. The parts image the whole, which in turn images eternity; but unlike eternity it moves: to invoke the distinctions of the Sophist (235C–236D), it is as an eidolon, an eikon and not a phantasma, and its being is to iterate an eidetic same in time’s contextual otherings. Thanks to the anima mundi, the chemistry of outer space is same with ours and vertebrates have eyes that mirror ours. What Daniel Webb says of Levinas’s instant, namely, “it is the emergence of a relation between conscious life and the world in all its complexity,” is true of Plato.23 To return to our text, it is evident that the vitalistic context does not seem to square with his view that time is a moving image of eternity. For all the talk of living and moving creatures with which the discussion begins, we are far from the time of life and, what is more important, seem locked in an eidetic perspective more appropriate to linear time, the time of the number series or algebra. The way down from reason reaches virtual reality, never life; one must begin there. 290

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Plato’s time, like number, seems to be an intermediate between the ideas and becoming and, if so, can hardly be the time of life and motion. How could it be a “moving image?” The correlate of this time would be the physical or timeless time of the receptacle, the site of the works of necessity, and given images, eidolon. Prior to images and granted its dynamical diversification, there is only becoming that never becomes anything, that is to say, prior to its being solicited as chora, the receptacle is an apeiron gignesthai. Time is then indistinguishable from eternity and rest from motion, for nothing can transpire without relation to a locus standi. Time is the form of events, entities whose being is change and not that in which things change. Time becomes a linear or world time when I want to relate my time to another’s. Otherwise it is both the creature’s being and its measure. Aristotle’s point remains valid: there must be both a countable now and a soul that can count (De Phy., 222b30–223b1). The forms may be eternal and mathematics can provide a grid “according to number,” but this pure hypodoche is neither a locus to which a natural meaning of motion/rest can be assigned nor sufficient to mark passage. A being is required that, although a creature of becoming, can stand over against it so that rest and motion can be discriminated. Such is the hypostasis whose emergent temporality must be worked out from primal becoming. The hypostasis is both open to and is an expression of change on which it then effects a closure. The reconciliation of time, space, and motion is a problem logicians and mathematicians have faced since Zeno. Our problem is wider, for we must also fit the time of life, the time of the creature poised in the now and, like Descartes, gathering itself into facing the relative non-being of past and future, with the time in which the now is well ordered with respect to all events, past and future. Many of the ancient commentators on the Timaeus sought ways of reconciling these times within a neo-Platonic ontology and often cited Aristotle with whom, however, they seldom agreed. The problem faced by Plotinus, Proclus, Damascus, and Simplicus was, in general, to fit lived time into the context of the hypostatic emanations of the neo-Platonic one. We, however, can start with the becoming that never really is from which, as we just saw, the One or Being is more or less indistinguishable and, following their leads, try to determine the time of the hypostasis and how it fits into its cosmos. Thus linear time will not be construed in relation to being but to becoming, which in its emotively charged energetics provides the necessary resources for understanding the embodied self’s vulnerability. If the Time’s Arrow

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atomic instant is without a predecessor and is, through its medial affectivity, “a system of all things,” then to take the road to complexity is to meet Plato coming back. Whenever we try to show what time is, we are likely to point to clocks or chronologies, but the successions they keep or mark are in derivative world time, not the time we are; and until we can show that our time does not necessitate ontological commitments, we will not escape Being’s bonds. What is there within time that makes its escape so difficult? First, there is a problem of language; names and predicates ossify beings, fix them as if in the amber of eternity; and second, the present with its past and future from which a way would open are intentionally constituted and are within Being’s clearing. When the Timaeus god made the cosmos to be an image of the eternal, he made the time manifest in the cycles of the heavens everlasting and “moving according to number.” Any of these cycles would be a natural clock and a “moving image of eternity” (37D).24 Time is always the creature, for what the creature achieves by way of promise and failure between birth and death is within its own successive paradigms or frameworks. Moreover, there is no departure from an initial completeness, no golden past left behind. It is otherwise with Plotinus’s One, which, although convertible with Good and Beauty, is being and not the Good beyond being. The way down from the One or “authentic existent” is hardly the way of Plato’s synthetic dialectic (Rep., 511C), for this neo-Platonic One is a creative source expressing itself on such levels of being as mind, soul, and matter which make up the cosmos. Like Aristotle’s God, it is a living act and, unlike that God, the fecund and expressive source of all else. Eternity, which seems to be the first of these expressions, is “life in the full sense of being all the life there is and a life which, knowing nothing of past or future to shatter its completeness, possess itself forever.” Plotinus adds that “it will never spend itself, and we have the statement of a life instantaneously infinite” (Plotinus, Ennead III, 7, 5). Thus our neo-Platonic commentators will interpret Plato’s “moving according to number” as an intellectual time whose nows coexist like the points on a world line, while the time of becoming mirrors this were it not the loci of creatures who are both involved in coming to be and who, because of their “fold,” are capable of reflecting on and belonging to linear time. If, as Plato thought, creatures are temporal forms and the universe is a living creature, then this intellectual time of the “works of reason” in which the demiourgos formed the universe would not be prior to its organic articulation. In line 292

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with Wheeler, the receptacle and cycles of the heavens must be construed from the standpoint of the living creature; in elucidating its possibilities each soul models these heavenly cycles in this holographic universe. Just as Plotinus says that eternity, everlasting (linear) time, is the (manifest) substrate of the One (Plotinus, Ennead, III, 7,5), so various orders of time are “manifest substrates” for orders, which they found. Moreover, something like intellectual time—such as Plotinus’s eternity that measures creatures—will measure us, but can this be the time that creatures are? Plato’s belief that creatures “come into being as forms of time” determines my response. The time of movement that images eternity is the time of life. Unless the creature is a clone of the idea, this requires that the creature’s time be granular so that it can effect unfettered decisions and image eternity by interpreting it. This self-positing interpretative relation was what the discussion of Scotus’s haecceitas aimed to establish. We begin with Plotinus’s account of the emergence of movement from Eternity. He introduces life into time by personifying it, saying that it was produced “by the desire for succession.” Before that, time lay self-concentrated, at rest within the Authentic Existent: it was not yet time; it was merged in the Authentic and motionless with it. But there was an active principle (the all-soul) there, one set on governing and realizing itself, and it chose to aim at something more than its present: it stirred from its rest, and Time stirred with it . . . and we, stirring to an endless succession, to a next, to the discrimination of identity and the establishment of ever new difference, traversed a portion of the outgoing path and produced an image of eternity, produced time. For the soul contained an unquiet faculty, always desirous of translating elsewhere what it say in the eternal realm, and it could not bear to contain within itself the dense fullness of its possession. A seed at rest; the nature principle within, uncoiling outwards, makes way to what seems to it to be a large life; but by that partition it loses; it was a unity self-gathered, and now, in going forth from itself, it fritters its unity away; it advances into a greater weakness. (Plotinus, Ennead. III, 7, 11) Is this “unquiet faculty” the “blind uneasiness” of Bradley’s affectivity? In Plato’s account, one root of the soul contains this “unquiet faculty,” and Plotinus probably had in mind the receptacle’s moveTime’s Arrow

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ment by the Errant Cause (Tim., 48A). Is not affectivity an unquiet faculty? Did deconstruction begin here? Were we to turn Plotinus’s charming fable upside down and take the “nature principle within uncoiling outward” as the emergence of the temporal hypostasis from becoming, what would be disturbing is the sense of fullness from which a creaturely time would emerge, or still again, the notion that it uncoils as if from a seed, only then to dissipate. The emphasis in this deterministic analogue of Bohm’s “unfolding” and Derrida’s dissemination is on something unfolding another; one asks “From whence did it come?” and one gives an answer in terms of Being, rather than “Whither does it go?” and thus on the basis of the Good that would draw the creature forth into selfcompleting. One way leads with Nietzsche and the history of being to a history of rancor; the other way leads through hope to an “impossible” beyond. What is more to the point is the way the emergent sets itself decisively over against its ground, thus imaging the egress of Cartesian consciousness from the cogito. Rudi Visker notes that for Levinas consciousness itself is a triumph over the apeiron il y a and “presupposes that in the limitless plane, in the apeiron of being as such, a certain discreteness . . . needs to be introduced. Instead of a continuum of faultless transition, there need be units.”25 The “whence” reminds Professor Wyschogrod of Heidegger’s errancy (beings unfolding in obliviousness to Being) “without which there would be no connection from destiny to destiny, there would be no history,” while the seed image suggests Derrida’s “power of germination and seminal differentiation,” that is, dissemination. Does such an initiation disseminate and fritter itself away? Away from the One, a plenitude of being and an eternal presence? I begin with a carnal self that in its affectivity is subject to the Good’s propositioning. If we want to go beyond being, there is only one answer. Anything can be reconciled with the necessities, but the way of the Good is never complete. All one can do is chart hope’s way. The epochal theory of time is required by the creature’s own economy. The way within is the way of Abraham, the way of faith and hope. Focusing attention away from eternity to time was actually begun by Plotinus’s successors. I suggested that the time of endless becoming seemed to model linear world time, while its reflective mirror represented emergence. Neo-Platonism moves away from Eternity to a two-layered account of time. The hypostasis is the site of simultaneous external and internal temporal orders. Iamblichus (circa 300 AD) thought that there were such layers, intellectual and physical, 294

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which were emanative stages or hypostases, the lower participating in the higher. The Now of the intellectual world is like the geometrical point, indivisible and without extension, and, like the points on a line, is always at rest. It is higher than soul (and with this he breaks with the psychism common to Plotinus, Augustine, and Kant), while physical time orders nature and all other things striving toward perfection. The Now of physical time, bound up with the changing world of sense, is always other and other and never at rest, yet each Now in this changing world intersects a Now in intellectual time. Relative to eternity, the Now of intellectual time is at rest; relative to physical time, it is in motion.26 Proclus’s commentary on the Timaeus (440 AD) extends Iamblichus’s analysis. In primary time, motion and rest are never absolute but are relative to one another, as Iamblichus saw in the relation of intellectual to physical time. Primary time seems modeled on the Platonic soul, for it partakes of both the divisible and indivisible, of both motion and rest. This time, though related to the participatory functions of soul,27 has been cut loose from eternity and provides Damascus (circa 500 AD) with new possibilities for thinking time. Like Heraclitus’s river, which is same only because in it “other and other waters flow” (Fag., 91), “motion and time are in continuous flux [flowing according to number, permanent as flux]”; “they are not unreal, but have their being in becoming.”28 Damascus could have thought of the hypostasis as temporal, not as an emanation of the eternal. Moreover, “since motion does not proceed by indivisibles [it is not composed of durationless nows, as a line is not composed of points], the nows are indivisible qua limits of time but never qua parts of it.” Time is both separative (that is, it “prevents the events of the Trojan war from being confounded with those of the Peloponnesian war”) and prehensive (that is, “it keeps them [the events] together”). When one retrospectively thinks of time as a river, it is at rest and images what previously was thought to pertain to eternal or intellectual time. But then it is not time, for time is this very flux,29 and the now is always succeeding itself. Were time a dense series of instants, then, as in Riemann’s geometry, there would be no natural standard of congruence. If there are indivisible nows, they must be limits and not parts and so not measure time. Moreover, were the now a part, it would either remain the same or be different, and both are impossible.30 “One must beware of believing that time is composed of indivisibles . . . for though time is Time’s Arrow

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incorporeal, it is not extentionless—it proceeds by jumps . . . [and] is composed of discrete and extended parts.” Like Plato and William James, Damascus accepts Zeno’s “‘flying arrow’ paradox.” However, does its being at rest in a moment follow, as Aristotle says, “from the assumption that time is composed of moments”? (De Phy., 1039 b30) Are the moments punctual? Is the real world a sequence of lighted phosphors on a TV screen? Is change really cinematic? The arrow’s trajectory, Bergson says, “is an act in progress, not a thing.”31 If so, we would want him to mean that the nows in Aristotle’s account of the arrow should be taken to be successive epochal durations and extended “acts of progress,” and though they can be divided, this is at the expense of their unity of becoming. What happens in their first half, for example, is inseparably necessary for what happens in the second. The instant is a unity of becoming, and its proper parts are, as Aristotle said of the drama, its beginning or whence; its middle, or supplementary development; and its end or whither. Things do come to be; unless duration has a determinate issue, nothing could be achieved. Events are not inscribed in causality and “come from themselves without precedent.”32 What is inherited from its predecessors is not a determinate but rather its own past to be transmitted or transmuted. From this point of view, like Whitehead’s occasion of experience, the Platonic instant has an immediate successor that comes from itself. On the other hand, Bergson really understands durations to be made up of successive, interpenetrating states each of which is changing, and thus takes a stand for an intuited though unrepresentable continuity of becoming. However, Pete Gunter tells me that Bergson wavered between an interpenetrating and continuous time and one in which duration comes in pulses of different lengths. Like Whitehead, Levinas also broke with continuity; his instant, Daniel Webb says, “is a time of a beginning that is quite new and not a continuation of what preceded it”;33 it is ex nihilo; for “what begins to exist does not exist before it has begun, and yet it is what does not exist that must through its own beginning give birth to itself, without coming from anywhere.”34 Becoming is a sequence of such durative jumps; the end of one jump is the genetically received program to be interpreted by its successor. Continuity is repetition of partial pattern, the inheritance of a scenario or plot as a same in time’s othering. The hypostasis is one of Plato’s “forms of time” (Tim., 38A), not an event in time. With this supercessive time, we arrive at time’s 296

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granular structure, where each moment is not a point but a duration, “an extension present all at once.”35 The ontological primacy of this meaning of space/time removes it from Kantian inner and outer sense and from any tendency to think of time as if it were one of the demiourgic “works of reason” that was imposed upon a spatial receptacle through the construction of the world soul.

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12

The Originary

The still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is; But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity, Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards, Neither ascent not decline. Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance. I can only say, there we have been, but I cannot say where. And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time. T. S. Eliot

1. Bergson and Husserl Let’s begin by asking ourselves, what do we mean by time? No doubt, many different things, but chief among these is that time is mine, what I am in my innermost self. What is it? We share Augustine’s dilemma; he knew what time was until asked. What is this time that is mine and yours alone, the time we are caught up in, never have enough of, cannot endure, and can lend or give to others? Then there is the time clocks keep that ticks away inexorably, indifferent to our moods and the occupants of its now, its before and after. The latter has been favored by philosophers and seems to be a holdover from the aspectual sense of presence inherent in the Greek verb “to be,” einai. Unlike other verbs, “to be” does not denote action, and indeed 298

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einai borrowed its aorist from gignomai, “coming to be,” so that however we experience beings, we bring them before the mind in nouns joined to predicables by the copula in a Parmenidian fixity. To break this bond we cannot but follow in the train of Heidegger’s progressively more radical interpretations of the relation between time and Being that led him beyond it to the mysteries of the Ereignis. Language, he said, is the house of Being. As long as we assume the priority of names in the noun/verb sentential paradigm— favored by both Plato and Aristotle and enshrined in common speech, as in “water freezes” or “dogs bark,” and dogs and water become bearers of their properties—escaping Being will be difficult indeed. There is always being’s aorist; doesn’t this suggest that the clue to going beyond may lead through gignesthai? This most fundamental sense of the process of living through and using time drops out when time is represented, for example, as a line being generated, as a wellordered succession of instants, or as one variable in a quadruple of real numbers. Then time becomes another being, an enduring presence, an entity. To think beyond Being is to finally eliminate Being from presencing. Medial becoming, the apeiron gignesthai, that diversifies the physicalistic receptacle and its avatar, Bradley’s “living emotion before me”; and indeed any such presencing in which nothing is present offer themselves as beginnings. According to Husserl, absolute consciousness constitutes a primal source point as a retained, present, and protented impression. We have been assuming a medial becoming, an apeiron gignesthai, that diversifies the physicalistic receptacle, which in itself isn’t anything. I have proposed other such avatars as affectivity and its coordinate modes (Wordsworth’s feeling intellect, Rilke’s open, and Whitehead’s intellectual feelings). Saying, as if by an epoché of the said, plays a similar role in language, while Augustine’s “belly of the mind” is diversified by its archival latencies. When Descartes, having found nothing in the books of the world or the past upon which to build knowledge, turned to the book of himself, he proposed what would now be an information theoretical model of the way mind responds to its archives. However, the relation is hermeneutical. Can we begin with affectivity to show that its arché is beyond being and that from it, at least in principle, we can derive its various splits, such as Husserl’s awareness and its object, Bergson’s memory and matter, Descartes’s thought and extension, and the like? Probably not, but we can perhaps point a way beyond such bifurcations. The Originary

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The middle voice can show that our usual approach to temporal distinctions is a cultural artifact. Jon Gonda points out that our way of making temporal distinctions is cultural; early Indo-Europeans experienced time “as duration or as periodical recurrence . . . the opposition past: future is much less clearly distinguished and not much attention is paid to exact temporal distinctions.”1 Though this middle voice was first translated as reflexive, which would seem appropriate in such contexts as bathing, adorning, or applying ornaments where “the agent comes back upon himself,” this is not correct, for it has the sense of “performing a process in one’s own sphere, with regard to one’s own possessions, to one’s own interests.”2 Gonda suggests that “duration” is medial, an interpretation that might well have met with Bergson’s approval. Pure duration is the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live, when it refrains from separating its present state from its former states . . . [and] forms the past and present states into an organic whole, as happens when we recall the notes of a tune, melting, so to speak, into one another. Might it not be said that, even if the notes succeed one another, yet we perceive them in one another, and that their totality might be compared to a living being whose parts, though distinct, permeate one another . . .?3 Though Bergson’s approach to duration through consciousness suggests Kant’s inner sense, there are important differences. Lived successions are heterogeneous, almost at times phantasmagoric, and thus never countable. The temporal succession generated in counting is a virtual manifold, and its continuity is Aristotelian, namely, an instant is the latest moment in one succession or the earliest in its successors, but not both. The point of the “Refutation of Idealism” is to show that, short of external objects, inner sense and its temporality can never be well ordered (B275)—which of course it must be if all knowledge is subject to time (A99). Kant eliminates time by spatializing it; he approaches time generation by counting a simultaneous or spatial array as if in a homogeneous medium (A143, B182). Bergson sees this as resulting from reflection; he offers as a model the succession that would appear to a conscious point that lived a line along which it moved if it were to rise above the line and “perceive several points of its juxtaposition.”4 Duration with its interfusing sensations and thoughts, constantly growing as they add and organize themselves, is “ever same and ever changing.” Later Bergson 300

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will identify the intellect with extended solids, for “it can form clear ideas only from the discontinuous” from whose immobility it will try, as in the integral calculus, to construct mobility. Durations cannot be divided except into those interpenetrating elements that, as virtual, constitute its continuity.5 There is not, as in Whitehead, a supercession in which continuity becomes, but rather a continuous becoming. No doubt it is the business of the positive sciences and systems or complexity theory to determine how individual entities stand to the initial event from which, as we now believe, all things evolved. After the formation of the elements and the various bodies or standing events that inhabit cosmic space, was life itself an evolution developing along different lines from its initial outburst? Was speciation, as Bergson suggests, a succession from this flash, which, like a fireworks display, gave off successive pods that burst again . . . as if emanations from a single élan vital? These streams are tendencies with a single root that prevail through time, even though different and new determinations are at each pod an analogous response of life to the contingencies of matter. Like Aristotle’s entelechy, its from that determines its whither. Acorns do become oaks. “The role of life is to insert some indetermination—if not into matter”—then into life and its frameworks.6 Deluze, though he recognizes material contingencies, assumes that differences are more nearly virtual and will appear over time, as the eye sets the same problem for different evolutionary lines; differentiation is as if immanently given from the beginning as an indeterminate for self-determination, which bursts forth from the force life carries within itself. This tendency is preserved in all subsequent divisions. As Keith Pearson summarizes, “When a tendency splits up in the course of its development, each of the special tendencies which thus arise tries to preserve and develop everything in the primitive tendency that is not incompatible with the work for which it is specialized.”7 Evolution works more or less simultaneously across these tendencies in diverse species through systems and organs; so developments of the eye, for example, in different species are different responses of the élan vital to material conditions. However, these are anything but homogeneous and set various problems. Robin Durie warns that the integrity of the organism must not be sacrificed to genes, which “simply ‘make’ organisms for them to exploit varying environments, the better to enhance their own chance of survival.” Though the élan vital applies to populations, not individuals, is there a danger in sacrificing the integrity of the individual in The Originary

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a world where “there are no things only actions”? There seems to be a counter-danger: the sacrifice of the creature to an even-moremysterious vital force that is neither a mechanism nor teleological force. The hypostasis, as Bergson says of an organism, is a “reality that is making itself” in an entropic “reality which is unmaking itself.”8 However, in Boltzmann’s classical and still most widely accepted version of thermodynamics, the second law is reversible. The spaghetti you cut up and ate could come back out of your mouth and reassemble itself on your plate. There is no place in Bergson’s metaphysics for dissipative systems,9 that is, systems that give rise to irreversible processes, such as the creative emergence of structure from chaos. Short of the intervention of a deus ex machina or an immanent intelligence responding to the lure of the transcendent Good, how could novelty emerge in a deterministic system? Mae-Wan Ho defends the classical, homeostatic approach in biology; but it seems to me that only if time’s arrow is an ontological and not merely psychological aspect of things can justice be done to life. Since it does not seem possible to add nonlinear or stochastic supplements to the Schrödinger equation, apparently we can get what is needed from the holistic consequence of the Wheeler/Zeilinger interpretation of the basic laws and avoid violating Ochamist requirements.10 Letting Bergson saddle himself with an élan vital formulated within classical thermodynamics or with a quasi-conservative continuity of virtual differences (Deleuze) is to assure that creativity is a fiction. Anton Zeilinger retains an ontological interpretation with de re probabilities through quantum entanglement. His admittedly holistic and participatory approach, together with his information-theoretic allegory that associates “bits” of information—the sorts of things that can be given a yes or 1 and no or 0 answer—with systems, eliminates the laws and allows one to make sense of the creative coming-to-be of epochal durations. By establishing the primacy of duration on psychological grounds, Bergson threatens to deliver “outer sense” over to Parmenidian being. If I say that “a minute has just elapsed, and I mean by this that a pendulum, beating the seconds, has completed sixty oscillations. . . . If I picture those oscillations to myself all at once by a single mental perception, I exclude by hypothesis that idea of a succession. I do not think of sixty strokes that succeed one another, but of sixty points on a fixed line.”11 Didn’t we learn from Descartes that even the ecstasies of “inner sense” or consciousness are rooted in the body, itself a complex structure of events? By beginning with our feeling intellect, which is already incarnate and which grounds self-consciousness, we 302

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can show that one is always already in communion with a world of physical events. Modern philosophy has tacitly cast its lot with selfconsciousness whose relation to the body is problematic and in which time is represented as spatialized and even reversible. The determinism saddling classical mechanism can be avoided if we can model the fundamental structure of time on durations understood with Husserl as affective “moments of reverberation.”12 Each gathers itself into being (autopoiesis) through its “archival” hypodoche whose gifts it can decisively interpret and modify in terms of transcending possibilities. By stressing the moment’s erotic root, we can discern a meaning of presencing that avoids entrapment in Being and gives the moment a fundamental “whither.” Each moment is a new beginning whose interpretations and self-interpretations are open rather than closed to possibility; each “reverberating moment” in this granular matrix is an expression of the soul’s chorastic root in the “divisible same, other, and being” (Tim., 35A) and, as affective and autonomous, gathers itself into unity as a protection against disruption and stochastic dispersal. Each also harbors the possibility of an epiphany and perhaps even an annunciation, a voice in the garden (Augustine), a cry in the street (Joyce), a light from the sky that “flashed all around him” (Paul), or the presence of an orphan and widow (Levinas); these open the moment to a radical, transcending alterity. This more or less continuous and durative presencing can also turn back on itself and regard the world in the making it left behind as a static res extensa, something already over and done with. The Timaeus soul, a demiourgos, has a micro-analogue in the instant. To find a meaning of time beyond being, let us attempt a quasiKantian deduction that begins with satisfaction and terminates with what Husserl calls the primal source point. We hope to catch a point in his argument that will take us beyond intentionality and Being. A deduction is also a production. No small order; we must show how time (being) arises and produce an augment that, first, lets us grasp actual entities and, second, see beyond to their ground in primal affectivity. Though its possibility lies amid the ordinary furniture of life, the production does not require Being as a springboard. The beyond is reflected, Levinas says, “within the totality and history, within experience. The eschatological, as the ‘beyond’ of history and the future, draws beings out of the jurisdiction of history and the future; it arouses them and calls them forth to their full responsibility . . . it restores to each instant its full signification in the very instant; all the causes are ready to be heard.”13 The Originary

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Levinas might well have characterized satisfaction in the middle voice. We are engaged in the enjoyable presence of things from which we live, such as good soup or a comfortable chair. “These are not objects of representations. . . . The I is not the support of enjoyment.” Living from need is enjoying it.14 When a problem arises, the soup is cold, or the chair uncomfortable, one could quickly pass over into more self-conscious modes. The detached philosopher is apt to ignore the motile, prehensive, and embodied nature of affects. During the first weeks or so of her life, the infant responds to and mocks another by sticking out her tongue or smiling. Bergson took affections to be “invitations to act”; besides the changes of expression, the child interacts with others by grasping or striking at them; objects surrounding the body “reflect its possible action upon them.” Information is always both carried by and carries affective tone. If “existence is song,” we should begin through music. Not only is a song a solicitation in a world without objects to be secured or procured, a pure existence, an open, beyond subjects and objects, but in listening to music, one is always ahead of oneself, attuned to what is going on as, entrained by the rhythm and affectively taking on the temporal shape of the melody, anticipating what may come and, by taps and subtle gestures, trying to modify it. Though its only goal is to be, its being is ahead of itself. Entelechies, not just necessities, also rule. Reflective detachment, the nonparticipatory alternative, can become pathological, but this is also the “inner man” in communion with transcending realities where Augustine, Luther, and Whitehead found God and where Descartes found his mathematics and physics. Reflection introduces us to a timeless now, one that is shared with Plato when, for example, one reads and reflects on what he wrote. Alasdair MacIntyre has noticed that timelessness extends “to the standards of reason giving, reason accepting, and reason rejecting . . . and is only to be understood as a piece of metaphysics . . . [in] the atemporal now in which reader and writer encounter each other, that ‘now’ in which both can appeal away from themselves and the particularity of their own claims to what is timeless, logically, ontologically, and evaluatively, and is only thereby and therefore the property of neither.”15 Nietzsche might have said that metaphysics is a fiction generated by the will to power. To abandon it is to make discourse a struggle of wills and reduce saying to the trauma of an Edward Albee play. That transcendent possibility must be built into the instant. Under what interpretation is another’s approach a cut, a decision, so that through him/her I am as if reborn? The route to an answer lies 304

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in Berkeley who “immersed all sensible qualities in the lived experience of affection. . .” Berkeley’s sensualism consists in reducing the sensible contents of objects into contents experienced, in which, in an adequate possession of the sensed by the sensing, the immanent contents of consciousness, the coinciding of being with its manifestations, is found again. The sensorial qualities are not only the sensed; as affective states, they are the sensing.”16 Michel Henry, on the contrary, says that “affectivity has nothing to do with sensibility, with which it is constantly confused, but is rather structurally heterogeneous to sensibility.”17 As Borch-Jacobson summarizes Henry’s thesis, “Anterior to every empirical affection and to every a priori receptivity, there would be pure affection of itself by itself, that auto-affection so immanent to itself that it cannot even reflect upon itself, conceive itself, seize itself, but that nevertheless feels (itself), experiences (itself).”18 Self-affection is more primary than “elemental” affectivity. Levinas rightly insists on the inseparability of affectivity and sense. There is something common to the “objective and the live. . . . It is as though the sensible . . . were an element sui generis, into which identical entities dissolve and from which they emerge but in which their opacity and fixity as substances turn into durations, while the flow of the lived is always on the verge of coagulating into ideal identities.”19 Unlike in Bergson, these are incarnate spatiotemporal durations. The moment, the distended now, is a unity of sensing and sensed, a whole with neither inside nor outside, subject or object, and whose content of the initial stage of the lived body’s now; this verbal becoming can be turned back on itself, be recognized in a concept and transformed into a nominal being and its horizons. The times of the hypotheses’ self-consciousness go against the grain of becoming’s uniform transition. Unless it turns back on itself to receive itself, Heraclitus’s river in which other and other waters flow could just as well image eternity as the flow of time. Even if time is denied in spatialization, the reflexivity in which it is rooted is a necessary condition for the emergence of difference, for differentiating creatures from one another, for differentiating the graphemes on this page from one another, for the deferring that makes significance possible. Can we give these modalities of time a coherent Platonic reading?20 First, this discussion of time and the hypostasis must accommodate Husserl with whom it is so closely intertwined. The discovery of various meanings of time appropriate to the hypostasis suggests Husserl’s distinction between cosmic time and phenomenological time, the “unitary form of all mental processes within one stream of The Originary

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mental processes . . . with its modes of givenness of Now, Before, After . . . [which is] not to be measured by any position of the sun, by any clock, by any physical process.”21 Is this time as lived? Ignoring sun and clocks, isn’t this still a concession to naturalism? Here, now, before, and after are sequential points, which, if modeled on a real line, effectively deny passage, possess no natural definition of congruence, and dismiss as a mere epiphenomenon the time of the “I can.” But let that rest and now, if we assume with Husserl the phenomenological standpoint, grant that while “both exist, but according to different modes,”22 the cosmic mode presupposes consciousness. Husserl’s merit was to have shown that there is no single meaning of existence. Aside from the different modes of existence that distinguish consciousness from nature, there are regional ontologies determined by “the Einfühlung, which is an act that reveals the conscious life of others which is different from sensible perception,” while the act that reveals the social life of others is different from that which intends animal life. Then there is the existence of what is categorially or eidetically intuited. If it can be shown that in all of these modes, appearing is the being of what appears, then it would be possible “to pass through the theory of knowledge to the theory of being.”23 With this, a central theme of Being and Time can be transcended if both phenomenological and physical time and the meanings of being appropriate to each presupposes a “source point” or common root in the matrix. At this very limit of intentionality, these sources are not any kind of being. Husserl recognized that his temporal distinctions are not absolute but depend on “something that constitutes itself in a certain profound and peculiar sense of its own and which has its source in what is ultimately and truly absolute.” Thus we arrive at the famous “primal source point” of the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, the most direct route into the originary source’s offering. His concern is with the impression received now upon which, on being recognized, apperception and intentional constitution supervene. “The primal impression [which] is the absolute beginning of this generation—the primal source from which all others are continuously generated . . . it is the primally generated, the ‘new,’ that which comes into existence foreign to consciousness, that which is received as opposed to that which is generated [i.e., the retentive and protentive aspect of the primal datum] through the spontaneity proper to consciousness’s origination of the primal datum.” This is in no sense “an apprehending act,” but rather the spontaneous generation, a “primal creation,” of the 306

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impression prior to its objectification as an appearance.24 Levinas finds the root of creativity in this temporal flow “behind the exhibiting of being.”25 Can we track it down? Levinas notes that here “time is subordinated to eternity . . . Does not Husserl’s analysis of time come down to expressing time in terms of presence and simultaneity—of retained and anticipated presents? . . . As if time were reducible to its way of making itself known . . . in a word its aptness to presence.”26 First, let him make his case. In moving up from this ground to the hypostasis, we must find a phenomenological equivalent to Plato’s granular time. Husserl’s absolute consciousness will be our clue—but at the price of scrambling the historical phases of his argument in Internal Time Consciousness that John Brough and its German editor, Rudolf Boehm, have gone to such lengths to untangle. We must focus on durations as emotionally internalizing the environment, a nonintentional meaning of time. In the early manuscripts (1901–1907), Husserl answers the question, “How, in a succession of consciousness, is the consciousness of succession constituted?” in terms of apprehensions and contents, a bias I appreciate. After 1908, he no longer describes time consciousness in these terms; it is now a theory about experiencing immanent temporal objects through an absolute time-constituting flow. The new question is, “How in a flow of consciousness is the temporally extended object constituted?”27 The now, with its past and future, is the intentional correlate of the primal impression, while the latter, together with retention and protention, makes up the absolute flow. Through this absolute flow the immanent object is experienced as now, as past, and as to come. Can we find a phenomenological analogue of an instant by borrowing from Husserl’s later text the source points of “ever new primal impressions [which now and now and . . .] flash forth with ever new matter” and retain the earlier apprehension/contents split?28 We are aware of an impression as now present, as past, or to come because the present impression is constantly being pushed back from and retained in the present by this absolute consciousness so that the new impression may supervene. Each present is itself specious, for as phenomenologically modified, it has “its now, its before and after.” My awareness of the object as self-same is constituted by an absolute subjectivity. In awareness I now expect (protention) in terms of what was (retention), and this temporalization is a function of an absolute subjectivity for which “we have no names. . . . It is a flow only by analogy with what it constitutes.” It is “nameless,” for its object is The Originary

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only the awareness itself whose content will be constituted as a recurrent, formal identity by this absolute, time-constituting consciousness. That too is changing, but this consciousness, having no content except awareness, is “beyond the namable.”29 Our “deduction” of time as being’s creative arché began with everyday satisfactions and construed these as medial durations. We passed through these to Husserl’s nonintentional primal impressions on the way to a granular temporality made up of durations. Why this apparent detour through Husserl? In the primal impression he came to a non-intentional origin of time; we will go below him only through him, if we are to discover a temporality that, though beyond being, gives such appearances. If we are to find a way from Husserl’s primal impressions, each a new creation, to their arché in Plato’s granular durations, we must first introduce the notion of duration into a discussion of Husserl. There is no evident equivalence between these “primal source points” and durations, but we can point to some features of his argument that seem to require them. The relevant material begins with the iteration of source points in the constitution of continuous time. In a 1916 text, part of which appeared above, Husserl writes that the temporal continuum is “a flow of the continuous production of modifications [the continuous tone I am listening to is modified by the just heard tone] [which] in the sense of iterations proceed from the actually present now, the actual primal impression. . . . The primal impression is the actual beginning of this production, the primal source, that from which everything else is continuously produced. It itself is not produced; it does not arise as something produced, but through genesis spontanea; it is primal generation. It does not spring from anything (it has no seed); it is a primal creation.”30 Short of a torture chamber, how often does one listen to a continuous tone? Protention and retention are fictions of reflective consciousness. We are not spectators, but are and live through time We hear the present note entrained within rhythm and harmony in a club or bar, alone or with others, interfused with what has been and pregnant with expectation. This medial experience can break apart in reflection within which one can no doubt posit a primal source point, but this would be time, not as lived but as thought. But on with Husserl’s story. Earlier (1909–1911), he had asked: “Is not the flux a succession? Does it not therefore have a now, an actual phase, and a continuity of pasts we are conscious of in retentions? We can only say this flux is something which we name in conformity with what is constituted, but it is nothing temporally 308

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Objective. It is absolute subjectivity and has the absolute properties of something to be denoted metaphorically as “flux,” as the point of actuality, primal source point from which springs the now . . . a continuity of moments of reverberation. . . . For this all names are lacking.”31 Levinas says that they are lacking because “the thing itself is beyond the nameable.”32 Besides the flux itself that we take to be the pulsing and restless, sometimes frightening, apeiron gignesthai or il y a underlying any content that appears to consciousness, what is not being named is the occasion of experience with which it is phenomenologically inseparable. Reverberations? A reverberation of primal impressions, for example, a continuously sounding note or tone iterated now and now and . . ., where each now is a source point and each repetition a primal creation. Suppose, however, that these are durations, not unextended instants, experienced as fusing into a pulsing continuum, which can then be arbitrarily divided if regarded from a perspective like that of the point that separates itself from Bergson’s line. We can also stand back from the long opening chord of Wagner’s Rheingold that will otherwise gather us up into the river’s powerful and turbulent flow and, regarding it sequentially, divide it into notes and measures. Considered morphologically, a primal impression can divide itself into a content and awareness of that content.33 Were it a duration, it could reflexively open on its own being and achieve the division between content and awareness; but the idealistic loading of Husserl’s primal impression commits it to another destiny. Levinas says that it is “retained, remembered, or reconstructed; accumulating, according to the so admirably phenomenological Kantian formulas, through the ‘synthesis of apprehension in intuition’ (that is, the sensible becoming cognition) and by the synthesis of ‘recognition in imagination,’ the impression is temporalized and opens upon itself . . . [this] temporal modification is not an event, nor an action, nor the effect of a cause. It is the verb ‘to be’.”34 What is phenomenologically primary is the flux itself, and if there are such moments, these all intertwine, mutually qualifying one another, for all synthesis is the work of the imagination (A78, B103). Its auto-affective opening on itself is not temporal but is itself the source of the awareness of the retained tone (Kant’s “synthesis of reproduction in the imagination”), the “identical object” of which it is aware. But what opens into awareness/consciousness? “Is it inherently absurd to regard this flow of time as an objective movement? Certainly! On the other hand, memory The Originary

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is surely something that has its now, and the same now as a tone for example. No. There lurks the fundamental mistake. The flow of the modes of consciousness is not a process; the consciousness of the now is not itself now. The retention that exists with the consciousness of the now is not ‘now,’ is not simultaneous with the now. . . . These are important things, perhaps the most important in all of phenomenology.”35 Come now, aren’t sensible things forms of time rather than being temporal because of intentional supplementation? Thoughts, having no natural periodicity, are generally in rather than of the very substance of time. Time is nothing without content. One is said to experience the primal impression through a “flow” of absolute consciousness. Its impressions and retentions/protentions constitute the primal impression as now, just past, or to come. This absolute flow is not a process, not in time, but constitutes time. John Llewelyn invites us to consider an absolutely conscious act reflexively intending itself; this intended flow will be a sort of specious present in which the presencing present is denatured or depresenced. Just as Bergson’s duration, considered sequentially, will yield the dead time of algebra, so “the very presentation of the presencing of the actuality of the living presence is its depresencing,” its hypostatization, where hypostatization is the phenomenological equivalent of algebrazation. In the living present one can never capture the impression in its effervescence, even though, as Llewelyn notes, it “can become the object of a hypostasis that locates the original nondurational hypostasis at a point in the course of hypostasized time . . . [This] is the living present’s petrifaction and death: its entombment.”36 The result is identity in difference in the anonymous constitution of consciousness and its object. Though Husserl attributes this constitution to consciousness as absolute flux, we have been straining hard to show that one begins with an affectivity in which feeling cannot be separated from what is felt. This medial experience is a durative awareness that can split into conscious of something and that of which one is conscious without benefit of constitution. An affectively charged duration is an analogue of Husserl’s primal impression Watch the infant respond to its mother and you will see the beginning of affectivity’s split. This approach to the dualities of mind and body points to a key difference with Bergson, at least as interpreted by Gilles Deleuze. A duration is a whole of mutually participating parts having a common root in affectivity, which is both emotional and intellectual. Deleuze begins his study of Bergson with important methodological considerations. These distinguish within duration indivisible, virtual wholes 310

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qualitatively differentiated from divisible, extensional or quantitative wholes. The former differ in degree and the latter in kind. These virtual wholes are differentiated and the task of philosophy, following Plato’s discussion in the Phaedrus, is to find their joints. Were Bergson able to bring the discrete multiplicities within duration, then the virtual differences between the durative subject and extensive object would overcome dualism. Extending this to the élan vital would overcome the ontological distinction between the genes as bearers of information and the formal principles of organization that shape their chemistry into a specific individual. Joints are usually defined by opposing transcendentals, such as one and many or being and non-being. Deleuze’s Plato asked in each case “how, how many, when, and where . . . The combination of opposites tells us nothing; it forms a net so slack that everything slips through.”37 The dialectic can “do nothing but carve the real according to articulations that are purely verbal or formal.” This reign of vicious intellectualism is prominent in the two types of negation, limitation and opposition, but this difference is much too general and Bergson condemns both. He wants to think differences in kind independently of negation.38 But now there is a problem. Having defined duration subjectively, he must ask, do external things endure? Not really, for as a discrete, cinematographic multiplicity we have only durationless succession. But are these differences of kind within duration? No. Would it not be better to stay with dynamical durations and affect loaded durations that accommodate both? I cannot but feel that the élan vital is a verbal abstraction that passes over the real agent of evolution, the individual, and Bergson should have condemned it on his own grounds. The phenomenology of eros seems a firmer ground for the driving force by which life shapes itself than a postulated vitalism. We have tried to provide a common root and a common receptivity that can accommodate synchronic transformations by virtue of formal or nonlocal causality rather than stipulate a force expressing itself in species. But then I am on thin ice and better back off. We have been too hasty and have overlooked the next step in our objective deduction from affectivity to a source beyond being. Robin Durie and Emmanuel Levinas can show us this opening in a nonintentional consciousness that permits consciousness, and with it Plato’s instant, to slip through the apparatus of time constitution. Durie asks if “there is an otherwise, a hither side to the flow’s movement of dephasure, an otherwise than being which is shown in a The Originary

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temporality beyond reminiscence, in diachrony?”39 That other side is found in the previously cited passage in which Husserl speaks of a primal impression being consciously received prior to time constitution by absolute consciousness: “The primal impression [which] is the absolute beginning of this generation—the primal source from which all others are continuously generated . . . it is the primally generated, the ‘new,’ that which comes into existence foreign to consciousness, that which is received as opposed to that which is generated [i.e. the retentive and protentive aspect of the primal datum] through the spontaneity proper to consciousness’ origination of the primal datum. At one and the same time,” Durie continues, “there is a sensing which is sensed prior to the conditions of possibility,” the intention-forming work of absolute subjectivity, “for all experience funded on the flow.”40 This nonintentional consciousness was not lost to Levinas. The primal source, that from which all others are continually generated, this today without a yesterday or tomorrow—the primal impression in not impressed without consciousness. Does not the originary impression—“non-modified,” self-identical, but without retention—precede every protention, and thus its own possibility? . . . It does not grow; it is a primal creation. . . . Objectifying consciousness is surmounted in the consciousness of the present. . . . Through the notion of the living present, the notion of origin and of creation, a spontaneity in which activity and passivity are completely one, tend to become intelligible . . . then we see the non-intentionality of the primal impression fitted into the normal order.41 This primal source is given in a non-intentional duration. We have found in the living present a meaning of time beyond being that completes the “objective deduction” and opens a way into a Platonic account of this durational arché. 2. The Parmenides Scholium on Time (155E–160B) Robert Brumbaugh’s commentary on Plato’s Parmenides suggests a scheme that can wrest the “primal source” from time constitution by absolute consciousness and restore it to becoming. His insights enter around Plato’s instant (Par., 156D), which isn’t any kind of being and seems to be the arché of time; it is a cut “lurking between motion and rest . . . being in no time at all” (156E) and is produced by the 312

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intersection of time and eternity or, in a more fundamental sense, of chora and the Good.42 As constituted by divisible same and other, the root of the psyche in Timaeus (35A), it is the arché of space and time. This transcendent orientation is contrary to the tendency in complexity theory to deny the existence of any such central agent or paradigm in the emergence of self-organizing systems from chaos. Never mind. We have adopted an atomic model that points away from a transcendent agent to a social or pluralistic cosmos in which each epochal instant is attuned to the all by immanent and transcendent participation; its attunement is with a formal field that shapes and is sometimes directed by its elements. A butterfly in Kansas flutters in response to a breeze, but that same flutter can direct the course of weather in Chicago. There is no transcendent agent. You and I, and perhaps even butterflies, can transcend totalities; we can abandon life for the sake of a justice never seen or written about. We construe the epoch with these open possibilities. Until now we have talked of participation in rather formal terms and identified the Timaeus soul as its demiourgos. What Plato says about the instant enables us to take a deeper look at creation itself. Like the soul in the Timaeus whose roots in being and becoming are rendered neighbors by the transcendentals being, same, other, one, and many, this epochal instant is a nexus of transcendentals which makes a place for the birth of beings through the weaving together of being and becoming. How? By giving the participated being a place and a destiny through a transformation by the transcendentals: rest into motion, non-being into being, one into many, and conversely. Since, for example, motion and rest are not just kinematic designators but, as referring alternatively to becoming and being, could also account for the ingression (engignomenon, Par., 138E) of the form (rest) in becoming (motion) and thus account for specific forms (rest) of change (motion). Conversely, the changing creature can be the determinate, a principle of rest, that determines a determinable otherness (motion), and this change will infect a form. For example, it is thought that mitochondria that store and release energy within the cell’s Krebs cycle are parasites, but we could not be without them. Being and becoming are double genitives; like the cell and its mitochondria or God and the cosmos, they participate in one another. An instant is a primal source that could also mark a creature’s death (“giving up being”) or birth (“taking on being,” 156A). This complex structure “enables all the conditions” (157B) that can befall the epochal instant. Kenneth Sayre says these conditions are established The Originary

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in the second hypothesis (142B–151E) and include rest/motion, separating/combining, like/unlike, becoming larger/smaller/equal, limited/unlimited, same and different, and younger/older.43 Like the soul, the epochal instant (or epoch for short) is the demiourgos that gives time and, with it, being to its creatures. This granular structure makes possible the radical freedom of the creature. Its ecstasis, in responding erotically or agapestically to the propositions of the Good, can persuade the inherited necessities into giving birth to beauty and justice. Though it must cohere, possibility is not a function of a prior actuality pace Aristotle. Morphologically, the instant is out of time yet is not eternal; it is a nexus of contradictory properties, while on reflection it is seen from without as an event “that separates states” whose continuity it will effect. In these respects it is like Derrida’s différance, and like it also invites a treatment analogous to that given God in negative theology; but rather than being a play of differential forces, it can, through the transcendentals or “greatest kinds,” participate both immanent and transcendent possibility. Immanent? Yes, for we must widen possibility to include the potentials inherited in the deictic surplus, in memory, and assumed in hermeneutics. “The things of sense that come to be are forms of time” (Tim., 38E) and as such have a place, but the instant, that “queer thing” (physis atopos; Par., 156E) that gives place is placeless. How? It weaves together past and future states to which it gives space and time, and thus being and a new life, by iterating what has been, where every iteration is a same modified by the contexts of the nows. In Brumbaugh’s translation, Plato says: I think instant means this sort of thing, such that from it changes occur from something to another. Nor does it change from rest by still resting nor from moving by motion, but the instant contains this irrational nature which is a mean between rest and motion [“positioned somewhere between motion and rest,” Sayre], not existing in any time, and to this and from this the moving thing changes to rest and the resting thing to moving. (156D) Such an event, Brumbaugh notes, encloses in itself “the absurd nature of being and not being in the given duration of a state” so that states can be treated as sequential or durations, their transformations as instantaneous or falling outside the system of algebra.44 Insofar as they are sequential, they can be interpreted as a succession of 314

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befores, afters, motions, and the like, which, as entities, make it possible to apply formal systems to time. But since they contain “the absurd nature that is a mean between motion and rest,” Allen can take these to be durations in which change occurs. These boundary events marking before and after are not instantaneous slices of nature; they are minimal durations that have no temporal parts into which they can be divided. The instant is a temporal and spatialized unit of becoming and, granted content, the place (chora) from whence the hypodoche is diversified. If Plato is right and the soul partakes in and mingles being and becoming, ideality and materiality, then this should be true of the instant which is in the final analysis, the demiourgos of participation. As such it should overcome the mind/body dualism. A duration is spatial and temporal. Bergson’s normal duration is purely internal; it contains spatial, coexistent memories or, in general, extensive multiplicities, but in its pure form it is only temporal.45 Though Deleuze persuasively argues that duration is virtually a subject that on its creative edge is generating the extensional object so that these are differences in degree, not kind,46 it is difficult to see how these claims can be established. Space would be virtual. Instants are initially feelings, passive beyond passivity; modes of “how one finds oneself’ (Befindlichkeit) that determine the instant’s perspective on its world. Though Plato’s exaiphnes (“instant”) “usually conveys a sense of surprise,”47 its Latin roots may be more relevant, suggesting its “in-standing” (instere). From what? Nothing, that from which things can ex-sist (“stand out from,” exsistere). The instant is not in rest or motion, is neither a being nor a non-being, and so forth, yet weaves what has been with what can be to give what is to be immortal, where the stress is on futurity. Continuity thus becomes. The previous dialectic (155E–156D) prepared us to see that instants as boundary events, having “the absurd nature of being and not being,” iteratively issue in durative beings. Like Bergson’s point that separates itself from the line, events that bound it can be seen as in motion and rest, as changing and not changing, as static and sequential, but if the “boundary event’” were to change, then it would itself be such a sequence and its own durative being would be lost. In this sense, change in an instant is no time at all (156E). Brumbaugh suggests that this granular time would be a flickering out of one event and the flashing in of the next, but that it would be hard to find a suitable metaphysical interpretation. If it is a flicker, it flickers because chora lets beings be and flicker. Its flicker could be The Originary

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the analogue of Husserl’s “primal impression.” If so, it would be a way of understanding the participatory originary behind the appearances. William James said that in these minimal events, “being gives itself abruptly” in “finite, not infinitesimal, steps.”48 Elsewhere he spoke of each as a “specious present.” These are Whitehead’s unitary occasions of creative coming to be, of the Platonic passage from nonbeing to being. Morphologically, the proper parts are functionally at work in a holistic order; like the beginning, middle, and end of Aristotelian tragedy, these parts cannot be transposed or eliminated. The transcendent timelessness of such moments intimates eternity. Is this an effective interpretation? What exactly corresponds to this epoch in this proposed phenomenological revision? To get there we must take a look at some aspects of R. E. Allen’s treatment. He calls attention to the ambiguity occasioned by the failure of the manuscripts to supply accents to the text of the question with which Parmenides opens his dialectic.49 Parmenides could have asked if it is one or not one or whether the one is or the one is not; Allen settles for the existential meaning, “the one is . . .” as against the predicative meaning, “it is one.” This disjunction in found in the first hypothesis, and our scholium appears near the end of his version. All the hypotheses assume that there are ideas and that sensibles, by participating in them, “affect them in fundamental respects.” Allen accounts for this reciprocity by a dubious argument, namely, that “if there is an idea of Being, and sensibles partake of it, to be is to be in time.”50 In this way time and many features usually attributed to sensibles enter into the ideas. Perhaps, but I believe the issue is more complex. As for the scholium itself, Allen begins with Aristotle who took the instant alternatively to be the upper bound of “earlier than” or the lower bound of “later than” but not both, and this defines Aristotelian continuity, which, as a consequence, will have the order type of the rational numbers. His instant is said to be a specious instant that is not a specious present. Parmenides’ instant is specious in both senses—it is a duration in which change can occur. Things are neither in motion nor rest; they become, but becoming would then preclude continuity. “The result is a restatement, at a level of ultimate analysis, of a Zenoian paradox . . . that of the arrow.”51 Aristotle resolved it by arguing that “everything which occupies an equal space is at rest, and if that which is in locomotion is always occupying such a space at a moment, the flying arrow is therefore motionless. This is false, for time is not composed of indivisible moments nor 316

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is any other magnitude indivisible” (Phys., 239b 5–9). Allen then says that “by Parmenides’ account, the arrow is neither in motion or rest in the now in which change occurs.” If time is composed of temporally non-extended instants, then it is either a potential or actual infinite; Aristotle opts for the first, while according to Allen the Parmenides may have embraced the second. However, I am dubious about introducing the actual infinite before Duns Scotus or Cantor. Though true to Aristotle’s version of Zeno, Allen’s approach algebratizes time, the way it would be seen in reflection, but it has little to do with lived durations. It needlessly introduces motion, which would involve the stadium paradox and the mysteries of special relativity. The epoch as a Eudoxian cut, for all practical purposes analogous to Dedekinde’s cuts that define the various number classes, was first proposed by Brumbaugh and more fully articulated by Kenneth Sayre.52 We would want the reflexive time of before and after to have the order type of the rational numbers, but we could define an irrational number by a cut, which would be the upper limit of one sequence and the lower limit of its successors. The before and after would give us temporal intervals, which could be measured by one another, for example, by a heartbeat. An irrational number would then be defined by sequences of rational numbers converging on both sides. Just as an irrational number is not a part of the rational line, so the instant is not a part of time. To the frozen world of reflection and its protentions and retentions, time might seem a dense succession of instants like crows strung next to one another along a telephone line, but in any instant there is nothing to succeed and the successor is yet to be. The instant is ex nihilo. Only on reflection can the instant be said to be a cut. As in systems theory or Bohm’s implicate order, the instant is the gathering of an archival past, prehensively (Whitehead), perceptually (Leibniz), or participatorily (Plato), within the context of its own locus standi; and, because there is always an inassimilable surplus, it gathers within its own “personal” constraints. At the most basic level, this gathering must respect the holistic and participatory interpretations of quantum mechanics by Bohr, Wheeler, and Zeilinger, which entails an adjustment of the part to the whole that suggested to Pauli the anima mundi. Wheeler says that the holistic quantum phenomenon is an original act of creation in which the universe sees itself creating itself through us.53 Since this is not a panpsychism, I assume that at the quantum level the basic entanglement and coordination of phenomena entailed by such cosmic reflexivity is through God. The The Originary

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Spirit is at work in the archival hypodoche. Or so the Zoodochus Pege teaches me. In the case of the hypostasis, constraints of receptivity by this locus often appear under the rubric “personal identity” and include the lifestyles, forms, and paradigms that make the creature’s life uniquely its own. To borrow insights from both Jung and Bergson, eidoi are inherited gradients that canalize force fields. If I may strain the metaphor, these forces are wave fronts and their overtones which are inherited by and attuned to the rhythms of the instant. Varela has shown that emotional tonality playing through these instants is essential to the dynamics of the “flow” and is “a boundary and initial condition for neurodynamics.”54 For example, an intention to carry out a movement is coupled with a change in emotional tone that is enfolded in the sequence of moves. To make a long and complex account short, these and other time orders, neural and physical, are in turn enfolded in the over-arching and durative emotion, the identity condition Whitehead attributed to feeling.55 At his level, Bohm has a point. In this account, temporal successions are formed from atemporal, recurrent unities of change. If we eliminate content, every instant is the ubiquitous and recurrent arché of becoming: “This irrational nature is a mean between rest and motion, not existing at any time, and from this and to this the moving thing changes to rest and the resting thing to moving . . . and when it changes it is in no time at all and is neither moved nor at rest” (Par., 156E). For Husserl this primal source is that to which the absolute flow of consciousness assigns temporal meaning. But the primordial relation we have to the instant is that we are it, an affect-charged duration, from which on excitation there can emerge a conscious subject related to a content. As we know from Levinas’s description of the medial awareness in ennui and the il y a, they are inseparable. There would be a more or less undifferentiated awareness of something going on that, on the provocation of an alterity, could split into the awareness/content dualism. The instant can now resolve the subject/object dualism if we can find an adequate model for its unity that admits nontemporal change. What we require is a model of nontemporal change, and the classical formulations of the Trinity provide nontemporal successions among the persons, Paternity and Filiation, and Procession. These suggest that the phases we have been loading into Plato’s instant might be modeled on Augustine’s interpretation of the Trinity. A similar succession obtains in Leibniz’s relation between memory and apperception “that is pregnant with the future” (Monadology, 19–22); 318

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or again in Kant’s three-fold synthesis. Kant is less useful, for he moves from the past (reproduction) to its synthesis with present apprehension and then to recognition in a concept, and thus to the depresenced horizons of algebra (A98–110). Both Kant and Husserl approach time as spectators rather than as participants. Moreover, the present understood in terms of these continua takes its bearings and its aim from its interpretations of the past rather than the future. If, however, the past is iteratively or nonreproductively present and is in some measure only an archive, like a collection of texts to be interpreted, then it bears a nonlinear and noncausal, even anarchical, relation to the present. Freedom is time’s game. Though “every act of memory contains intentions of expectation whose fulfillment leads to the present,”56 neither protention nor expectation is, as David Wood demonstrates,57 “an adequate paradigm for consciousness of the future.” There is no provision for eros or desire, the instant’s conatus essendi or its evolutionary analogue, the élan vital. The emphases should be on hope, Havel’s “certainty that something makes sense, no matter how it turns out.” Though I have explained the transition from one occasion to the next by participation, Robin Durie proposes a solution in terms of an earlier text that gets right to the point of creativity. Plato says that “the move ahead is to touch both the now and after, to let go of the now and grasp the after, while coming to be between the two, namely, the after and the now” (Par., 152B).58 Was it with this in mind that Levinas wrote, “What begins to exist does not exist before having begun, and yet it is what does not exist that must through its beginning give birth to itself, come to itself, without coming from anywhere. Such is the paradoxical character of beginning which is constitutive of an instant . . . A beginning does not start out of the instant that precedes the beginning; its point of departure is contained in its point of arrival.”59 This is “the paradox of an absolute beginning [that] announces a sudden vulnerability to a dimension incommensurable with that of temporal continuity.”60 The after, in Plato’s idiom, is the possibility grasped in “the coming to be” between the now and the future instant. Letting go of the now marks time as perpetually perishing (Locke). The demiourgos is the lion who crosses the desert and wipes out his tracks with his tail. The instant, the primary meaning of chora, is nothing without something being formed; otherwise it is purely formal, a conjugation of transcendentals that effect its relational ties. In this formal sense, it is nothing, placeless; but granted content, this incarnate locus is the The Originary

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place, chora, which, like a catalyst template or enzyme, puts the elements in their proper places, that is, makes sense of its inherited text. The instant may be an absolute beginning, but it is given now with this archive, not as its efficient cause, but with sensibility as its resource. Levinas notes that Malebranche understood that “the instant in which existence is both born and dies is followed by the instant in which existence is born, which inherits its legacy.”61 It receptively inherits in its receptive pole an apeiron plenthos, an indeterminate multiplicity, with the creative promise that Prigogine and others have shown us that is latent in chaos. When mentality is present in the occasion, the panpsychical model becomes feasible and then it inherits within a personal style and must find itself by sifting through and cutting away the anarchy of givenness, which is redacted or supplemented by transcending possibility. Then the instant is besouled and is the cosmos “writ small”; it is the demiourgos of participation, holding within sensibility “the ambiguity of constitution whereby the noema conditions and shelters the noesis that constitutes it.”62 It too will have its reflexive moment, like Bergson’s point that separates itself from the line it then surveys. Reflection, implicit in all but the most primitive affective forms, makes the cut. It “lets go the now and grasps the after” as the creature “comes to be between the two” (152B). Webb suggests that this separation and return binds the ego irremissibly to itself and its burden of guilt;63 but when E. coli reads its DNA prior to mitosis in order to discover and repair any damage, or when I return to what I just wrote in order to correct mistakes, is this tie negative? In the same way, guilt is a burr in my saddle blanket or a spur to my backside. In Levinas’s case, the tie can be broken by Alterity. If Whitehead is correct and there is a becoming of continuity, at the granular level, what was past is not and lives only within the present as the parameter to which the self-forming duration must conform. But this is less paradoxical that it might seem if the occasion receives the past as information to be interpreted, where the linkage is by a text analogue and not causality. Sometime parameters on interpretation are so narrow that each instant seems an iteration of the predecessor, and then again that is room for the greatest variety. Plato lends himself to an information-processing account of participation, for the basic elements of his cosmology are “letters” (stocheia; Tim., 48C), and this suggests an information-processing model for participation. Anton Zeilinger and his associates at the University of Vienna have recently proposed new foundations for quantum physics 320

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on the “allegory” that a quantum system is a carrier of information in a three-dimensional information space, much closer to our idea of reality than the Hilbert space of the Schrödinger equations.64 This squares with Whitehead’s effort to give a Euclidian interpretation of general relativity. Heidegger sought a temporal understanding of Being in the archaic Greek eon, but Plato had already discovered in the instant the creative event that gives being and time. The instant is a determination of the matrix and is both and neither subjective nor objective, actual nor potential, internal nor external, psychical nor physical. The matrix, appearing in this text under such names as il y a, hypodoche/chora, the es of es gibt, the open, and the like, is that in which “activity and passivity are completely one.”65 The instant can incorporate most of the features of Marion’s marvelous extensions of phenomenology by his analytic of the gifted and given but without his restriction to immanent order and the suspicion of virtuality that haunts his argument. We can also accommodate cosmology, and this is, I think, no small gain. To touch base with Marion, we agree that the given noncausally arises from givenness, which I associate with the dynamics of the receptacle, through the transformations of the gifted. The red of a physical and biological transaction is the red of a Rothko painting. The receiver of the gift or given, the gifted, exists in response to the gift’s call from “the immemorial past,” a future to which responses are directed, or the “present that summons the gifted at each instant.”66 This call and response are internal to the instant, and its ecstasies arise in their play. The various time schemes occur when, qua hypostasis, it doubles back on itself to receive its gifts as “just past” or “about to come.”67 3. Beyond Being and Time? We have assumed the “iterative emergence” of the epochal hypostasis, which can be a persona/prosopon through vulnerability to alterity, and have shown how time and being are given by the instant. We know the rustle and even terror in the unquiet darkness, yet we too, like Saul, know ourselves to be called: “Here am I” (1 Sam. 3:1–9). In our discussion of the instant, we emphasized its responsiveness to what was given through the givenness of the past, and perhaps “call/response” are better phenomenological primitives than noesis/ noema, subject/object, perceiver/perceived, and the like. Their The Originary

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medial form eliminates metaphysical determinates, such as agent and patient, substance and object, etc. Usually the call is to pick up and complete unfinished business, but in certain cases, like Samuel’s, it proposes a new future. Though this call or solicitation and response seem to have a temporal order, they are within the now, which is out of time. Time is the stuff of differences. Marion has observed that Heidegger first gave its givenness an ontological interpretation and then turned to the Ereignis; Levinas collapsed difference into a relation with the Other within a temporal horizon, which presupposes “that the Saying differs from the said according to a lapse of time”; while Derrida’s différance differs and so “undoes self-identity and selfequality” and defers self-presence: “from the outset [this] compromises the metaphysical promise of a substance without reserve as well as the phenomenological goal of a presence that shows itself without remainder.”68 Difference differs by its withdrawal, its lapse, or delay, but should this delay be thought temporally? Marion has previously argued a call and its response are unitary, neither being without the other, and this is not to be defined temporally but rather “provokes difference on the basis of itself alone, before time.”69 Some are moved toward the Word made flesh. In his discussion of the Eucharist, Marion notices that the Word “allows the text to pass to its referent, recognized as the nontextual Word of the words . . . at the point where [Christ intervenes and] proffers the unspeakable speech, absolutely filial to the Father ‘Taking bread, he gave thanks’” (Luke 24:30).70 Thus the Word terminates a potentially infinite sequence in which each signified would become in turn a signifier, etc. But any Other foreshadows what we see in Christ—as the grandmother of Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” saw Christ in the Misfit’s face just before he killed her. Revelation is an “absolute experience” in which the expressed coincides with the one who expresses in “a privileged manifestation of the Other,” the manifestation of a face over and above form . . . The face is a living presence; it is expression.”71 This also pertains to any other who, as parent or teacher, gives me the word, is Other, and who, as prosopon, is the transcendent condition of objectivity. Does this—the Good’s Love we see through those whose love talks us into having a world—confer truth and existential import to the virtualities of the tales we tell ourselves? If so, we are moved, not from or by Being, but by the Good toward a meaning of time that may defy presence. The previous accounts of time, while permitting descriptions of phenomena in which presence may play no appreciable role, are temporal modes 322

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rooted in a past that determines the present. The Eucharistic temporalization of the day by its past, “Do this in memory of me” (Luke 22:17), refers to an even more essential temporalization by the future, “until he comes in glory” (1 Cor. 11:26). The Eucharist anticipates, Marion says, what we will see, will be, will love . . . Presence must be received as the present, namely as the gift that is governed by the memorial and epektasis [temporalization by the future]. Each instant of the present must befall us as a present. This applies to the present time (gift given) as to manna: one must gather it each day without ever being able to store it up or amass it . . . the manna of time thus becomes daily for us . . . The daily character of the bread constitutes it as a definitely provisory gift, always repeated and taken up again; it insures against any taking possession of the present . . . The Eucharistic presence comes to us at each instant as the gift of that very instant, and in it, of the body of the Christ in whom one must be incorporated . . . the consecrated Bread and Wine seem to borrow their indisputable permanence from a permanent present (according to the model of the here and now) because our charity does not have enough lucidity to deconstruct this subsisting present into a present gift . . .72 Marion’s critique of Heidegger’s so-called “ordinary concept of time” rests on his interpretation of the present “on the basis of the memorial that gives a pledge and the eschatological call that provokes its accomplishment . . . the importance of the memorial, which renders present time always anterior to itself, depends on the irrepressible eschatological epektasis; we may say that ‘temporalization by the future determines all’ . . .”73 Liturgies are mostly repetitions of sacred events in which original returns to abide in the unfolding present. They can begin, for example, with the promise to Israel and, through the bread and wine of the Eucharist, have an eschatological focus in Love. Experience is song, a medial happening, but the good is as likely to appear in Dionysian modes as Other. But suppose that Christ’s words of consecration, “Take this bread . . .” are an epiclesis, a call to distribute, and not the mumbojumbo of transformation. What is consecrated is the community of the faithful by the “presence of the spirit.” They are the true altar and their flesh is the temple: “You sustain God in you, the altar in you, Christ in you, and holiness in you” (Ignatius of Antioch). The The Originary

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community’s representative, not Christ’s, celebrates the Eucharist. The thing itself, you and I, are deictic noemata that, if Marion is right, makes this experience of the Good real, not virtual. Even at the physical level, what comes down to us from the past can be modified by a Good that has never been present. In our historic religions he is present in his traces he left in memory, admittedly often difficult to discern as the war-like acts of the godly. It is also that memory in which instants are coordinated to participate in Wheeler’s and Zeilinger’s creative relations. Whitehead spoke of this as the consequent nature of God that is derived from becoming and plays back upon it through his evaluation of its relevance. This formation of a unified past as a relevant potential, for the future is “the transmutation of temporal actuality [as “a unison of immediacy” with its joys, sorrows, and failures] into an ever-present fact.”74 This is a gift of the God beyond being to time and being. The matrix enters into the center of the Trinity (see chapter 16, section 2).

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13

Otherwise than Metaphor

Before every human being comes a retinue of angels, announcing, “Make way for the Holy One, Blessed be He.” Hasidic Text

1. Blanchot: Darkness and Light Thanks to the gifts of the instant that is beyond beings, beings can enter into the rubrics of metaphor, hermeneutics, and participation, all of which share a reflexive structure. In perception, the paradigm case of participation, a form is engendered when the “subject” crosses over and interprets what is actively received. This resembles both the crossings of hermeneutics and metaphor.1 We must now go beyond these in approaching the Good, though the beyond is always under an ontological pall. As a preliminary, saying offers the prospect of a way beyond. Though Heidegger neglects the ethical priority of the other who addresses me for the sake of a sort of third-person disclosure, he extends the hermeneutical “as” to attributive predication; “our fundamental analysis of being, and of course in connection with the is (which as a copula gives “expression” to the addressing of something as something).”2 Is that “is” apophantic? No, if we begin with the ethical situation in which, as John Llewelyn says, Levinas “dephenomenalizes the ‘as’ in a manner that lets the manner of being of propositional 325

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truth and proto-primordial aletheia be as manners of being of the veracity of exposition to another in the face to face.”3 That veracity is the trace of the Good implicit always already in saying (dire). Granted saying’s ethical priority and the beauty of the other who addresses me, it requires no great leap to also attribute fecundity to this between. Scott Buchanan somewhere observed that the storyteller’s “once upon a time” is like the mathematician’s “let us assume that . . .” or Keats’s “charmed magic casements, opening on the foam of perilous seas, in fairy lands . . .,” for each is an invitation to venture forth to the heights of romance. Poetry and mathematics are each an epoché, a suspension of the natural standpoint and an invitation to enter new horizons. Both can follow the ways of dialectic. Mathematics can begin with collections of ones and go up to the one itself and then downwards to generate number through cuts in the infinite dyad (Parmenides). Or it can go from dialectical puzzles concerning being, one and the many, being, same and other, or being, rest and motion, to the dialectic of these “greatest kinds” in the Sophist and then, in the Timaeus’s downward or deictic move, to a mathematical physics. So too the poet can with Dante take us to a vision of the Trinity or to the shape of greed. “The structures of mathematics and the propositions about them are ways for the imagination to travel and wings . . . to take you where you want to go.” These ways are rooted in metaphor’s peculiar “expansiveness,” a restless hunger for more characterized by the play of the “greatest kinds.”4 These establish what we may call hypodochic horizons that make possible the virtual structures and affirmations of poetry and mathematics. Both belong to the between and can articulate what is below and what is above; but neither metaphor nor any other sort of structure will take us to the Good beyond being. The way lies not in what is said but in the hypodoche the telling of the tale opens for desert peoples, Wanderers restlessly seeking God. Even in the labyrinth, besides death that sits at the center, there may be traces of a way beyond. Would it be possible to prescind the receptacle in which the tale occurs from structural complexity? In a series of remarkable literary studies written under the spell of the late Heidegger and in the neighborhood of Levinas, Maurice Blanchot says that a tale or narrative both negates the actual existence of things named, and thus of the truth value of those assertions implicit in predication, and depersonalizes and neuters the narrator. Though this neglects Bildung, the formation undergone through literary paradigms, Blanchot’s minimalist 326

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assumptions may point to the Good. His variant on the hypodochic manifold, the “space of literature,” permits a Levinasian deduction of literature’s hypodochic horizons that can neither be said nor brought within phenomenology. The first myths were cosmogonic and usually begin with the founding acts of the gods. Divinity first appears in narrative, as in the Bible’s “In the beginning . . .” or the Enuma Elish’s “When from on high. . . .” Derrida somewhere said that, like “categories,” narrative originates in juridical discourse in response to someone’s demand that the truth be told about what has taken place. Maybe, but what if it achieves its focus by a metaphor or symbol that opens the passage beyond the truth values of definite description into a virtual world where there is the promise of an ontophany, Eliade’s plenary experience of oneself as bearing the marks of being, that is, as effective, durative, and powerful? This eschatological promise seems ever delayed in Derrida and Blanchard. The latter sees that its narrator is no longer the first-person observer but, in the more general case of literature, is neither in the text nor beyond it, is neither male nor female and, moreover, is neither subjective nor objective but is neuter. French does not distinguish il from “it” or “he.” This may be to its advantage, since the neuter is “not a third something in opposition to the two others . . . but something that occurs in every gender; the non-general, the nongeneric, like the non-particular. It rejects determination in every category of the object as well as the subject.”5 Let me summarize Blanchot’s findings: (1) The neuter speaks from and preserves a distance “without mediation or community” and even experiences the infinite distancing of distance. (2) Neuter speech neither conceals nor reveals. “It does not signify in the same way the visible/invisible signifies, but opens another power of language” that neither illuminates nor darkens. “It does not signify in the optical manner” and “remains outside the light-shadow reference that seems to be the ultimate reference of all knowledge and communication, to the point that it makes us forget that it has only the value of a venerable . . . inveterate metaphor.” (3) It suspends the attributive power of language. “All language begins by articulating, and in articulating it affirms. But it could be that telling (or writing) is drawing language into a possibility of saying that would say without saying being and still without denying it either. Or more clearly—too clearly—that it is establishing the center of speech elsewhere, where speaking is not a matter of affirming being or needing negation in order to suspend the Otherwise than Metaphor

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work of being.”6 Metaphors can unconceal the moral order and disclose or bring into clearer focus the point toward which Desire draws us; but self-referential texts are metaphors about the world or the nature of textuality. In connection with Plato’s eschatological myth that concludes the Gorgias, he says that “a tale is not the narration of an event, but the event itself, the approach to the event, the place where the event is made to happen—an event that is yet to come and through whose power of attraction the tale may hope to come into being too . . . The tale is a movement toward a point . . . unknown, obscure, foreign, [and] such that apart from this movement it does not seem to have any prior existence; and yet it is so imperious that the tale derives its power of attraction only from the point and cannot even ‘begin’ before reaching it.” The proclamation of the Word or the Eucharistic liturgy is not the narration of an event, but the event itself. We resonate in unison with the story in a time before time, the time of paradigms and archetypes, as it unfolds towards its point, and go with it to be touched by its stratified temporality vulnerable to the fate of its characters into what may be an unfathomable mystery touching the center of life. Carl Jung was not altogether wrong when he said that Plato’s paradigms, and by extension his own archetypes and the tales we tell, are both fields and psychic gradients, vectors that shape and gather us into the interpretative drama of self and world from what is implicit in implicate order. Michael Conforti and his associates at the Assisi Institute show that what would otherwise be an immanent development in complexity theory admits of modification by archetypal fields. Even without structural modification, roles play themselves out in various guises. The shop girl who sees herself as Cinderella, whose prototype is in turn Mary, dreams of an annunciation that will release her from her mean existence. The gambler tries another hand, hoping that like Paul on the way to Damascus Grace too will overcome him. Myths, especially those having to do with rites of passage, have the power to set truth free to be lived and ordered, not just to knowing, but for being-in-the-world and on the way beyond it. Where is that? We will have to wait, and if we do not find out, no matter. It is quite enough to travel within the opalescence that lights the way. These vestiges of transcendence are lacking in Blanchot’s “space.” Who addresses us? The narrative “he,” denied existence and speaking from nowhere “dismisses all subjects, just as it is removed from every transitive action and every objective possibility.”7 In literature we are said to experience a placeless world where nothing really 328

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happens. As Levinas notes in a similar context, there is “a stoppage of time” which, like a statue, “is an instant that endures without a future”; left with a present that has lost its evanescence, “it will never have completed its task as a present, as though reality withdrew from its own reality and left it powerless.”8 In her introductory remarks to Blanchot’s The Space of Literature, Ann Smock suggests that he withdraws place (chora) from the space (hypodoche) of literature, which is like a desert or place of exile that one can enter but not leave.9 If without place, then it is also without its gift of being—and without time’s present. To write, Blanchot says, “is to surrender to the fascination of time’s absence. Time’s absence is not a purely negative mode. It is the time where nothing begins, where initiative is not possible, where, before the affirmation, there is already a return of the affirmation. Rather than being a purely negative mode, it is, on the contrary, a time without negation, without decision, where here is nowhere as well, and each thing withdraws into its image [because, being intertextual, reference can only be to images] while the ‘I’ that we are recognizes itself sinking into the neutrality of a featureless third person.”10 Is this Yeats’s “agony of flame that cannot burn a sleeve”? Narrative structure is an analagon for life lived in terms of virtual frameworks, the way the world is for Husserl’s intentionality, for the Hegelian self on the way to the absolute, for Levinasian “atheism” and its “totalities” and, to our immediate purposes, the experience thought will have as it attempts to pass beyond beings and Being to the Good, the cause of being and truth. The space that Blanchot discerned in literature is a typic of a closure to alterity that contains a trace of the beyond. Every gambler knows how easy it is to enter this virtual world, a strange inversion of Grace, which is like the dream in which we dream that we are not dreaming and is the state in which we apprehend chora (Tim., 52B), but how to escape is always a problem. One hopes for the eruption of Alterity. As with any obsession, or even a routine or customary orientation, focus is limited. But alterity sometimes has to break into autistic closure. Timaeus will show that the condition for a break-in will not be provided by placeless philosophers (19E), by Socrates’ suggestions that military operations must replace verbal negotiations (19D), or by Marxian call to revolution; it will occur when Timaeus’s receptacle gives chora for the reception of the other in an Annunciation. In my own communion, saying in the context of liturgical narrative, as the reading of a sacred text or the priest’s consecration of the host, prepares one to participate in Otherwise than Metaphor

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the opalescent reception of the gift of the “real presence.” Only through some such cultic analogue of these alterities relative to the closure in question but absolute in that they occur within the transcultural supplements, will there be an eruption of the Good beyond being. Such eruptions are always corrigible, always founded on faith, hope, and love. The displacement of the Good is the open-ended way of the desert or the exile. The epoché is a displacement of the real for the sake of the virtual. The effects of the displacement can be felt in Husserl’s phenomenological reduction where the “I can” of the verificatory synthesis continues to obtain even in a virtual world, a world where the “I can . . .” forces no issue.11 What appears in “passive” synthesis is reduced to states of the monadic ego. Levinas says that Blanchot sees beyond this “I can,” beyond the limit of human possibility, into the solitude of the “desolate world of impossibilities incapable of constituting themselves as a world.”12 True enough, but this is the world of the literary epoché, which releases a virtual world rooted in a hypodoche without chora. Will analogous conditions to literature’s curious bracketing of Being obtain for the middle voice which is also beyond being, beyond affirmation and negation? Yes, for Being is cut loose and left to flounder, but no, because the middle voice is the voice of existence itself. In listening to or telling tales are we not taken up into a medial process, a reduction beyond affirming or denying, in which the story develops possibilities of feeling or being, even thinking, within a framework or lifestyle? These frameworks or forms of life are, as we learned from Plato and Taylor, commitments to and expression of an ultimate concern. Blanchot seems to have rejected the suggestion that the Good could be the “center of gravity” of this saying; for like Husserl, he denied the very possibility of adequacy, of fulfillment, and transformed movement toward this center into an infinite task. Levinas noted that Derrida also places the “idea in the Kantian sense” in the “very heart of intuition itself” so that nothing but signs signifying signs are produced which “endlessly postpones the contemporaneousness of the signified with a presence. The latter, always pointed toward, always escapes prehension . . . thus releasing a system of signs, of a language that no meaning guides.” Levinas attributes this guiding meaning to saying that opens up a passage to a transcendent Other, where the saying is never simultaneous or congruent with a said and, like Derrida or Blanchot, avoids fulfilled presence. But, and this is the point, the said diachronically thematizes the saying, its “guiding meaning.”13 Why no dissemination? Because 330

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the other addressed is beyond being and is not a sign. Moreover, the affective experience of the sacred continues alongside the said as its control that is never left behind; furthermore, this felt surplus is never nominalized and never a candidate for the literary epoché. Saying is its vehicle and remains as a surplus alongside the said, for there is more to be said. That surplus beyond the ontic implications of the said carries much of the weight of prayer. Yet there is a danger, for without the focus of a being, are we delivering wind-eggs? These chorastic horizons, like those of Pentheus in Euripides’ Bacchae, can be destructive unless we experience an opalescence in a chiasmus with the Good. With this there can and should be a reversal, as with the escaped prisoner from Plato’s cave who sees the sun and returns to the task of freeing others. The center or goal toward which Blanchot’s desert dwellers move cannot be shown because there is no light by which it can be seen, whether it be that of Being or the Good. Blanchot turns from light, which since Plato has been associated with knowing, to darkness; in this darkness all that “might reveal itself is swallowed up.”14 The more the world is affirmed as the future and broad daylight of truth, where everything will have value, bear meaning, where the whole will be achieved under the mastery of man and for his use, the more it matters that art must descend toward that point that nothing has meaning yet, the more it matters that art maintain the movement, the insecurity and grief of that which escapes everything we propose, everything that we have acquired, everything we are, all that is disclosed on earth and in heaven, returns to insignificance, and where what approaches is the nonserious and the nontrue, as if whence sprang the source of all authenticity.15 As Levinas notes when he opens a theme in Blanchot we will hear again in Derrida’s works on chora, this unconcealment is the very opposite of Heidegger’s; “the work uncovers, in an uncovering that is not truth, a darkness . . . As in a desert, one can find no place to reside. It is an irreducible relation to the earth; a sojourn devoid of place.” Rather than elucidating the world, “art exposes the desolate, lightless substratum underlying it.”16 As long as we understand light within the hermeneutical parameters of Being rather than the Good, it will reveal a “pagan rootedness that characterizes all Heidegger’s mention of things.” Levinas then contrasts Blanchot’s lightless space as a vulnerability that opens us to Alterity with the lighted spatiality of Otherwise than Metaphor

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Heidegger’s “ring dance” of the fourfold, a reciprocally mirroring dance of mortals, earth, sky, and gods from which “we let the thing be present in its thinging from out of the worlding world.”17 In “Building Dwelling Thinking,” Heidegger had said in reference to the Rhine bridge: To be sure, the bridge is a thing of its own kind; for it gathers the fourfold in such a way that it allows a site for it. But only something that is in itself a location can make space for a site. The location is not already there before the bridge is. Before the bridge stands, there are of course many spots along the river, which could be occupied by something. One of them proves to be a location and does so because of the bridge . . . a location comes into existence because of the bridge. The bridge is a thing; it gathers the fourfold, but in such a way that it allows a site for the fourfold.18 Thinking and building (poiesis) meet in dwelling; thought brings into the slot what had been formed to be transformed by poetry. Dwelling is freshly thinking on what is not yet formed in this place and is, according to Heidegger, the basic character of being, corresponding to which mortals are.19 Dwelling brings the “presence of the fourfold, the earth, sky, mortals, and gods, into things.” We pass in and out of dwelling, a location, from which “spaces receive their being.” Building, which is both conserving and creative (poiesis), founds and joins spaces in man’s dwellings.20 Is dwelling always in the light, never in darkness or the opalescence of the Good? The mystics say God dwells in darkness (SM DN, 998a) beyond the light of his vestibule. Levinas concludes his first “On Blanchot” essay with the observation that this light reveals the indissoluble fourfoldness in the place and in the object [and] assures an absoluteness of perception, of the place in which the world and geometrical space itself, and the sky and the earth as determinates of space, are situated. That primacy, that absoluteness of the landscape in which the relation to man is not separate from the other three relations, certainly flatters our taste as privileged persons and as Europeans. But it implies asserting the impossibility of human wretchedness. The idealism of the haughty! Can we be sure that perceptions are transcended only by mathematical abstractions—and fallaciously so, since abstractions spring from a place, and no place can be harbored 332

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in a geometrical space? Was not perception . . . abandoned as a system of reference in the revelation of the Invisible God which “no sky can contain”? The God of justice, of the desert, and of men. . . . Does not the poet before the “eternal streaming of the outside” hear the voices that call away from the Heideggerian world?21 Though they understand it differently, the eschatological hope of Muslim, Christian, and Jew is fueled by the messianic focus of the Old Testament and this can be understood Platonically, also a shared legacy. To mix metaphors from Levinas and Blanchot, the liturgy is a narrative leading us to a world in which we are vulnerable (“saying,” dire) in a “passivity beyond passivity,” to an Alterity beyond the text that is, nevertheless, the tale’s “center of gravity.” This alterity, though not a being, can give ontological weight to the said and make possible its affirmations and negations. “The tale is a movement toward a point, a point which is unknown, foreign, obscure, but such that apart from this movement it does not seem to have any real prior existence, and yet is so imperious that the tale derives its power of attraction from this point, so that it cannot even begin before reaching it—and yet only the tale and the unpredictable movement of the tale create the space where the point becomes real, powerful, and alluring.”22 The sacred tale is such a region (receptacle) and can be the truth about beings only if it grants places (chora) accessible to others through the focus of the Good, where this focus and regioning are beyond being. Athens was such a place or frame for Socrates (Crito) and the focus was through Apollo’s oracle (Apology). 2. Beyond the Wasteland In the desert of his days, teach the free man how to praise. W. H. Auden

The hypodochic manifold Blanchot finds in tales is more accessible in music. We are as if oscillating between our somatic chora and the music as together we are drawn into an always-gathering opalescence that never gives being its place. Music could well be Blanchot’s “lightless substratum” beyond being’s Parmenidian (if not Heideggerian) truth and falsity, attribution, and the like—were it not for its glistening. Scott Buchanan noted that literature is subject to certain ultimate categories, Plato’s greatest kinds (Sop., 254D–257A), which define the soul as a musical measure. These are Otherwise than Metaphor

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elements of a universal grammar defining participatory involvement in the world. In this musical world, which one can easily enter but which has its own closure from where there is no ready egress, structural elements, like the elements that diversify the receptacle, are posited, transformed, set aside, taken up again in new contexts, and finally allowed to play themselves out in a becoming that never becomes anything. Music is a saying in which nothing is said; a world is in the making that is never a world somewhere between chora and the Good. Music can direct us to a place where truth can happen, as in the masses of Bach, Beethoven, Bruckner, and, even more interestingly, in those of such non-Christians as Bernstein, Fauré, or Berlioz; but pure music is in the end placeless, the place of pilgrimage and not consummation. The power of music to draw us into opalescent spaces, ethereal or demonic, was perhaps behind Plato’s concern with musical modes in Republic III. Nietzsche discovered in Wagner’s music the cheapest metaphysics. Music entrains us in a vulnerability to all sorts of solicitations, patriotic, kinesthetic, erotic, religious, and the like. As Susan Langer discovered years ago, music is the morphology of feeling, or is it the deictic morphology of saying’s song without words that awaits a word? More than any other vehicle, music promises to take us to the threshold of the Good beyond being. This musical motif should be kept in mind as I show how liturgical saying opens us to the Good beyond being. Unless we can justify these experiences of the transcendent, this will have been a bloody waste of time. Though I am suspicious of mystical practice, hesycharm hesych, especially the breathing exercises with its affinities to Zen, is not unattractive. Palomas insisted that it was a fully incarnate experience. It too takes us to the threshold of uncreated light. If the essence of Dasein is existence,23 the essence of the hypostasis is dwelling. The analytic of dwelling has revealed that the hypostasis arises from and is sustained by the place (chora) in and from which it dwells. The boundaries between chora and the hypodoche are quite permeable. Plato says that the necessities of these dynamical conditions (Tim., 47E), which he associated with elemental earth, air, fire, and water (49A–B), are subject to persuasion by “mind to bring the greater part of created things to perfection” (48A). In the language we have been cultivating, vulnerability is receptivity to alterity, to everyday persuasions and, in a more perfect form, to those of the Good and Beautiful Other. We have seen that the hypostasis is always already in relation with others through the hypodoche/chora 334

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nexus. I will interpret Levinas’s saying (dire) to accommodate both everyday and more perfect and prior modes of being with others. The between is the site of the imagination and thus the matrix from which the phenomenal world emerges. In general, a between is, like the erotic metaxu in the Symposium or the fecund Timaeus gap between Being and Becoming, the site of such phenomena as birthing, copulating, possession by the sacred, thinking, using a language, becoming, playing, imagining, perceiving, and the like, which are by ancient lineage entitled to be considered, if no longer expressed, in the middle voice of process. It is also the site of dwelling which is, Levinas says, “the very mode of maintaining oneself, not as the famous serpent [uroboros] grasping itself by biting its tail, but as the body, on the earth exterior to itself, holds itself up and can.”24 In many traditions, the sky, Uranus or Ap’su, separates off from the mother, Gaea or Ti’amat, so that creatures are autochthonic offspring of a fecund matrix. Does the creature really hold itself up? Is its “I can” a declaration of empowering possibilities? In our uranian tradition, Abraham and his progeny are desert dwellers and our matrix is barren, a wasteland or desert where one seeks God in the place where He chose for his revelations. No doubt the creature holds itself up, but its “I can” is bleak. We propose to think metaphor as bounded by a fecund and intricately ordered chora from which the creature can stand upright, and the Good, which can also transform barren places into gardens. We have yet to arrive at the land, the open, of YHWH’s promise. Isn’t it better in this “destitute age” to dwell on the positivities, the radiance, splendor, yearning, and flights of love that it gives through the Good than to dwell in sterile shadows? Metaphor can lead to a site upon which to build, think, and dwell within the medial modalities of this middle world.25 Dwell? Metaphor begins not with the copula and its constative trappings but with building or structuring, which facilitates solicitations, i.e., propositions, and makes a place for creation in a medial, fecund dwelling. Some English and German roots of the verb “to be” mean “to dwell.” To say “I am,” Ich bin, is to say “I dwell.” Metaphor’s “is” invites terms to cross over and dwell with one another. Dwelling is, of course, associated with place, chora, which refers primarily to a place set aside for human dwelling, first for a town (such as Chora on Chios), and then a region, such as the Mediterranean basin, and as such is an assemblage that brackets out what is foreign, threatening, or undesirable with walls, a code of laws, a language, a fleet, or an army. Chora is also the place outside Otherwise than Metaphor

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the walls that enjoys this protection. With chora, elemental nature (the dynamical hypodoche) has been bracketed and a region domesticated in which there is a promise of a satisfying life. That chora is a necessary condition for the highest human good and is often thematic in classical oratory, as in Pericles’ Funeral Oration, Plato’s Menexenus, or Aelius Aristide’s Panatheaic discourse. The right place and, as Saint Paul might add, right time (kairos) are fortuitous, not always predicable, gifts. Chora, which can be good or bad, presupposes a social setting, a neighborhood, in which ethical rather than polemical relations should dominate. This is a linguistic account of presencing on a generalized model of “saying.” Heidegger begins his profound approach to saying by noting that “design” brings out the unity in the being of language: The name demands that we bring out the proper character of the being of language with greater clarity. The “sign” in design is related to secare, to cut—as in saw, sector, and segment. To design is to cut a trace. Most of us know the word “sign” only in its debased meaning—lines on a surface. But we make a design also when we cut a furrow into the soil to open it to seed and growth. The design is the whole of the traits of that drawing, which structures and prevails throughout the open, unlocked freedom of language, the structure of a show in which are joined the speakers and their speaking: what is spoken and what of it is unspoken in all that is given in the speaking . . . The essential being of language is saying as showing . . . All signs arise from a showing within whose realm and for whose purpose they can be signs . . . Speaking [saying] is listening to language before we speak.26 This is an advance on Heidegger’s earlier identification of significance with the reference structure of projects, but this turn to language misses the ethical dimension subtending speaking, a “pre-original” saying, which does not fall within the scope of the ontological presuppositions that always already govern the said; it binds me to another and belongs to an absolute past that places me, in Levinas’s idiom, in the accusative case. The receptacle sometimes, not always, grants situations, chorastic neighborhoods in responding creatively to context-forming intentions. These forms of togetherness or neighborhoods are also ripe for conflicts, for the war of all against all. Levinas is cognizant of this possibility; his matrix, the il y a, is anything but benign. It is both beyond and the condition for such distinctions as subject and object, 336

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inner and outer, and the like, which may be apprehended in forms of “bastard reasoning” (Tim., 49A) such as fatigue, insomnia, anxiety, or ennui; the il y a is that from which the hypostasis or self appears and introduces, by its interiority, such differences and distinctions. Cognate with the hypostasis is dwelling—a modality of chora from which one can egress and return. Levinas’s il y a is more or less equivalent to Plato’s receptacle and dwelling with chora, place. “Place” is prior to what Heidegger describes as Dasein’s disseverance, which allows one to intend things close at hand or to dismiss them, and thus more primary than understanding and its intentional fore-structure; it is also more somatic or chthonic and orienting, like that attunement of Heidegger’s Befindlichkeit. To it belong the emotional vectors, such as joy or anxiety, which express the orienting powers of places. So much of what resonates in metaphor is its gift. These states of mind are to Dasein what receptacle is to world, microcosm, or macrocosm. The said or word appears in its slot (chora) to gather (logos) us into language (legein), which, in its turn, lays out and protects those things that appear through the vectors of its directional and directing feelings, the primordial possibilities for being in or, more accurately, dwelling in a world. Language protects? Yes; lost and destroyed places, one’s place in the world, one’s place before others and the gods. But let Rilke speak: But because life here compels us, and because everything here Seems to need us, all this fleetingness That strangely entreats us. Us, the most fleeting. Once for each thing only once. Once, and no more. And we, too, Only once. Never again. But to have been Once, even though only once: This having been earthly seems lasting, beyond repeal . . . The traveler doesn’t bring from the mountain slope Into the valley some handful of sod, around which all stand mute, But a word he had gained, a pure word, the yellow and blue Gentian. What if we are here just for saying: house, bridge, fountain, gate, jug, fruit tree, window, at most, column, tower . . . but for saying, understand, oh for such saying as the things themselves never hoped so intensely to be. Isn’t this the sly purpose of the taciturn earth, then it urge lover on: that in their passion each single things should find ecstasy? Here is the time for the sayable, here is its home.27 Otherwise than Metaphor

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Metaphor has the power to let crossing happen; it transposes things, gatherings, and ourselves from one place into the place and hidden powers of another, from which it lets ordinary things be seen with a new intensity. With this monstration of something in chora, virtuality becomes real (res). It will then make sense to speak of other places in space not as what place is in, but rather as that nexus of relations that will let things appear as near and far. Because place also stands in determinate relations with other more or less significant places (hedra), the movement from receptacle to chora is as if from a nonmetric geometry, perspectival or affine, to a metrical geometry (topos).28 The ostentation of hedra suggests Dasein’s spatiality; something otherwise absent can be brought close. If the receptacle makes possible inside and outside, closure and openness, it must also contain the conditions for deconstructing these distinctions. Even as I enjoy the comforts and securities of home, I must remember that Heimlich and its comforts already contain the sense of Unheimlich, the terrible or awesome. Thus I, a totalizing and appropriating ego, emerge from my dwelling, assembled from the resources of and yet always under the threat of the il y a, to enter into the marketplace to say (dire), assert, question, demand, and the like. This discourse, though replete with symptoms of self-interest, nevertheless overlays the obligation of a symmetrical or just exchange with others. The prior condition for this saying, the justice I am obliged to respect in these dealings, is the archaic saying in which I am addressed by and called to responsibility for others by the Other. I am seized and overcome by an obligation I did not legislate. Rather than construing it within the active voice of personal agency, isn’t it grace? Its call seems to introduce alterity, sometimes transcendent, and thus novelty into the immanent concerns of the ego. In saying I am first responsible to and for another which, moreover, gives the said a focus, a tie to times and persons and places, and with this connexity, a possible reference to discursive themes. Is this a case of reason persuading necessity? Moreover, the said is the condition for the more or less anonymous textuality, which Derrida has explored in Dissemination and elsewhere. The text is the quasi-transcendental condition for meaning and reference and a symbol of the totalizing ego that reduces alterity to iterating a same. The new now harbors old baggage. Because saying is always iteration, what was novel is always a same. The text metaphor illuminates phenomenology’s totalities. Its beyond is a radical alterity; first there is Beauty’s decentering role and then there is 338

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the call of the Other who deconstructs the tyranny of the self-same. This call is a recall, has already taken place “prior to every proposition, even discourse in general—whether a promise, prayer, praise, celebration”29; thus it is already within. But the said and the order of logic and concepts to which it belongs and which threaten to embalm language in Parmenidian amber are not impositions on but gifts of saying, an excess of intellectual feeling that can never be delivered over to the said. There are Freudian slips, the sense that what I said isn’t right, that it did not reach you, that I did not mean to say what I said, that I was not clear and left you confused. Don’t I feel things that can’t be expressed and you know and share that feeling? That I am vague and disorganized and haven’t quite got it right? Is my vagueness precise? Don’t these address you, the individual? Don’t I feel obligations I cannot justify, to say nothing of guilt for “sins” I never committed or deeds beyond the scope of my powers? It is only because there are such “withouts” that there can be “withins.” Saying, infinitely rich in contents that nurture and supply linguistic needs, which make up the very life of soul, is the matrix prior to the always already said “Thou shall not murder,” or better, “Thou shall love one another even as I have loved you.” Whatever its affinities with the orgiastic which often reappears in perversions of Eros, something else is at play in saying that moves discourse beyond metaphysics. Plato’s great image of dialectic as the mechanism of this transformation from imprisonment in the cave into the freedom of the sun (and Good) also images a movement away from the orgiastic mother toward the Father, the sun. Though a Platonic saying would more often be ethical than epistemological, wouldn’t it be subordinate to the intelligible order in which rules justifying action would turn the act into a kind of knowledge? If we but listen, there is a mysterium tremendum in saying whose roots are orgiastic; like Levinas, Plato tries to free philosophy from these roots and, as Derrida says, “instills a first experience based on responsibility.”30 The immediate impulse is to rationalize responsibility and thus to dismiss place, but Derrida notices that responsibility constitutes my singularity by relating me “to what no one else can do in my [affectively singularizing] place.”31 Most are tempted to think of saying as an intentional act, which is, at least in principle, self-evidentially congruent with the said. Levinas praises Derrida’s Speech and Phenomena for dislodging this correlation and, with this, founding language on something other than speech acts or meaning intentions. Though Derrida focused on signification Otherwise than Metaphor

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and the incongruity between what was meant and what was said, and thus the said’s aptitude for dissemination, Levinas found a trace of the Good in saying, a matrix “which sets language apart from everything empirical that exhausts itself in presence or the absence of presence” in a directedness in which one is for the other. Without doubt, in saying I enter into the proximity of the Other in “fear and trembling,” naked and vulnerable, as neither agent nor patient, in perfect freedom in this bondage to the unique, singular other without justification in words which are given to me, put in my mouth, by her appeal. The said or sign would be “an extraordinary event—against the flow of presence—of exposure and subjection to the Other, the event of subjectivity.”32 The referentiality of signs derives, not from the sign or the act that animates it, but from the relational or horizontal structure of saying which, Levinas says, is “on the hither side of ontology,” and in which things are to or for the other.33 One addresses another to persuade, to show, to motivate, to share time, to plead a case, to inform, to ask or command. The first question “saying” might raise is “Does God exist?” but the real question is “What does he require of us?” Saying, even before prayer, is an openness to the other which is beyond metaphysics as is the other who possesses me in separation and in whom I experience the Good, not just a lure, but as the mysterium tremendum.34 An understanding of this moment of turning, from self to the other and, paradoxically, from exteriority to interiority, to the responsibility that binds me which I can never wholly fulfill, goes beyond Plato. Pre-original saying is a proximate relation to the other “and has to be conceived as responsibility for the other.” This is possible only because, as in place with the other, I first feel her presence, am vulnerable to her approach. This relation is the nonreciprocal converse of the disseverance that marks intentionality in Dasein’s spatiality. I am vulnerable alterity, but this vulnerability is prior to and the necessary condition for significance, for a deflection of the Good, a speaker’s veracity and being for another, i.e., substitutivity, as well as the possibility of objectivity. The thematizing logos, the saying stating a said in monologue and dialogue and in the exchange of information, with all the historical and cultural dimensions it bears, proceeds from the pre-original saying. The saying is prior to civilization and every beginning in the spoken speech that signifies. The unlocking of sincerity makes possible the dimension in which 340

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all communication and thematization will flow. The trace of significance in the making of signs and in proximity is not thereby effaced, and marks every use of speech.35 Insofar as each saying is a pre-condition for the said, there is, on the one hand, the saying in which there is a symmetrical exchange in the appropriation of alterities into egological totalities and, on the other, the saying in which I am addressed by the other as if an avatar of the Good; whatever its mode, saying gathers the forces and resources of langue into chora and thus into a said (dit) presence/present. In the former case, saying pertains to Dasein’s fore structure; in the latter there is a “conversion” in which one is turned back on oneself and is an object, not a subject. We will be concerned with saying as fore structure, but we will not forget that the very possibility of being a subject depends on my first having been an object in thrall to the other and that, like duty in Kant, we can never be fully certain which are the grounds for our action. “Metaphor is, so to speak, a borrowed dwelling.” With that Du Marsais directs us to think metaphor through dwelling which, as I understand it, is to take up Platonic chora (place, spacing, site). It is said to be a difficult dream-like notion apprehended in a bastard reasoning (logismo notho; Tim., 52B) and is neither an idea nor thing that becomes, but belongs to a third kind and is “difficult of explanation and dimly seen” (49A). Since it is neither nominal nor, for that matter, verbal, how can it even be named? Derrida says chora “is a prename that is earlier, both maternal and virginal . . . that stands behind every maternal, feminine, or theological figure.”36 May we not perhaps say that, as the mother of all creation, she makes possible metaphor and with it a world? In most metaphors the issue of dwelling is rather straightforward. An imaginatively charged matrix is crossed and lets a thing be seen from itself in new ways—or even lets something new be seen in place of what was originally thought to be there. In metaphors of philosophical interest, the apophantic or monstrative role of metaphor is less evident. In a sense there is nothing to cross, except something like the conceptual space that separates neighbors, such as finite and infinite or being and time. This gap is usually between hierarchically ordered differences or opposites, one of which, such as sense, is lower than the other, the intelligible realm. Metaphors were thought to bridge ontic gaps between heterogeneous, hierarchical realms, such as finite and infinite, dependent and independent being, or time and eternity. These Otherwise than Metaphor

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distinctions and differences which have moved metaphysics are now called upon to dwell in one another and thus create a hermeneutical space or clearing in which beings can show themselves through this differential community. Consider the Christian paradigm, the Incarnation, in which these differences are somehow reconciled. If metaphor cannot lead beyond being, it can reconcile differences that would otherwise fly apart, follow Hegel into an Aufheben, cancel themselves out in contradiction, or find unities in an incarnational model; one is now called to such thinking, even in more secular domains. In Derrida’s différance, hierarchies, which normally structure differences, such as space/time, accidental/essential, male/female, sensible/intelligible, and the like, are reversed. The predicates of the subordinated term are shown to account for the character of the privileged term and thus determine a new “economy” in which the subordinate is primary. Something of this sort is apparent in Hegel’s master/slave dialectic, where the master becomes the slave of the slave, and conversely. This mutuality of determined and determinate constitutes an opalescent “between” within which the differences can play back and forth in an oscillating logic. Differences perpetually displace one another. It is true, however, that there is often oscillation between the supplements and any provoker/provoked relation, as in perception or participation itself. In Eugene Gendlin’s “dwelling thinking,” however, this displacement of difference is minimal; instead, the differences mutually cross and dwell in one another. The title of Heidegger’s masterpiece, Being and Time, is a metaphor in which “time” crosses over the between to dwell in “being,” which is now seen in time’s parameters and thus verbally, as a process or becoming. But there is also its chiasmus, Time and Being, in which a groundless time now has its sense of making present beings as its durative gift, and so the operative “concept” is now the Ereignis.

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Saying Something

O Callicles, if there were not some community of feeling among mankind, however varying in different persons—I mean to say, if everyman’s feelings were peculiar to himself alone and were not shared by the rest of his species—I do not see how we could communicate our impressions to one another. Plato

1. The Threshold Plato thought that light was the medium of seeing (Rep., 407E). The sun, which causes both light and life (509B), is “the child whom the good begat in its own likeness” (508B). Thought the cause of vision and generation, the sun “is not himself generation” nor can it be seen directly through an excess of light, but only through a dark glass or in its effects; so too for the Good. Nevertheless, the sun is said to have been begotten in its likeness. Patristic apophatic theology, working from this invisibility of the Good, spoke of it as “invisible in light” (St. Denys, Letter 1.1064A) and dwelling in darkness (DN, 998A), of its “infinite hiddenness” (DN, 1.588C). Since “the founding ray of the good is abiding and fittingly revealed by the analogical illumination of every being” (DN, 1.588D), analogies can lead to its threshold, if not within. But the dispersal of light, like that of the Word, presupposes the extensivity of hypodochic love; with Spinoza we say God is an 343

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extended thing, but here the extension is affective and in a world where each moment is an annunciation, an infinite proximity, and a mode of motion and rest. We have set ourselves the task of exploring the Good and its relation to beings and, however irrelevant to true religion this may be, the Good addresses me as a philosopher and I cannot do otherwise. However, I must confess my uncertainties about how to approach the Good. I have never been attracted by Plato’s thesis that pleasure rivets the soul to the body and that the philosopher is therefore always dying, nor by its mystical neo-Platonic and early Christian avatars. My approach is mostly hyperbolic, for I feel the depth of the Levinasian movement that deflects the Good onto the other. In the light, other concerns are atavistic. However, I have practiced and found attractive the deictic movement of Zen meditation. This contrasts with the eremitic prayers that dominated Christianity until the fourth century in which the mind ascended to God. This movement dominates so much of Orthodoxy and, repelled by it autism, I have tried to avoid it in my discussions. However, this neo-Platonism was replaced in eastern Orthodoxy by the hesychastic mysticism’s “permanent prayer of the mind” which, rather than disincarnating the mind, transfigures the entire person. Prayer became with Marcarius and Palamas the prayer of the incarnate Jesus “in which the heart is master and King of the whole bodily organism.”1 Even reason is a part of the whole person and there is a certain justification to my philosophical inquiries. The Benedictines say the liberal art is a prayer. Levinas and his followers intimate that knowing and responding to this personal Good is irrelevant; the Good ravages such ego-centricism in opening one to the Other. This call of the Good is experienced in face-to-face relations in which I respond to the needs of this other, whether or not that other is the icon of the Christ. This call that justice be done to the other is the real point of our religion. Does the other deserve this justice if he threatens me and my family or even my nation? We can do injustice in the name of justice. Doubt is a part of true religion lest we serve an idol rather than the true God. Levinas admits that one cannot give the bread from one’s mouth to another unless one has bread to give, that is, has paid attention to the economic order. We will not respond to the other as fully human unless we have spiritual gifts to give, and we are unlikely to have these unless we paid attention to the economic orders of reason and spirit and made some effort to acquire them. 344

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Can metaphors of light bring one to the threshold of being’s beyond? Only if this is the Good’s and not Being’s lighting. For Palomas that “uncreated light” is the beyond; for Eckhart it is the place in being where we meet God. In our linguistic context, “saying,” the condition for any discourse, is our medial threshold in which we hope to find the Good’s likeness; it also marks the site made familiar by Derrida’s différance that without a guiding concept makes highly problematic any movement beyond saying, its grammar and iterations. The logic of oscillations expresses the workings of différance that, like those of negative theology, are “neither sensible nor intelligible, neither positive nor negative, neither superior nor inferior, neither active nor passive, neither inside nor outside, neither present not absent, not even neutral, not even subject to a dialectic with a third moment, without any possible sublation—despite appearances, it is neither a concept or even a name, but calls for another syntax, and exceeds even the order and structure of predicative discourse.”2 This logic hovers over the conjunction and strong disjunction of differences or, in Platonic terms, over an irresolvable conflict between participation in a same that is both more and less than one can express and simultaneously posits an irreconcilable otherness. The power of this logic, which is considerable, is rather like that of Hegel’s negative, a control on and goad of reason, but without the promised resolution of difference in the Absolute. It is, Derrida says, the logic of the hyper, of the over and beyond, and is a movement produced, guided, and attracted by negativity.3 It is applicable to all crossing, hermeneutical and participatory, but if taken as an account of how we stand to one another or the Good, the absence of qualitative distinctions, such as superior and inferior, limit its applicability. For example, how is proximity possible? Unlike apophatic theologians, we are concerned to keep, not overcome, differences at a distance from one another, that is, as proximate. Our spiritual forefathers, Denys, Eckhart, and Maximus, found a place in prayer for God who has traditionally been placeless. But stop and think. Isn’t the Hebrew God a god of places? He appeared in places, for instance in Sinai and Bethel, and gave his people a land, Canaan, and a mountain, Zion, in a city, Jerusalem, on which to build his temple. Moreover, if there is a Trinity, then something like proximity is present in divinity. If the Good expresses itself as agape in hypostasizing itself as a Trinity, isn’t this a diversification? Like Plotinus’s one, this loving love goes out from itself, but unlike Plotinus’s emanations, love transcends toward an alterity that is other than itself, the point of ex Saying Something

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nihilo creation, which it creates and sustains. Isn’t this first creation the hypodoche? The Holy Spirit is not the cunning of reason but is the uncertainties of affectivity. This affectivity in the first saying whose said, the Word, is a passivity beyond passivity awaiting Annunciation, the parousia, the Other. We too await annunciation; for just as I here feel your presence there, so too I feel the presence of the wholly Other. Derrida has observed how the figurations and apophatic places of rhetoric, the encomia that preface the silence of prayer, make place for the God; but do they call on Him to make a place for us? Proximity links God with us, just as our response affirms that linkage in a sort of reciprocal proximity. Mary is the icon that makes it possible to discern this linkage and take up the maternal matrix into Trinity. Earlier we mentioned Levinas’s belief that intentionality is a modification of sensibility, which had been identified with affectivity.4 Something like a deduction of proximity is now possible. As an infant I am first together with others in an affective bond, which, thanks to the other, leads to my being conscious of. . . . These and other deictic relations singularize me. In success and failure, in frustration and anxiety, in sorrow and joy, I come to recognize that I am a self. My being is different and so too is hers; but because I am vulnerability, I identify with others and am empathetic, experiencing a sameness beyond anything that can be said. My initial response will be to keep her in bondage, thanks to this logic of indecision, and to assimilate her needs to my perspectives with attendant self-gratification and renewed self-respect for feeling her pain as mine. The differences are kept in play and thwart appropriation. For example, she is ungrateful. Thus the oscillation of offer and response. To break into this requires a priority among those very qualitative distinctions différance denies. Whether it is Levinas’s deflection of the Good onto this other, or a gift of charity as if from on high, I am obsessively for her in her difference. Oscillations are broken, if only for a moment. Plato would have us believe that these avatars of the receptacle can partake of the Good and thus of reason (Tim., 51B). The receptacle is the place of the God’s trace, the place where, to borrow Saint Denys’s words, “He manifests that which suited his Goodness” (DN, 558c). “Yet with these he does not come to God Himself: he does not see God—for God is unseen—but the place (topon) where God is. This signifies to me that the most divine and highest of what is seen and intelligible are hypothetical logoi of what is subordinate to that beyond-having all. Through this is shown the presence of that which 346

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walks upon the intelligible summits of His most holy places.” (DN, 1000bc) Intelligence walks. Goodness has a place that gathers all places into the presence of the god. And it can gather because both God and humans share an affective, hypodochic neighborhood. Because of the considerable weight placed on prayer as a vestibule to the beyond, a critical digression is in order. Prayer is directed to a unique Other for the sake of the other, but it eludes logical regimentation as well as the descriptive syntax that would enclose it in a web of attributed properties and assertions (Aristotle, De Int., 17a). The speaking of prayer, the silence in which I await the call of the Other, is not something I do, not something I actively bring off or suffer to let happen; “the power of speaking and speaking well of God comes from God.”5 Prayer is thus likely to make accessible an experience of the Good beyond Being, perhaps in a silence of a saying in which the Other calls. Approaching God “without being” through prayer could take its itinerary from Plato’s metaphor of the sun, a being, whose analagon, the Good, is not any sort of Being. Revelation says that God is light (1 John 1.5) and agape (1 John 4.8), but since neither love nor light is a being, there is nothing for metaphor to unconceal except the very possibility of unconcealment. Though prayer does not concern itself with determining determinables, it does take its direction from the determinations expressed in its associated encomia. Orientation requires the negative and hyperbolic determination of the hyper, such as Denys’s “mystical summit more than unknown,” for its aim. Prayer is a likely access to the proximity of the Good only if in “saying” there is an experience “beyond being.” Such would be the Jesus prayer in the hesychastic tradition. Otherwise such negative statements as “it is not this but not that, it is not in some way but not in some other way” (St. Denys, DN, 824b) become, as Derrida remarked in reflecting on the reception of his différance and the behavior of some of his camp followers, an “automatic, ritualistic, and doxic enterprise of the suspicion brought against anything that resembles negative theology.”6 What Derrida says of chora is like what one says of God in negative theology. However, “resemblance” promises only nominal similarities, and the identities we seek will be hard to find in différance. For a closer look at the opening provided by prayer as well as the deconstruction lurking in its written inscriptions, consider Denys saying that7 “it is necessary that we first be lifted toward it, the source of all Good, by our prayers, and that, by drawing near to it, Saying Something

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we be initiated into the all-good gifts of what is founded around it. And then we invoke it by our most holy prayers . . . before everything, and especially before a discourse about God, it is necessary to begin with a prayer—not that the power present everywhere and nowhere shall come to us, but so that by our divine remembrances and invocations we ourselves shall be guided to it . . .” (DN, 680b) What Blanchard says of the tale is true of prayer or liturgy: “The tale is a movement toward a point . . . unknown, obscure, foreign, such that, apart from this movement, it does not seem to have any prior existence; and yet it is so imperious that the tale derives its power of attraction only from the point and cannot even ‘begin’ before reaching it.”8 Faith, the obscure “point” and trace of the Good in the affective matrix, is the “attractor” guiding our remembrances and invocations. If chora cannot be spoken of in metaphor nor given a proper name, still it is necessary to speak of it, and Plato gives the rule: “You must address it in the same manner” (Tim., 49B). Derrida then proposes that “this is not limited to the name: a phrase is necessary . . . beyond all philosophemes, [it] has nevertheless left a trace in language.” Prayer is a likely locus of such traces, because it need make no ontological commitment. Nevertheless, silent prayer (speaking) presupposes the matrix, the place of traces, which is in this context Spirit synchronizing affectivity with the proximate God. Though Plato doesn’t say what this same manner is, I think we begin to hear it in Timaeus’s prayer: All men, Socrates, who have any degree of right feeling, at the beginning of any enterprise, whether small or great, always call upon God. And we too, who are going to discourse on the nature and origin of the universe, how created or how existing without creation, if not altogether out of our wits, must invoke the aid of gods and goddesses and pray that our words may above all be acceptable to them and in consequence to ourselves. (Tim., 27C) As is proper to a saying, one invokes the aid of the gods that the discourse, in being acceptable to them, may instruct others as if from on high. Though Saint Denys approaches the “divine dark” through the following prayer, what is more to the point than a desert pilgrimage or a mystical ascent is what he says in his instruction to Timothy: “O Trinity beyond being, beyond divinity, beyond goodness and guide of Christians in divine wisdom, direct us to the mystical summits, more 348

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than unknown and beyond light. There simple, absolved, and unchanged mysteries of theology lie hidden in the darkness beyond light of the great mystical silence . . .” (DN, 998a) What is the trace that can direct us “beyond being, beyond divinity,” but not—as we noted earlier—beyond good? “According to our power,” Saint Denys says, “we attain to that beyond all by a path and order in the denial and preeminence of all . . .” (DN, 872A). These encomia, which seem to have the trappings of ontological discourse, direct one to the beyond of being. This raises some problems. Meister Eckhart said that prayer is an experience of being at the threshold to the beyond of Being (ME SW, 1:150). But these prayers are written, and this seems to place them among modalities of being, such as iteration and description, which seems to take away prayer’s promise. They give God a place and thus being to what is without place. Is there only a momentary hiatus before prayerful saying is reduced by these encomia to the said, a form of being? Doesn’t the unsaid saying and its implicit order continue alongside with and even go beyond the said? Even so, it is difficult to avoid Derrida’s point that there are ontological imputations involved in these negative encomia.9 Saint Denys, for instance, asserts that God’s “complete name is ‘good’—[and He is] the source of good and is beyond good” (DN, 3:680a) and orients us toward “mystical summits more than unknown and beyond light” (DN, 1:998a). In directing us to the object of prayer, they seem to ontologize the Good or, as in the case of Eckhart, reintroduce the very notion of being he sought to avoid. When Eckhart speaks of God as beyond all forms, God still remains the giver of forms, even when addressed in negative terms, such as hyperousios; but something may be at work that makes the way circular rather than leading beyond being.10 Encomia posit an artifact or reveal what faith already sees “through a glass darkly.” Derrida’s objections are to the point, unless he grants what I see by Revelation, namely that God, the Good, is self-hypostazing. Triune Love, a “loving love” that, though it constitutes divine Alterity, is itself no sort of being. A divine hypostasis was incarnate and dwelt with us. Denys denies that God is a being, but then being is the “place where God is” when he is “brought down from a separation from all and beyond all to what is in all.” This probably is the source of Palamas’s “uncreated energy,” the God in whom we participate. This is possible only if what is also beyond being, the chora, grants beings in which he may envelop himself. Through these energies chora makes possible the dwelling whose threshold opens on Saying Something

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God beyond being, the God who is “never separated from himself” (DN, 712b). Thus one magnifies the presence of God who dwells in being, the theme of the Incarnation, yet denies that God is restricted to being, for he is “never separated from Himself,” which in turn emphasizes his radical transcendence. With the Incarnation the Good can constitute beings and be indirectly ontologized with various hyper prefixes. Perhaps more to the point is Levinas’s observation that these do not just invite us to determine God; they are given in the imperative, not the indicative. “God is merciful” means “Be merciful like him.”11 By freely transposing talk of the Good into talk of chora, we have given them a parity exceeding Plato’s intentions. Chora is other, and though it does not go by the name of God or being, we nevertheless speak of it in terms apophatic theology applies to God. “What takes place,” John Caputo asks, “in this discourse about a desert, about a barren and naked place, a pure taking place, an empty place? What is the wholly other, God or khôra? What do I do when I love my God? God or khôra?”12 But is it an either/or? We must begin to present the case for their reconciliation through the Virgin Mary. Through her the placeless Logos has a place among us and, as the Word of the Father, is an everpresent saying. When Mary appears as the Black Virgin with an oakleaf crown in the crypt at Chartres or as the scarred and suffering Black Virgin of Czestochowa, we gather the immemorial past of what has hitherto been chthonic divinity into the “Mother of God,” a very uranian god at that. We can now approach the Good, her supplement, in our all too vulnerable humanity through prayer, ritual, and icon. Of course, this too often degenerates into magic or idolatry rather than an auto-accusative experience which turns the “for me” of the ego into a self for others. In his Dynamics of Faith, Paul Tillich discovers two directions in which faith pulls. On the one hand, faith is understood ontologically as a desire for presence. In the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, that presence may be sacramental, but in these and other traditions and faith communities, it could also lie in sacred texts, traditions, or through symbols. In the mystical form of the divine darkness, which could be Hindu, Christian, or Buddhist, there is the promise of a loss of self in an encompassing presence. Does this translate into a mystical fusion, being-one-with? It could be that this Aristophanic moment is not a consummation; it is the moment of return, not unlike what happens to one who, having seen the Good, returns to the cave to free others. Becoming one with God, characteristic of 350

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Plotinus’s upward way and, after him, of much Western mysticism, need not be the telos of Desire. Preemption of self is a purgation that frees me to consider its nonexclusive moral alternative (Levinas, Difficult Freedom, 65) characteristic of the Jews, Islam, and some Christians, in which the emphasis is on the law, justice, and righteousness. While I am trying to give the ontological form its due, what I hear in prayer echoes Saint James: “Humbly welcome the word that has been implanted in you and is able to save your souls. Be ye doers of the word and not hearers only, deluding yourselves. If anyone is a hearer of the word, he is like a man who looks at his own face in the mirror . . . religion that is pure and undefiled before God and the Father is this: to care for orphans and widows in their affliction . . .” (St. James, 1:21–23, 27) In Jesus’ parable of the last judgment, the sheep are divided from the goats not on the basis of being a good or bad Christian, Muslim, Jew, Buddhist, and the like; ritual practice or doctrinal belief, including getting the Trinity right or saying “Jesus” like Jimmy Swaggart is of no consequence. What matters is what one did to Christ in the form of feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, helping the ill and the prisoner, greeting the stranger . . .” (Matthew, 25: 31–46). The contradiction resulting from saying that something is “ineffable” has led many to see negative theology as nonsense. The contradiction in kenosis, namely, an ineffable beyond that isn’t any sort of being ensnared in the logic of being was said by Saint Paul to be foolishness to the Greeks (1 Corinthians, 1:23). The way up from being to its beyond becomes the downward way of love. This ultimate expression of God’s love for man, of the beyond in the midst of, and of our consequent call to love one another as he loved us, is foolishness. It leads to the beyond of being and then back through saying to my being called to go out to others. In denial and preeminence there is, as John Llewelyn says of Levinas’s use of hyperbole, “an amphibolical crossing of a phenomenologico-ontological sense with an ethical or, more strictly speaking, proto-ethical sense in which the former is over determined and accomplished.”13 I who called to God am called to get about his business. 2. Producing a Metaphor There is a difference between “saying” (dire) and “something said” (dit) in the expression, “saying something.” Saying is a verbal or medial phenomenon, which is older than the said, where the said is a Saying Something

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nominal being that arises from and in part governs the process, as if a proto-hypostasis. Because “saying” pertains to the receptacle, and thus to the body as the matrix of intentionality, the performative “I can,” such as offering food to or caressing another, are also implicated. Until now Levinas’s ethical relation has been given short shift; but now justice must be done to this great and noble thinker. Levinas’s great insight is that “saying” is “for another,” where this “for” is “the way a man approaches his neighbor, the way in which a relation with the other is set up that is in no way proportionate. It is a relation of nearness where the responsibility of the one for the other is played out. In this relation there is a non-thematizable intelligibility; this relation is meaningful by itself and not in the effect of a theme or thematization. That means—here at least—that intelligibility and rationality do not belong by first right to Being.”14 They do not belong, because “we are concerned with an affectivity without intentionality,” an insight Levinas attributes to Michel Henry,15 in a diachronic time that is “a disjunction of identity where the same does not rejoin the same” stated as properly as possible (for the ground of the saying is never properly said—the subject is not in time, but is diachrony itself).16 However used, “saying” stands under this judgment. Saying is a moment of vulnerability that eludes language, yet it is already and always language’s other side. In mundane contexts, saying more or less delineates how the said is to be received by the other and carries in its slots or silences those situations—physical, linguistic, cultural, and the like—that make spoken or written language possible. In saying I am always being addressed by the Other and sometimes afraid I may hear. “Saying” avoids the inscriptions or presuppositions that would be appropriate if we began with the said. Moreover, saying must be thought in the Good, a memory of what has never been present and a hope for an impossible possibility. Like the agent intellect in Aristotle’s De Anima which allows one to break away from bondage to interior phantasms into the freedom of concepts, saying frees me to go out to the other, but this freedom is also bondage, for now it is as if I were an object assigned to her. Moreover, “I am separated from . . . [my] own inwardness . . . turned inside out” for her and am thus vulnerable, as if I had left a shelter and were at the mercy of the unknowable and unfathomable. I am an opening denuded “of any identical quiddity” which, at the same time, “identifies me as the unique one” who must “adhere to the approach and expression of the other, to her esse,” and not, as in the case of the 352

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said, to my own inwardness and its reflexive expression.17 This preresponse to another’s singularity is prior to their status or character and offers them a world that “becomes personal and oriented only when I represent what is present to another.” The emerging said belongs to the daylight world of circumspective intention and intension, to syntax and semantics, to the thinghood of things which is, to again exploit Llewelyn’s graceful wisdom, “their presence as presents to another.”18 Does the ethical relation in saying subtend all others? If so, the alterities that elicit the said from saying must also function within a more mundane poetics. Rather than beginning with the metaphysics implicit in the “expression of a term (or concept),” let’s begin with Gendlin on how “saying” is involved in speaking to another, and then take up the more complex case of metaphor. In this dialogue I want to hear what you make of what I said. I addressed you from here, a place (chora) from which I spoke, and now I await your words from over there, a neighborhood within a common matrix.19 We do communicate. Your response does not echo my words nor do you look up meanings or even reiterate sames; you too are creative and your cut engenders, if not new words, then words in new senses as you speak and so move beyond my words. In speaking to you, I want to know that you get it and to hear what you have to say about it, even if you say nothing. As I speak, I see from your facial expression and your movements that you don’t understand. “Wait,” I say, “let me explain.” We are situated in a between that is an affective matrix pregnant with meanings and thus with language; nevertheless, it has not given nor have I received from it the right words, and nothing is said. I want you to know exactly what I mean and I know that, even if you could repeat everything I had said exactly as I said it, you wouldn’t understand it. There is a felt surplus that is not exhausted in the said that exercises its own reasons. Isn’t it as if there were sense, meaning, without language and, paradoxically, language where there is no sense? Or do we see the sense of “language” and “meaning” changing and even interchanging as the words remain the same? Is this because, having a place in the gap or slot, they owe their identity to the matrix of sense “crawling with secret designs,”20 rather than to a sense (Sinn), so they can be same and yet work in new ways? The said is usually inconspicuous when it cuts at the joints; but in saying something one cuts with a to and fro, oscillating dialectic of saying and the said, of orienting, demonstrating, and articulating which releases to one another other beings to be seen, enjoyed, and Saying Something

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understood.21 Language is never ostentatious unless it isn’t ready-athand, that is, when one sees strange words or hears strange tongues. Does that mean that language is ready-at-hand, like gear (Zeug), and that when made ostentatious because it is no longer handy, it is a present-at-hand? Are words gear? Are words recurrent, iterable sames, tokens of types, drawn upon from a linguistic stockpile? Never will this approach arrive at the saying, the presencing that seems to happen of itself. Instead of looking at what is disclosed, its referents, suppose we first look at language as a transparent mode of being in the world; and then to saying as exposure to the skin of another, touching another, a morphogenetic field prior to language that communicates without anything said. 22 Transparency, Varela’s translation of Heidegger’s Umsicht (“circumspection”), is always factical, an unreflective mode of attunement with the world (Befindlichkeit) absorbed in what it is about until it abandons itself by shifting into a reflective mode. An unreflective absorption in things ready-at-hand can be shattered with the breakdown of some significant structure—a speller tells me I misspelled the word or the pen is not there when I go to pick it up—and this results in “a panoply of affective tonalities,” such as anger, disgust, anxiety. These specific emotions supervene on a broader dispositional or affective orientation, which preconditions the tone that appears. Umsicht is, to repeat Varela’s definition, “a readiness or dispositional tendency for action in a larger field of specific ontological readiness . . . an expectation of the way things in general will turn out.”23 These emotions vary with time and culture and are enfolded in the individual. This is a threefold structure of underlying mood, affect, and emotion which the native user brings into his saying. Eugene Gendlin’s slot in which words appear is governed by our vulnerability and a sense of impending significance. It has the “sense” of problems, concerns, or situations and is meaningful, not a mere twitch and twinge as our positivist forebears said. If we listen aright, it will speak to us of the physical, situated body, its somatic feelings, its orientations and physical, social, and even spiritual neighborhood. The felt sense is not unlike Heidegger’s Befindlichkeit or Comforti’s morphic fields and associated attunements; understanding and interpretation “imply a disclosive submission to the world, out of which we encounter what matters to us.”24 Feeling is with us always, changing even as it changes us. Successively think of two people close to you and notice the feelings about oneself and the other and how these shift. To linger with the feeling may require 354

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the art of a Proust, but with attention, not unlike that practiced in meditation techniques, its secret designs come into focus and can be grasped and, with being named, can communicate themselves “all at once . . . as bodily felt.” 25 In more familiar language, the receptacle qua saying is the possibility of slots and their felt, complex vectors, gathered, amplified, and situated in the slot by the just said fundicating word. A situation is not where something happens to be; to be situated, to be embodied, gives language its soul and, with its changes, brings about different attunements, different modes of life. The just said carries with it into the slot what Gendlin, citing Wittgenstein, calls its “use family.” Although that order or structure is imposed against the common belief, Gendlin finds a design already in the slot, a discovery he attributes to Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Though on its surface a blank or silence, the slot has its own deep structure of cultural, somatic, physiological, spiritual, and linguistic fields—this division of the whole is arbitrary—and, though it may seem to reek of chaos, it has an implicate order that is gathered and laid out in and by the saying for the said. The felt meaning has a sort of impendence and guides new expressions. Isn’t the saying/said a kind of physis? Even as the said, the word or phrase, stands out for a moment in the slot, the saying is still with it, still judging and correcting. Will there be a cultural invariance, something in the linguistic situation that is definitive?26 3. Making Is Finding What happens when we make an effort—say in writing a letter— to find the right expression for our thoughts? . . . Now if it were asked: “Do you have the thought before finding the expression?” what would one have to reply? And what, to the question, “What did the thought consist in, as it existed before the expression?” Wittgenstein

A use family is made up not of separated words, but by their role in sentential crossings with all the other members of the always expanding and developing family. For instance, the senses carried by “use,” such as “daily use,” “usefulness,” “the resentment felt on being used,” “the meaning of an expression is its use,” and the like, together with their crossings and re-crossings, make up a use family, the archival matrix brought into focus by context. “A use family consists of actual Saying Something

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uses, each of which must have crossed with the whole family . . . any actual use must be a fresh crossing . . . Many different situations are all crossed in our felt sense of familiarity with a word.” With the whole family? Is this Heraclitus’s “all mingling with all” with no indigestible alterity to effect a cut? Doesn’t the focus of a contextforming intention in this new instant act as a sort of epoché to reduce this all to some? A human situation also includes other situations that can be changed by what we say. “The diverse situations in which a word is used all cross in our knowing how to use a word.” Earlier and even later crossings are implicated in the present. “We act and speak . . . to carry a story forward consisting of many situations.”27 If this is a reasonable account of how past and future determine the gift in the present, then are we not beyond being? Have we not found in saying a release from the tyranny of being, which works insidiously to give its present to the present? Gendlin’s approach to phenomenology is, like Derrida’s, linguistic and makes little reference to the intuitive route we have been taking. His crossing results in the transformations of words in use families and not the opening of horizons. Gendlin does not make much of intuition; he denies that perception is the arché of experience and would probably fault my metaphor of the word as a way of seeing; yet it is still the case that we are talking both about situations and their intuited surplus. Never mind, we have much to learn from him. Gendlin first began to talk of metaphor in terms of a likeness that was created by the relation. In “My love is like a red, red rose,” the likeness between a girl and a rose must be created by the juxtaposition of these differences. Its first author sought for some likeness by asking, what is she like? Then he finds the rose and creates a specific likeness with the girl. Metaphor is a creation of a crossing between the fresh, blooming, tender, quiet, waiting-to-bepicked girl and the rose.28 Later he invokes the crossing of a situation by a use family. First, metaphor uses a word in a situation that was not part of its usual use family. Rather than two situations crossing, which is one way of stating the traditional theory, a use family crosses a situation.29 Again we take up the rose to account for the creation of likeness: If the metaphor makes sense, the common features or resemblances, which are its basis on the traditional theory, are derived from the metaphor. A girl standing alone in a field is said to be a rose. She, like the rose, is alive, fresh, young, soft, seemingly 356

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ready to be picked, poignantly time limited—can scratch, will die when the person (man) is only scratched, the double standard . . . all these and many more. . . . The crossing of the girl and rose is not a pattern, nor . . . is the girl a pattern, nor a rose. The girl’s situation is not just here and now. A human situation implies other situations—what will happen to her, how her life will change the meaning of what happens here. . . . The crossing of these crossings produces the sense the word makes here.30 This felt meaning, its frustrations and satisfactions, is “a direct referent” of what is to be said, whose meaning is “carried forward” by the word or line it accepts or rejects. Patterns carried forward do not determine word use “since the next use could contradict the pattern.” Saying is carried along. The said is never without its beyond. Something transcending the epochal slots can be shown to be the condition for its creative expressions. Indeed, the problem of catching hold of saying when it seemed always to be taken up and disseminated in the said can now be resolved. There is an existence, saying, without an existent, a said. Its affective root, the saying, the slot, is not left behind in the said but is carried along to govern and be governed by its historical, intricate, and implicit order. Moreover, though the said can be among the distinctions or differences that are the very stuff of deconstruction, here is an instance of how differences can dwell with and alongside one another. Let’s develop this in a rather schematic account of one of Professor Gendlin’s examples, which may show how to think something beyond being that gives being and, at the same time, the promise of access to the Good. Let’s return to the poet who, having come to an impasse, awaits the word in a slot where nothing comes. He rereads the lines. First, he tries to listen to the slot, to hear or see what these lines ask, demand, want, imply. Many lines, some good and some bad, come into the slot, only to be rejected. He rereads what he had said and tries again. “The lines that offer themselves try to say and do not say—that . . . The blank is not pre-verbal. It knows the language well enough to understand and reject all the words that come.” What he is to make or create is found to be already there, even if in some sense he cannot find it. Gendlin continues: The blank is vague, but it is also more precise than the poet can as yet say. The said lines have a role in this saying, and, when it comes, the new line may require their revision. Its Saying Something

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coming makes something said right or wrong. But notice that the poet’s slot continues to function in this retelling. “The way that something implicit for the poet functioned is now implicit also for us in our philosophical discussion of how it functioned.”31 Consider something that is both vague and precise; is this a contradiction? There is no back-and-forth play as in différance, in which first one and then the other difference is dominant, but “precise” dwells in and characterizes “vague” and says something about how the slot implies. “Vague” is not crossed out by “precise,” but tells us that the slot, though apparently blank and thus vague, “says this vagueness of implied phrases that have not come.” Implied? There is nothing there to imply. But in reaching ahead to what is to come even as it leads to nothing is precisely the point of “vague.” That vagueness is precise enough to reject some phrases that come into the slot. It is more precise than anything yet said. “The words ‘imply,’ ‘demand,’ and ‘leads to’ have been nakedly saying how a slot can lead to a next saying before it comes.” The word’s own working cannot be said only by the word. The “naked saying”—the blank’s demands, implications, connections, and the like, though not categories, concepts, or syntax imposed by thought—allows these words to come forth and work. The receptacle gives the word a place. Gendlin’s appealing account of the slot can, with only slight modifications, be brought into line with our deictic concern. However, the concept of a use family requires some tinkering; like any internally related system, it is over-determined. Do we really need to carry all the complexities of past crossings into a new situation? Emily Dickinson could “carry” more than I into a slot. We need a spiritual limitation, such as genius or inspiration, on the scope of families. Moreover, must not the word, whatever its debts to the past, say like Luther: “Here I stand”? The use family is a resource in the langue of the general text, but only some words or phrases come into focus through the felt just said. I would also prefer to say that a context-forming intention, a vouloir dire or intelligible situation, not a word, crosses the fecund gap to generate the new word. The background of the slot is, of course, the alterity of the world, the context of all contexts and what we talk about, which can be accessed in saying. Wanting to say something, an open speech intention with its own semantic structures, is rather like the intention operative in a move required by a game as it plays us, which, though willingly 358

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done, is not done by an act of will. Like Husserl’s context-forming intentions that cross hyletic data, this speech intention, even if I don’t quite have the word, constitutes the situation that crosses the more linguistic matrix and its precise context-forming datum. It creates the identities. The word is made anew in a crossing even though it is found in the slot. Heidegger’s “metaphor,” “Poetizing (‘making,’ ‘creating’) is finding,” shows how this works. Though this seems to be an oxymoron and to express irreconcilable differences, here it makes perfect sense: don’t we make the word even as we find it? The word “finding” is a new creation, the old word working in a new way, not as just a rearrangement of what was already there in “making’s” semantic matrix, and yet it is already there when crossed by “I mean to say—if only I could say it.” The solicitation (the proposition as proposal and erotic lure) implicit in desiring to say is one of Plato’s works of reason (Tim., 47E) which crosses the necessities of the fecund between, a receptacle, across which we face and from which we speak to one another. We do not impose order on the receptacle, for she has her own order, even that of chaos; and if we try, the results can be tragic, like those chronicled by Euripides in his Bacchae when the young Pentheus sought to impose his kingly will on Dionysus. The middle as receptacle is, at this phase of “saying,” which is prior to any response to being propositioned, Llewelyn’s “bustle of mere rearrangement.” This is ambivalently a hostile or welcoming reception and—like the Artemis who is orgiastic at Ephesus, the protector of wild things in Arcadia, and nurturing at Brauron or even, to cite a less-mythical instance, Levinas’s il y a—the forces that swarm within may or may not gather themselves and give place, chora, to a said. These suggest that space is not at our disposal but that, on the contrary, we must dispose ourselves to it. The time may not be right, the place barren. While technology can dispose of the earth, nature’s forces defy calculative understanding and our power to gather these forces and make safe, interesting, healthy, barren, sacred, fearsome, proper, fitting, or nurturing places.32 Though place, chora, seen under the form of the Good belongs to a spiritual, not just a physical, topography, it can harbor evil. But, secondly, as fecundated by the just said “making” under the lure or aspect of the Good, the matrix now gathers (logos) herself and, like a jig or template, canalizes forces into an assemblage that brings “into play within us and outside us populations, multiplicities, territories, becomings, affects, events” that diversify this matrix as a primordial apeiron gignesthai. The matrix is already part of Saying Something

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the cosmic matrix and so is geometrically structured by an analogue of the regular polygons whose harmonic and geometric transformations are beautiful forms and can be elicited by the soul’s poetic solicitations. “Making” makes place for a new creation; she has become one of Plato’s “works of necessity” and a conformal condition on saying, imposing upon the flux its differential structure that canalizes the force manifold and limitless resources of language. This place (chora) is a seat (hedra) for “finding”; the word made is found to be already there. In this diachronic time of poetic gestation, of saying before the said, T. S. Eliot remarked, “a poem, or a passage in a poem, may tend to realize itself first as a particular rhythm before it reaches expression in words, and that this rhythm may bring to birth the idea and the image.”33 Why? Because saying raises into prominence what makes possible Dasein’s there, its oriented “being-in” the world. This is, as we saw in our earlier discussion of Blanchot, already musical. Rilke has it right: Gesang ist Dasein (“Existence is song”; Sonnets to Orpheus, I, 3). With Gendlin’s slot, it is possible to articulate this nexus and bring it into language. The judgment implicit in chora is now explicit: were the word not to come or were some other word to appear, we would know whether it was right or wrong as if a priori. To repeat, in this medial matrix, saying is the womb of language within which the diversifying locutionary and illocutionary vectors may gather and, as I struggle to find them, give place (chora) to the words suddenly found and said as if already there. By a “shock of recognition,” we are gathered into understanding. This choragraphy makes metaphor. The terms within a “living metaphor,” such as “making is finding” are not naturally neighbors. Metaphor is neither a making nor a finding: it is a making/finding.34 They belong to different semantic fields and, in Paul Ricoeur’s happy phrase, are “semantically impertinent,” oppositions obscured by Black’s frame/focus and I. A. Richards’ vehicle/tenor distinctions, even if these avoid the customary literal/metaphorical difference. Ricoeur expresses the relation as one of tension in an oscillating affirmation and negation that is felt even if the copula as such is absent. I suggest that the play is chiasmatic, not assertion and denial, that it is centered in how to say the thing, and impertinence assures that the dwelling will be felt to be borrowed. In 1927, if not today, Heidegger’s title Being and Time was a living metaphor whose between was a restless neighborhood within which “being” and “time” played back and forth. In the explicit “making is finding,” opposites cross over with their semantic baggage to dwell in one another. This epoché opens a 360

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horizon is which being is unconcealed, in the first case as an eventual or process phenomenon, and in the second as dynamically invested chora, that is country, inhabited place, marked place, rank, position, territory or region, and though not a subject that gives and a patient that receives, is nevertheless the dwelling through which a being receives its being.

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15

The Receptacle

. . . the place without place of the advent. Lacoue-Labarthe

1. Derrida’s Chora In “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” Jacques Derrida approaches chora from the perspective of apophatic theologies in which every attributive predicate is said to be “inadequate to the essence, in truth the hyperessentuality (the being beyond Being) of God.” Only a negative attribution can claim to approach and prepare us for a silent intuition of God.1 These claims elicit Derrida’s interest because his différance, which is not a concept, describes how the matrix may work in articulating language, for in its ineffability it resembles the withdrawn God of mystical theology. He distinguishes several types that “deconstruct grammatical anthropomorphism” and awaken Desire for the experience of the impossible.2 More recently Derrida seems less interested in the force and signification of the general text than in the traces of a religious and ethical beyond irresolvable into such forces. Marion gives a different reading. He holds that patristic mystical theology recognizes neither the way of affirmation or negation, but seeks that way beyond them in which the divine names direct one to a non-object from whom

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one receives determinations so radical and so new that they speak to me and shape me far more than they teach or inform me . . . They expose me to what lets itself be said only for the sake of no longer permitting me to say it, but to acknowledge it as goodness, and love it. . . . The unthinkable, as the distance of Goodness, gives itself, not to be comprehended but to be received. It is therefore not a question of giving up on comprehending (as if it were a question of comprehending and of not being comprehended). It is a question of managing to receive that which becomes thinkable, or rather acceptable, only for the one who knows how to receive it. . . . If love reveals itself hermeneutically as distance—only love is able to welcome it. 3 Though Marion’s way leads to deification, Derrida will use his way to give a new look at chora. There are said to be “two concurrent languages” in the Timaeus.4 The first uses metaphors to “reappropriate the thinking of the chora for ontology and for Platonic dialectic,” while the other rejects metaphor on behalf of a chora that is “radically nonhuman and atheological.” In “Faith and Knowledge,” Derrida again takes up these meanings of chora, only to reject the more orthodox approach for excluding other participants in our common Abrahamic faith. He opts instead for one that considers chora “before and after the logos, which was in the beginning, before and after the Holy Sacrament, before and after the Holy Scriptures. . . . The question remains open, and with it the question of knowing whether this desert can be thought or left to announce itself ‘before’ the desert we know (that of the revelations and retreats, of the lives and deaths of God, or all the figures of kenosis or of transcendence, of religio and of historical religions); or whether, on the contrary, it is from ‘this last desert’ we can get a glimpse of what precedes the first, what I call ‘the desert in the desert’.”5 By an epoché we can arrive at this barren land: “One cannot say that it gives place or that there is the chora. The es gibt, thus translated, too vividly announces or recalls the dispensation of God, or man, or even that of the Being of which certain texts of Heidegger speak. Chora is not even that (ça), the es or id of giving, before all subjectivity. It does not give place as one would give something, whatever it may be; it neither creates nor produces anything, not even an event as far as it takes place. It gives no order and makes no promise—but if it is amorphous (Tim., 50D), this signifies neither lack nor privation.

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Chora is nothing positive or negative. It is impassive, but it is neither passive nor active.”6 But why should a medial phenomenon be characterized by metaphysical distinctions, such as active or passive, positive or negative? Though much can be said for this option, I nevertheless find these assertions unsettling. Are we talking about Blanchot or Plato? Has a reverse phenomenological reduction removed all possible modes of intentionality and left us with a barren prototext? We found chora in Plato’s instant where she was the es of the es gibt. If you remove the participation of the matrix “in some puzzling way in the intelligible,” are we now talking of apples and oranges rather than of some single “regioning”? It is not that Derrida needs Plato’s coattails, but it seems unjust to position oneself in the proximity of Plato’s chora and to ignore what it explicated. Weren’t Plato’s images designed to explicate creation? Was the hypodoche/chora itself created? I would like to avoid this obvious issue, for Plato gives one answer and Christian faith, another. Since we have taken it to be the Good’s chiasmatic supplement, the Platonic answer seems to be no. What is primarily said about the hypodoche is in terms of the becoming in which nothing becomes; this is an apeiron gignesthai or a primordial affectivity, which I have taken to be its phenomenological equivalent. More dramatically, this hypodoche could be Levinas’s monstrous il y a, the “night and silence of Nothingness. This impersonal, anonymous, yet inextinguishable ‘consummation’ of being that murmurs in the depths of nothingness itself . . . invades, submerges every subject, person or thing . . . we are riven to it, we are not dealing with anything. But this nothing is not that of pure nothingness. There is no longer this or that; there is ‘something . . . The rustling of the there is . . . is horror.’”7 Kearney has suggested that this reading lies at the base of its treatment by Derrida and Caputo. We must begin with the elementary becoming, for Levinas, Derrida, and Caputo are disinterested in the fecundity with which Plato invests it. This becoming is diversified first by the elements which may then sometimes autochthonically (as in chaos theory) produce differences and, to hurdle other possibilities, sometimes through the Spirit and the Logos, that is, by Trinitarian energetics, create real beings. Whatever the details and the difficulties with a sempieternal chora, in Plato the hypodoche is uncreated and coordinate with and, as I would have it, supplementary to the Good. I, but not Plato, have taken the play of forces that spatialize and temporalize the hypodoche to be created; any emergent being, anything 364

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that comes to be and be definite, even if only like a wave, presupposes that the hypodoche these diversify also serves as their necessary archival condition and that the coordination of the resulting totality be under the sway of the anima mundi or Spirit. The hypodoche is a field and so, granting the resulting internal relations, it is meaningful only within a creaturely context; that is to say, only in relation to a being that gathers up the field and is for itself. Such is the case with Plato’s instant. In what sense can the Good and the matrix be supplements? The Christian Good is absolutely transcendent and beyond supplementation. The Good beyond being is a loving that hypostasizes as the love and thus being of the Father (for the Son and Spirit), the love that is Spirit (for the Father and Son), and the love that is the Logos (of the Father and the Spirit). The Trinity is the life of God in God and, unlike Spinoza’s substance, God is absolutely transcendent; His life is His own immanent expression. The created energies, as Palamas called the hypodoche’s forces, presuppose the uncreated energies and the immanence of God, and in this sense the matrix and the Good are supplementary (see 16:3). This primordial potentiality is, in other words, like the ideas, a potential for being. Such might be its Christian interpretation. Creating these forces ex nihilo entailed the coordinate creation of their receptacle. If we are to distinguish Derrida and Damascius, there are two kinds of chora: the atheistic version favored by Caputo and Derrida, and the classical version that follows on Richard Kearney’s reading of the icon, the place of the placeless, in the Chora Church in Istanbul. This is the chora that embraces God.8 My reading was inspired by that same icon. Apophatic theology proper should begin with discussions of the Good, though the absence of explicit reference to the Good in Timaeus invites a loan from Philebus, its appropriation through its coextensive transcendental Beauty (Tim., 28A), or gestures to the father past finding out (Tim., 28C). This having been said, Derrida has much to teach us and we must do him justice. In the first language, the receptacle “produces” metaphor, that is, brings it about and lets its creative power be seen. The matrix reappeared as the “space” of literature, the il y a, the es of es gibt, and the pilgrim space of prayer. When we turn to the master, Saint Denys, who guided us into the proximity of the Good for insight into the matrix, we will be disappointed. His receptacle is as denatured as Derrida’s. For example, things are said to participate in the single idea like The Receptacle

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many of its impressed images participate in a single seal; the receptacle is soft, smooth, and receptive (St. Denys, DN 2.644b). These images utterly ignore what I take to be receptacle’s supplementary role. Was this Plato’s intention? Though liberties have been taken, I have tried to respect Plato’s images. Then bear with me while I sketch what seems to correspond to Timaeus’s first language in the neighborhood of Derrida’s second language. There are correspondences, especially since we are both in debt to Levinas’s images and Blanchot’s reduction of the tale to its space. To begin with, Derrida gives chora (“place”) priority over other terms designating various aspects of the matrix.9 He is fully aware of the dramatic ironies with which a Platonic dialogue opens and the ambivalence this occasions for its “object horizons.” The historical narratives opening Timaeus are set in motion by Socrates as if he, son of a midwife, were the segregate for chora; but this deflects attention from what seems to be its central theme, a magisterial account by Timaeus about a cosmos made and in the making that opens with a prayer to the god.10 It is as if his access to the Platonic nexus were through Blanchot’s observation that narratives tend to suspend assertion and attribution and thus avoid the imputation of Being. Less in evidence is Blanchot’s observation that there is “a movement toward a point . . . [from which] the tale derives its power of attraction.”11 Such a point may be Socrates’ anarchic history that thematizes justice, not war. Is this a trace of the Good that points beyond being? But on Derrida’s telling, we never get from this dead world to a “synthetic” moment of original presencing from beyond being. Until Timaeus, perhaps on behalf of the fourth and missing speaker (Tim., 17A), takes up the challenge, we are left with stories about stories. Derrida’s approach to writing is not always congruent with Gendlin’s. A Gendlin text is always going beyond itself, always new, rewritten, creatively inscribing itself; but its pre-predicative and preontological conditions (aitia) remain alongside these ontic eruptions and are never wholly domesticated by form even as she submits to reason’s lures. The slot is constantly being carried forward, so that when the word or line comes (made), it is already there (found) in what Whitehead described as “a becoming of continuity rather than a continuity of becoming.” The old word working in new ways assures both continuity and novelty. Derrida wants to discover the prior condition for any narrative topology that could contain a trace of a beyond. He is probably more interested in deconstruction as it develops in proto-writing (Of Grammatology), 366

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différance, and dissemination, while Gendlin’s focuses on its creative, unprogrammable aspects, on the implicate intricacy of saying. Levinas cites Plato’s thesis that language can come to its own defense. That may be impossible on Derrida’s account of arché-writing, which presupposes the final reduction of language to a deep transcendental field, independent of its users, in which meaning forms a closed, selfreferential system. If language is never a window on the world, as Husserl thought, but refers only to itself, then this eliminates, as Iris Murdoch notes, metaphor and any substantive theory of truth.12 The sea of language, not the world, is transcendent and cannot be dominated by the creatures who play in it and who, as she says with some exaggeration, “do not speak or use the language but are spoken or used by it.” We shall show, however, that a saying’s context is a grant by chora that can in part bracket out this field and, like Molly Bloom’s primal “yes,” let the word stand forth. We can defend language because, as other to one another, we are beyond being. But we can also defend the word because, as an analogue of the hypostasis’ haecceitas, it too has a place hedra from which it can command. Positively, Derrida’s reduction of language to chora can help recover a space for sacred scripture, liturgy, and prayer. I find it odd that Derrida, who claims filiation to Husserl and phenomenology, seems almost oblivious to the theme, “to the things themselves,” and to the widening of experience to cover intentionality and its empirical, eidetic, and categorial objects, real and irreal. He discovered from Husserl that signification did not of itself entail intuition. Since Speech and Phenomena, he has focused instead on signification, admittedly involved in all intentional experience, which Husserl treats as if it were autonomous. “The absence of intuition . . . is not only tolerated by speech, it is required by the general structure of signification, when considered in itself.”13 Chora will hardly be the place that gives beings and must be understood in terms of textuality (see 9:3 above). Until now my focus has been on what Timaeus says about a world that is always being created and not, as Derrida reads the dialogue, on a sequence of overlapping narratives addressing the problem of textuality. The approach is through a virginal rather than procreative chora that never lets herself be touched, broached, or exhausted by tropistic interpretation or translation. She seems to receive and to appear in these types; and though she gives them place, she remains inaccessible, impassable, amorphic, ever virgin. “She is not a support or a subject that could give place by receiving or conceiving, The Receptacle

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much less by letting herself be conceived.”14 Not being anything, neither existing nor not existing, she is nevertheless “nothing but the regularity for the naming, of the discourse.”15 This is the regularity of “speaking in the same manner” which is, in turn, “how I can glimpse Chora—in a difficult, aporetical way and as if in a dream.” Chora has no identity of its own and thus no determination and so is neither a giving subject nor a possessive recipient but “receives or gives place to all determinations” even as she possesses none. Even so, she makes possible a history programmed by kinds that is reflexive and reproductive.16 When whatever chora or khôra names is purged of features that predispose us to think of it anthromorphically, such as generous or caring, it is fit to be the possibility of a general text that, in the spirit of Derrida’s Grammatology, eliminates saying, its showing and proximity to the Other. A chorastic Socrates is found to be a sociological and historical variant on this textual possibility, which, lacking Timaeus’s contribution, would be closed to being and truth. Would it not be a supreme irony if Socrates, the son of a midwife whose name meant “master of life,” were not to recognize that this text made up of idealities and fictions needs life-giving alterities? Something beyond the text must set his lifeless images in motion (Tim., 19B–E).17 Only when we glimpse through Timaeus the Father who is Other can we move from fiction’s beyond being to the beyond of being. Ours is not the strongly disjunctive either/or of Chora or the Good, the way of Derrida or Jean-Luc Marion; it is Plato’s “give us both.” Indeed, both overlook the constitution of psyche, which both unifies and effects participation in Being qua peras and Becoming qua apeiron gignesthai. The latter, the dynamics of our embodiment given place by the receptacle, is hardly as alienating as Derrida makes it out to be. It is in its vulnerability the very condition for alterity. Though I would have preferred Derrida to speak in terms of the receptacle, no one has shown a greater appreciation for Plato’s effort to go below the appearances to the conditions for their appearing than he: The bold stroke consists here in going back and behind the origin, or also the birth, toward a necessity that is neither generative nor engendered and which carries philosophy, “precedes” (prior to the time that passes or the eternal time before history) and “receives” the effect, here the image of oppositions (sensible and intelligible): philosophy. This necessity (chora is its surname) 368

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seems so virginal that it doesn’t have the figure of a virgin any longer. The discourse on Chora “herself” plays for that which philosophy speaks of; the cosmos formed or given form [“as if the father engendered it on his own”] according to the paradigm. Nevertheless, it is from this cosmos that the proper— and necessarily inadequate—figures for describing chora will be taken . . .18 Perhaps our attempt to transform the more hostile and less giving receptacle or Levinas’s il y a into a dwelling place through the image of the Virgin is overly Christian; but this is in the spirit of Plato’s “holy family.” Less controversially, hasn’t Derrida ignored the fact that chora cannot be thought apart from the Good, its supplement, and that she is open to the suasion of reason? There is an excess to the matrix that defies saccharine representation and which reason can never economically reduce. This excess is implicit in number theory. The natural numbers posit the rational numbers, which in turn posit the real numbers; these in turn posit complex numbers, and then there are transfinite numbers; finally there is Gödel incompleteness and the limits on a consistence proof with which reason could effect closure.19 If mathematics and its hypodochic roots, which appear in (Aristotle’s) Plato as the infinite dyad, are to be our paradigm, then we can expect a similar resistance to closure in every rational domain. In developing the image of the receptacle I will try to respect that more-primordial necessity beyond Being and even Becoming, and by adding her supplement the Good, avoiding exclusive reference to the role of the more-familiar father figures of onto-theology. It is difficult to say anything about it/her that does not entail some structure that can be thought, such as her fleeting appearances in ennui or insomnia and the like. Moreover, I also want her to bear those beautiful forms we still see in Chartres’s rose windows that are based on Plato’s elementary solids which, partaking in reason in a mysterious way, opens her to reason’s erotic suasions. Isn’t she the bowl (hypodoche) in which the universe is formed (41D)? If seen through the focus of the creation myth as told by a Pythagorean scientist, Timaeus is about a world “in the process of creation and created” (Tim., 28C) in something that has various modalities, hypodoche (receptacle), chora (place), hedra (seat), and topos (space), in a religious and scientific context that, though the home of various necessities, is not opaque to the role of reason and the suasive power The Receptacle

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of the Good.20 But what Derrida says about chora and its dialectic that oscillates between participation and exclusion could also be said of the soul or life. Chora and the Good may oscillate and exchange roles, essential to ongoing creation, but oscillation breaks down in the affective response to the Other and to Beauty that deconstructs the self and its frameworks. We saw the appearing of the word in the slot as an instance of reason persuading necessity. The narrative movement in Timaeus is a suspension of being in a virtual history in a movement toward a focus, the Good, which through the mediation of chora, holds out a promise of the ingression of the transcendent. Expressed in what may be overly Christian terms, this suspension is characteristic of Saint Paul’s version of the Old Testament, the suspension of fulfillment in the law that awaits the coming of the Messiah. This narrative mirrors saying, whose said is the Word made flesh that dwelt among us, and so is its own referent; this self-reference to Alterity allows the text to pass to its referent. The truth condition has been fulfilled. The meaning of this fulfillment is another matter. The issue of the Eucharistic sacrifice, at least since Saint Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo, has been on “a full and sufficient sacrifice for the sins of the whole world,” as the Book of Common Prayer once put it, but this self-fulfillment could be narcissistic and in forgetfulness of the new life, of the rebirth and deification with and in Christ into life for others. Having experienced the Good, Socrates would have us return to the cave. There are analogues of what Derrida calls Plato’s “oscillational logic” in Levinas’s il y a or Heidegger’s es gibt, but this logic must be placed under severe restrictions. I have allowed the supplements to oscillate between, for example, exclusion (transcendence) and participation (immanence).21 But this play that seems to banish hierarchy neglects the absolute transcendence of the Other. Oscillation ceases with the hierarchy of concrete universals. To recast Derrida’s statement, we can say that chora “is more situating than situated in this opposition [with the Good] that . . . exceeds the metaphoric sense/proper sense, which must be withdrawn from any grammatical or ontological alternative to the active or passive.”22 (It is irrelevant to speak of the literal or metaphorical senses of the disclosive metaphors through which Plato lets us “see” the matrix; but they no longer exercise a constraint on vision when Derrida asserts a metonymy between Socrates and chora.) Socrates is now the place for political fictions and thus, ironically since he is placeless, an avatar of chora.23 370

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Derrida would not accept my proposal that Plato’s images are disclosive of chora. On his reading, this “ever-virgin third kind” (triton genos) is sterile (Tim., 50D). Chora does not couple with the father, in other words, with the paradigmatic model . . . she does not belong to an oppositional couple, for example, to that which the intelligible paradigm forms with the sensible becoming which looks like a father/son couple. The “mother” is supposedly apart. And since it’s only a figure, a schema, and therefore one of the determinations [italics mine] that chora receives, chora is not more of a mother than a nurse, is no more than a woman. This triton genos is not a genos; first of all, because it is a unique individual [sic], this strange mother who gives place without engendering can no longer be considered as an origin.24 Really? Chora and the Good are reciprocally active (father) and passive (mother); chora belongs to a supplemental, not an oppositional, chiasmatic couple who cross and exchange roles. There is a father, an Other, who is the basis of novelty and without whose persuasions all would lapse into entropic disorder. Even more to the point is the dismissal of the engendering mother. The Father, the Good, responds to her just as she solicits him. Together with their offspring they make up Plato’s “holy family,” which, were this argument more or less acceptable, may do more justice to a Triune God than Chalcedon. Coupling or carnal union is a better example of an oscillating, proximity-maintaining dialectic. Each is for the other and yet remains completely other. If there is to be a new creation and not simply a Nietzschian field of countervailing forces, then chora requires the Good, and conversely. Just as the hypodoche in her contraction (chora) is passive beyond passivity and active beyond activity, so too is the Good. Unlike the impassive God of Aristotle, the actus purus of Aquinas, or the Good in the Republic which could never go outside of itself, the Good we desire must persuade necessity, must respond and act just as the receptacle must respond and act. Saint Denys spoke of God as “vehement in his manifold and beneficent Eros toward all beings and spurs them on to search for him with a yearning Eros . . . inasmuch as He allows himself to be affected by the zeal of all beings . . .” (DN, 712a–b). God as Eros? Why not? The Good beyond being loves beings and requires the receptacle if there are to be beings to love. Kant’s productive imagination schematizes the categories as modes of time formation and so effects a union between sense and The Receptacle

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understanding. Alas, hope of unity through the rather anarchic receptacle must be banished. Chora is already schematized. Sometimes, like waves in the sea, these autopoietic ejects can lead to autochthonic expression and then, were this all, she would be ever Virgin; but sometimes, through the Good’s suasion, there is a new creation. Though participation lets us see her—if anything can be seen in such a catachresis—as the mother who grants her child a place through which it gathers itself into standing out (through the way she vectors nutrients as nurse), she is also other than a nurse or mother. Her geometry, her proteins and DNA, is our fate. Is she virgin? Only, I think, as receptacle. Sensible becoming, always an individual event or event complex, is a design, a son, but primal becoming, an apeiron gignesthai, is the receptacle, which then, by granting it place, becomes its mother. One can assume that the four kinds of being in Philebus (27B)—apeiron (“unlimited”), peras (“limit”), mikten (“mixture”), and aitia (“cause”), which is the Good (61A), are still operative in Timaeus as, respectively, “the becoming that never really is” (28A), the forms, the living creatures, and Good, the aitia of Becoming and the all (29E). I assume that, like the hypodoche/chora, the Good “beyond Being” (Rep., 509B) is also marginal and will leave its traces in the text? Thus the receptacle and the Good are supplementary and chiasmatically reverse roles; together they make up the two senses of arché, each being principle and origin, and replace Being in the Ontological Difference. In a Christian context, it would be more appropriate to say that the Father and the Holy Spirit effect this chiasmatic exchange, since the hypodoche is an ens creatum and the mutual indwelling of the persons allows us to say how each is in the other. Derrida does not attempt to translate chora, which cannot be expressed within the usual metaphysical oppositions such as truth/lie, mythos/logos, sensible/intelligible, existence/nonexistence. Though on my reading the receptacle gives place to creatures who assemble themselves by reading nature’s text, the schematically informed receptacle, he begins with chora in an oscillating logic of oppositions, even though she submits to none: “she belongs neither to the horizon of sense nor sense as sense of being” (268). Does this exclude the monstrative power of Plato’s metaphors? This seems to assume the Aristotelian predicative model, so that “mother,” “nurse,” and the like determine her as a certain kind of being. But does “seeing as” determine anything? On the contrary, I think that Plato makes an intuitive appeal through images to demonstrate the creative 372

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nexus as receptacle (51A); topos (52A); chora (52A); and hedra (52B), terms that provide a modal context for the third kind (52B). The disclosive metaphors at work within one or the other of these modes are errant cause (48A); nurse (49A); mother (50D); principle of natural necessity (48A); gold that is never golden (50B);25 always in transition (49B); a verbal such and never a nominal that (49E); retainer of form as a perfume base retains scent (50E);26 sifting or winnowing form (52E); unlike the heavens, in variable motion (52D, 53E); the home for all created things (52B); apprehended in bastard reasoning (52B); in a dream-like state (52C); and so forth. These schematize her as creative. According to the logic of oscillation, she both includes and excludes whatever images say. Before we examine the sense of this logic, let me make a plea for the creative thesis that can be assembled from these images on the model of Plato’s use of idea,27 Heidegger’s use of Gestell,28 or even Derrida’s assemblage of différance. 29 By rejecting as relics of onto-theology the metaphors disclosing the creature’s self-assemblage from inscriptions in the receptacle, Derrida seems really to miss its point. In an argument paralleling Heidegger’s rejection of metaphor because it concealed the Ontological Difference, Derrida says that metaphors ontologize the matrix, make a being of what is beyond being. That the “receptacle” is invariant (Tim., 50B) in all that it receives suggests that this word for chora “transcends the opposition between figurative and literal meaning”30 and renders possible “tropic detours,” which are no longer rhetorical figures. We abandoned figurative and literal meaning long ago and without tropic detours; how are we to get to the truth? But suppose that these tropic detours are deictic and do not evoke the substitution thesis implicit in literal/metaphorical “rhetorical detours.” They are crossings that let the receptacle be seen. As it is? No. Are they constitutive? No. If the Kantian imagination is the mechanism that constitutes empirical reality, this is an imaginative approach that can yield a likely story. On Derrida’s topographical reading, the largest region (pandeches; 51A) contains the other locii and types of discourse, including that of genera and kinds, as well as places and times, real and imaginary, without and within the Timaeus; something like this topology and its curious contradiction defying logic is implicit in any saying and marks the receptacle, if not chora, as the possibility of placing in a shadow web or nexus of extensive and intensional connectedness.31 This is also the logic of spacing, the “becoming space of time” and the The Receptacle

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“becoming time of space.”32 Can we say that this generalized nexus between any others, now “individuated” by Socrates’ situation, is the a priori condition for narrative, if not dialectical, discourse? The metonymy Derrida believes to obtain between Socrates’ discourse and a regionally articulated chora seems parasitic on the priority he gives chora over her other designations, especially the receptacle. Granted that the “ever-existing chora” is—with form and those things that become and are carried in and out of hedron [place, seat, or throne of honor]—one of the three kinds, and that she has an importance beyond that attributed to the receptacle (52A–B), would one come to Derrida’s interpretation if “the kind of discourse” upon which the metonymy depends was that of Timaeus rather than Socrates? Socrates’ discourse is the receptacle for the nesting sequence of regions determined by the tales told by various speakers, actual or remembered, each imposing a certain necessity on discourse imparted by its context, its relation to other regions. Perhaps chora seems overly topographical when thought as “place, emplacement, region, country,”33 rather than as the dwelling place, city, country, region, etc., through which something receives the gift of being. If chora is so important to Socrates’ part in the argument, why is it mentioned only once prior to Timaeus’s own contribution, and then in a rather peripheral context, if anything in Plato is peripheral? Socrates remarks that after some of the children who were sent away to be reformed were returned to the state, they were to be put in a place proper to them (Tim., 19A). The notion of a “proper place” suggests that we must think chora not in relation to placeless narrative manifolds but in relation to places justly assigned. Moral directedness is determined by Good and evil; thus place has an ethical import. Derrida ignores this trace of the Good and the important role given to the more creative receptacle, and lets chora regulate his discourse. We have noticed that Socrates’ account, like those of poets and sophists, is “lifeless” (Tim., 19B); life comes only by the test of war and the ultimate alterity, death. Isn’t this the fate of an autochthonic text? If so, it would make sense to say that the Socratic text is closed on chora and only war, not the Good, will deconstruct it.34 Derrida seems to miss this point and instead proposes a genealogical interpretation (in which various stories, i.e., “regions,” descend from others) rather than an interpretation under the hermeneutical constraint of Plato’s images, such as becoming, nurse, or mother; thus, metonymyous Socrates gets interpreted through a set of narratives about origins, real or fictional, and their relation to places, real or 374

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imaginary. With this beginning, Socrates is said to “induce and program the discourse of his addresses, whose listener and receiver he affects to become”35 and self-effacingly gives place to various political discourses that he proposes, tells, and receives. Like Bohm’s implicate order, Socrates’ as a hypodochic manifold begins to unfold as he recalls the stories told on the previous evening, continues through what seems to be the political layout of the Republic, and concludes with the confession that he, placeless like the poets and sophists, cannot animate his words. Derrida seems to have fallen away from the arché, from origins and principles, into the abyss of genealogy. Abyss? Yes. The integrity of a being, a movement, a culture is ignored and its being is borrowed from its ancestors. Seen in the Spirit, that past is an enabling condition for erotic projects aimed at possible futures. Looked at from a different perspective, the political discourses give way to cosmology, to something beyond being that as life-giving source, errant cause (Tim., 48A), and winnowing basket (52D–E) bursts through the textual closure in a recapitulation of the Symposium’s ascent from just institutions and laws to the science of order everywhere (210C–D). The earlier part of Timaeus recapitulates the Republic’s isomorphism between the human soul and the polis; Timaeus extends this to the cosmos. Socrates’ ironic confession that his discourse is lifeless probably reflects his midwifery (Theat., 148C–151D) and opens the way for the animating receptacle, truly a Zoodochus Pege, a life-giving source and not merely a biophysical genealogy. Consider for a moment the unfolding sequence of tales. Young Critias begins by recounting a speech by Solon, poet and lawgiver, which he had heard from his grandfather, the elder Critias. An Egyptian priest told Solon about the great deeds and institutions of the earlier Greeks which the Egyptians had preserved in writing; though forgotten by the illiterate Greeks, they were political paradigms for the Egyptians. The speakers, real or mythical, placeless or with a secure sense of place, tell of what was spoken or written; this series of oppositions seems to converge like the nesting boxes on Socrates whose saying directs and empowers discourse even when he is silent. We are told by Derrida to think diachomai [to receive, to await the gift of hospitality] through Socrates, “the receptacle on which everything from now on will inscribe itself,”36 rather than through Timaeus’s words about the receptacle. This establishes the essential role of writing in human culture, the happy result of the labyrinthine topology of Derrida’s deduction from the said to chora. The Receptacle

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In the earliest Academic tradition, chora was understood as creative and procreative, a role that is continued in Whitehead’s philosophy and in some physical cosmologies. The version that descends through Blanchot to Levinas and Derrida is bleak, even hostile. Must one pass through this darkness? Having learned the hyperbolic character of those statements that constitute affirmative theology in which “the divine being is manifest as cause and beings are manifest as what is caused,”37 we must nevertheless put aside these “images that fresh images beget” for the darkness. Denys says, speaking of the God beyond being in ways which reverberate in Plato and Heidegger, that “while to it one must posit and affirm all the positions of beings, as cause of all; one must properly deny all as beyond being, as beyond all—I believe that one must celebrate the positions and denials in an opposite way; for we posit these by beginning from what is first, and descend through these through the middle down to the last; we deny them all, having made our search for the highest principles from the last to the very first. We do this to know undisguisedly the unknowing which is covered roundabout by every knowledge in beings; we do this that we may see the darkness beyond being which is hidden by the light in beings” (St. Denys, DN, I.2.1000A, II.1025B). Is it possible that a new life, a birth on Beauty emerges from this darkness? If so, it would be the darkness of the womb, not that of the exile in the desert. 2. The Zoodochus Pege Make itself? From the earth? From the matrix? Then the earth no longer demands blood, which once cried out from the ground (Gen., 4:10). After the murder of Abel, God said to Cain, “You remain accursed and will be banished from the very ground that has opened its mouth to receive the blood you have shed—you shall be a wanderer, a fugitive on the earth” (4:11–12). Then God set his mark on Cain’s forehead. The Earth Mother has been vanquished. And yet, though we wander, we continue to kill our brothers, and the earth still drinks our blood. Orthodox Christianity unwittingly preserved this insight when the archival ensemble of Earth Mothers was gathered into Mary, The God Bearer, “the place of the placeless.” An icon will show us how to give the matrix a more benign look. The Byzantine icon “Life Giving Well” (Zoodochus Pege) is my source for this movement. On two icons dated circa 1320 AD in the sixth-century Chora Church (Kariye Comie) in Istanbul, the Virgin 376

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is represented as “the place of the placeless.” In the Pege icon, of which only a fragment remains in the Chora Church, she is seated in a receptacle (the Platonic receptacle, font, and chalice) that gives off healing waters. She holds the Christ child on her lap and is the place (chora) of the placeless Logos. The wild and raging waters of the oceans, symbols of the Earth Mother, now heal and give life. The Virgin Mary gathered in herself many features of the GrecoRoman cult worship of Earth Mother. This process seems to have started by Pulcheria, sister of the Emperor Theodosius, in the early fifth century. After his death, she continued this work as Empress, the wife of Marcion, and was successful in leading the cause of Cyril of Alexandria against Nestorius at the Councils at Ephesus and Chalcedon, which gave Mary the title of Theotokos, “God Bearer.” In Mary’s new role as celebrated, for example, in the Akathistos, a hymn still central in Orthodox worship, she is in fact a divine entity. Pulcheria’s newly institutionalized cult of venerating the Virgin led to Mary’s becoming an object of public worship by the eighth century, providing Constantinople with the benefits given by the earlier goddesses.38 In the Latin west the Black Virgin seems to have preempted the role of the mother goddess, but whatever the antecedents, the theology of the cosmogonic Zoodochus Pege is a quantum leap above the usual Byzantine icons. According to our icon, Mary gave place to the Logos “through Whom was made everything that was made.” (John 1:3) Within this world in which chance and catastrophe continue to play major roles, theodicy makes a mockery of the facts of human suffering. Through Mary in all her human vulnerability, God took on our flesh and a human form and became a man of sorrows. Flesh marks the vulnerability that Christ brings to Godhead. The Zoodochus Pege is said to have originated in a monastery by that name just outside the Istanbul walls during Justinian’s reign. A monk was told in a dream to dig until he found an icon; water sprung forth on its discovery. This became the site of the monastery and, to continue the legend, the source of the icon. Mary is represented with the infant Christ, in some later versions as a Mandela in utero, seated (hedron) in the receptacle that autochthonically gives off living, healing waters. A similar receptacle recurs in some representations of the crucifixion. The tree that issues from it—as in Piero della Francesca’s Legend of the True Cross in Arezzo or the image over the door of the Strausbourg Cathedral—is both a cross and the tree of life or knowledge sacred to the mother. The relation to the earth, undone by Adam, was restored through Mary by Christ. The Receptacle

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According to the second Council of Nicea (787 AD), he “who venerates an icon venerates in it the hypostasis who is inscribed in it”; and what is venerated is the “invisible” that, aiming at us, allows the “intention of the invisible [an infinite intention] to occur visibly.”39 The visible is not opposed to the invisible since “it consists only of an intention,”40 that of the mystery of infinite love. In the experience of our icon, we are the focus of two gazes, that of the Mother and that of the Christ, an icon of the invisible God. Two persons look at us. Professor Marion has said that in an icon the focus of our gaze “becomes the optical mirror of that at which it looks only by finding itself more radically looked at: we become an invisible mirror of an invisible gaze that subverts us in the measure of its glory” so that our face, “by dint of being saturated beyond itself by this glory, becomes, strictly though imperfectly, the icon of it” (Marion, God without Being, 20). The world, Plato said, is an icon of the intelligible (Tim., 91C); through Grace as mediated by the icon—which, according to John of Damascus, “manifests and indicates the secret”—we too can become instruments of Grace. In the Zoodochus Pege, the child looking at us is the incarnate Logos “by whom was made everything that was made,” who was given place by the Virgin seated above the receptacle-font-chalice as chora. Together, these reveal Divinity as procreative and sacrificial love and, therefore, at least by the testimony of this icon, as medial and beyond being. Let us take our clue from Heidegger’s words; the icon is a rift-design, “the intimacy of opponents that belong to each other.”41 It is thus a “setting-itself-into-work of the truth of what is”42 in which, on solicitation by the Good, the not-always-benign and sometimes savage and orgiastic forces associated with the Anatolian mother goddesses, proxies for Heidegger’s earth, such as Cybele or Artemis at Ephesus, which diversify the bowl-like receptacle, now supplement rather than oppose the more-uranian Father. Through this propositioning or erotic lure, these forces are gathered into a place that gives, protects and nurtures life while remaining “ever Virgin.”43 It should be noted, however, that Beauty and thus the Good with which it is convertible can seem indifferent to us. The receptacle, like the Levinasian il y a, promises failure, suffering, and death. Golgotha is an accident of history only because history is accidental. There are no shadows in the life of a rose. Mary, granting place to God, is now the Earth Mother’s more benign, but surely notalways-saccharine successor. Her way led to the cross. How that is to mean is a matter of faith. But unless, like the apostles, she be one of 378

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us, the point of the Incarnation will be lost. The Holy Spirit that she symbolizes is always with us; we should pay less attention to her role as mediator and more to what she represents. But something even more radical than this transformation may be at stake, for the Father—the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to say nothing of David’s Psalms—is too often demonic, at war sometimes with and sometimes against the chthonic forces; this is characteristic of the awesome or even uncanny (unheimlich), which Ralph Otto found in the Holy. Saint Paul says that “the first man became a living creature whereas the last Adam has become a life-giving spirit—the spiritual does not come first; the physical body comes first and then the spiritual. The first man is made from earth, the heavenly man is the pattern of all that is heavenly” (1 Cor., 15, 45–48). Prior to Mary, man was natural; after her, God becomes man. This new Adam could say Father. She became the place of the “life-giving waters,” the icon of the Spirit. The waters that flow from the “receptacle” in the Zoodochus Pege are the waters of baptism, a symbol of the Holy Spirit, and, flowing from Christ’s side, of rebirth in the Spirit. The God we see through our icon seems far from the God who shall “shatter the jaws of my foes” (Psalm 3:8) or who, when “by the rivers of Babylon [where] we sat mourning and weeping,” let us rejoice at the thought that “happy are those who seize your [Babylonian] children and smash them against a rock” (Psalm 137:9). Even after the holocaust, innocents are still slaughtered. Nevertheless, these waters that flow from the receptacle are the healing waters of salvation; this icon is a metaphor about the Good and thus about what it is to be a hypostasis, divine or human, that reconciles differences in the love expressed by the Mother for the child and for us by the Christ. Through the merit of her Son, we have been told, she is with him coRedeemer and, in some Franciscan traditions, co-creator; and while such appellations are questionable if not idolatrous, doubtless something important is being said. Be that as it may, the gazes that cross our gaze can make us prisoners of Grace. Now we know: the darkness is creative, the desert will flower. Socrates takes after his mother and is something of a midwife. Though barren, the stories he assembles point to Timaeus’s story, which turns on chora. Like the point of a joke or the point on which overlapping regions converge, Mary as icon of spirit is somehow outside these regions, as is appropriate to a trace bearer, and she should be read through the regions of the dynamical and apeiron-like receptacle from whose forces she gives and shelters life as she gathers The Receptacle

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(logos) to give place for the reception of form and the empowerment of her offspring. She is Dwelling and, at the same time, always Other. The receptacle, not chora, is the primordial possibility of connectedness through which the dynamics of becoming (or saying) are transmuted into the possibility of physis (the said). Her “regioning,” however wantonly assembled, makes monstrations possible. Fearful of making something of her, Derrida has given us a protestant, iconoclastic chora. The receptacle makes possible nesting regions, monstrative spaces that define a place and, granted the creature, the necessary condition for spacing, the “becoming space of time, the becoming time of space.” In the analytic dialectic of which this is a moment, these regions converge on and demonstrate something not a region. We can phenomenalize this spacing, thanks to Derrida’s suggestion that Socrates is chora, so that, for example, memory can be defined by this receptive condition.44 Like Saint Luke’s account of the Annunciation (1:35–38) or Proust’s “petites madeleines,” memory comes upon us and overshadows us even as it is welcomed. That welcome or acceptance is, as we saw in an earlier account, the freedom of the recipient in the face of this necessity. Of course, this “passivity beyond passivity” presupposes moods predisposing receptivity; gift and receptivity chiasmatically resonate with one another, as in “making/finding.”45 Memory invites textual metaphors. As in Kant’s reproductive synthesis, memory also spatializes, lets the now reach back to and resonate with a past that is now coexistent, to make possible the conditions of significance which, thanks to the anarchical arché, obtain through narrative regions.

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À Dieu

The à Dieu greets the other beyond being, in “what is signified beyond being by the word ‘glory’.” Jacques Derrida

1. Rosenzweig: Saving the Word What is left to language were the said peeled away from the saying? A primal fecundity awaiting the word. When saying is propositioned by erotic reason, it is as if the said hypothesizes, stands out, and is substantial through the other. If haecceitas and its ties to alterity individuate the hypostasis, establishes its integrity as something against which to stand over and take our measure, is there anything that will give the word a similar status? Is there some analogue to the “Word made flesh” that can prevent its endless chain of signifiers or limit its dissemination, if with the plethora of sects the integrity of the Logos is still thinkable? What we want is a deep saying, one below the duality of saying (dire) and the said (dit), as the receptacle is deeper than the duality haecceitas and the hypothesis. We have seen that the hypostasis is “produced” by unsolicited alterity while “deep saying” is responsibility for and answerability to the other before anything is said that calls me to support “all of them and everything on their behalf without reason.” The said of this saying is my response.1

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On its surface saying is a now-subject, yet it promises, as Levinas said, to reveal “the plot that does indeed lead it to the said, to the putting together of structures that make possible justice and the ‘I think’.”2 We are, however, less interested in the “extreme passivity to exposure to the other,” which is “saying,” than in the way experience of a radical alterity entails a generalized sense of koinos, of community, communication, and communion. How does saying qua the linguistic receptacle give something more than a virtual place to binding words through lowly graphemes and phonemes? Aristotle says that we think forms or concepts in images (De Anima, 431b 2); on the contrary, I think we “see” things through transparent words, where what is “seen” transcends sense. For example, it is a nexus of categories and fit for logical deployment. If it is the nature of a word to be transparent, short of a Versailles-like hall of reflections, some terminate reference; otherwise one is caught up in the romanticism of infinite tasks. There are words beyond which one cannot go. Words are almost things (res), almost substances (ousia). Words command. Words entreat. Words pledge fidelity. Words address God. There can be no going around or passing through them to further signification. As in most fundamental studies involving being, this involves a dialectic of being and non-being; but unlike Hegel’s beginning, it will not lead to the Absolute but to the word. Franz Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption suggests an intriguing interpretation of the language that obliquely addresses its “spatial” or deictic modes. The most direct way into the linguistic matrix has been through a rather naturalized version of saying as a differential field of forces carried by de Saussure’s langue that may give place (chora) to the word (parole). Is not the receptacle an immediate infinite mode of extension, a sort of natura naturans, expressed (with some help from non-Spinozistic alterity) in such mediate modes as topos (51A), chora (51A), and hedra (51B)—terms usually associated with space, which invite a “bastard reasoning” (Tim., 52A)? I have made an effort to show this in “saying” and then to characterize this between through Plato’s images in a methodology that derives from Husserl’s imaginative variations. Prior to saying, the linguistic matrix is an apeiron gignesthai (Tim., 28A). As with all interpretations in which the receptacle is primary, this is a medial flux of opposing forces that might be expected, as in Deleuze’s interpretation of Nietzsche, to form hierarchies founded on dominance and submission. Power justifies; the de facto dominant term is de jure. Picture the complexity of an Anaximanderian apeiron 382

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generating and enabling linguistic opposites. These forms are construed by de Saussure as a field of differences between signifiers, graphemes or phonemes, the others by which a signifier, a word, and—if you are a nominalist—even a concept is a same;3 now consider how their conceptual analogues also form the differential hierarchies, such as making/finding, inner/outer, agent/patient, and nature/art, which structure language. Derrida’s différance deconstructs proto-Hegelian hierarchies; then the play of differences could be thought to generate the text, the shifting structures of meaning by which we are and through which we live. To risk being formulaic, the emergence of the said from saying is the work of différance, but with this difference—by the Good’s suasion. That makes all the difference. Linguistics takes signs to be signifier-signified unities; in natural languages, and thus unlike symbols, icons, or natural signs, they are said by de Saussure to be “unmotivated and arbitrary.” This may not be true in formal disciplines or in the construction of various machines, for you might try to build an odometer or calculator with Roman numerals; but now assume that the identity of a signifier lies in its differential structure; “whatever differentiates one sign from another constitutes it.”4 Socrates’ dream of the letters in Theaetetus will bring de Saussure into focus, for in this dream things are reduced to collections of simple objects, such as letters of the alphabet or Russell’s logical atoms (Theaet., 201E–204A). No account can be given of these elements of “which all other things consist.” They can only be named; all else said of them, such as “just,” “it,” “each,” and the like, “run loose about the place and are attached to everything.” Complex things may be ostensively defined and understood by “combinations of names” (202A). Elements, like letters, are without sense apart from their assemblage into wholes. Though unknowable in themselves, letters are intuitively distinguishable, but nothing can be asserted of them. The elements are “objects of perception and cannot be known”(202B). Socrates says that the whole alone is knowable and not its elements or parts. Absurd consequences follow however these wholes be understood—whether as emergent unities, heaps (Aristotle). They are distinguishable simples such as epistemic or metaphysical atoms or the objects in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Later Wittgenstein cites Plato’s myth5 as a reason for abandoning its logical atomism. While a relational essence is required for signification, I still want to know if unintelligible differential quality is the basis of intelligibility. À Dieu

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In this tradition, a concept is also a sign and it too would be an eject of a field of differences. The being of any signifier is through nonbeing, its difference from others, the generically same but formally other elementary kinds, and it works, according to Barthes and other structuralists, through the absent others in its formal, differential field. The signifier is what it is, because it is the trace of the absent others. Nevertheless, something must have an intrinsic property if it is to have a relational essence, for otherwise there would be a relation with nothing to relate. This is not to deny, for example, that words have sense only in expressions and that meaning is use; however, dictionary makers can order these usages around a discriminable and intelligible kernel and, as in the Oxford English Dictionary, bring before us the history of word, a language, and perhaps a people. The intrinsic nature of signifiers is more evident in a language we do not understand; once it becomes familiar, its signs are animated (Husserl) and we pass through them to their referent. Given some rule in virtue of which certain combinations are possible, these formal differences are potentials for structure. Leibniz’s differential signs were better suited to disclose structure than Newton’s fluxions. What is brought into the slot by logos or Dasein carries a grounding history and an appeal to an intrinsic intelligibility. The seen grapheme offers itself through the occasioning computer as an interpretation of a circuit, because Leibniz devised the binary base for the number system and Shannon gave these an electrical interpretation. The signifier that appears for interpretation requires linguistic and philosophical skills. It is hard to take seriously de Saussure’s statement that signifiers are not characterized “by their positive quality . . . [but] simply by the fact that they are distinct. Phonemes are above all else opposing, relative, and negative entities.”6 If the sameness of a signifier, whether a linguistic sign or concept, is founded on the others, on what it is not, is this same constituted by alterity an epiphenomenon of the field of signifiers? Saying is a field in which I can be called by another and solicited, shaken by a transcending alterity, and say yes to the other’s call. De Saussure accounts for dissemination, an openly endless horizon of signs signifying signs, but unless the buck stops here, unless I can come to its aid and stand behind it, how can it have the integrity implicit in the commitment, “I give you my word”? Is there the faith and honor of an “I” behind the iteration? I iterate a promise made for me in a rite that constitutes my identity. With Luther one must be able to say, 384

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“Here I stand . . .” Though it may not be true of de Saussure, one is tempted to assume that such fields are autochthonic. Could such a self-forming word come down to us through a field of differences as if from on high and place us under an obligation? Could that word be the Word? Or would it be no more than an epiphenomenal eject of a linguistic field in the service of political hierarchies? Are words like waves in a sea, reducible to a force field? Or can we find, even in mundane empirical situations, traces of the suasive power of the Beautiful and Good? Hasn’t beauty and saying, prayer and its amphibolous possibilities, given us grounds for hope? Then there would be hierarchies, the sort perhaps familiar in Christ’s sermon on the mount, in which the more powerful would respond to and be ordered by the needs of the more vulnerable. De Saussure’s reductionist thesis is only part of the truth and, thanks to Plato, Franz Rosenzweig, and John Llewelyn, we can begin to see the outline of a choraphonographical alternative.7 Rosenzweig’s point is quite complex, but perhaps we can gain an intuitively appealing hypothesis if we can minimize the distinctions between the levels of negation (Naught, nothing) and affirmation (Aught, yes, Amen) of something (aliquot if not ens) with which he begins his great Star of Redemption. Rosenzweig’s first Amen posits being, not in the sense that it is opposed to the Heideggerian Nothing, but by the matrix or il y a. Heidegger’s Nothing causes beings to shrivel up in dread and fade away. Rosenzweig’s Amen is opposed to the indeterminate, what is not yet known or perhaps, because formless, unknowable but not radical non-Being. That nihilating “nothing” comes into play with the separation of essence from existence as a consequence of the Judaic-Christian ex nihilo creation theory. Thereafter exsistere, “existence,” came to be part of the meaning of esse, being. Ex-istence, like its Latin root, means to stand out from. From what? Nothing? Though Kierkegaard and Heidegger may lead one through dread into a “lived experience” of nothingness that legitimates this kind of thinking, I remain persuaded that nonbeing cannot be thought except as other than some determinate sense of being, a contextual rather than a global absence, which is close to Plato’s use to “other” to gain Non-Being (Sop., 259A–B). Rosenzweig begins here. In his essay “And Cain Said to Abel,” Rudi Visker says that this original yes is the mark we bear from creation ex nihilo. Prior to Cain’s murder, man was without a moral sense and lived under the program of the conatus essendi—or, if you will, the pleasure principle. The mark À Dieu

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on Cain’s face is a sign of a common humanity, a “true fraternity . . . outside all biology,”8 by which God completes creation, giving us a lacking moral sense that establishes our autonomy: “Thou shall not murder.” “The self finds itself responsible—in response—before it can decide to be responsible. Responsibility is not a product of my freedom—it is ‘older’ than my freedom.” Levinas notices that “in creation, what is called to being answers to a call that could not have reached it since, brought out of nothingness, it obeyed before hearing the order.”9 “This yes is the yes of creation,” Visker says, “and without it, the appeal of the Other would either have to miss me or not arrive at all, or if it did touch me, it would leave me indifferent at best or, perhaps more plausibly, provoke an allergic reaction . . . [and] introduce another worry in my existence that already has enough sorrows of its own.”10 I find myself not quite thrown into a world and left to fare for myself—before anything is said, for I am inextricably linked with others prior to the yes or no of decision. 2. Yes How does this initial yes stand to its no? Saint Thomas’s “being is that which is first in the apprehension absolutely and is included in whatsoever else a man understands” (ST I, q.94, a.2) points to a primordial understanding of Being which, though it gave Heidegger a basis for his hermeneutical ontology, makes the epistemological perspective primary and places God under the formality of Being, not with Denys, Maximus, Eckhart, or Bonaventure under that of the Good.11 Aquinas’s five ways lead from a finite being’s condition as, for example, caused or contingent to an uncaused or unconditioned being. By negating limiting conditions, one is led to an unconditioned being. In further qualifying this being, a creaturely perfection, strength, or wisdom is attributed to God substantially and in a superlative degree. Since the creature stands in no proportion to the infinite, what are contingent qualities in us are essential to God; but then the similarities vanish and a pious agnosticism is inevitable (S.T., I, q.13, a.2). One may salvage something by heeding the claim that all creaturely perfections are in God (q.4, a.2); and then by denying likeness, insisting that He is their non-univocal cause (q.4, a.4). Just as approaching the Ontological Difference through beings obscures Being, the God of these analogies turns out to be a sublime instance of a kind of being and thus a form of idolatry. Love, not Being, is the primary name of God (1 John 4:28).12 386

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Franz Rosenzweig does not begin with non-being, with the Nothing of creation ex nihilo as usually understood, but with existence as we explained it; he is also suspicious of the Nothing in which mystical theology ends.13 He says that the path that begins by negating something, a non-naught, leads to the infinite being; but this path from something to the nothing of negative theology “leads to mysticism or atheism.”14 Can we discover here a way of construing the Good beyond being, not as a mystical silence ecstatically experienced in deification—as the Orthodox mystical theology has it—but simply as something about which it makes no sense to raise epistemological questions? Heidegger’s path terminates in “nothing that itself nothings,” as he characterizes non-being during one phase of his reflections on the Ontological Difference. 15 However, Rosenzweig wants to turn this upside down and consider non-being less globally; for example, as the ignorance with which we begin thinking about God. To us, He is initially a Naught. This initial Naught is “not the Naught in general— but the Naught of the individual problem.”16 The non-Naught that results from the negation of the global Naught points to the infinite, to being or the All; but if one begins by negating the particularized Naught as given in, for example, Levinas’s il y a or the hypodoche, the resulting consciousness is finite. Rosenzweig’s Naught is not Heidegger’s nihilation of Being but the Naught of the saying in which we await the said. In this sense chora is delimitation, a sort of bracketing out or epoché, of the receptacle that makes possible the hidden, elemental yes and no and thus delimits the play of differences by which there is a same. On the next level, thought moves from this undiversified to the diversified, from the saying to the said. Rosenzweig says yes and no are the arché words of language “which lie hidden under each and every manifest word as secret bases and rise to light in it.”17 As in de Saussure, a signifier or even a concept is in part constituted by what it is not, “the promise of the real word which is carried by its hidden no,” that is, by the differential field of others by which it is recognizably same; but equiprimordially, it carries a hidden yes—“the Amen that accompanies every word”—that signifies “in the beginning [and] gives the word in the sentence the right to exist, supplies a seat on which it may take its place; it posits.”18 This hidden no presupposes, does it not, the force fields carried by signifiers which, like vast tropical storms obscuring the earth’s surface on a satellite image on the weather channel, diversify the receptacle, while with the yes these À Dieu

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storms seem to coagulate into distinct features, assert themselves as determinate places, become the said of a saying. We need to add to this the obvious fact that what is being disclosed presupposes the affirmation of the word and gift of the word to another implicit in the saying. To make sense of this primordial yes, I suggest we look to the concluding page of James Joyce’s Ulysses. In this wonderful novel written in the shadow of the Timaeus, the hypodoche has no supplement and being has lost its engendering power, so we are left with a matrix that, like John Wheeler’s black hole, gathers all into itself and gives nothing. In this all-consuming il y a, yes is the last word in Molly Bloom’s apeiron-like soliloquy.19 Molly is the final transformation of the receptacle, the matrix theme with which the novel opens. Until then, it had symbolized the ephemerality of creativity (Buck Mulligan’s froth-filled shaving bowl), death (“the bowl of bitter waters” into which Stephen’s mother poured out her life), sterility (the dead flotsam on the shore of Dublin Bay), the cuckolded Leopold, Dublin, and so forth.20 Molly concludes this long, medial flux of language by gathering herself into readiness to respond and accept: “Yes!”21 To echo Levinas, in this “passivity beyond passivity” there is a readiness—which can be expressed only in the middle voice—to respond to the other. But Molly is only a virtual chora (52A), for hers is still the autochthonic yes of soliloquy, and the word from on high is yet to come. Nevertheless, were this “yes, yes” Mary’s “let it be done to me according to thy word,” it could mark a place (hedra) that is receptive to the burden of the Word. Only then can one speak of the Good incarnate in the yes of veracity, of good faith. The Other’s address is an Annunciation and a Revelation. Can we now see what Rosenzweig might have meant by saying that yes posits, “supplies a seat [hedra; 52B] on which [the word] may take its place [chora; 52A]”? The yes is the affirmation, the acceptance of responsibility, implicit in saying that gives the said a place and lets it function significantly. This place is between the one listening and the one speaking, who are beyond being and where the word can “come to its own aid.” The word can arise and go forth in a said from this saying, a Gendlin slot that is “carried forward” and in which the new word is found.22 Hedra could be the throne from which a king issues rules and from which, as a “principle,” he governs. The rule of a principle can be disseminated, as shown in the historic course of dogma; but “Do this!” apart from all reasons is absolute. Singularity always eludes description but is gained in one’s singularizing response. 388

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At a more mundane level, with hedra the saying is expressed as if from above in its said, the flesh in the Word; then chora would be the matrix as fecundated by “making” prior to the occasioning of “finding” and, therefore, with its said “finding” we have the receptacle’s “yes” to the solicitations of reason. An utterance can introduce novel difference as if from on high, or a feminine necessity is persuaded to reveal herself. One dwells in rather than displaces opposites. In summary, “dwelling” is a place that nurtures, protects, and grants such integral being as befits the creature. It presupposes the receptacle’s prior fecundity, symbolized by chora. Before “finding” appeared in its linguistic matrix to form the metaphor “making is finding,” which Heidegger says is not a metaphor, making was a gift fundicating chora; a welter of linguistic forces in use families converged and formed the semantic field “making.” This field is framed, that is limited, through the appearance of its focus “finding.” But until it appears, these forces converge in “making” and seem to prepare a place (chora) for a word drawn from its semantic associations, as in “making out.” Yet this is neither automatic writing nor an eruption of opposites from an Anaximanderian apeiron; for a desire to say, a shadow of the Good, crosses and overshadows this matrix and then, with the “seating” of finding, a radical alterity appears as if from on high. I go against the grain of “making’s” semantic field and channel new vectors. Signification stops here. 3. A Christian Platonism? You do not stare at beauty: it stares at you. Its gaze is terrifying. Nikos Kazantzakis

Christianity first expressed itself in the Greek language and was from the beginning the heir to Hellenism, the native soil of eastern Orthodoxy. The Patriarch’s justifiable pride in the Greek language and its philosophy developed in part as a response to Julian’s rescript forbidding Christian professors to teach the pagan Classics. Though the Cappadocians admonished their followers to “prefer the simplicities of faith to the demonstrations of reason,” these demonstrations abound in Basil and, to a lesser extent, in the two Gregories.23 Several generations of scholars have insisted on the superiority of an Aristotelian Christianity, but I am convinced that Plato offers an anthropology and approach to spirituality, though not to a polity, that À Dieu

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is far superior to what I have found in my own Latin and English tradition. Metaphor is the medium of the Patriarchs’ journey. Though metaphor aspires to storm the gates of heaven, its metaphysical issue is an ontic and possibly idolatrous determination of God in the name of Being, not the Good. In our more customary metaphorics, the images of greatest interest are those opening a buyer to a product or, at the highest level, inviting a Cartesian inspectio which, through mathesis universalis, yields a hypothesis. But seen in the Good, our concern is with the Other’s proximity and not his words, with dwelling in and with one another and its hyperbolic expressions, such as “ineffable” and “infinite,” as they function in a divine economy. Truth arises in the vulnerability of saying and mutual witness secured for Moses by God’s name, ehyeh asher ehyeh, “being there for you.” We must found our understanding of the divine mysteries on the Good, which is not a substance (ousia); but unless He bears vestiges of ousia, we will lose too much of what we may presume has been revealed and the tradition has said of Him. To replay a theme we heard in Blanchot, unless the space traversed by experience has its attraction in a meaning of being, it degenerates into what happened to the followers of Bob Jones in Guinea, Woodstock, or worse. The Word made flesh that dwelt among us is such an attractor—to borrow a term from complexity theory—that can take our measure and redeem us from sophistry. Other traditions can perhaps offer attractive alternatives. I can speak only for my own. From time to time I have suggested that the Good as agape hypostasizes itself, and as a consequence will sustain most of the classical attributions of being in the Trinitarian hypostases. Though I am ill-equipped to carry this off, I can offer some suggestions. According to Wilamowitz, this movement away from the bonds of Greek “substance” theory was begun by the Greeks. “God” is not equivalent to theos, for the latter is a predicative notion. Thus we can say “love is theos,” where the lack of an underlying substantive should permit a hypostatic definition of God as the triune “substantive” hypostasized by love. Now one can also say “God is love.” If God is not a being, we can follow Aquinas and refer to him by his operations. Thus, as John Damascene notes, theos comes from thein, “which means to provide for all things, take care of all things; or aithein, which means burn (a fire consuming all wickedness); or theasthai, to see all things.” The usual reading of Exodus 3:13, “I am who I am,” which Aquinas said signified the very incommunicable 390

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and singular substance of God, misses the point that by the first and third of such operations God expresses the sense of his name ehyeh asher ehyeh, “being there for you.” Although Ricoeur and Greisch are among those who acknowledge the correctness of the promissory or, as Augustine put it, the Idipsum (or “steadfast”) rather than the ontological reading, they feel the weight of what our history has vested in the Greek einai.24 So too do I, but I confer it on the persons, not the Godhead. Jean-Luc Marion’s “Is the Argument Ontological?” is a radical reading of Anselm’s argument which attempts to understand God’s being through his prior goodness. Marion argues that Anselm does not meet the requirements of an ontological argument, which proves the “existence of a privileged being simply on the basis of the concept of its essence . . . [which] covers the entire range of the multiple meanings of Being yet without leaving its unique meaning as essence.”25 He denies that he has a concept of God, and argues within the horizons of Good, not Being.26 Following Augustine, Anselm is reluctant to call God a substance, even a supreme and primary substance, since substance always implies a relation, at least a possible one, to the notion of accident. However, here he tolerates the name of substance, at the express condition that it is based on the principle of melius, thus seen in the perspective of the sovereign good. In this sense, “just as it is blasphemous to suppose that the substance of the Supreme Nature is something which in some respect it would be better not to be, so this substance must be whatever in every respect it is better to be than not to be.” Substance can no longer be understood as a relative category but as a particular (and probably privileged) function of melius: to be such that nothing better, at least according to the hierarchy of the categories, could exist that it itself is not—“it alone is that than which nothing is better” (Monol. XV, 29, 18–20). Therefore God can be granted the name of substance—that is to say, the metaphysical title par excellence of ousia—only on the condition that he receives it as a particular case of melius—i.e., under the aegis of the good.27 Admittedly Anselm is closer to Saint Denys than to Descartes or Kant, but Gregory Schufreider convincingly argues that Marion’s reading is not as sound as one would like.28 I take the even more questionable approach to being through a hypostatic love. À Dieu

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So far Timaeus’s images have dealt with the nexu–s of ideas associated with the matrix. We now approach the Good with the help of the Symposium and, more important, the patristic tradition which sought to break the Greek bond between truth and nous. Saint Maximus noted the impossibility of identifying truth with God who is beyond the true and the false; the Logos is hyperaletheia “because there is nothing which may be examined beside Him and compared with Him, though the truth we experience is opposed to falsehood.”29 A hypostasis is already and always ecstatic, imaging the ecstatic God who is always outside Himself and returning through creatures to Himself. The truth about God, who is love, lies not in being but in kenotic relations. Thus the creaturely hypostasis responds to the Good beyond being through the gift of grace in a rebirth, not unlike a Platonic birth in Beauty, whose issue is to do such good works as may be apportioned to him. Truth is the unconcealment, the nakedness and vulnerability, of oneself through the Other. The wisdom of God is not to see the world as a totality in a nunc standi, the role given him as nous, but to see it temporally through his immanence as the Holy Spirit in the created matrix and in his response as Logos. God shares in this vulnerability. Beauty animates eros and then Desire in, respectively, selfreflective and diachronic temporality; it also gives a direction to saying that will not allow it to forsake its roots in Being and Becoming and opens it to all dimensions of Alterity. Charles Hartshorne once suggested to me that although relativities could not be accommodated to absolutes, the converse obtained; Beauty could be a relative absolute. The aesthetic standards that animate one era are not those of another, and yet in its greatness each can erect monuments to Beauty. Blanchot somewhere said that the artwork “is the place where the event,” the epiphany of Beauty, “is made to happen.” It happens at Chartres, but also at Delphi, at Mehmed Aga’s Blue Mosque or its neighbor, Justinian’s St. Sophia, yet I would be hard pressed to choose between them. Because of this relativity, it is easier to think history under the formality of Beauty rather than Being and its inescapable Parmenidian overtones or even to think the Good through Beauty, for otherwise the Good tends to collapse into a teleological ethics of virtue or pleasure or, acknowledging duties to the other, into deontology. In a Platonic mood, Saint Thomas identifies the essential element in the beautiful with a knowledge that provokes desire and says that beauty is the name proper to the second person of the Trinity who, as 392

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Truth, discloses beings in integritas, consonata, and claritas (S.T., q.39, a.8). As Hans-Georg Gadamer says, “Beauty is the way goodness appears, reveals itself in its being, and presents itself. What presents itself in this way is not different from itself in presenting itself—not something that exists through something else. It is not the radiance shed on a form from without. Radiance, then, is not only one of the qualities of what is beautiful, but constitutes its actual being.”30 For Denys, light was the first created being and the cause of corporeal beings; it is an “echo [a metaphor for participation] of the Good” (DN, 700a). It is the “nature of a form,” Gadamer says, “to be radiant, to present itself . . . the beautiful must always be understood ontologically as an image and closes the gap between the idea and appearance.”31 Beauty is like light, visible only in things it makes visible, and is “the mode of the appearance of the good in general, of being as it ought to be.”32 Heidegger, brooding on Nietzsche, at one time thought we were destined to nihilism by oblivion to Being. With the death of God and the loss of a being whose providential concern for beings made history meaningful, we were left with a becoming in which nothing meaningful becomes, with Nietzsche’s word that what is ought not to be and what ought to be is not. Its historical issue is the Gestell.33 The possibility of a beyond that would break this destining, this Platonic circle of the same, which motivated so much of Heidegger’s later philosophy, is already realized in the patristic tradition. Isn’t Nietzsche’s eternal return of the same an offspring of Hegel, who thought that history was patterned by the triad unity-separation-return? If the end is in the beginning, we depart from and return to a fulfilled and absolute presence. The necessities implicit in an initial unity govern this movement of separation and return. This way of making sense of (sacred) history was first worked out by Origen, the great Alexandrian theologian. He understood this procession of spiritual forms in terms of the triad genesis-stasis-kinesis, where genesis is coming to be, stasis (rest) is the innocence of the Garden, and kinesis (motion) represents the Fall from this union with God. From this perspective the Incarnation would be an ad hoc increment. The movement in this immanent neo-Platonism was away from an original plenitude and was conservative, not creative. At the onset of Maximus’s Hellenistic mythology, the Seventy Difficulties, history is destined to fall away from being. In comments on a passage in Gregory of Nazianzus, Maximus suggests that this triad should take the form generis-kinesis-stasis.34 The movement of history (kinesis) is À Dieu

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not from and thus according to nature and its necessities but rather toward fulfillment (stasis), where the latter deification is according to grace: “the truth of history is in the future.” But that means that love replaces ontology as the meaning of history. Unlike the version familiar in the West since Augustine, the Fall does not initiate history. The Fall is not a fall from perfection, but rather inaugurates history’s eschatological movement. The meaning of history is so contingent on the end, loving communion with God, that “irrespective of the Fall, the incarnation would have occurred.”35 History is salvation history, not that of the fall, sin, and redemption. The classical version of the Trinity harbors an oscillating logic. Gregory of Nazianzus said that “no sooner do I conceive of the One than I am illuminated by the splendor of the Three; no sooner do I distinguish them than I am carried back to the One” (Oration, 41, 43). This logic, were it also medial, would be unity preserving rather than disseminating. Maximus’s case would be strong indeed had he recognized that communion (koinoia) is medial. These details could be worked out in the context of Dante’s Convivio. Were persons hypostatic rather than substantial, each being would be in the other two. In Dante, for example, the Father (being) and the Holy Spirit (good) are in the Son (truth) in a splendid conjugation of convertible transcendentals. We would have grounds for understanding the Divine Persons, who communicate essance and are thus not concrete universals, in an oscillating logic. Alas, the situation is not that simple. The Good is a hypostatic and triune community, a unity of persons arising out of the mutual love whereby they are one. The Son (word) can no longer be understood as a perfect expression of the Father, as if the speaker were one with the spoken; for the world is not a closed, predictable system in which the word (Logos) would be constitutive. He is a perfection of parental love. Love lets beings be. How they are is pretty much their own business. Predestination is broken. The Son’s role is not to be understood in the stasis of a “standing now” but in terms of a dynamical genesis. His role is to provoke and succor a bleeding and broken world into a love of justice, mercy, peace, and freedom. Filiation requires that the Son is from the Father through the openness of Mary as a willing instrument of Spirit. She first appeared in the image hovering over the waters when the Father said, “Let there be light” (Gen. 1, 1–3). Creative love is the image in which we are made. Now, however, comes the crunch: God must accommodate into his unity what had been one of the supplements, the matrix or the mother. Should we defer to those who find it difficult 394

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to give a feminist interpretation of the Holy Spirit? But on this medial reading that deconstructs gender, perhaps integration more or less within the parameters of Chalcedon would be possible. From a Platonic viewpoint, the God of process would be a process and, if not a being, the giver of being through the matrix, chora; the supplement that makes coming to be and being possible. My modified proposal is that the Good be understood as the communion of hypostases and that one of these persons is always at work in the matrix, an ens creatum. These supplements must never be sundered. Giving the matrix a place apart from God would be to risk Manicheanism. The solution is to assume that God first created the matrix and that thereafter the Holy Spirit has an immanent role along the lines of Plato’s world soul, the anima mundi, or Whitehead’s consequent nature. In Plotinus the hypostases, which are not personal, arise as states in the stages of emanation from the One or Authentic Existent. However, if we think Good medially, its Unity must lie in the unity of its hypostases, understood as the nominal posit of loving. It makes no sense to speak of something in these eventive, medial forms, as Professor Gonda has said, unless these “denote something happening to or taking place in the person of the subject; a process takes place, by which the subject, in some way or other, is affected.”36 The persons are hypostasized agape; God as the Good has no nature, no ousia, and does not exist, but as agape He is ecstatic. One now comes to a most promising aspect of Saint Maximus’s theology. At the same time, his lapse into ontic determinates present a central difficulty in situating God beyond being. “We do not know God from His being but from the magnificence of His handiwork and His providence for creation.”37 This distinction between transcendent being and its imminent expressions seems to have been based on Gregory of Nyssa’s observation that Divinity is “unnamable and unspeakable . . . every divine name, whether invented by men or transmitted by Scripture, serves only to explain concepts relative to nature” (To Ablabus, 120D). It is evident that his Divinity is ontological and not the Good beyond being. Nevertheless, this distinction points to two modes of participation. Life began in the garden in communion with God. Cyril of Alexandria was the first to make a distinction between this sense of communion and more mundane participation. In the patristic tradition, participation as metoche ( “sharing the beyond in the midst of”) is the natural relation between entities and is explicative of process as the reduction of alterity to the same. Communion (koinonia) is the À Dieu

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relation between the persons in the Trinity who, as the “proximity” characterizing Levinas’s infinite, are same (essence is communicated) and wholly other (individuated by relations of origin). In a moment we will try to show how, as medial, their Being is Communion. We who are through participation can also participate through communion in Christ. The eschatological event is not understood as contemplation but as dwelling. Taken existentially, it is as if an epoché opens a new way of being toward one another. This enables us to salvage Palamas’s distinction between the unnamable, unspeakable, and ineffable God of apophatic theology and that same God’s uncreated energies—which, thanks to the symbolism of Mary, we found in the work of the Holy Spirit. As understood by Palamas, the God “who does not come forth” is unknowable in his being, not merely unknowable to us because he surpasses the human mind or, as I would say, because he is not any sort of being. Even John Zizioulas, my guide into the mysteries of the love that hypostasizes itself, assumes the priority of being over the Good when he says that this agape is not a common nature but is identified with the Father who hypostasizes God.38 No, not a nominal common nature, but as we discovered in Scotus, this nature is common as a medial essance (Levinas) or verbal wesen (Heidegger). This eastern Orthodox tradition begins with concrete hypostases and sees the common nature as communion, rather than beginning, as in Aquinas, with a nature (ousia, substance) pluralized by these relations. We begin with the Western tradition, only to part company with our masters over the idea that one can speak of being, substance (ousia), in common rather than love. God’s hypostatization is not substantial: it is koinonia. The Father’s love of the Spirit and Her love of the Father constitutes the Son, not their being, and through this love each is a being. Saint Gregory Nazianzen says that the Word and Spirit are two rays of the same sun or, rather, “two new suns.”39 Assuming that the Father is another sun, this is closer to being right than Saint John Damescene’s chauvinism: “The Father derives from Himself his Being, nor does He derive a single quality from another.”40 Really? Not even being a father? In the tradition the Divinity of the other persons is derived from the Father through relations of origin, the Son by filiation and the Holy Spirit from both by procession. Procession? A procession from the Father and the Son in which this relation constitutes the Holy Spirit? No. Relations of origin? Yes. Relations that ecstatically relate (eros) and freely create beings who can share their love. The Son is born from the Mother 396

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and the Father. The filoque clause that triggered the split between the Greek and Latin Churches is rejected; at the same time, if we are to retain processional language, the Son proceeds from the Spirit through the Father’s love and the Father is a father though paternity. Since we noted that love must have an object, the hypostasized eros, in answering to the name Father posits as its object the Mother, Spirit. Though we wish to give a special importance to the individuated persons, the vestigial patriarchal image that haunts both the eastern and western churches seems highly inappropriate. Should we follow the Latin tradition and begin with a loving nature pluralized by relations? Only as hypostasized is love a substantive. Here I suggest that, contrary to Zizioulas, we take God’s transcendent nature, which in Palamas pertains to His essance to be agape. His uncreated energetic expression, his ecstatic eros, hypostasizes itself in koinonia as a Trinity and then, immanent in the ongoing creation of the world (Origin), as consequent (Whitehead). Let me repeat and amplify this argument. Love hypostasizes. Can there be only one Person? A hypostasis is always social; communion is an immediate consequence. Doesn’t it make sense to say that the Divine Hypostases or Persons are constituted by their communion in mutual love, not unlike the love by which we are formed into personhood by our parents? Doesn’t love hypostasize itself in the same way that “love” apostrophizes itself, for example, in the Symposium or Saint Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians? From this standpoint, the person of the Father and the Son can be readily fitted to this process schema, but the third person as traditionally understood within Christian theology does not so readily fit into a Holy Family. Aquinas’s point is well taken; the Holy Spirit is “the love and gift of God” (S.T., q.36), but neither his “Common Spiration” (q.42, a.4) nor the processional relation by which creedal formulae define the Holy Spirit readily suggest Maternity. The Platonic image of the World Soul, the source of all life, might better express the Mother. She would be responsive to the Good, and creatures would be the life drawn from this providential love that shapes the world. As soul, she would participate in both Being and Becoming and would give life to all that therein comes to be. This Spirit could also give the “saying” through which, according to our creeds, the prophets spoke. If the Holy Spirit is to be effeminated, then She may even be said to occasion Mary’s response to the “persuasions” that opened her to the Father and left her with child (Luke À Dieu

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1:35). The life she gives through Mary is life in the Spirit, which is not a life of miraculous and supernatural power but one which, through baptism, “takes [one] out of the perishing world and seals him for the one to come.”41 Lest we make God over to match our needs and fall into idolatry, we should recall that He is also Unheimlich; and that too pertains to the Mother. Mary is a symbol of the Holy Spirit and thus allows us to integrate what we learned about the possibility of an anima mundi into the Trinity. She expresses God’s immanence in the world, but she also has a life in God and leaves the possibility of radical evil with the matrix. If, to continue, Christianity is to accommodate Platonic insights, it must begin with a medial Good, a “Loving,” in which the Persons, the hypostases, are as if precipitated. Each is a hypostasized Love expressing the essance of God. Each, requiring the other and yet fully Love (agape), fully God, is a hypostatic unity and, as Love, is one with the other Persons in nature, is we may speak of a nonsubstantial ousia. In that sense, God is Loving Love, not a romantic love that loves loving, but the loving that constitutes the one who loves. Such is love’s work. Romantic illusions to the contrary, the economics of Love, agape and eros, are fecund and pertain to the family whose members are founded on these relations. The Triune God is ecstatic. Perhaps neither Plato nor Aristotle could comprehend this ecstasy, but this at least is orthodox: the relations of paternity, filiation, and procession define the persons ecstatically, as beings whose being is a function of their self-transcendence, their communion with one another. Being is communion. The being of the Divine Hypostases arises out of darkness of Loving, which is beyond being, into personal being and lighting. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (“Lord and Giver of Life”) are persons in relation, not the reified psychological functions of Saint Augustine’s great De Trinitate; nor can they be Saint Thomas’s selfsubsisting relations (S.T., q.41, a.4). As infinitely Good, God must communicate the gift of light and life (John 1:4); the latter requires the fecundity of the Mother. How else can there be a Son of God, a Son of Man? Clearly the first expression of our creation through Spirit, the “giver of life,” will be an analogue of the receptacle, which, through the instrumentality of Mary, becomes “the place of the placeless,” the “life-giving source.” She is the icon of the Holy Spirit that lives in a reciprocal proximity, its bindings, significations, and its gathering affectivity, with the Father and their Son. She is providential uncreated energetic at work in the world gathering us, not into 398

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unity with the absolute, but into community. Spinoza could have placed Affectivity not in Ethics, Part IV, but together with Thought and Extension among God’s infinite attributes. She partakes of both. We have maintained the reciprocal participation of being and becoming under the aegis of the Good and Chora. The prayerful petition “that we may dwell in Him” is a formula for the participation of becoming in being, while its chiasmatic converse, “that He may dwell in us,” which we have identified with determinable determinates or the generation of novel eidoi, needs clarification. That is participation of being in becoming is possible through the Holy Spirit (anima mundi), which the tradition has called, when directed to her icon Mary, her intercession with the Father. As an alternative, one can focus on participation on the classical theme of Her intercession with the Son, the Logos. I shall assume the latter hypothesis. Zizioulas’s identification of love with the Father is justified in the context of God as creator. In Platonism the Father past finding out, the Good, also tends to be the locus of the idea realm. The Spirit, our Christian version of the world soul, is God’s immanent presence in his uncreated energies. She is everywhere in the hypodoche, but she focuses and evaluates its archival and given possibilities here as the genetic or inherited fund for the chora of this instant’s arising. Now we need to suggest the hypostasis koinonia. We have just seen the creature emerge in a coordinated cosmos under Spirit’s interpretation. Just as Spirit participates with the Father in securing funded chora from which the new creature can emerge, so she participates in the Son whose response to this coming is the propositional lure. This lure, a proposition with deictic limits on universal eidetic possibility, perhaps expresses a novel nexus of ideas or perhaps only an iteration of a same. The proposition is a response to Spirit, the way the Holy Spirit and the Creative Father are in the Son in Dante or scholastic theology. Through Her intercessions He replies to the need or desire of the creature. Thus the Good participates in chora, the God dwells with us. Chora—or, better, her animating Spirit—can intercede in creation (participate in the Father) and providence (participate in the Son). This is only one of several possibilities I leave to the reader to develop. We participate in this communion as incarnate through the Incarnation and are “placed in God and inflamed with desire”; love must be “the grounds of His being that we seek.” I mentioned a problem in Maximus, and now we can take it up. Saint Maximus says “we will find no encouragement in what is proper to him.” It is not because, À Dieu

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as Maximus thought, that knowledge of God’s properties “is impossible and forbidden alike to every created nature,” but because the “proper” presupposes God’s being. However, the Good and therefore the predicables, among which is property, is beyond Being. God is love and constitutes in this love (Communion) a Trinity of beings. He is not a Being, a substance, with properties, which may or may not have relations to alterity. We know Him only in his relational attributes, with which Maximus the Confessor admits we must remain content. “My knowledge does receive encouragement from His attributes—I mean to say those things that concern His eternity, infinity, and immensity; from His goodness, wisdom, and His power that makes rules and judges His creatures. And with regard to Him, this only is completely understandable [sic].”42 This very fact that, as Maximus goes on to say, “of knowing nothing which is knowledge surpassing our minds, as the theologians Gregory [Nazianzen] and Denys said somewhere, will be a function of infinity of Goodness, not Being.” We participate in God as incarnate, not merely as spirits attached by the Fall to sinful bodies. The body is our chora; its needs, vulnerabilities, affects, and passions are as sacred as the mind and its affects. This theological perspective may free the intuition of entities from enchainment to Being. The ecstasis by which God crosses over into creation is not an expression of His nature (ousia) but of his free gift of love. This is revelation and not an ontological necessity. While participation obtains between ideas, more to the point is participation in God’s love in which his life is realized in our personal existence. Something comes upon us that persuades rather than compels.43 Through this “shock of recognition” or “inscape” there is a “birth in beauty.” Saint Denys says that “beauty calls all to itself” (DN, 701c) and thus, empowered “by the throwing forth of erotic goodness” (DN, 712b), one can be outside oneself in the world.

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Notes

Throughout the notes in this text, I often abbreviate titles. For example, John Llewelyn, Emmanuel Levinas: The Genealogy of Ethics, appears as Llewelyn, Genealogy. Where permission for reproduction has been given, the acknowledgement is given in the appropriate endnote. The full bibliographical citation is found in the bibliography. Preface 1. Caputo, Demythologizing Heidegger, 200. 2. Kearney, The God Who May Be, 72. 3. Kearney, The God Who May Be, 3–4. 4. Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, 61. 5. Ibid., 54. 6. St. Denys, The Divine Names, 2, PG 3, 1000b. 7. Marion, God Without Being, 73–83. 8. Derrida, Margins, 207–271. 9. Ibid., 18. 10. Levinas, On Escape. 11. Bigger, Participation, 197–212. Acknowledgments 1. Ballard, Principles of Interpretation, 33–38, 74. Introduction 1. Levinas, Proper Names, 3–4. 2. In an unpublished lecture, the late Edward Ballard defined nihilism as a fundamental doubt concerning the possibility of a world, where world is an enduring structure of meaning and value. The death of a world leads, as 401

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Nietzsche said, “to a radical repudiation of meaning, value, and desirability,” a situation in which “the world as it is . . . ought not to be and . . . the world as it ought to be . . . does not exist” (Nietzsche, Will to Power, 7; 318). It is a consequence of “the death of God,” which Heidegger interprets as the elimination of Plato’s supersensible (Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, 53–54; 61): “The supersensory ground . . . thought as the operative, working reality of everything real (Wirkliche), has become unreal” (Ibid., 99). 3. Lloyd, Polarity and Analogy, 403. 4. Analogy connects by generating middle terms, but if we look at the “middle,” or better, “the between” in a metaphorical context, the unity is disseminated. Were it not for Symposium’s Eros, a medial image for the middle’s creativity, would we not fail to see that the creative between, the metaxu, is bounded by that “which always is and is never becoming” and “that which always is and never becomes” within which living creatures arise? Furthermore, analogy entails reading the copula “is” as close to an identity statement, and, while this is sometimes appropriate, it fails to capture metaphor’s reflexive and hermeneutical role. Doesn’t this failure limit the relevance of analogy? Given the metaphor with terms A and B and their hermeneutical operator, R (usually a form of the copula), then if ARB, B dwells in and interprets A; what identity or similitude with B is claimed for A? Sometimes it is seen and the metaphor works; at other times, the result is ambiguous. At times the discerned identity cannot be stated independently of metaphor or the identity may be functional and thus teleological. A site on the membrane of E. coli is a receptor, but the way this binds to its substrate and functions has nothing to do with the way my eyes or ears operate. If I see A as B, then B is a model-theoretic way of understanding A which allows. me to import and map certain features of B into and onto A and maybe even establish an equivalence class. Where intentionality reaches its limit, for example, with chora, metaphor is irreducible. Seeing the eidos is often like seeing the point of a joke—it controls the narrative or demonstrative phrases through which it is intended without ever being directly intuited. Metaphor is not always symmetric, for if A crosses B, B may not cross A. Philosophy is, however, mostly interested in catachresis; otherwise the predicate will threaten to absorb the subject as in Hegel’s speculative proposition. Even in a catachresis it is not necessarily true that the counter-crossing is innocent of the trace of the first. In Plato’s metaphor, “the state is the individual writ large,” the state is socialized when crossed by the individual whose very form is communion. When he is in turn crossed by the state, i.e., the individual is the state, then it is a humanized state that lets us see him, not as a subject of tyranny, but as Aristotle’s political animal. There are situations in which irresolvable oppositions play back and forth, as in deconstruction, and nothing appears in the gap. 402

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5. Tsu, Tao Te Ching, 25. 6. Heidegger, Basic Concepts, 78; see also Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, 124–138. 7. Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking, 35, 33. 8. Ibid., 25; see also Heidegger, Basic Questions, 81–106. 9. Marion, Being Given, 228. 10. Heidegger’s The End of Philosophy is a rather bizarre version of the relation of Plato to Aristotle (who thinks for the first time the individual as actual and “who was more truly Greek in his thinking than Plato”) and to the thinking of the Being of beings (9). Gadamer thought and Stanley Rosen demonstrates that these interpretations follow from his way of reading Plato through Aristotle. In Heidegger’s 1924 lectures on Plato’s Sophist, whose merits Rosen freely acknowledges, Plato was said to have been aware of and to have repudiated the Ontological Difference (Rosen, The Question of Being, 319) and to have discovered the process through which something presences, physis, only to abandon it for the look (idea) of what appears. Through presencing this look comes into view (Rosen now quotes from Heidegger, Contribution to Philosophy, 145), “the shining forth of the look itself, what the view offers for observation.” I retain the sense of physis and interpret the “look” iconographically. An icon like a face, itself an icon, looks at us. Jean-Luc Marion proposes in God Without Being that in an icon we see ourselves being looked at so that we become the “invisible mirror of an invisible gaze [the divine intention] that subverts us in the measure of its glory” (22). The icon lets the “visible be saturated with the invisible,” where the invisible manifests the “secret,” the mystery (17). The maker’s look does not reflexively rebound and, like the look of an icon, deconstruct the maker but looks to a paradigm in terms of which he, God or man, assembles or brings things about. This technical look is supposed to conceal physis, the giving of the gift of Being. Heidegger may have become aware of a difference in his remarks in “A Good Beyond Being,” (Basic Problems, 285–286) whose conclusion is, however, that “the idea agathou is nothing but the demiourgos pure and simple.” 11. Caputo, Against Ethics, 2. 12. Heidegger, Being and Time, 43. 13. Bernasconi, Heidegger in Question, 190. 14. Derrida, Margins, 135. 15. Duns Scotus’s in quid/in qual distinction will be useful both now and hereafter. Being, a transcendental, is predicated in quid of what is determinable, the species or genus, and in qual of its determinates. Except for “simply simplex” determinates, any is a determinable and, except for the matrix, any determinable can be a determinate. Since being is a transcendental, one of the “all-pervading connecting terms” (Sop., 253B) that has “communion with all” (254C), events can be said to participate in events; the in qual stone participates in my perceptual event, the in qual determinate Notes to Pages 4–7

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white in quid, events may participate in qual in ideas, ideas in ideas in an in quid/in qual chiasmus, as in metaphor’s creative crossings, and finally, in quid ideas can participate in in qual events. This latter possibility assumes that the absolute is not an actus purus but can respond to contingencies. But this is not just true in providential contexts. Evolution is an excellent example of the way events determine their determinates. So too are the determinates that emerge in stochastic processes. In the conjugation of the transcendentals being, same, other, one and many, the Sophist’s “all connecting terms of discourse” (253B), the motion/rest dyad is not among these greatest kinds (254E), even though it was central in the “war of the giants and gods” (246A–249D) and used in the deduction of the other terms. This is unfortunate, for this earlier argument requires that being, the ideas, participate in becoming. This conjugation would show that ideas are in effect double genitives; ideas participate in becoming, a formal warrant for contextualization, just as events participate in ideas. When one says “motion is rest,” the apparent contradiction is resolved when the other and other of motion is seen through rest, a same, and this makes it possible to speak of the being of change. The argument of Parmenides’ scholium on time shows this transition to be epochal (155E–156E), as if each supercessive occasion were, like Zeno’s arrow, changeless. So-called identities would be repetitions. In this chiasmus, “rest” is a transcendentally signified. Since these transcendental conjugations are metaphors, one must complete the chiasmus and say, “rest is motion.” Now “motion” is the transcendentally signified that crosses over and dwells in the idea, hitherto the principle of rest, and determines it as a determinable. The idea participates in motions. Eidetic “motion” or change is determined by becoming, the same or rest through which its change is to be understood. 16. Levinas, Collected Papers, 124. 17. Denham, Art and Moral Experience, 227. 18. Josipovici, The Word and the Book, 299. 19. Denham, Art and Moral Experience, 239. 20. Heidegger, The End of Philosophy, 55–78. 21. Heidegger, On the Way, 100. 22. James Anderson’s The Bond of Being is good introduction to Cajetan’s interpretation of Aquinas on analogy. More recent studies, summarized and extended in George Klubertanz’s splendid Saint Thomas Aquinas on Analogy, call this interpretation into question. 23. I use “virtual reality” as understood in science fiction (the recent film Matrix was a good example). I often assume something like a computer modeling of an external and public world, which various devices, such as special clothing, gloves, and glasses, enable one to inhabit. Leaving off the apparatus, it is a useful metaphor for the phantasmagoric world of Plato’s receptacle (Tim., 52B) and any movement that begins with abstractions and may end up in a time and space in which “I can” is inoperative. When Rudi 404

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Visker says Proust is “real without being actual, ideal without being abstract,” he has defined virtual reality. A virtual realm hovers between the ideal and the actual, between possibility and actuality and partakes of both. Its time is usually reversible and its moves may be rule governed, it is more nearly abstract than concrete, and can be a sort of fictional domain, like the game Dragons and Dungeons that young people played a few years ago, within which there can be obsessive involvements. My use of “virtual” is not that of Bergson/Deleuze, which, to avoid confusion, I will italicize. Their virtual refers to the contents of a continuum, which is a qualitative multiplicity that can be actualized as discrete differences, such as the minutes in a duration. The élan vital conceives of evolution “as involving a productive power actualizing the virtual in contrast to the less inventive or creative realization of the possible.” Something like this occurs in David Bohm’s implicate order. However diversified, the hypodoche is archival and thus virtual. Besides the species constituting differences that are said by Deleuze to be immanent in the beginning of life, other examples of virtual realities are color, sound, and, on the reading of Pierce and Hartshorne, Plato’s ideas. White is virtually all colors, while the notes in a musical scale can be thought of as virtual cuts in a sound continuum (Phil., 17B–19A). Aristotle thought that some of the ideas were virtual, because they could be generated by Dedekind cuts in the indefinite dyad (Meta., 1083a 1–1085a 2), and in his Philosophy and Psychology of Sensation Hartshorne has shown how this can be extended to qualities (see also Bigger, Participation, 150–154). Bergson objected to the separated ideas, but if they can be understood virtually, and that does not commit us to their transcendent separation, to instantiation, universals and the like, then we can bring these philosophers of process into closer alignment. In its occasional scholastic usage, “virtual” refers to the inner, hidden potential or power in a thing or what is not quite real, such as a virtual standoff. 24. W. D. Winnicott, with Melanie Klein, a founder of the English school of object-oriented psychoanalysis, stressed that playing with things with the mother is essential in breaking away from primal narcissism to an object cathexis. By directing the infant’s attention through “shifter words,” such as this, here, I, you, and the like, to the transitional object in transitional space, the child was led into an object-oriented awareness. Primary process fantasies are projected onto a ball or toy he cannot quite control and this failure results in an awareness of objects as such. 25 Llewelyn, Genealogy, 175. 26. Heidegger, Pathmarks, 82–96, 231–239, 277–290. 27. Marion, Reduction and Givenness, 65. 28. Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time, 65. 29. Indispensable to understanding these developments has been the philosophically sophisticated studies of Alison Gopnik, Andrew Meltzoff, and Patricia Kuhl in The Scientist in the Crib. Daniel Provinelli’s work at the Notes to Pages 13–14

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University of Louisiana Primate Center with primates and in the Child Development Center has also been very helpful. 30. Hypostasis, from the medial hypostamai, originally had the sense of the participle ousia, beingness or substance. “Participate” is still heard in “participle,” for it expresses the togetherness of being and becoming, the nominal and verbal. Its usual nominalization made the unchanging stratum, whether material or eidetic, primary. Athanasius thought hypostasis was more concrete than ousia and better fitted to express the incarnate “person,” the later expression being a contribution of Cyril of Alexandria. Its medial root eliminates the usual active and passive senses of the verb and allows being and becoming to mutually participate (Bigger, Kant’s Methodology, 179). 31. These opening words of a poem by Euros Bowen were brought to my attention by John Llewelyn. Bowen discovered them in the fifteenth-century Resurrection fresco that fulfilled the promise of these opening words in a dilapidated, run-down church in a seedy Istanbul neighborhood (since beautifully restored by the Turkish Touring Club). My pilgrimage to Plato, which began with Joyce’s sterile vision in Ulysses where the receptacle was first a shaving bowl, a bowl of bitter waters, the flotsam-covered shore of Dublin Bay, Molly Bloom and the like, took a dramatic turn with this iconography. 32. F. M. Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, 72. 33. Asymmetric metaphor proposes something like a conceptual revision. In Heidegger’s Being and Time, the conjunction defines a neighborhood over which time crosses to dwell in and radicalize our understanding of Being, which had not been taken to be eventual or temporal. Being is not time and still retains, at least until overcome by the Ereignis, the sense of ground and presencing. “The state is the individual writ large” is the master metaphor of the Republic (369D) and is an example of dwelling with. The terms are “rubbed together like fire sticks” (435A), and in the ensuing light, the polis is humanized and man politicized. 34. St. Augustine, Confessions II, iv, 9. 35. Any metaphor is a perspective on something that admits other determinations. Leibniz said that Paris was the totality of its perspectives. Doubtlessly, some are more perspicacious than others. Like Paris, ideas are saturated, in excess of our ability to fix them in a single concept. My introduction to these mysteries came when the late and greatly admired Lewis Hammond had me read Apollonius on conic section in a poetry tutorial. Some flesh was put on these bare bones by Austin Farrer’s great Finite and Infinite that showed how metaphysical relations could form a dialectical nexus that disclosed something of the mystery of creature’s relation to its creator and, in Glass of Vision, how revelation spoke in metaphor. I have extended this wider use of imagination to Husserl’s use of imaginative variation in the eidetic reduction. 36. Husserl, Crisis, 357. 406

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37. Derrida, On the Name, 126. 38. Levinas’s “The Thinking of Being” is a brilliant critique of the externalities haunting Derrida’s linguistic hall-of-mirrors (The God Who Comes to Mind, 116–121). Though Derrida is quick to establish the proto-writing and thus the possible dissemination implicit in speech, he overlooks the origin of speech in our being thrown together and communicating from the beginning in the language of gesture, babble, expression, and the like, where nothing is said that issues into dialogue. Levinas, with Heidegger, understands saying as founded on a showing. I assume and will defend saying as paradigmatic. 39. Taliaferro, Plato: The Timaeus and Critias, 30. 40. Most of Eugene Gendlin’s work is available on his Web page, www. focusing.org/philo.html. His most sustained account of metaphor is found in “Crossing and Dipping,” while his provocative account of intricate order is found in “The Responsive Order: A New Empiricism.” Logical patterns are implicit in all human life, but these are rather more complex than those in formal logic. They are carried forward into the slot where the word, thought, action, and the like occur in a pattern that exceeds these occurrences. Language is metaphor-like, a crossing of words and situations that posits a word or expression so that what is posited is always being carried forward into new and novel situations and crossings. Chapter 1 The Place of Metaphor 1. Interpretation is formally a corollary of participation. A is said to interpret B if it shares with B a partial identity of pattern. A and B may participate in or share an identity ϕ . The tides interpret the movements of the moon, the rose my beloved. 2. Distinguishing the priority of either hypodoche or chora is a chicken/egg situation. Plato assumes the standard distinction between location and being contained in something (Par., 138A). There is no container (hypodoche) without the contained and, given the relational and communitarian character of participation, no creaturely loci (chora) without the necessary extensivity. In recent philosophy pride of place is given to chora, which, as if by an epoché, is stripped of its contents; as against this, I give a sort of priority to the receptacle which then can become an archive for various modalities of time and space that permit motion from here to there and bring, as in disseverance, whatever internal relations—ranging from the physical vectors through affectivity to memory—that are deemed necessary to fund the gift of being through the focus of chora. 3. Plato’s rejection of physical operations in mathematics (Rep., 527A) and his preference for the still-fashionable axiomatic method is a bizarre consequence of his rejection of images. Thus begins the tradition that counts Hilbert among its greatest proponents. Hilbert eliminated the proof of Euclid I, 4, in which one triangle is “applied” to another. Transport is, with rotation and reflection, a property of Euclidian geometry and is an “I can. . .” Notes to Pages 20–22

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that eliminates geometry’s virtuality and places it in the world. Does this mean that the world is Euclidian? No. But the work world where we recognize tools and their places from every angle is. 4. Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, 53–54. 5. Ibid., 61, 99. 6. Hass, in Rilke, Selected Poetry of R. M. Rilke, xvi. 7. Heidegger, Basic Questions, 135. 8. Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, 48. 9. Llewelyn, Genealogy, 174. 10. Derrida, On The Name, 92 . 11. Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 39; 38–39. 12. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 147. 13. John Llewelyn uses Wittgenstein’s family resemblances and opentextured concepts as an alternative to my identity-saturated view of metaphor. He quotes approvingly Robert Musil’s discussion of these open concepts that reign in discussions of justice, premeditated murder, and scorn, which were said to be founded on “multiply branching and variously supported comparisons” among examples, “the more distant of which can be quite dissimilar to each other, indeed distinct from each other to the point of being opposite, and yet be connected through an association that echoes from one link to the next” (Seeing Through God, 3). Such family resemblances render the concept usable—but where? In the sophistries of the law court or the legislature perhaps, or where it is necessary to collect a historical development, such as “law” under one term. Even in a stochastic universe we need nomological laws. A similar passage through resembling colors where there is no recognition of a color as such, a possibly recurrent red, orange, and blue which collects natural kinds (provide a logos) would lead one to see the color at one end of the spectrum as the other; and this a pathology. Everything may resemble something in some respect, but what would be the sense of a concept that would impose no limits on what it collected? Llewelyn then asks if this reduces logical or conceptual necessity to anthropological, historical, sociological, or psychological contingencies. He contends that the relevant necessities can be derived by abstraction from the “life world” (Husserl) or one’s nonperceptual, habitative being-in-the-world (Heidegger). Just how does one define Leibniz’s identity of indiscernibles from a life world? It is at best a second-order concept involving the quantification of predicates in a logic that can be shown to be neither consistent nor complete. How about the continuum hypostasis? Euclidean geometry may be a necessary condition for the life world, since it alone can account for rotation, transport, and reflection that would allow a tool to be recognized as same when found anywhere in the workplace. More or less straight can approach the straight itself as a limit. Moreover, a point, for example, is without parts and itself defines the abstractive apparatus whereby it can be demonstrated, made 408

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seen, from overlapping regions in a world, not of objects, but of something going on. Whitehead defined the basic concepts of applied mathematics in this manner, and I have made it foundational to my approach to metaphor. We seek the form in the facts that can yield a concept, one that collects by identities and not mere resemblances. 14. Bigger, Participation, 116–156. 15. In an extensive series of experiments, Rupert Sheldrake has shown that it is highly likely that perceiver can make a difference to the perceived. For example, one is more often than not aware that someone is staring at one’s back. This would follow from the perceptual model of perception in which the active motion of the agent determines a field that disposes receptive awareness, just as the experimental setup creatively determines how light is recorded as a wave or particle or, even more mysteriously, as a dog or a parrot will respond to its owner’s unprogrammed preparations to return home (Rupert Sheldrake, The Sense of Being Stared At and Other Unexplained Powers of the Human Mind). In the quantum physical world, these acausal (or participatory) phenomena are known as entanglements, and Sheldrake and his colleagues have shown the widespread existence of similar fields influencing animal behavior. On Sheldrake’s account, these fields are most notable in morphogenesis and in animal behavior. For example, rats can apparently pass on a disposition to subsequent generations to more easily learn a task (www.sheldrake.org). But this Lamarkian morphogenesis also seems true of a separated line of rats, which also show a dramatic increase in this ability to learn. Sheldrake thinks, but without any conclusive evidence, that a strand of learners in Australia could pass along this ability to a strand in Chicago. It is true that in our organicist metaphysics any phenomenon inherits the world totality at each instant, but this would be an apeiron gignesthai in which all would mingle with all and differences would elide. It may be that elements in a totality are accessible in any instant, as the debris of the cosmic bam in which worlds were born is accessible to astronomers, but something has to epoché this totality if finite achievement is to be possible. I will try to show in the sequel that this elimination of some of the past as irrelevant, which may have been the task of the anima mundi in Plato, is the work of Spirit. Michael Comforti (Field, Form, and Fate) and his colleagues at the Assisi Institute show how more restricted fields, morphogenetic and social, unify the mental and physical and are at the basis of social bonds and organizations and their genetic propagation. I suggest that from these remembered hypodochic, archival fields—which pertain to the hypostases’ chthonic roots and belong, in Plato’s metaphor, to that aspect of the soul that participates in divisible, same, other, and being (Tim., 35A–B)—are focused around an attractive idea—not unlike what Charles Taylor calls a framework or Plato, a lifestyle—as they are gathered and supplemented by chora into a unique being. Notes to Page 26

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I also differ from Sheldrake’s implicit Bergsonian “continuity of Becoming” (The Presence of the Past) with Whitehead’s “becoming of continuity” in which the determinate morphogenetic field is the initial datum in which the ex nihilo instant finds itself. I also adapt the Platonism of Heisenberg (Quantum physics has decided against materialism for Plato. “The smallest units of matter are not, in fact, physical objects in the ordinary sense of the word; they are forms, structures, or—in Plato’s sense—ideas, which can be unambiguously spoken of only in the language of mathematics”; quoted by Sheldrake in The Presence of the Past, 29) and René Thom (“If sodium and potassium exist, that is because there is a corresponding mathematical structure. . .; such a structure can be specified, in quantum mechanics, for a simple object like a hydrogen molecule . . . I think likewise that there are formal structures, in fact geometrical objects, in biology which prescribe the only possible forms capable of having a self-reproducing dynamic in a given environment . . . the Platonic approach is in fact unavoidable”—Structural Stability and Morphogenesis, 320,129) and Brian Goodwin’s field equations from which specific morphologies are generated. Unlike Thom and Goodwin, I assume that becoming can also determine being, that is, formal structure. This chiasmus allows for the reciprocal flow of influence between organisms and structures or ideas; it does justice to the Aristotelian immanence favored by Sheldrake and is required lest we end in a virtual world. 16. Marion, In Excess, xxi; 96–99. 17. Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, 201–202. Used with permission. 18. Lucas, A Treatise on Space and Time, 148, 180–184. 19. Heidegger, Basic Questions, 132. 20. The details of this Timaeus (35A) construction will be taken up in the sequel. All we need now note is that “divisible being, same, and other” refers to the soul’s root in becoming, while “indivisible being, same, and other” refers to its other root in determinate or eidetic being. In this construction, being, same, and other are transcendental terms that explicate participation. These transcendentals are shared by Levinas, who identifies my “becoming” with the verb “to be” (Beyond Essence, 32). In virtue of these forms that mingle with all and thus with one another, becoming is being (Sop., 253B–E). Hegelians might say that time, being other and other, is other to an other and thus a same, that is being. But Plato said that other cannot be thought by itself (255C). Wendell Keisner has informed me that Plato’s other is never an itself and can thus mingle only with other forms. It is other than the same, which makes transcendence possible. Though apparently forbidden by the Sophist (256B), I propose to transport the transcendentals motion and rest from the Parmenides; then being is at rest with respect to motion, and conversely. Where becoming has the meaning of rest to being’s changes, then ideas participate in becoming and are contextualized, even come to be, on the occasion of this change. Isn’t this 410

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what evolution tells us? Being and becoming mutually participate in the general creativity, each being a function of the other. While I prefer this radical approach for resolving the bifurcation of being and becoming, in the text I usually take a more conservative route and attribute being to the ideas and becoming to the matrix (Tim., 27D). Being used in the root sense (Tim., 35A) pertains to being in the original being/becoming dichotomy. In virtue of its constitution by the transcendentals, being, same, other, one, and many, life makes being qua one and other, the idea, same and many qua becoming. Though Heidegger’s thesis that the death of God means the elimination of the supersensible is not convincing, a rather more cogent case for Plato’s pernicious influence is Nietzsche’s charge that Plato was indeed the author of the “life-denying ascetic ideal.” No good can come from a form of life in which its highest member, the philosopher, yearns to shed the body to free the soul from its shackles. “Every pleasure and every pain [is] another nail to rivet the soul to the body” and prevent its eternal portion, nous, from freeing itself from all desire and passion (Phaedo, 83D–E) and returning to a contemplative life in its home with the gods (84A). When the Hellenistic and Roman cosmopolitan empires destroyed the smaller states and their indigenous institutions and gods, the astral religion of the Timaeus swept over western civilization with the promise that the citizen could overcome alienation and achieve a meaningful being by cultivating his eternal soul which, like the God it images, is simple, one, “unmoved by externals and is inalterable.” Hellenistic Judaism (Philo), Christianity, and even Islam grew up in this climate. Thus, for example, Gregory of Nyssa, the successor to Origin and Clement but the first to successfully “subdue philosophy to the service of religion,” took up without evident reservation the early Platonic anthropology. He denied that pathe belongs to the soul. Perhaps the distinction was not clear in the last half of the fourth century, but he did not distinguish his religion, which teaches the resurrection of the body, from Plato’s teaching about the soul’s immortality. Though this asceticism was never shucked, a more integral position became available by the twelfth century when the Crusaders brought Aristotle back from the Middle East. The more naturalistic Aristotelian soul, the “first actuality of a body possessing organs” (De Anima, 412a27), was better fitted to claim a new body at death than Plato’s, though within an ontology and epistemology that led one to classify rather than measure and that broke apart with Galileo. What was lacking, at least among Christians, was an adequate feeling for the anthropological consequences of the incarnation and the recognition that the Timaeus offers an incarnate version of the soul formed by a blending of time and eternity, being and becoming, that promises to overcome dualisms, even Plato’s. 21. Bigger, Kant’s Methodology, 178–180. 22. Paul Ricoeur opts for same (identity) in the sense of the Latin ipse, which posits no unchanging core, rather than the stronger idem (Oneself as Another, 115–118), which does. The latter has the sense of Locke’s “personal identity” on Notes to Page 30

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the model of physical permanence. Ipse is more nearly “self-hood” and can accommodate debts and promises in a world in which little is permanent. 23. My metaphors for metaphor vary depending on context; sometimes terms cross, and here creativity is usually at issue; sometimes dwell in one another, and here the semantic force of one term warps the sense of the other, as in “man is a wolf to man”; and sometimes generate a friction that lightens as if an epiphany. 24. Taliaferro, Plato, 30. 25. Ballard, Principles of Interpretation, 52–53. 26. Levinas, Collected Papers, 4. 27. Euclid says analysis assumes “that which is sought as if it were admitted and the passage through its consequences to something admitted to be true” [or Pappus’s “belonging to the class of first principles”]. Analysis is the upward movement of Plato’s dialectic and it is also Kant’s logic of discovery. Synthesis, the method of proof, assumes “that which is admitted [by analysis as true] and the passage through its consequences to the finishing or attainment of what is sought.” In the Treasury of Analysis, Pappus says theoretical “analysis takes what is sought as if it were admitted and passes from it though its successive consequences to something admitted,” while synthesis “takes as done what was arrived at and by arranging in their natural order as consequences what were taken before as antecedents, and successively connecting them with one another, we finally arrive at the construction of that which we sought.” (Elements, 1:138) The best of the many useful commentaries on this construction is R. Catesby Taliaferro’s brief introduction to the Thomas Taylor translation of the Timaeus (Timaeus and Critias, 25–31). The lack of a perfect fit between the works of reason and the necessities is represented in the analogy, the soul is to the body as the whole number ratio is to the incommensurables. The elements that make up the body are the solids, the tetrahedron, octahedron, and icoahedron, formed from the elementary triangles, right triangles having equal legs, which represent air, water, and fire and which can transmute into one another. The square representing earth, which does not transmute, is formed from right triangles having two unequal legs such that the square of one is three times that of the other. The fifth regular solid, the dodecahedron, “is inscrutable in terms of the triangles and is reserved for the shape of the universe” (30). 28. Bergson, Time and Free Will, 29. 29. Ibid., 12–13. 30. The middle voice (or medial) is an Indo-European grammatical form that came into focus through Derrida’s Différance (Margins, 9) and has found its most complete and sensitive development in John Llewelyn’s The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience. What I say now and hereafter about the philology of Indo-European middle voice also echoes (another metaphor for participation) Jan Gonda’s “Reflection on the Indo-European Medium I and II.” 412

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31. Jean-Luc Marion says of a painting that it gives itself in its effect. Cezanne had said that “every object is a being endowed with a life of its own and which in consequence has an inevitable effect” and, Marion adds, “it is not a representation submitted to the imperial initiative of the gaze of consciousness, but is an event whose happening stems not so much from a form and therefore real (and imitable) colors as from an upsurging, a coming up, an arising—in short, an effect” (Being Given, 49). Without this arising or givenness, Marion is able to show that the denatured effect or given would be lifeless, without “the emotion that invades the one gazing . . . carrying with it an emotion in the soul” (49). Marion’s “effect” carries all these terms’ polysemic weight, but what concerns us is its affective dimension, Cezanne’s “interior resonance.” Such medial phenomena and their sometimes concomitant bedazzlements do not lend themselves to metaphysical distinctions that are, anyhow, eliminated with the phenomenological epoché. Marion is struck by the fact that both Husserl and Heidegger begin with “poor phenomena,” mathematical or categorical intuitions that are certain; and “common law” intuitions in which intentional fulfillment in a complete noema is open-ended. He adds to these the less improvised intuitions of saturated phenomena in which “intuition sets forth a surplus that intention can neither conceptualize nor foresee” (In Excess, 223). He proposes a graded movement from poor and more common phenomena to the saturated hierarchy, where the latter begins with Geschichte-like events (Heidegger), then passes through idols, flesh (Levinas), icons, and culminates in revelation. This eliminates the positivism that has haunted phenomenology’s phenomenal origins and introduces something like the lure of the Good by this grading. The saturated phenomenon is the telos of the given/givenness distinction, where what is given exceeds intentional objectification because, paradoxically, givenness gives nothing. Derrida has made a very strong case (for example, On the Name, or “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials”) concerning the unavoidability of metaphysics, that is, assertions of Being or presence, in mystical theology. Marion detects four main points in his argument: (1) theology knows only negative and affirmative predication, not the third way beyond both; (2) it therefore falls into the way of affirmation in order to avoid the atheism implicit in the negative way; (3) the notion of super prefixes, such as super-essential, inscribe God within the horizons of presence or being; and so, finally (4) negative theology falls before “the sword of deconstruction” (Marion, In Excess, 149). This assumes, Marion says, that “across all the claims to denegation, theology, and first of all Jewish and Christian theology, intends only the positivity of presence, envisages nothing higher, nothing more suitable, nothing more divine than the most intense presence possible. In short, theology succumbs in full to an obsession with presence”; but the evidence does no bear this out. Presence ignore the Biblical statements that “No one has seen God” (John 1:18) or “nobody has seen my face” (Exod. 33:23) and that the ontological Notes to Page 34

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difference does not characterize our tradition because neither Being not its apparent equivalent, presence, is really at issue. 32. Marion, Being Given, 199–212. 33. Ibid., 212–213. 34. Ibid., 267. 35. Ibid., 269. 36. St. Augustine, Confessions, v.i.1. 37. Llewelyn, The Middle Voice, 159–160. 38. Ibid., 162. 39. Ibid., 165. 40. Systems theory tells a rather different story. A self-generating system is complex, like a hurricane; closed, unlike a wave; but like a wave has no organizing center. Given generating conditions such as those that might trigger a tornado, its form is enfolded in the system. Centers are constituted as consciousness is aroused from sleep or as an enzyme is generated by metabolism as a situational response rather than being substantial. The conditions for the generation of form and not the forms themselves may lie, as Ervin Laszlo held, with ingressing wave-fronts, but are the eternal objects, as Whitehead called Plato’s ideas, “generated by actual entities but sustained independently of them”? Yes, if there is a prior eidetic content to transform. We propose a mutual derivation that is neither Plato’s nor Whitehead’s. The idea of the Good is of course nonderived. The form generated by a process can itself be an idea, a determinate in some other process. Being participates in becoming, and conversely. 41. Llewelyn, The Middle Voice, xi. 42. Gonda, “Indo-European Medium 2,” 184. 43. Neither grace nor Gelassenhit, “releasement,” are medial in some interpretations. Gelassenheit is, Heidegger says, the “end state of a will not to will” (Discourse on Thinking, 79) and as such seems to perpetuate the conatus essendi or striving characteristic of the will. Saint Paul sometimes seems to require an initiative and thus an act of will to receive grace. John Llewelyn has shown that, while grace is unjustified in Ephesians, 2:8–9, a prior “seeking” is required by the construction in Galatians, 15–16 (Llewelyn, Middle Voice, 225–226). 44. Gonda, “Indo-European Medium 1,” 53. 45. Gonda, “Indo-European Medium 2,” 175. 46. Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, 79–80. 47. Gonda, “Indo-European Medium 2,” 181. 48. Gonda, “Indo-European Medium 1,” 66–67. 49. Scott, “The Middle Voice of Metaphysics,” 752. 50. Benveniste, Problems, 149. 51. Josipovici, Text and Voice, 127. 52. Prigogine, The End of Certainty, 1. 53. Llewelyn, Middle Voice, ix; see also Bigger, Kant’s Methodology, xxxi–xxxii. 414

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54. Levinas seems to resort to medial phenomena to characterize nonintentional phenomena. Aside from ennui, boredom, and the like in Existence and Existents, satisfaction and sexuality in Totality and Infinity and vulnerability in Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence are implicitly medial. 55. Haecceitas is Duns Scotus’s principle of individuation; it singularizes the common nature, which I understand as an adverbial modification of the verbal nature. 56. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 19, 45, 47. 57. Provinelli, “The Self: Elevated in Consciousness and Extended in Time,” 76. 58. Calcarco, “On the Borders of Language and Death,” 92. 59. Borch-Jacobson, The Emotional Tie: Psychoanalysis, Mimesis, and Affect, 125, 130. 60. Henry, The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis, 52. 61. Lawrence Hatab, “Dasein, the Early Years: Heideggerian Reflections on Time.” Heidegger Conference, New Orleans, 2004. Used with permission. 62. Gopnik, Meltzoff, and Kuhl, The Scientist in the Crib, 44–45. Used by permission of HarperCollins. 63. Ibid., 27–28. 64. Llewelyn, The Middle Voice 28. 65. Heidegger, Being and Time, 187. 66. Lawrence Hatab, “Dasein: The Early years,” 13. 67. Whitehead, Concept of Nature, 4–13. 68. Levinas, Existence and Existents, 57–60; see also Marion, Being Given, 115–119. 69. Marion, In Excess, 19. 70. Levinas, Transcendence and Alterity, 2. 71. Marion, In Excess, 19. 72. Ibid., 19. 73. Ibid., 68. 74. Ibid., 51. 75. Koshland, “A Response Regulator Model,” Science, 196. 76. Instead of “context,” one might try Leibniz’s perspective metaphor. Any eidos is, like his Paris, the totality of perspectives in which it can be envisaged. It is the one of an infinity of situations. Phenomenology includes the relational noesis, the affective and linguistic contexts that give us access, and the eidos is their absolute noema, a parameter on usage. The eidos has both relational and intrinsic aspects. One might think of the invariance of an idea on the model of a conic section. A circle, a sine curve, a hyperbole, a wheel, an ellipse, a business cycle, and the like are either perspectives or founded on perspectives on a noematic cone as intersected by noetic planes. The regulative ideas contextualize. These ideas, which can be taken to be a sub-set of the Aristotelian/Scholastic transcendentals, good, true, beauty, being and one, range over the constitutive res, aliquid, and ens to determine Notes to Pages 40–50

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for these latter normative patterns of life, culture, art, and the like, as well as the lifestyles, forms of life, and the like that characterize the individual underway to be a being of a certain kind, as the father might say to his son, “Be a man” (Par., 130B). These assume as their base the constitutive ideas, the non-degree admitting mud, hair, and dirt about which the young Socrates expressed some doubt (130D). What I call the transcendentals, such as “likeness and unlikeness, multitude, unity, rest and motion and the like” (129E), mingle inter se and define how the other kinds mingle. My early Participation defined these various classes and specified their role in participation (77–96). However, I will ignore the role these classes can play in forming paradigms germane to this or that circumstance. 77. Albinus’s Didascalicus (Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, 64–65n) says it all: “Since the soul enables us to judge each kind of existent, the god naturally arranged the first principles of all things within the soul, in order that, since we see each thing according to its affinity and likeness, we may posit the soul’s harmony with things. Plato, while declaring that there was an intelligible existence that was invisible, also posits another existence that was divisible in the region of bodies, indicating that the soul could apprehend either by its thought. Perceiving, further, Sameness and Difference in the realm of the intelligible and in that of the visible, he made all these contribute to the composition of the soul.” 78. Plato’s otherwise distasteful Laws goes some way in developing the image of life as the medial dance that dances us, but this, together with music, harbors the threat of Bacchic frenzy (L, 672B) and its performance must be hemmed in by many restrictions (796E; 802A). This dance theme also appears at 654A ff; 656E ff; 791A (where it can be a restorative to health); 795A (inculcation of grace and beauty); 814A (fits women for a military life); 771E (appropriate in religion and where, dancing, we please and come to intimately know one another and the gods); 802A (dance is to life as a keel is to a ship), 803C (as His toys, we are most pleasing to God in dancing). 79. Derrida, On the Name, 97. 80. Marion, In Excess, 84. 81. Derrida, On the Name, 99. Chapter 2 The Matrix 1. Walter, Placeways, 21. 2. Ibid., 23. 3. Hegel, Aesthetics, 1004. 4. Walter, Placeways, 126–127. 5. Taliaferro, Timaeus and Critias, 171. 6. Heidegger, Pathmarks, 82–96; 97–135. 7. Marion, Reduction and Givenness, 46. 8. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 145–161; also 165–182. 9. Levinas, Outside the Subject, 158; Husserl, Ideas I, 191.

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10. Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, 236; 241. 11. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 93,104; see also Visker, Truth and Singularity, 239. 12. Gregory Palamas, The Triads, 106–107. For the relation between Palamas and the hesychast tradition, see the Introduction by John Meyendorff, 1–20. 13. MacIntyre, Rival Versions, 45. 14. Gendlin, “Crossing and Dipping,” www.focusing.org. Used with permission. 15. Ferraris, “What Is there?” 138. 16. St. Augustine, Confessions, XII, vi. 17. This imposition of Trinitarian images is a heuristic usage intended to facilitate the developing argument (see 16:3 below). 18. Whitehead, Modes of Thought, 104. 19. Griffith, Archetypal Process, 56; Whitehead, Process and Reality, 244. 20. St. Augustine, Confessions, XII, vi, 6. 21. Sallis, Chorology, 101–107; Cherniss, “A Much Misread Passage,” 247. 22. Ibid., Chorology, 69–70; see also Bigger, Participation. 23. Mourelatos, The Route of Parmenides, 198–199; see also Bigger, Kant’s Methodology, 18–19. 24. Derrida, Writing and Difference, 292. 25. Heaven is what I cannot reach! The apple in the tree Provided it do hopeless hang That “Heaven” is to Me! The color, on the Cruising Cloud, The interdicted ground Behind the hill, the house behind, There Paradise is found! There’s a certain Slant of light On winter afternoons, That oppresses, like the weight Of cathedral tunes — Heavenly hurt it gives us; We can find no scar, But eternal difference Where the meanings are. None can teach it anything, ‘Tis the seal, Despair, An Imperial affliction Sent us of the air. When it comes, the landscape listens, Shadows hold their breath;

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When it goes, ’tis like the distance On the look of death.

Selected Letters and Poems of Emily Dickinson, 78 and 74. Reprinted with the permission of the estate of Robert N. Linscott. Rather than crossing and dwelling in one another, these two poems create a neighborhood of irreconcilable oppositions. What same do we see in each? No metaphor emerges from their play. In the following poem, the play is between variants of a single poem. nearest The maddest dream—recedes—unrealized – The heaven we chase.— Like the June bee—before the Schoolboy – Invites the race — Stoops to an Easy Clover – Dips—Evades – Teazes—deploys – Then to the Royal Clouds – Lifts Spreads his light pinnace – Heedless of the Boy __ bewildered Staring—defrauded—at the Mocking sky.— Homesick for steadfast Honey. Ah, the bee Flies not—that brews That rare variety.

The words written overline create two opposing poems. (Sharon Cameron, Choosing Not Choosing, Fascicule 14. Used with permission.) 26. Llewelyn, The HypoCritical Imagination, 191. 27. Levinas, Proper Names, 6. 28. Dyson, “Clockwork Science,” New York Review of Books, vol. L, n. 17, 44. 29. Heidegger, On the Way to Language, 92–96. 30. Though motion/rest has an ambivalent status among the transcendentals or “greatest kinds” (Sop., 255D) involved in the construction of soul in Timaeus, they are central to their “deduction” (251D–255B). The essential episode in that dialectic is the battle between the giants and the gods (Sop., 246A–150E). The gods taught that being can determine becoming; but as the giants taught, the converse is also true. If there is this reciprocal mingling, the meditative modes of temporality will be their joint products and will also (see 10.1 below) determine the various structures of consciousness. 31. Laszlo, The Creative Cosmos, 49–52. 32. Bradley, Essays on Truth and Reality, 159–160. 418

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33. Protevi, Political Physics, 59–65. 34. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 28. 35. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 42–46. 36. Heidegger, Question Concerning Technology, 20–21; Derrida, Margins, 21–27; and Bigger, Participation, 15–17. 37. Llewelyn, “Levinas’s Critical and Hypocritical Diction,” 11–16, 4. 38. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 19 39. Gadamer, Dialogue and Dialectic, 187. Used with permission. 40. Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, 240–241. 41. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 305; Otherwise than Being, 46. 42. Wyschogrod, An Ethics of Remembrance, 16. 43. Damasio, Looking for Spinoza, 96. 44. Ibid., 96, 30. 45. Ibid., 191. 46. Charles Taylor’s concept of a framework in Sources of the Self articulates the matrix within which we, self-interpreting beings, quest for some spiritual source that can give meaning to life. Though different cultures, historical periods, and individuals can give these different weights and interpretations, frameworks are built around the three axes of the moral life: (1) our sense of respect for and obligations to others; (2) our understanding of what makes a full life; and (3) and what constitutes our dignity. Frameworks incorporate sets of qualitative distinctions. “To think, feel, and judge within such a framework is to function with the sense that some action, or mode of life, or mode of feeling is incomparably higher than others more readily available to us . . . these ends or gods stand independently of our own desires, inclinations, or choices, that they represent standards by which these desires and choices are judged.” 47. Byatt, On Histories and Stories, 125. 48. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 49. 49. Sallis, Chorology, 91–97. 50. John Sallis pointed in a recent lecture to an intimate connection between metaphor and translation in texts from Plato’s Critias (107C–108A; 113A–B). This translation or movement from one language to another (to apply this to metaphor, the movement from what is shown by one term to its being seen in the interpretations of another) is sanctioned by the power of the word to make something present that can then be represented in another language. Saying is first showing. 51. Hegel, Aesthetics, 1104. 52. Saint Denys and Saint Maximus the Confessor could approach, not reach, the Good in metaphors of light. These lead to its “vestibule” and not into God’s “dwelling” in which, Maximus says, “the simple, absolved, and unchanged mysteries of theology lie hidden in the darkness beyond light of the great mystical silence. . . .” (St. Maximus, DN, 998a). 53. Heidegger, On the Way, 94. Notes to Pages 68–79

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54. Heidegger, Contribution to Philosophy, xxvi; On the Way to Language, 95. 55. Heidegger, On the Way to Language, 121. 56. This Peircian move, echoed by Derrida, is not necessarily Husserl’s. I am persuaded by Jean-Luc Marion’s masterful Reduction and Givenness that Derrida’s reduction of phenomenology to a theory of signs misses the “things themselves that show themselves from themselves” which is its aim (20–28). “Givenness” is also missed by the phenomenological reduction, which leads to Husserl’s own bifurcation of phenomenology and ontology. Marion offers convincing reasons for retaining this givenness and “the object as a thing,” and for rejecting the priority of the idealistic “consciousness of the object” (159) that places the “I” beyond Being (161–166). 57. Wittgenstein, Lecture on Ethics, 28. 58. Heidegger, Basic Questions, 61. 59. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 342. 60. Heidegger, Basic Questions, 86, 133. 61. Heidegger, Basic Questions of Philosophy, 113. Used with permission. Chapter 3 Plato’s Idea Theory 1. Agamben, Potentialities, 29–36; see below, 4:2. 2. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 71. 3. Ibid., 73. 4. Merleau-Ponty says that “reflection does not grasp itself in its full significance unless it refers to an unreflective fund of experience which it presupposes, upon which it draws, and which constitutes for it a kind of original past, a past that has never been present” (Phenomenology of Perception, 142). For Levinas, this is the past of responsibilities for to others I did not contract or inherit, which nevertheless are mine. Until empiricism took over in the eighteenth century, the radical difference between empirical and intelligible objects was primary. It was so for Aristotle, Plato, Aquinas, Averroes, Scotus, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and so too for me. How this knowledge is possible is another question. What recollection or the agent intellect, even knowledge of the third kind, tried to explain was the radical difference in kind that a priori / a posteriori elides. We are not talking about sentences but about objects. I am attracted by Augustine’s account in De Magistro, namely, that this is a function of Christ, the Logos who is the interior teacher that dwells within and is available to all as part of general grace. On my account this indwelling teacher would be a function of Spirit: wisdom is a lady. 5. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 71. 6. Heidegger, Being and Time, 174. This apophantic thesis concerning language, and by inference linguistic metaphor, governs this present text. For both Levinas and Heidegger, saying is first showing, that is, letting something be seen. 420

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7. In this context one should not ignore the fact that understanding, discourse, and interpretation are equiprimordial aspects in the “existential constitution of the there.” 8. This is a persuasive rather than constituting version of Husserl’s context-forming intentionality and draws upon Whitehead’s understanding of propositions as impure potentials for matters of fact, which are functions of the “propositioning” Eros that drives the world. The Good is, in this restricted context, a lure. Since this supplement is marginal to the metaphysical text, one can second Derrida’s observation in “The White Mythology” that metaphor, which establishes the science of being as being (where “science” has its usual logistic and univocal loading), cannot be defined apart from the images it makes possible and thus will ever elude a proper knowledge. We found metaphor on the supplements that are, if anything, catachrestic. “The conception of propositions,” Whitehead says, “as merely material for judgment is fatal to an understanding of their role in the Universe. In their logical role, a non-conformal proposition is merely wrong and therefore worse than useless. But in their primary role, they pave the way along which the universe advances into novelty. Error is the price we pay for progress. The term “proposition” suits these hybrid entities [pure potentiality for definiteness fused with matter of fact] provided we substitute the term ‘feeling’ for the narrower notion of ‘judgment’ and ‘belief.’ A proposition is an element in the objective lure proposed for feeling, and when it is admitted into feeling, it constitutes what is felt. The ‘imaginative’ feeling is one way of feeling it; and intellectual belief is another way [of] feeling the proposition, a way that presupposes imaginative feeling. Judgment is the decision admitting a proposition into intellectual belief” (Adventures of Ideas, 284–285). 9. Plato says “being is power (dynamis)” (Sop., 248C), not the power of a being, that is to say, Aristotle’s first or second act, but reactive and active becoming and its determinates. These seem to be medial phenomena. Although Plato avoids middle-voice forms, which were by then archaic, the sense of his “becoming” (gignomai) is best expressed medially as gegonesthai, to become becoming (Scott, “The Middle Voice of Metaphysics,” 746). This apeiron gegonesthai, a dynamical, indeterminate (but determinable) becoming in which nothing definite becomes (Tim., 27D), in which we hear Anaximander and Gaea and his own Philebus (23C), falls outside the scope of Parmenides’ “same for knowing and being” (DK, B3). Plato seems to have anticipated the Renaissance with its sense of unbound energy. “We need a sense of power which does not merely pass through the subject,” as John Llewelyn observed, “which is neither a mere conduit or passage, not the conductor entirely in charge of a performance, but is performed by as much as it performs the process” (Llewelyn, Middle Voice, ix). This requires that the relation between constraining form and the context of its exemplification, which is the way power is modified by the necessities, be Notes to Pages 87–89

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interpreted as mutually involved in one another; that is, each as alternatively determinate and determined. On the one hand, peras (idea as limit, Phil., 23C) gives this apeiron becoming its ever-changing forms, that is, earth, air, fire and water, its determinates, as these processes are brought to a stand for thought on the creature’s emergence for a monstrative that (Tim., 50B). On the other hand, the context of the becoming determines the relevance of forms, which are thus relatively determinable and perhaps even constituted anew. Let us examine this latter possibility in terms of the hypostasis, the term we use for any living creature and, unless the context requires it, not just persons. Levinas can show the medial roots for this emerging presence in Husserl’s Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (99). We should also take into account Levinas’s investigations of the limits of intentionality in insomnia, ennui, or his il y a, which are, Llewelyn says, “before time” (Genealogy, 30–41). A hypothesis is a verbal presencing of an enduring presence, not like ousia (substantia) a nominal presence, where change, like Yeats’s “ghostly spume,” plays across its surface. John Zizioulas suggests how this extension of hypostasis is possible through love that “can endow something with uniqueness, with absolute identity and a name. It is precisely this that is revealed by the term ‘eternal life,’ which . . . signifies that the person is able to raise up to personal value and even life inanimate objects, provided they constitute an organic part of a loving relationship [and] all creation can be saved thanks to its recapitulation in the loving relation between the Father and the Son” (Being as Communion, 49n). The personal hypostasis, which presupposes the necessities of its individuating biological root, is engendered in love, in an eros in which there are traces of agape, by and of persons and is inclusive. In this proximity, the Good and the receptacle are correlatives and, as such, they cross and exchange roles. Rational persuasion animated by love, even if not backed up with blackjacks and guns, is not without power. The Good must also be receptive beyond receptivity and active beyond activity. In justice to Plato, how else could we respect its status as aitia, cause, of paradigms for self-interpretation and selfassemblage? 10. Levinas, Collected Papers, 6. 11. Marion, Being Given, 198. 12. Ibid., 264. 13. Zeilinger, “On the Interpretation . . . of Quantum Mechanics.” 14. Prigogine, Exploring Complexity, 215. 15. A more adequate account of contextualization would center on a theory of propositions as impure potentials for becoming. This is vaguely intimated by the quantifiers of the predicate calculus. The relevant conditions of the matrix, analogous to the some and all, are fused with the ideas, the pure possibles germane to these occasions. The paradigms required by “frameworks” are of this nature. This is intuitively more satisfying though technically more complex and, in the end, more radical than my approach. 422

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In Whitehead’s scheme, divinity has a dual nature; its primordial nature as the grounds of the lure, and consequent nature as grounds for the providential and interpretative ordering of the past as received in its initial receptive phase by the actual entity. 16. C. S. Peirce extends the meaning of icon to cover the relation of an algebraic equation to its geometrical equivalent. Also we could extend it to the signs themselves (Collected Papers, 2.158). The base 2 can be modeled in a Boolean algebra, in a computer circuit, and say the same thing that the base 10 can say. Moreover, as Leibniz discovered, what is seen through a differential notation is superior to what can be seen though Newton’s fluxions. 17. Though Panayot Butchvarov argues for the truth of the Platonic ante rem theory, he acknowledges the strength and reasonableness of the concrete universal that “lives in its species and instances and they live in it.” This concrete universal unites the “moments of particularity and universality in Reality, is identical with its species and instances, with all of them together and each one separately and thus makes them same in their diversity and diverse in their sameness” (Resemblance and Identity, 178–179). We can deduce, at least in principle, that “the concepts of its species” (178) and, for example, properties of triangles are deduced from its definition as Hume’s missing shade of blue is deduced from the available shades—but, of course, as he notes, we do not deduce their existence. His defense of the Platonic theory is admirable; my approach to the concrete universal is existential, namely, through what we will come to understand as the interpretation of the common nature, the ante rem universal, by the haecceitas. But neither of these metaphysical approaches does justice to phenomena. That, of course, pertains to phenomenology where, if my rather late attraction to Jean-Luc Marion’s genius is a sure guide, his “saturated phenomenon” is the apotheosis of phenomenology’s givenness/gift nexus. Marion is able to free phenomenology from its objects and their horizons and to show that intuition will often overflow intention and move beyond the compass of Being. Since the subtlety and scope of Marion’s argument defies my summaries, I will mention saturation from time to time within a not-always-adequate phenomenological alternative. I assume that certain metaphysical contexts involving human “concrete universals” admit an immediate conversion to a saturated phenomenon. Not all phenomena are saturated. 18. Murdoch, The Sovereignty of the Good, 26. 19. Ibid., 40. 20. Husserl, Ideas 1, 40. 21. Levinas, The Discovery of Existence, 101. 22. Heidegger, Being and Time, 134, 139–140. 23. Gendlin, Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning, 276–280. 24. Gendlin, Language beyond Postmodernism, 15–16. 25. Ibid., 15. Notes to Pages 93–97

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26. Ibid., 15. 27. I follow the lead of Gail Fine’s translation and commentary on Aristotle’s Peri ideon. While the use of “meaning” prior to the nineteenth century is not quite appropriate, it is a useful invention. Nevertheless, I do have a problem with Fine’s denial of meanings in Plato. One has only to consider the intentionality of eros in the Symposium: Socrates asks Agathon: “Is love of something or nothing? Something we do or do not possess?” (199C–201C) Bats and E. coli also live in a world of meanings that are hardly abstract entities. Plato surely has what for us are meanings that straddle the de dicto / de re line. 28. The elementary triangles that form the elements in Plato’s stereometric chemistry are limits (peras). As gradients these canalize (Bergson) the receptacle’s dynamical apeiron gignesthai. Though we do not encounter the receptacle as such until 49A, I assume that it presupposed in that “which is always becoming and never really is” (27D) and first is implicit in the bowl in which the soul is formed (41D). I also assume that creatures come to be from and, by the utilization of its forces, stand out against this becoming. Rather than retrace old ground, I refer you to my previous treatment of these topics in Participation and Kant’s Methodology. 29. Vlastos, “The Third Man Argument,” 231–265. 30. Fine, On Ideas, 61–64. 31. Though the principle that to be is to be in relation is stated for becoming, it is also true when numbers are measured against one another, for without itself changing four is greater than two and smaller than eight. The war of the “giants and gods” in the Sophist clinches this point (Bigger, Participation, 123–128). 32. Whitehead proposed to resolve this issue by introducing ideas in the subjective as well as in the objective mode. This development is well worth further study. 33. Blackburn, “To Feel and Not Feel,” 350. 34. Levinas, Collected Papers, 83, 85. 35. Ibid., 80, 85. 36. Levinas, The God Who Comes to Mind, 118. 37. Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, 10. 38. Williams, Ponder These Things, 25. 39. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 532, 526. 40. In the Phaedrus (265B–266E) account of articulation, natural joints are discovered through the analytic method that “brings a dispersed plurality under a single form” (266A) and is introduced in the Sophist through historically relative access conditions. For example, we discover the angler, hardly a transcultural absolute, through divisions determined by such artifacts as hooks, barbs, and the like (Sop., 221B). 41. Heidegger, Basic Questions, 139. For Heidegger and the Greeks wonder is the disposition or affect in which philosophy begins. Heidegger says it is characterized by a need, which is a distress, not a lack, that is a distress that does not know the way out or in to the “between in which 424

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beings and non-beings Saint and forth as a whole, though Saint ill in their undifferentiatedness.” This between is the Ontological Difference. Though this can hardly be what either Plato or Aristotle meant, Heidegger knows better. He speaks German, which is better fitted to express what was meant by the Greeks than their own language (Basic Questions, 14). But let him continue: Since the between is the whole of these undifferentiated beings, there is nothing outside to which an exit would be possible. And because it is a whole that is undifferentiated, there is nothing to which a way might lead to a standpoint inside. What here permits neither an out nor an in oscillates back on itself in an extraordinary sense as this “between.” Therefore this distress of not knowing the way out or the way in, this need, has an excess that raises it above every lack and lets something be that we have to express as the opposite of a lack, an abundance. (Basic Questions, 139) Beings as an undifferentiated whole can be distinguished and fixed by language and thus distinguished from “that which presses forth as inconstant, formless, and carrying away.” The latter is being, but here it sounds more like our apeiron gignesthai that gives existence. This is to be contrasted with Derrida who invokes in its stead a lifeless chora and an oscillating logic to deconstruct any substantive hope of the gift of an “excess or abundance” (see below, 15:1). Heidegger’s between denies transcendence and is bounded by undifferentiated being, as in primordial awareness, boredom or ennui, and their generative condition in the matrix, if I may take that liberty with his text. My route will be by way of wonder invoked by beauty which will display a similar sense of need that is not founded on a lack within the between of being (peras) and becoming (apeiron). 42. Levinas, Collected Papers, 163. 43. The ontological and eschatological interpretations of the “name” of God are discussed with considerable scholarship and philosophical acumen by Richard Kearney (The God Who May Be, 20–38). He notes that Nicholas of Cusa considers God not as esse but as possest [absolute possibility that includes all that is actual—aspects I try to capture in the Whiteheadian primordial and consequent natures of God]. Gregory Palamas distinguishes between the divine essence, which is the unknowable darkness of Denys and Maximus, and the uncreated energies of God in which He communicates a new knowing—not unlike Heidegger’s “another thinking” and a new participation—that bears a deep affinity with the consequent nature (George Maloney, SJ, A Theology of Uncreated Energies, 66). Kearney is not persuaded that Marion’s saturated experience of God is distinguishable from monstrosity, and wants to introduce some aspect of the ontological interpretation. The absolutely transcendent Divine hypostases close God to Notes to Pages 104–105

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knowing, but his uncreated energies (Gregory Palamos) by which He goes out to the world in grace, deification, or providence open that ontological possibility. What is at issue is a loving Good beyond being and a call to serve Him with justice. 44. Levinas, The God Who Comes to Mind, 168; Otherwise Than Being, 70. 45. Infinity is not an ontological predicate, but is “produced as revelation, as a positing of its idea in me,” which I could neither receive nor contain in virtue of my own identity (Otherwise Than Being, 126, 26–27). 46. Llewelyn, “Levinas’s . . . Diction,” 32. 47. Contrary to Kant, Levinas says that love can be commanded—by love (Difficult Freedom, 191). Levinas’s “passivity beyond passivity” is itself an “action” expressing loving obedience. Action and passion cannot be opposed if, as Llewelyn notes, the passivity is “produced and accomplished” as action, where “produced” means both realized and revealed. 48. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 196, 199–200. 49. James, Writings 1902–1920, 426, 424–425. 50. That man is a self-interpreting (or hermeneutical) animal is Royce’s thesis in The Problem of Christianity. Anita Bigger and I then tried to show that self-interpretations are co-extensive with life (Bigger and Bigger, “Biological Recognition”). That man is a self-interpreting image of the ideas entails that, contrary to Plato, an idea is not always same, “uncreated and indestructible, never receiving anything into itself from without, nor itself going out to any other” (Tim., 52A; see also Bigger, Participation, 154–155). Moreover, chora must do more than “shelter and nurture” an image in “a ghost scene that, enshrouding precisely in letting appear, endows the fleeting specters with whatever trace of being they might enjoy” (Sallis, Chorology, 122) if the creature is to have the integrity of a being-for-self and the appropriate desires and that qualify a self-centering being. 51. Marion, Being Given, 226. 52. Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” 113. 53. Even if one is unsympathetic to apophatic or negative and mystical theology, Saint Denys can wean us from the Aristotelian and Thomistic reduction of Good to Being. In The Divine Names he says that his discourse “does not intend to describe the beyond-being goodness, being, life, and wisdom itself of the divinity itself beyond being . . . Our discourse celebrates that goodness which has preeminently manifested the good-producing providence, the cause of all goods, beings, life, and wisdom: the being-producing, life-producing, and wisdom-giving cause to all those that participate in being, life, reason, and sensibility” (Saint Denys, DN, 816C). 54. Hebblethwait, “Austin Farrer’s Concept of Divine Providence,” 546–547. 55. Richard Kearney, Strangers, Gods, and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness, 88-89. I came late to this text, but had I come upon it earlier, I still could not 426

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pretend to do justice to this grand work which comes closer than any to answering the question, whence evil? In a private communication, Llewelyn wondered why I did not follow Julia Kristeva and Kant and my theology did not invoke the sublime rather than beauty. I can’t imagine such demonic and apathetic conflations that the sublime may contain nor does the Good, unlike the il y a, have a place for Otto’s Unheimlich nor the tremendum in the tremendum et fascinans dyad. 56. Cited by Kearney, Strangers, Gods and Monsters, 105. 57. Ibid, 107. 58. John Caputo defines an impossible possibility as a situation from which there is no exit, no possible way beyond; that comes upon and overwhelms us, and in spite of this, reveals an exit, a possible way beyond. God is the possibility of these impossibles, as He was for Mary, who, having known no man, was impossibly with child. The incomprehensibility of the infinity that overcomes us to reveal the other as Other (Levinas) might be another example. 59. Llewelyn, Middle Voice, 197. 60. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 37. Used with permission. 61. I concur with Kearney’s insight that Levinas’ il y a “is a thinly disguised critique of Heidegger’s equation of abyssal Being (Es Gibt) with Nothingness” and is in itself “a mute, absolutely indeterminate menace. . .the absence of Being before the light comes” which Derrida will radicalize as chora (Kearney, Strangers, Gods and Monsters, 107). However, I take what is called chora to be Plato’s becoming that never becomes anything (gignesthai) that chaotically diversifies the receptacle (hypodoche) and is rather more benign than Levinas’ il y a. 62. Levinas, Existence and Existents, 99. 63. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 135, 139, 104. 64. Maturana and Varela, The Tree of Knowledge, 23. 65. Fabro, “Intensive Hermeneutics,” but see also Bigger, “Saint Thomas on Essence and Participation”; Clarke, “The Limitation of Act by Potency”; Henle, Saint Thomas and Platonism; Klubertanz, Saint Thomas Aquinas on Analogy. 66. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 42–46. 67. Husserl, Logical Investigations, 450. Chapter 4 To Feel and to Know 1. Marion, In Excess, 148. 2. Marion, The Idol and Distance, 153. 3. Auden, The Enchafed Flood, 20. 4. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 157. 5. Jung, Alchemical Studies, 214. 6. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 391–392. 7. In Donald Zeyl’s “alternative” translations of Timaeus 49A–50A, the receptacle can be a neutral stuff, which is the substrate of elements, fire, Notes to Pages 113–127

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water, and the like, or that in which their images appear. He combines both by beginning with the receptacle as “room” in which to move about. It is like an agitating container in which a contained liquid sloshes about and provides room for some parts to travel through other parts. “The Receptacle is a plenum or stuff . . . not sheer empty space” (Plato’s Timaeus, lxiii). The receptacle has no independent existence. There are only beings, creatures, whose traces it bears. This generative principle is the matrix, womb or mater, that gives space and time to creatures and through whose dynamism they come to be. By a reduction we can eliminate the creatures and talk about their abstract conditions, even about a featureless space and time, but these are abstractions from a field of events, not a sort of room in which things come to be. I propose to follow Plato and, picking up Timaeus’s opening theme of that which is always becoming and never really is (Tim., 28A), speak of the receptacle as diversified by this flux, a radical becoming which “contains” those necessary conditions for the appearing of fire, air, and the like (50A). These eventual elements, coming to be and perishing, defy demonstrative adverbs, this or that, which would prescind them from the flux and fix them by a name in a nominal eternity, what is, as “that which is φ .” Thus Timaeus says, “Not this, but what on each occasion is such,” where the “such” is the occasion’s “what” (49D), the participated form and a relatum in recognition. The receptacle is a stuff in so far as it holds or retains the forms, like a perfume base, by which each “has some stability.” 8. That the hypodoche is sometimes said to be a “foster mother” or “wet nurse” (49B) and then again “mother” (50D) could give one pause. Because I take it to be the creative arché, my interpretation stresses its fecundity. Derrida will stress its sterility and thus read it as the nurse, but not wet nurse, of all becoming. 9. Zeilinger, “On the Interpretation and Philosophical Foundation of Quantum Mechanics.” At http://www.quantum.univie.ac.at/zeilinger/philosop. html. 10. Gendlin, Language beyond Postmodernism, 17. 11. Visker, Truth and Singularity, 388. 12. Nietzsche, Will to Power, 517. 13. Heidegger interpreted Nietzsche’s will to power as the final phase of western metaphysics. Rather than thinking the will medially, as when I willingly let a language speak to me, he fell back on the metaphysics of act and passion. It is then said to actively create stability (“preservation and enhancement for complex forms of relative life duration within the flux of becoming”) as a “standing reserve” (Bestand). But “there is no will: there are only treaty drafts of will that are constantly increasing or losing their power” (Will to Power, #715). The difficulty encountered by Heidegger in going beyond being with the nihilistic baggage he carried is an artifact of his belief that the history of metaphysics reaches a closure in the will to power. In the 428

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later The Question Concerning Technology, he will see through the Gestell the nihilism implicit in the reduction of beings to this “standing reserve.” I give “being” a verbal, presencing, or eventive sense, except in Platonic contexts, and then I will speak of creatures (beings), becoming (existence), and being (ideas). 14. Clearly the concept of the hypodoche, receptacle, is not without its difficulties. If one brackets out its diversifying elements, it could be taken to be a four-dimensional non-metric manifold whose elementary contents are the elements: Plato’s stereometric air, fire, water, and earth—though earth is excepted from these elementary transformations. What we are trying to grasp is something that gives being through the gift of space and time that is a cosmological analogue to Kant’s transcendental apperception. Since the matrix gives beings eventuality under the suasion of the Good, space and time are, strictly speaking, abstract features of events. Different types of events will have different spatial, temporal forms. The time of my relation to another is not the time of a physical process or the time I bide. The receptacle is not a being, not spatial or temporal, though we unavoidably use this language when we speak of it in relation to creatures that diversify it and regard it under the formality of topos. Only as diversified is it passive or active, “swayed only because of the qualities it receives” (Sorabji, Matter, Space, and Motion, 214) and only then does the sorting out of elements occur, like wheat from the chafe in a winnowing basket (Tim., 52E). This means that natural place, the locative power Aristotle sees as the term of the upward movement of fire and downward movement of earth, is not to be found in the receptacle per se. Nor would this dynamism appear in topoi, the space/time of things moving and at rest as well as the space of Aristotle’s “innermost, motionless boundary of that which contains” (De Phy., 212b 20) and, later, of Damascus’s “shared space.” A more “active” aspect appears in chora; I move around in the topological space of Baton Rouge, but my head stays in the same place (chora). Robert Sorabji noticed that this more organic aspect, which “surrounds and embraces . . . holds bodies up,” leads Iamblichus to speak of space as “cause or origin.” Damascus can then say that space (our, if not Plato’s, chora) draws things together and, like time, arranges that things be apart. Place (topos) is also open to measure. This will also fit with what Damascus says about time and entails an acceptance of the arrow paradox and ontology of minimal events. 15. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 18. 16. Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time, 56. 17. Ibid., 71. 18. Husserl, Philosophy as Rigorous Science, 108. 19. Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, 46, 48. Used with permission. 20. Levinas, The Discovery of Existence with Husserl, 115. This surplus is inherent in categorical intention in which something is meant as an “aggregate, indefinite plurality, totality, numbers, disjunction, predicate, state of Notes to Pages 131–134

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affairs” in “an act that renders identical services to the categorical elements of meaning that merely sensuous intuition renders to the material elements” (Husserl, Logical Investigations, 785). The relation between the two is between parts and wholes, where the categorical is an abstraction from a sensuous whole. Categorial intuitions and the judgments they found are implicit in any intuition. 21.Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 46. 22. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 122; Zeilinger, “A Fundamental Principle,” 637–41; “On the Interpretation. . .,” 3–. 23. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 119. 24. Varela, “The Specious Present,” 299. 25. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 138. 26. Descartes, Philosophical Writing II, 33. 27. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 148. 28. Levinas, Existence and Existents, 68. Used with permission. 29. Raffoul, “Heidegger and the Origins of Responsibility,” 109, 116. 30. Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 301. 31. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 87. 32. Ibid., 82, 89, 85. 33. Ibid., 82, 85. 34. Cited by Daniel Siegel, The Developing Mind, 49. 35. Visker, Truth and Singularity, 376. 36. Something must now be said for my continuing use of the Latin persona and the Greek prosopon, as well as Richard Kearney’s assemblages from Marion’s excess and Levinas’s Alterity and his own interest in restoring the thing to phenomenology. Both terms originally referred to an actor’s mask. In Jungian psychology, the persona is the constructed self-image in terms of which we want to see ourselves and to be seen by others, but it also masks the shadow, the unacknowledged and repressed desires of the soul, while prosopon meant that aspect of the face which is related to others. Through their common usage as actor’s masks, they lend themselves to expressing how the medial hypostasis plays out its roles, its responsibilities, and lifestyles (Plato) or forms of life (Taylor). We must begin with Richard Kearney’s illuminating and indispensable distinctions between “person,” prosopon, and persona, even if we don’t follow his denials of Platonism and the soul’s “supersensible” dimensions. He acknowledges the transcendence of the persona/prosopon but means by this what is beyond intentionality (The God Who May Be, 14). A person is the other entertained as this or that, and as such he/she can be reduced by the totalizing ego to an instance of a kind, such as a cop, a nagging wife, a bully, or, as in Plato’s more exalted version, to a likeness of Hera or Ares (Phaedrus 252D–253D). I will tweak this brilliant distinction in the direction of the Platonic soul that, participating in being and becoming, is the demiourgos of the hypostasis’ life. Kearney would not agree with 430

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my claim that the person as welcomed as persona, that is, besouled, has chthonic and uranian roots. On the one hand, the hypostasis participates through the body in the environing world in, for example, seeing the idea “red” on a stop sign (persona as the naturalistic demiourgos of personal life) or being seen in its surplus (persona as an icon of ungraspable possibility); on the other hand, the hypostasis welcomed face-to-face is a prosopon, a participant in the life of God. Where the former evokes the consequent nature of God, the latter points to the Good hypostasized as propositioning Logos. When a person is intuited as a persona, he/she is no longer open to assimilation or fusion, to a collapse into a “collective representation, a common ideality,” and stands before me in the mystery of her personal aurora as unique, irreplaceable. Kearney says that persona is an eschaton, that is, as playing out possibilities, as ends in themselves, in openly endless, changing, and unpredictable horizons. This openness to the adventures of futurity distinguishes an eschaton from a terminating telos. An eschaton as persona “is the other’s future possibilities which are impossible for me (to realize, possess, grasp)” and which, moreover, can never be mine. The persona seems to occupy the timeless time we have associated with the receptacle, for he/she is without graspable retentive and protentive horizons. Unlike a character in fiction, the persona continually forces a future, but how and what this is, remains a mystery. Kearney echoes Levinas when he says of the persona that “the relation with the other is the absence of the other, not absence pure and simple, not absence as pure nothing, but absence in a futural horizon, an absence which is time . . . my persona is both older and younger than my person . . . and is always already there and still to come.” (The God Who May Be, 12) Were we to understand the other as persona, we would “have denied the other’s temporality, futurity, alterity . . . The phenomenon of the persona surpasses phenomenology altogether.” (Ibid.) More to my point is Kearney’s suggestion that the persona may constitute the person’s haecceitas and, on the account we will soon make for Scotus, would be equivalent to its adverbial interpretations of its form and situations in the processes of being a person. Persona takes the place of the no place; but it does not itself take place. Yet it does give place to the person and without it the person could not take its place. It is the non-presence that allows presence to happen in the here and now as a human person appearing to me in flesh and blood. It is, in short, the quasi-condition for the other remaining other to me even as he/she stands before me at this moment. But however non-present it is, the persona is not to be understood as some anonymous presence. Nor is to be taken as a merely formal condition of possibility (Kant), nor indeed as some archaic and formless receptacle (Plato’s and Derrida’s khora). (Ibid., 12)

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It should now be apparent that what “gives place to the person” refers to the medial persona’s chora. Kearney then proposes a further transformation of persona into prosopon that “signifies the infinite otherness of the other in the flesh-and-blood person here before me.” Thanks to its etymology (pros, “toward,” and opos, “eye,” “countenance,” or “vision”), the other faces us “revealing itself from within itself.” What Levinas describes as a deflection of the Good onto the other would be, on Kearney’s reading, a transcendence in immanence. Kearney is on target when he says that “the good of the persona takes precedence over my drive to be (conatus essendi).” As prosopon one sees “the in-finite in the other person before me. In and through that person. And because there is no other to this infinite other, bound to but irreducible to the embodied person, we refer to this persona as the sign of God. Not the other person as divine, mind you—that would be idolatry—but the divine in and through that person. The divine as trace, icon, visage, passage.” (Ibid., 17–18) I will continue to use hypostasis for person with the tacit understanding that we can think it qua persona or qua prosopon. 37. Descartes, Philosophical Writings II, 235. 38. In The Principles of Natural Knowledge and The Concept of Nature, Whitehead developed phenomenological foundations for applied mathematics. He began with “the undifferentiated terminus of sense awareness,” the buzzing world in which something is going on (Concept of Nature, 13). This general fact is later factored into factors, the red feelings, and the like, which then become entities, for example, the feeling of red. Thanks to Bradley’s description of immediate experience as “my general feeling that at any moment there is more than the objects before me, and no perception of objects will exhaust the sense of a living emotion” (Bradley, Essays on Truth and Reality, 159), Whitehead identifies this emotion with feeling and will hold that feeling is the basis of experience. 39. Henry, The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis, 21. 40. Levinas, Existence and Existents, 68. 41. Descartes, Philosophical Writings I, 337, 335, 336. 42. Henry, The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis, 39–40. Used with permission. 43. Marion, Cartesian Questions, 106. 44. Borch-Jacobson, The Emotional Tie, 132, 144, 145. 45. Dr. Daniel Siegel describes this arousal as an “initial orienting response.” It refers, he says, to how the brain and other systems of the body enter a state of heightened alertness with an internal message of “something important is happening here,” which, in turn, alerts a cognitive mechanism, “Pay attention now,” that does not require conscious awareness and “that does not initially have a positive or negative tone. Within microseconds, the brain processes this representation of the body and the external world generated with this initial orienting process . . . elaborative appraisal and arousal [arise] that direct energy through the system.” Arousal incorporates 432

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past experiences of the stimulus, emotional and representational elements of memory, the present environmental and social context, expectations, and emotions involved in approach or withdrawal. “Emotional processing prepares the brain and the rest of the body for action” (Developing Mind, 124–125). 46. Siegel, The Developing Mind, 125, 147. 47. Marion, Reduction and Givenness, 192–198. 48. Gopnik, Meltzoff, and Kuhl, The Scientist in the Crib, 39. 49. Ibid., 24, 70. 50. Rorty, Contingency, 18. 51. Byatt, On Histories and Stories, 118, 119. 52. Ibid., 122. 53. Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method, 279, concludes this citation with “asked of him in general.” Levinas, however, would say that this encounter is with a unique and irreplaceable Other in the context of which the claim of moral knowledge is somewhat misleading. Though as an encounter with such an other it will have the generality, that is, justice, implicit in an ethical demand, this generality is hardly knowledge. The danger of Beauty, which the Good will correct, is that it tends towards totalities, not to the pluralities or the responsibilities I have to those who have nothing in common. 54. Levinas, Collected Papers, 26. 55. This claim by Jesus is not to be restricted to the way he was understood by Justin Martyr, Clement, or Origin as an affirmation of Platonism, even if it does pertain to the order and perfection of the cosmos, nor is it exclusively directed to a fulfillment of fragments and antinomies of Hebrew sacred history. It is directed to the true or eternal life. Since the “Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14), this entails that truth should be understood as dwelling, as Communion. The thesis I propose, though laden with feminist heresy, is in both the cosmological logos tradition of Justin and the Eucharistic tradition of Irenaeus. Moreover, it goes beyond the Greek/Jew of Derrida and Levinas in trying to find a way to speak as a Christian through both. 56. Aristotle attributes this discovery to Plato’s friend, Archytas of Tarentum (Meta., 1023a 21). 56. Husserl, Logical Investigations, 340. 57. Marion, Reduction and Givenness, 13. 58. Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time, 66–67. 59. Heidegger, Being and Time, 33. 60. Levinas, Discovery of Existence, 7–8, 5. 61. The method of imaginative variation is an avatar of Plato’s analytic dialectic. One goes from what is unknown, treated as if known, through similar unknowns until one arrives at something known. These unknowns could be hypotheses or images, as the discussion in Republic 510A–E makes clear. Given that variations may be experimental, it then becomes Kant’s method of discovery. Plato too hastily dismisses images, the initial condition of the dialectic. Notes to Pages 144–151

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Chapter 5 Deictic Metaphor 1. Kearney, The God Who May Be, 115, n.1. See above, 4: n.36. 2. Marion, Being Given, 322. 3. Levinas, Outside the Subject, 25-26. 4. Agamben, Potentialities, 193. 5. Murdoch, Sovereignty of the Good, 29, 34. 6. Taliaferro, Timaeus and Critias, 13. 7. Husserl, Logical Investigations, 450; Ideas I, 6, 137. 8. Husserl, Ideas I, 8. 9. Husserl, Ideas I, 138; Logical Investigations, 450. 10. Cherniss, “The Philosophical Economy of the Theory of Ideas,” 1–12. 11. Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, 78. Used with permission. 12. Marion, Being Given, 52. 13. Byatt, The Virgin in the Garden, 176. 14. Llewelyn, HypoCritical Imagination, 184, 196, 199–200. 15. Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 339. 16. Bradley, Essays on Truth and Reality, 161. 17. Scarry, On Beauty, 112, 47, also 25. 18. Ibid., 1, 115, 47. 19. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 129. 20. Ibid., 141. 21. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 135. Used with permission. 22. Sallis, Force of Imagination, 159. 23. Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, 30–31. Used with permission. 24. Ibid., 30–31. 25. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 42–43. 26. Froment-Meurice, Marc, That Is to Say: Heidegger’s Poetics, 157–158. Used with permission. 27. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 71, 76, 67. 28. Warren, “Visitations,” New Republic, September 13, 1993; 37. 29. Levinas, Collected Papers, 3. 30. Bergson, Time and Free Will, 133–134. 31. Von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, 19. 32. Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, 6–7. Used with permission. 33. Allegorical crossings are asymmetric. For instance, in Hobbes’ allegory, “man is a machine,” life is identified with motion in an ideally isolated system whose analogue is the state of nature, and the operations characteristic of humans, such as desire, are mapped into mechanics, so that desire is attraction, indifference, or avoidance. The converse humanization of mechanics had to await Leger. 34. Buchanan, Poetry and Mathematics, 94. 35. Lacoue-Labarthe, Poetry as Experience, 44. 36. Ibid., 48. 37. Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, 3. 434

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38. Wall, Radical Passivity, 15. 39. Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, 4, 9, 11, 6–7. Used with permission. 40. Ibid., 10–11. 41. Grube, Plato’s Thought, 150. 42. Agamben, Potentialities, 187, 189. 43. Heidegger, Being and Time, 135. 44. Agamben, Potentialities, 194, 195, 201. 45. Heidegger, Being and Time, 41, 54. 46. Agamben, Potentialities, 203, 202. Used with permission. 47. Ibid., 203–204. 48. Ibid., 204. 49. Mendelson, Later Auden, 31, 33. 50. Murdoch, Sovereignty of the Good, 29. 51. Murdoch, Sovereignty of the Good, 26. 52. Ibid., 34, 40. 53. Murdoch, Sovereignty of the Good, 22. 54. Levinas, Collected Papers, 170. 55. Kearney, The God Who May Be, 66. 56. Ibid., 18. See also 9–19. Kearney’s indispensable distinctions between person, persona, and prosopon are developed in 4. n36. Since Kearney does not appear to share my Platonism, I continue to also employ “concrete universal” in contexts where reference to ideas is desirable. 57. Levinas, Beyond Essence, 124, 118. 58. For a more sustained and incisive critique of Levinas’s strong disjunction between autistic self-closure and being for the other, see Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another (335–341). Ragged edges are the norm in ethics. 59. Kosman, “Platonic Love,” 57. 60. St. Maximus, The Ascetic Life, 78. 61. Ibid., 74. 62. Saint Paul takes a dim view of the chthonic roots of incarnation: “Put to death those parts of you that belong to the earth—fornication, indecency, lust, evil desires and the ruthless greed that is nothing less than idolatry” (Col. 3:5), but the loss of some earthly things would be the death of the self that must remain even after a new birth in Christ. 63 Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, 31. 64. Ibid., 37. 65. Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” 79. 66. Marion, “In the Name,” 27. 67. Ibid., 27. 68. Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, 73, 94–95. 69. Levinas, Entre Nous, 20–21. Chapter 6 Truth and Metaphor 1. Agamben, Potentialities, 35. Notes to Pages 170–183

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2. Ibid., 36. 3. Ibid., 32. 4. Ibid., 31, 33. 5. Ibid., 35. 6. Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, 252–253. 7. Jakobson, On Language, 388. 8. Cited in Agamben, Language and Death, 30. 9. Marion, The Idol and Distance, 113. 10. Ibid., 91. 11. Heidegger, Basic Questions, 146. 12. Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, 153, 2–5. 13. Heidegger, Being and Time, 57, 33. 14. Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time, 53, 85. 15. Levinas, Entre Nous, 5. 16. The passage at Rep. 517C is the basis for Heidegger’s assertion that for Plato truth meant correctness. His translation says that the idea of the good is the “original source of all that is right [orthon] (in their comportment) and all that is beautiful.” Instead of reading orton te kai khalon aitia as “the Good is responsible for everything that is right and fine” (Waterfield), “cause for all that is right and beautiful” (Shorey), or “universal author of all things right and beautiful” (Jowett), he uses the ad hoc notion of “comportment” to mean not how things are disposed by the Good, but that any act must be rightly conducted; that is, with a view to the idea. True enough, but what is “unconcealed,” aletheia, in things is subordinate to what the mind knows. Admittedly, Plato says that “the sight of it [idea of the Good] is a prerequisite for intelligent conduct. . .” (517C), but the Good beyond being is not a mental conception, representation, or paradigm. 17. In the Phaedo (99E), Socrates admits to having abandoned a phenomenological approach to truth. Instead of being confused by things, he took “refuge in theories and studied in them the truth of things that are.” The result is the separated ideas of the middle dialogues. 18. Nietzsche, “Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense,” 42–47. 19. Years ago a graduate student, Lee Bailey, sent me some material from his dissertation, Plato’s Waters of the Underworld, Department of Religious Studies, Syracuse University, and I am in a considerable debt to him for this discussion of Plato’s participation metaphors. 20. Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, 310. 21. Levinas, Face to Face with Levinas, 33. 22. Gendlin, “Dwelling,” 9. 23. Heidegger thought that metaphor obscured Being by the transport of beings or that intelligible, the predicate, sublated (superceded) the sensible. In the spirit of Kant’s program, he used metaphor to sensibilize concepts. For example, in comments on Parmenides (frag. 3), “There is a same (auto) for thinking (noein) and being (einai)” (Early Greek Thinking, 87–89), he 436

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suggests this fragment should be read after Frag. 8, in which the emphasis is on eon, being, and not immediately on einai, to be. Metaphors are at work in the schematization of einai, eon, noein, logos, and the like. In the “Anaximander Fragment” (Early Greek Thinking, 33) he concludes, with more than the usual legerdemain, that for Homer’s Kalaches eon meant “coming into presence in unconcealment,” and thus is launched the prototype of the Ontological Difference between Being (eon) and being (einai). Returning to Frag. 8, we can see difference beginning to take shape. Noein, thinking, means to perceive and is “grounded in legein, [“saying,” whose roots are agricultural] in which the letting lie of what is present in its presencing occurs” (Early Greek Thinking, 89). Like the wheat or barley, which one gathers to then lay out and shelter, saying lets lie before us what is gathered, logos, and unconcealed for thinking (noein). Noein takes knowing to be active and passive perception; in seeing we reach out to interpretatively gather or collect what is laid out in unconcealment before us. Einai, to be, has no verbal sense; its aspectual sense is that of a nominal, durative presence, present in every present. “Presencing,” though usually ignored, survives in its participle on, being. Its aorist is borrowed from gignesthai, becoming. Therefore, Parmenides means that things come to a stand in letting lie before the knower. If, on Heidegger’s advice, the order of the fragments is reversed, then when eon crosses and interprets einai, being loses it fixity and beings will have something of the eventual sense of physis; things will gather and lay themselves out to stand up for a while in unconcealment. “There never was a presence or presencing outside of eon, since presencing itself is grounded in, appears in, and shines out of the unfolded light of the twofold . . . Knowledge and the evidence of knowledge cannot renounce their luminous derivation from essential disclosure, even when truth has been transformed into the certainty of self-consciousness.” (Early Greek Thinking, 95, 97) Heidegger interprets logos to mean laying out that unconceals. Perhaps he is justified in giving eon the sense of “presencing,” but on, like the Latin ens, does not usually display its verbal aspect. The more direct route to temporality is to interpret becoming, gignesthai, as medial. Bearing this in mind, the metaphor implicit in Parmenides (frag. 3) is an example of “dwelling thinking” in which each term crosses over to interpretatively dwell in the other. “Thinking (noein) is being (einai).” Thinking and being cross one another to disclose a same (auto). How do we come to see such a same? What is this same, this auto? We find it through this hermeneutical use of the verb “to be” which joins thinking and being in mutual interpretation. This use of “is” is close to the hermeneutical “seeing x as y.” When thinking crosses over to dwell in einai, in spite of the concomitant intellectual feelings one is likely to be caught up in the usual Parmenidian fixities. The eventual and interpretative sense of noein will be dismissed, like chimeras and other fictions. The metaphor is ignored in this Aufheben or “speculative proposition” in which thought gets taken up into being. But metaphor is not always asymmetric, Notes to Page 195

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for there is a reversal, a chiasmus, in which being crosses over to dwell in thinking. What kind of thinking? Thinking that is close to aesthesis, that is subtle and sensitive to the nuances in language, situations, nature, the other. The intellect is a feeling intellect. The same for knowing and being is feeling. Though einai will continue to bear an unchanging sense, it is in part constituted by the mind’s intentions. If neither term supercedes its other as it tries, and never quite succeeds, to make a home for itself within the other’s semantic space (chora), we might as well let them be neighbors who mutually cross their between, “saying,” in a visitation short of metaphor. In this play we might even see einai through Homer’s vitalistic eon. 24. The distinctions between topos, hypodoche, chora, and hedra are not justified by Plato’s own usage. Mention of “saying” in Levinas’s special sense is unavoidable. If there is a “saying without the said,” the “crux of a plot” which, though it leads to the said, doesn’t of itself “lead to phenomenology,” then saying is an avatar of the archival receptacle and is one’s asymmetric participation in the other as Other; and it will now be the ethical ground entailed in all that is said. Saying is introduced from the start “as the supreme passivity of exposure to another, which is responsibility for the free initiative of the other” (Beyond Essence, 45, 46). 25. In his early lectures on Plato’s Sophist, Heidegger says that “place is something belonging to beings as such, their capacity to be present, a possibility that is constitutive of their being. The place is the ability of a being to be there, in such a way that, in being there, it is properly present” (Plato’s Sophist, 75). This may be true of place as hedra or topos, but its kinematic (“capacity to be present”) and metaphysical (“properly present”) presuppositions are foreign to the matrix, the receptacle, that gives place, chora. 26. Before I could say this, I made a pilgrimage to Chalcedon whose formulae I deeply loved but which is now an Istanbul railway station. Trains slowly go to Ankara or Smyrna, but nowhere else. It is almost a dead end. 27. Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 247. 28. Heidegger forges the concept of “neighborhood” from Parmenides’ “there is a same for thinking and being.” For an extended discussion of this usage, which entails that differences, such as that between Being and beings, have in the same a creative and reciprocal relation of belonging together, see Heidegger’s On the Way to Language, 57–108, and William Lovett’s fn. 6, in his translation of Heidegger’s “The Word of Nietzsche, ‘God Is Dead’” in The Question Concerning Technology. Since they are beyond physis or being, I propose that the matrix and the Good are metaphysical neighbors. 29. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 62–63, 216–220. 30. Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful, 16–18. 31. Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, 12. 32. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 66, 44. 438

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33. John Llewelyn calls attention to Robert Nye’s discussion of the “feeling intellect” Wordsworth uses in the Prelude for “that grace which dwells between one possibility and another, perceiving and revealing a pattern beneath the surface of experience without wishing to impose a style on it. It is as much a talent for saying nothing, for submitting to the supposed meaning or meaninglessness of life, as for deliberate speaking out. It overcomes the opposition between fact and reason in a celebration of respect, a humbler tenderness or the humble patience of the thinking heart and gives thanks,” Llewelyn continues, “for what is given by the grace of being.” (Middle Voice, 207) 34. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 107. 35. To borrow an insight from Heidegger’s discussion in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought 47, the matrix conceals—the mark of the feminine—but also juts forth. In a sense too complex to be argued here, she is androgynous and in some respects even autochthonic and, as Levinas will say, pagan. 36. Froment-Meurice, That Is to Say, 74. 37. Heidegger, On the Way to Language, 107–108, 57. 38. Levinas, Collected Papers, 101. 39. Heidegger, Being and Time, 55, 32. 40. Heidegger, On the Way to Language, 69. 41. Froment-Meurice, That Is to Say, 46. 42. Heidegger, On the Way to Language, 91, 92. 43. Froment-Meurice, That Is to Say, 61, 74. 44. Celan, Selected Prose, 19–20. 45. Cited from H. G. Gadamer, Gadamer on Celan, 96. 46. Ibid., 96, 99. 47. Levinas, Proper Names, 38–46. 48. Celan, Selected Prose, 44, 48. 49. Levinas, Proper Names, 41. 50. Celan, Selected Prose, 49, 51. 51. Ibid., 54. 52. Levinas, Proper Names, 45. Chapter 7 Aristotle: Poetry and the Proper 1. One should model mythical or metaphorical disclosure on Husserl’s method of imaginative variation; these variations could be stories, pictures, or images that point, as if in a circular dance, to the eidetic center as they correct and supplement one another. This is also the dialectical method of Austin Farrer’s Finite and Infinite in which various metaphysical relations were used to elicit the unique “cosmological relation” between Creator and creatures. However, in this case there is no being at the center and thus nothing upon which to hang properties, metaphysical or otherwise. One can try to show this creativity at work, as I will later in saying, and then use Plato’s images to institute chora in a disclosive dialectic. Notes to Pages 200–208

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2. The problems with the separation of forms could blind us to the generative gap between becoming (the materialists) and ideas (the friends of the forms) by which it is overcome (Sop., 246A–249D). Not seeing that they require one another, as if in Heidegger’s ring dance, we are prone to ignore Whitehead’s wise observation that “types of Platonic philosophy, in spite of much association with arbitrary fancifulness and atavistic mysticism, retain their abiding appeal; they seek the forms in the facts” (Process and Reality, 20). Meno’s slave sees the idea of the square in its schema. 3. Is Derrida on target when, speaking for Aristotle, he says that, though inseparable from essence, the distinction between property and essence makes metaphor possible? In metaphor “the transported significations are those of transported properties, not of the thing itself, as subject or substance. For metaphor itself to be possible, without involving the thing itself in a play of substitutions, one must be able to replace properties with one another” (Margins, 249). The transfers take place at the level of second intensions, “from genus to species, from species to species, from genus to genus, and by analogy” (De Poet., 1057a 8) and involve the “thing” only as a species. “Here stands my ship” is said to be a transfer from species to genus, for being at anchor is a kind of standing (10). Yet when Saint Thomas says God is Good, the goodness known and transposed to God is our contingent attribute, not a property. God has no properties, since these would divide the unicity of His essence. Plato’s “the individual is a polis” is also a non-Aristotelian transfer. With this apparent misrepresentation, Derrida will be in a position to question the possibility of metaphor—if he can deconstruct the substance/property distinction. 4. Technically, this is an allegory in which something seen, flowing liquid, and known, the fluid mechanics of Descartes, Bernoulli, and the like, becomes the paradigm for thinking electricity. Science is allegorical and, in the case of the exact sciences, metaphors of measure effect the mapping. As more pedantic and narrative, allegory is preferable to the symbolic presentation of an idea. Goethe said “allegory changes manifestation into a term, the term into an image, but does so in such a way that the term can always be linked to the image and preserved in it.” This seemed to the romantic mind to be rather banal; following Kant’s third Critique (sec. 39), he says that “symbolism changes the manifestation into an idea, the idea into an image, but does so in such a way that the idea remains forever effective and unreachable and, though spoken in all languages, inexpressible.” 5. For the import of the definitions of ratios in Euclid V, see Sir Thomas Heath, Euclid: The Elements, v. 2, 116–137. 6. There is a fascinating account of this drama in Marx Wartofsky, Conceptual Foundations of Scientific Thought, 419–473, which is also the source of the Koyre citation. 7. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 7. 8. Jean-Luc Marion says that in Heidegger’s “Fourfold,” the “four instances, Earth and Sky, mortals and divinities, buttress one another, hence 440

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confirm and repel one another, in an immobile and trembling tension where each owes its advent only to the combat with others, and where their mutual struggles owe their harmonious equilibrium to their (dis)entanglement(s) to Being, which convokes, mobilizes, and maintains them” (GW, 40). Greg Schufreider found evidence in the Heidegger archives that the crossing here is the crossing out of being found in “The Question of Being” (P, 314), which suggests that this dance is a community of difference, if not différance, in Jean-Luc Nancy’s sense. If so, a more profound and more radical approach to communitarian proximity is possible than anything I have undertaken. 9. Heidegger, On the Way to Language, 100. 10. Llewelyn, Genealogy, 174. 11. Derrida, Margins, 24. 12. Ibid., 250. 13. Ibid., 251. 14. E. coli will interpret a chemical gradient as naturally lethal and swim directly away from the source, but on this logic it would be indistinguishable from an artifact. Does this mean that the bacterium’s interpretation is artifactual? When Husserl says that the perceived object is seen as having other sides, is the other side an artifact? The freedom of constitution stops before what is ontologically prior. The lethal gradient and the unseen sun are examples of the limits nature places on interpretation. Unfortunately, Aristotle does not adopt this defense. 15. Derrida, Margins, 243. 16. Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, 30. 17. The key issue is the reflexive linkage between the potential intellect (the sensory phantasm) and the active intellect inscribed in the image of the single power like a “line bent back on itself.” Given illumination by the creative intellect (De Anima, 430a 14–18), the potential intellect is “the same power in a different state” which reflectively appropriates the phantasm (429b 10–28). 18. Timaeus’s genealogy of the gods begins with Oceanus in which, John Sallis has noted, “there is an unannounced moment of monstrosity . . . the order of generation and birth is burdened with discontinuity and unpredictability” (C, 86). This unpredictability, which may also have transcendent causes, is characteristic of Nietzsche’s genealogy and, leaving aside the bombast, is a good account of the way the hypodochic archive functions in history. “The cause of genesis of a thing and its final usefulness, its actual employment and integration into a system of purposes lie toto galeo apart; that something extant, something that has somehow or other come into being, is again and again interpreted according to new views, monopolized in a new way, transformed and rearranged for a new use by a power superior to it; that all happening in the organic world is an over-powering, a becominglord-over is a new interpreting, an arranging by means of which the previous ‘meaning’ or ‘purpose’ must of necessity become obscured or become entirely extinguished.” (Genealogy, 50–51). Notes to Pages 211–216

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19. Ballard’s account is found in his Principles of Interpretation, 129. He refers to material in Section 85 of Ideas I, in which Husserl attributes intentionality to morphe and sensibility to hyle, where the former is meaning-giving, and the latter is nonintentional sensory content. He then wonders if “a form without matter or matter without form are possible.” Can this hyletic data be experienced if in fact all experience [Erlebnisse, “lived experience”] is intentional? “Yes,” Husserl admits as much and then hedges in his very ambiguous Internal Time Consciousness. I propose to treat it as a medial becoming in which there is neither subject nor object, that is, intentionality. Ballard apparently accepted this interpretation of Husserl, and it is certainly central to this present thesis. It is more defensible if we relate it to a passage in The Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (hereafter TC) where Husserl speaks of “a flow of continuous change . . . of something that originates at a point of actuality, a primal source point,” or primal now, which is presented as “a continuity of moments of reverberation . . . for this all names are lacking” (Husserl, TC 79). Though Husserl speaks of this flow as “absolute subjectivity,” this idealistic reading is unwarranted by the passive synthesis in which the flow is given. However, when the flow becomes “a continuity of moments of reverberation,” that is, when this hyle is intended as temporal, a verbal process becomes a nominal, recognizable what, if only a before or later than. Temporalization is the primary intentional morphe. Perhaps the subjective reading may then be appropriate. Nevertheless, there is a danger in assuming the notion of hyletic data and thus an initial subject-object dichotomy, which threatens to become primary rather than lived sensuous affectivity. Levinas also interprets this primary flow as nonintentional, though, I presume, affective, in both the early The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology (47–50) and in the later Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence (32–35). In his comments on this passage in the latter text, he observes that this is “to speak of time in terms of flowing and not in terms of temporal events” which is also “the unthematizable flow of time [which presences] from the reduction of the said” to the saying (Otherwise Than Being, 34). When this flow, time experienced as time, is temporalized— “an openness by which sensation manifests itself, is felt, modifies itself without altering its identity, doubling itself by a sort of diasatasis of the punctual, putting itself out of phase with itself”—one comes to the primary sense of the verb “to be.” Levinas will discover a time, a flux, which is a noesis without a noema, in Blanchot’s “space of writing” in, as his editor Séan Head has it, “a saying that exceeds the said.” The movement of poetic language, unlike ontology, which confirms itself in discourse, unfolds itself in “forgetting and waiting” (Levinas, Collected Papers, 150). 20. Levinas, ever wary of the excesses of the orgiastic feminine, proposes that the gift of being, and the maternal cluster Plato exploits in his metaphors for participation, “is beyond all metaphor” (cited by JL GE, 183). Yes, but it 442

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also makes metaphor possible and may be “demonstrated” in a catachresis. That I take to be the point of such images as the perfume base, winnowing basked, nurse and mother, “gold, not golden,” and the like (Tim., 49D–53A). 21. Gonda, European Medium II, 179. 22. Von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, 501. 23. Proust, Time Regained, 913. 24. Scholowski, Husserlian Meditations, 58–59. 25. Marcel Proust, The Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 3, 912–913. Used by permission of Random House. 26. Ibid., 915. 27. Ibid., 908–909. 28. Levinas, Discovery of Existence, 73. 29. “The love that contemporary religious thought, cleared of magical notions, has promoted to the essential situation of religious existence, does not contain social reality” (Levinas, Entre Nous, 21). Thanks to Levinas, this is hardly now the case. 30. John Llewelyn hits a sensitive chord when he questions my going beyond being to the good and its beauty rather than to the sublime and its responsibilities, doubtless a consequence of an apparent tendency to subsume agape under eros. The movement I want Plato to have made is from the love of one beautiful body (eros) to Beauty, which then, rather than leading to the erotic love of all beautiful bodies (Sym., 210A), deconstructs the erotic self and posits agape. This occurs when he discovers the beauty of the other’s soul, which, thanks to the radiance of the Good, cannot but bring him into the proximity of the Other. If I may borrow and slightly refocus Llewelyn’s words, Beauty is both “traumatizing and thaumatizing.” The gift of agape begets responsibility; what else, except this transformation, could account for the love of a just human order? What else can be meant by the next phase, the love of “institutions and laws?” (211D) On the other hand, while the Beautiful can accommodate agape, can it accommodate Lear’s lesson, namely—to again cite Llewelyn—that there is something array in the world, a natural injustice, an absolute adakia. . .? Until, perhaps, the “types and shadows have their ending and the true world appears.” Or we return to the nothing that we are. Chapter 8 “To the Things Themselves” 1. Kahn, “The Greek Verb ‘To Be,’” 255–256. 2. Kahn, “Why Existence Did Not Emerge. . .,” 233–235. 3. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 147. 4. Talmud 112, cited from Visker, “And Cain Said to Abel,” 3–4. 5. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, sec. 56. 6. Marion, The Idol and Distance, 39. 7. Levinas, Beyond Essence, 113–114. 8. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 104. Notes to Pages 217–224

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9. Llewelyn, The HypoCritical Imagination, 231. 10. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 104–105; see also Visker, Truth and Singularity, 235–273. 11. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 75–76. Used with permission. 12. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 139. 13. Whitehead, Concept of Nature, 51. 14. Without benefit of chora, words never have a site (hedra) entre nous from which they arise and stand out, command and be questioned, but are disseminated in a play of differences in a dead time and space. We will show that in metaphor this displacement need not occur and, thanks to Rosenzweig and Levinas, there is a primordial assertion in saying that resists deconstructive différance. 15. Cajetan’s interpretation of Aquinas has been challenged by George P. Klubertanz and Cornelio Fabro. I discussed these matters in “Saint Thomas on Essence and Participation,” The New Scholasticism, LXIII (1988), 319–348. If Fabro is correct, then esse, the act of existing, contextualizes form. 16. Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn, 16. 17. In Metaphysics Z, which has always struck me as the high point of his metaphysics, Aristotle makes a distinction between analysis in the formal and material partative modes and contrasts these with the “substantial” (ousia) mode of analysis. In a bronze ring, the circle and its characteristics is the subject of the formal mode and the bronze and its elements invite material analysis (1034b 20–1037b 5), while in the “bronzen ring” these are inseparable (1033b 15, 1041b 5–35). 18. Goodman, Languages of Art, 69, 72, 85. 19 Kant’s schematism entails the categories that give the productive imagination an a priori rule. 20. Hegel, Aesthetics, 1004. 21. Llewelyn, Genealogy, 164. 22. Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking, EGT, 22, 23, 25. 23. Marion, God Without Being, 83. 24. Moody, The Logic of William of Ockham, 42–44. 25. Sorting out “singular” and “individual” is not always easy. If something, a tode ti, is thought from above through its sortal, it is said to be “instantiated.” Individuation and singularity depend on deictic conditions and are existential. 26. Moody, The Logic of William of Ockham, 62. 27. In Derrida’s Speech and Phenomena, Husserl’s signifying intention becomes “a meaning to say” (vouloir dire) and is then constituted, granted the animation of the indicative sign, on the model of soliloquy. 28. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 171. 29. Whitehead, Concept of Nature, 141. 30. Levinas, The Discovery of Existence, 61. 31. Husserl, Logical Investigations, 798. 32. Ibid., 340, 63. 444

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33. Levinas, The Discovery of Existence, 57, 56. 34. Husserl, Logical Investigations, 785–786. 35. Ibid., 333. 36. Ibid., 329–333. 37. Ibid., 350–386. Chapter 9 The Hypostasis: Its Thisness and Its There 1. See G. L. Prestige, God in Patristic Thought, and John Zizioulas, Being as Communion, as well John Llewelyn’s discussion of Levinas’s “deduction” of the hypostasis, more primordial than ecstatic Da-sein, from the il y a (Genealogy, 20–60). 2. Heidegger, Basic Questions, 63. 3. My account is inadequate if Mary Margaret McCabe’s Plato’s Individuals (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1994) is the norm. She works over the “personal identity” chestnut, and seems to take the receptacle as a substrate underlying change, which is in once sense true, but she fails to see it as the anarchical arché of all coming to be. Like a perfume base, it retains without itself entering into its expression (Tim., 50E). In an outstanding essay marking his turn away from Aquinas to Whitehead and Hartshorne, Leonard Eslick has demonstrated “matter’s” creative role (“The Material Substrate in Plato”). Parenthetically, I might mention that Eslick knew something about matter; he had been a mule driver in the mountain artillery in Italy during WW II. 4. “The beautiful-in-itself shows itself to be as much beyond beings as the good itself. Thus the order of being, which consists in the orientation toward the one good, agrees with the order of the beautiful” (Gadamer, Truth and Method, 435). 5. Llewelyn, Genealogy, 30. 6. An over-determination characteristic of internal relations may be the case with David Bohm’s extremely suggestive “intricate order.” For all his expressed admiration for Whitehead, the latter’s occasions of experience have a decisiveness apparently lacking in Bohm, Wholeness and the Intricate Order, 207. 7. Heidegger, Being and Time, 48. 8. Marion, God Without Being, 170. 9. Husserl, Internal Time Consciousness , 382. 10. Levinas, Transcendence and Alterity, 12. 11. Kahn, “Why Existence Did Not Emerge as a Distinct Concept in Greek Philosophy,” 323. Kahn notes this bodes badly for the Cartesian doubt and the ontological proof. 12. Prestige, God in Patristic Thought, 164–165. 13. Levinas, The Discovery of Existence, 76. 14. Kearney, The God Who May Be, 114, n. 8. 15. It is possible to speak of the time of the hypodoche as Heraclitus’s other and other, but only from a locus standi and a metric, usually associated with Notes to Pages 235–241

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topos. This reflexive time proposes the possibility of different metrics and interpretations and is usually associated with the strangely timeless gramme, writing. Chora is the link between this reflexive time, which is more or less virtual, and becoming. 16. Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 87–88. 17. Paul Ricoeur, “La platonisme est une philosophie engagé dans une réflection sur la relation des autres entre eux. . . . Une ontologie pluriste est une ontologie rationnale,” Étre, Essence et Substance chez Platon et Aristote. Paris: Seuil, 1954. 18. Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 46. 19. Levinas, Existence and Existents, 19. 20. Marion, God Without Being, 170. 21. For a subtle and illuminating analysis of the dangers inherent in the use of “body” in Heideggerian studies, see Charles E. Scott, “Seyn’s Physicality,” Existentia, 21–27, v.10, 2000, Fasc. 1–4. I have used psyche rather than mind to minimize the danger of stepping in the direction of mind-body dualism. 22. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, xxix. 23. This and the following paragraphs echo Levinas’s discussion of the psychism and its separation from alterity, the time of universal becoming, that enables it to be at home with itself (TI, 53–60). 24. In the Treatise (book 1, part 1, section 1), Hume notes that the distinction between impressions and ideas or, in our terms, between sensibility and thought, is a matter of feeling; he counts certain affective states, such as love and anger, among the impressions. The angry red (contiguous impressions) becomes contiguous ideas, red and angry. 25. My interpretations of Duns Scotus have been forged under the watchful, though often disapproving, eyes of two very fine scholars, Alan Wolter and Mary Sirridge. Such good sense and scholarship as may be present in my discussion is thanks to them. 26. McKeon, Selections, 303; 305–306. 27. Ho, The Rainbow, 6. 28. Wolter, Transcendentals, 97. 29. There is no general agreement as to what counts as ultimate differences. Alan Wolter thought that these include haecceitas, irreducibly simple differences, and the transcendental differences that differentiate genera (Transcendentals, 83). Ockham, on the contrary, understood this to refer to ultimate perfections in the quidditative order that cannot be further determined in that order but only by singularity. This supports my insistence that frameworks or lifestyles are implicated in “becoming who we are.” Wolter rejects this on the ground that all that Scotus meant was that what is signified by these terms is not nothing, since the subject on which each is predicated is always a “being” (QQ on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, book 4, q.1). Wolter is right in saying that when being is predicated on something in the real world, it stands for the object as a whole, not just its beingness. However, 446

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species is as such a determinable (in quid) and, as apt for instantiation, a possible being; at the level of the ultimate species (as individuated), it is in qual, denominatively dependent on the in quid common nature in which it participates. If this nature natures (Levinas’s essance or Heidegger’s wesen), then its in qual determinates, among them haecceitas, could be adverbial. 30. Wolter, Transcendentals, 97. 31. Ibid., 86. 32. Prigogine, Exploring Complexity, 11. 33. Goodwin, Signs of Life, 41; 29–41. 34. Prigogine, The End of Certainty, 214–215. 35. In his brilliant, if difficult and terse, “Levinas and Language” (The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, 118–138), John Llewelyn discusses how both Heidegger (Ereignis) and Levinas (saying/said) attempt to avoid entanglement in the ontological difference. Having come by his paper only as I was about to send this to the publisher, I cannot do it justice. But I can clarify how the verbal adverbial distinction I have been using may fit into this eliminative program. 36. Llewelyn, “Levinas and Language,” 127. 37. Marion, Being Given, 231. 38. Ibid., 232. 39. Cited with permission from Alan Wolter’s unpublished “A Reportatio on Dun Scotus’s Merton College Dialogue on Language and Metaphysics.” 40. Ibid. 41. Wolter, Transcendentals, 104. 42. Husserl, Ideas I, 66–67. 43. This interpretation of Whitehead’s method of extensive abstraction was inspired by W. S. Weedon’s 1957 Presidential address to the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology: “A Method of Pointing,” Southern Journal of Philosophy, v.1 (1963), n.1. See also my “Speculative Demonstration,” Journal of Philosophy, v.lviii (1961), Kant’s Methodology and, more impressively, Edward G. Ballard’s Principles. 44. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 190. 45. Edward G. Ballard (Principles, 228) characterizes Being as “the unifying power of giving a that, revealed as a what, to a person in a process of discovery that has come to be known as aletheia.” Chapter 10 Elementals 1. The phrase, chorion tou achoretou, is from Clement of Alexandria’s Encomium of Mary (Hom. XI, 42). 2. Levinas, Beyond Essence, 75. 3. Llewelyn, Middle Voice, 223. 4. Levinas noticed a feminine vulnerability in the OT deity; Rekhem, womb or uterus, is the Aramaic root of Rakhmana, which is in turn cognate with Rakhamin, The Holy One. (Llewelyn, Middle Voice, 219). Notes to Pages 248–264

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5. Visker, “And Cain Said to Able,” 32–33. Unlike Heidegger, Levinas’s attitude toward the earth bodes ill for environmental concerns. 6. Levinas, Difficult Freedom, 137. 7. A conjunction of Platonic and Christian themes would be for most a round square, but it points to the necessity of thinking the hypostasis as incarnate if Eros is to be procreative and the other loved in her singularity. The receptacle is more than a Klein bottle or an Escher drawing or, to cite Derrida’s analogue, a matrix of ashes and cinders, and is susceptible to the suasions of the Good. 8. Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide, 109. 9. Levinas, The God Who Comes to Mind, 115, 116, 117. 10. Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, 65. 11. Levinas has shown that “exteriority” is a determinate of and so not prior to the proximity of the face-to-face, a relation which does not “fit” any intentional object but in which one term “will be affected by what it cannot assume, by the Infinite.” In this being affected by what is absolutely other, there is an extraneity, which is unlike the exteriority of conventional signs, for “indication,” though without correspondences or anything held in common, gets its intelligibility from an irreducible transcendence rather than from intending or need and thus “the presentation of a being to the consciousness of. . .” (Discovery of Existence, 118). In saying I first submit to the measure of the good and echo its affirmation, yes. This pre-diction is presupposed in any diction. I will say no and lose myself in satisfaction, Levinas’s analogue of Heidegger’s fallenness, unless something like the grace through the proximity of the Other calls me back to this original responsibility. 12. Levinas, Entre Nous, 80, 165. 13. Llewelyn, Genealogy, 23. 14. Wyschogrod, Ethics of Remembrance, 17. 15. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 168. 16. Ibid., 26, 257, 258, 265. 17. Ibid., 28. 18. Ibid., 28, 258, 265. 19. Ibid., 270, 265. 20. “The voluptuosity of erotic love which the Old Testament names knowledge, is an intimation of this archaic quasi-transcendental condition that transcends all transcendental categories” and, Llewelyn continues, “the voluptuosity of nakedness is a prefiguring of the nakedness of the face . . . which may be the nape of the neck, the hand, the entire vulnerable body . . . The discovery of the body in voluptuosity is ambiguously à deux. The nakedness of the face-to-face into which erotic love is a non-initiative initiation—for ‘there is no initiative at the birth of erotic love, which arises in the passivity of its pangs’—is, ethically speaking, unambiguously à Dieu.” (Llewelyn, Middle Voice, 202). Granted Levinas’s deduction of the face-to-face from voluptuosity, how does one reconcile this with Levinas’s 448

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statement that the accusative is not a modification of the nominative (Beyond Essence, 124)? 21. Levinas, Existence and Existents, 51. 22. Levinas, Entre Nous, 126. 23. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 120. 24. Under the self-imposed parameters of atheism, Levinas views the hypostasis from the phenomenological standpoint of the being enjoying its satisfactions, and while this gives him a nonintentional starting point, he misses the obligations inculcated by others. After all, the hypostasis is social. 25. Levinas, Collected Papers, 167. 26. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 142, 190, 141. 27. Ethics isn’t a matter of genes, Levinas would say, and we would agree, but still the ethical hypostasis has a body and must respond to the Spirit. In Totality and Infinity Levinas says that the sovereign I “vibrates in enjoyment . . . is seeped in a medium and consequently undergoes influences . . . the originality of influence lies in that the autonomous being of enjoyment can be discovered, in this very enjoyment to which it cleaves, to be determined by what it is not, but without enjoyment being broken up, without violence being produced. It appears as a product of the medium in which, however, it bathes, self-sufficient. . . . What has influence over life seeps into it like sweet poison. It is alienated, but even in suffering, the alienation comes to it from within. . . . The existence of this equivocation [simultaneously sovereign and submissive] is the body. The sovereignty of enjoyment nourishes its independence with a dependence on the other . . . [and] runs the risk of a betrayal; the alterity upon which it lives already expels it from paradise. Life is a body, not only a lived body where its selfsufficiency emerges, but body as the crossroads of physical forces. . . . In its deep seated fear life ever attests this inversion of the body-master into body–slave. . . .” (164) 28. Levinas, Existence and Existents, 57–64. 29. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 261. 30. Ibid., 263, 266. 31. I am indebted to Richard Kearney (The God Who May Be, 60–79) for the eschatological theme in this discussion of paternity. 32. Levinas, Proper Names, 93. Chapter 11 Time’s Arrow 1. Whitehead’s method of extensive abstraction (CN, 74–98) normalizes Plato’s analytic dialectic under the name of “speculative demonstration” (Bigger, Participation, 197–211), which is also Kant’s method of discovery that goes from hypotheses through hypotheses to ideas (Rep., 510B). This can be extended to metaphor’s passage from images through images to the thing itself. 2. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 53. 3. Ho, The Rainbow, 26–28. Notes to Pages 271–278

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4. Varela, “The Specious Present,” 300. 5. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 107. 6. Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, bk. 1, pt. 3, sec. 3. 7. I presume that I will be able to justify this nominal usage. We are talking at the level of the hypositization of agapà and the work of the hypostases that are a Trinity and their cause in the Good beyond Being.. 8. Varela, “The Specious Present, 301–302. 9. Maturana and Varela, The Tree of Knowledge, 95, 74–75. 10. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 170. 11. Griffith, “Time and the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness”, in Physics and the Ultimate Significance of Time, 12. 12. Goodwin, Signs of Life, 33. 13. Sheldrake, The Presence of the Past, 97–109; Goodwin, How the Leopard Changed Its Spots, 94–98, rejects Sheldrake’s theses that morphogenetic fields are nonphysical. As Sheldrake says in A New Science of Life, 71; “Although morphogenetic fields can only bring about their effects in conjunction with energetic processes, they are not in themselves energetic.” In increasingly complex structures the number of future possible forms increases and the chances that there is a “unique minimum level decreases,” but living systems invariably take up only one of these possibilities and “no such factor is presently recognized in physics” (67). My thesis is that ideas are nonphysical parameters over fields of physical variation. If, like an enzyme, they arise from the becoming they in turn control, they are eidetic. That is not true of an ocean wave. Participation allows us to retain formative causation in an energetic dynamics. 14. D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, On Growth and Form, 1029. 15. Levinas, Existence and Existents, 76. 16. David Bohm, “Comments on Ilya Prigogine’s Program,” in Physics and the Ultimate Significance of Time, 261. 17. Zeilinger, “On the Interpretation and Philosophical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics,” 5. 18. Wheeler, “From the Big Bang,” Interview. 19. Summarizing his position, Zeilinger says that in deciding on the arrangement of the experiment, the observer cannot determine whether the several ways the process can proceed are distinguishable. If they can’t be distinguished experimentally, they are indistinguishable in the formalism. “This situation is more than the situation in classical physics where we can always mentally split the ensemble into its constituents and where the stochastic behavior of the whole ensemble follows from the behavior of its individual constituents which can be thought of as defined to any precision. In classical physics this can be done in situations where we have no way to really distinguish the individual components. In contrast, the quantum mechanical rule says in a colloquial form, ‘Thou shall not even think of distinguishing the indistinguishable.’” The impossibility of a description of the 450

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individual statistical event leads to a fundamental unpredictability, at least on the Nagel-Hemphill covering law model. In choosing the apparatus we decide which of two complementary properties will manifest themselves, such as position or momentum, but we have no influence on the value of the quantity. The interference phenomenon follows directly from distinguishability/ undistinguishability. “The observer does not have total control over the phenomena in Nature.” The experimenter can, through his experimental questioning, jostle nature into giving answers to questions that exclude one another, but he cannot influence which specific result may materialize. Quantum mechanics, in agreement with Bohr, Pauli, Wheeler, and Heisenberg, should include the “differentiated role of the observer.” “Quantum non-locality . . . is a consequence of the points just mentioned, if one grants that quantum phenomena can extend over any distance—it is very likely that the new paradigm will include holistic aspects. This follows in a direct way from the fact that in the Copenhagen interpretation it is impossible to dissect a quantum phenomena into its parts . . . the preparation of a quantum system, its evolution and its observation, form one entity which, following Wheeler and Bohr, we call the quantum phenomenon.” (Zeilinger, “On the Interpretation and Philosophical Foundation of Quantum Mechanics,” 8.) 20. Zeilinger et al, “Decoherence by the emission of thermal radiation,” Nature 427, 2004, 711–714. 21. Prigogine, Exploring Complexity, 53. 22. Prigogine, Exploring Complexity, 49–51. 23. Webb, “The Complexity of the Instant,” 203. 24. Catesby Taliaferro says in what has been for me the most important commentary on the Timaeus, that necessity is like “the receptacle, but without any shape; like the mathematician’s space but without the coordinates actualized, having a pure movement with nothing moving. In modern terms, it is as if you said Necessity is the possibility of a multidimensional manifold, the possibility of many independent variables. In particular [granted the three-dimensional solids that are its diversifying elements], the receptacle represents the possibility of three-dimensional space and the motion inherent in the receptacle time. For time, says Timaeus, is the moving image of eternity. And the movements of the stars [the circle of the same] and the planets [the circle of the other] are manifestations of time. The daily motion of the fixed stars was usually taken by the Greeks as the uniform motion whose cycles were the whole numbers of the time coordinate, and this was also demanded by the Newtonian theory. This means we measure time by choosing some motion as uniform and numbering its returns. Timaeus is saying explicitly that any motion can be taken as uniform, and the absoluteness of this time is the principle that enables the mind to consider any motion as uniform, and this is exactly the theory later stated at great length by Saint Augustine in his Confessions where time is the mediating principle Notes to Pages 289–292

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of Redemption just as it is here the mediating principle between the form motion and the flux. By uniformity of motion is meant that we can number the recurrences of the motion, if it is cyclical, by whole numbers, thus considering every cycle of the motion as equal. The Newtonian principle of absolute time is a degradation of this Platonic principle. Instead of keeping absolute time as the mediating principle in the light of which any motion could be taken as its measure [as in relativity theory], Newton tried to realize it as a hypothetical absolute to which all possible sensible motions could be referred. This was necessary for Newton because of his particular formulation of the laws of mechanics. Since the vector of mass-acceleration is for him the essential entity to be measured and since the vector of massacceleration changes with the frame of reference, it is necessary to postulate an absolute frame of reference to which all observers can refer themselves if they are to have a common science [since the laws do not hold for any frame]. Since such a frame cannot be found by its very nature, that frame has been chosen which saves most accurately the Newtonian laws. . . . The fixed stars serve this purpose best. Having degraded a perfectly good principle, one arrived at no principle at all [an ad hoc situation that delighted the positivists of the last Century]. The doctrine of the Timaeus would demand a law of mechanics general enough to hold for any observer in any frame of reference; obviously such a law might well entail the relativity of time as counted, though there is never this kind of relativity in the time that counts.” If you want a direct intuition of this necessity, “you would have to try to see it as in a dream . . . you would seek to deny reason to plunge into the flux to be only flux . . . But this conscious effort at a stream of consciousness, this monotonous flight from the same, is a kind of folly, a madness ending only in frustration.” (Plato, The Timaeus and Critias, 32–33). Levinas’s il y a is the phenomenological equivalent of this cosmological thesis. 25. Visker, Truth and Singularity, 245. 26. Sambursky and Pines, The Concept of Time, 14–17. 27. Ibid., 17. 28. Ibid., 83, 65. 29. Ibid., 83. 30. Ibid., 87. 31. Though Bergson’s duration is sometimes an action, more often it is a continuously unfolding multiplicity, like a melody. The élan vital was modeled on the phenomenological time of consciousness and is the bearer of virtual differences that, granted material contingencies, lead to speciation. A continuum of differences, as Deleuze says, “changes in nature in dividing itself” (Deleuze, Bergsonism, 50). As becoming it defies analytic thought but leads to lived experiences, which “enlarge the human condition” (Bergson, Creative Evolution, 195). Of course, Bergson’s durational élan viatal is absolute and embraces all phenomena. For Whitehead duration is relative; each eventual creature 452

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(percipient events) defines a Galilean frame of motion/rest within, however, a universe whose transformations are Euclidian. Only Euclid’s geometry makes recognition or invariance possible, and it is the only metric geometry with a natural meaning of congruence. Absolute space and/or time can, however, be defined by the intersection of the frames of any four such events. This is the metaphysics of finite achievement within mutual immanence, and though it can account for complexity and the dynamism, communitarianism, and creativity of the élan vital, its monstrative and phenomenological base, as in Concept of Nature or The Principle of Relativity, overcomes the virtualities that haunt Bergson’s “super-phenomenology.” Is something close to Bergson-Deleuze virtuality entailed in coupling? In walking along a forest path, at each moment within my purpose, there is a dynamic, emotional landscape in which the path is enfolded. The choice of trajectories, the shiftiness that enfolds various trajectories, shapes the dynamical landscape. Though we have favored the Wheeler-Zeilinger approach, could something like this be involved in Heisenberg’s indeterminacy? 32. Marion, Being Given, 162, 175. 33. Webb, “The Complexity of the Instant,” 199. 34. Levinas, Existence and Existents, 76. 35. Sambursky and Pines, The Concept of Time, 91. Chapter 12 The Originary 1. Gonda, “The European Medium 1,” 61. 2. Ibid., 45, 67. 3. Bergson, Free Will, 100. 4. Ibid., 103. 5. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 170, 171, 370. 6. Ibid., 109, 137, 139. 7. Pearson, Philosophy and the Adventures of the Virtual, 135, 132. 8. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 270, 271. 9. Prigogine, Exploring Complexity, 50–54. 10. Zeilinger, “On the Interpretation and Philosophical Foundation,” 4–5. 11. Bergson, Free Will, 104. 12. Husserl, Internal Time Consciousness, 182. 13. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 23. 14. Ibid., 110, 118, 115. 15. MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions, 45. 16. Levinas, Beyond Essence, 63. 17. Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, 463. 18. Borch-Jacobson, The Emotional Tie, 130. 19. Levinas, Beyond Essence, 32. 20. Time seems inextricably bound up with the “works of reason,” but timeless logical relations and the ubiquitous is of predication leads us to timeless time. Plato appears to follow this pattern. He once wished to elimNotes to Pages 296–305

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inate all construction from mathematics because it introduced time and motion into eternity (Rep., 527A); but this begins to change in Meno (87A) and is implicit in some of the mathematical constructions in Timaeus (54B ff), where time becomes identified with psyche (37A–38B), with life and not just the rational soul. In spite of the atemporality of the “circle of the same” that hovers over the changing world, it is clear that time is the when and how long of creatures, and the cosmos, an ever-living creature, is the horizon of all process. When time is experienced as pure flux, as something indeterminate going on, then this medial “flow” is a primordial becoming. There is a spread, but nothing to protend or retain. In Aristotle, time begins its shift from cosmology to rational psychology, to the knowing or measuring subject (De Phy., 223a 16–28), to finally become ideal in Augustine and Kant. Heidegger’s failure to find in the pre-Socratics a way of thinking of time without an egological loading and as ontologically prior to space should give one pause (John Protevi, Time and Exteriority). Nevertheless, Timaeus contains the seeds of an alternative philosophy of medial processes from which space and time-order are derivative. The receptacle is ontologically prior to subjects and objects and is experienced as indeterminate becoming, a medial mode. Something distended but otherwise undefined is going on without, but we do not order it with respect to past, present, and future. I propose to begin with the receptacle as the arché of both the measuring subject and the measured event. But be cautioned: the receptacle is a metaphor and, as is the case with all metaphors, we can mistake the finger (that points) for the moon. Thus we might imagine it to be a container or, like the ether, a medium, and both would be misleading, if not false. As in most things that matter, Kant can show the way even if it is one he does not always follow. Though he begins with inner sense and thus with the priority of time, well-ordering time’s moments with respect to before and after requires material objects in outer sense. That order entails that the imagination that is the root of sense is proto-spatial and, since it is also the root of understanding, proto-temporal; thus imagination belongs neither to subjective inner sense nor objective outer sense, yet partakes of both. Just as the pure imagination is, when crossed by the intention to count, the matrix that releases manifolds, which are successive or temporal (arithmetical) and co-existent or spatial (geometrical), so given that categories are forms of temporal and spatial order, the categorical form implicit in any empirical intention releases a mathematizable world. Like the God of the Book of Wisdom, we constitute our world in measure, weight, and number. 21. Husserl, Ideas 1, 192. 22. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 34. 23. Ibid., 127, 32. 24. Husserl, TC 193, 106, 119, 100. 25. Levinas, Beyond Essence, 34. 454

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26. Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, 12. 27. Brough, “The Emergence of Absolute Consciousness,” 93, 83. 28. Husserl, Internal Time Consciousness, 68. 29. Ibid., 201, 382. 30. Ibid., 106. 31. Ibid., 382. 32. Levinas’s descriptions refer back to his own account of the il y a which was in turn inspired by Heidegger’s experience of being through nothing (Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 23–24). “Let us imagine all beings, things and persons, reverting to nothingness. One cannot put this return to nothingness outside of all events. But what of this nothingness itself? Something would happen, if only night and the silence of nothingness. The indeterminateness of this ‘something is happening’ is not the indeterminateness of a subject and does not refer to a substantive. Like the third-person pronoun in the impersonal form of the verb, it designates not the uncertainly known author of the action, but the characteristic of the action itself that has no author. This impersonal, anonymous, yet ‘indistinguishable consummation’ of being, which murmurs in the depths of nothingness itself, we shall designate by the term il y a, there is. The ‘there is,’ inasmuch as it resists a personal form, is ‘being in general’” (Levinas, Existence and Existents, 57). 33. Husserl, Internal Time Consciousness, 97. 34. Levinas, Beyond Essence, 34. 35. Husserl, Internal Time Consciousness, 333–334. 36. Llewelyn, Genealogy, 49. Eugene Gendlin recognizes that mirroring experience “while swimming after it” is orthodox Husserl, but in a reply to J. N. Mohanty, he says that he does not see why a “single act cannot be meaningful and reflexive. Reflexive does not mean reflection . . . we usually know what we are doing quite without any separate act . . . Aristotle had no problem pointing out that thinking and perceiving are inherently what he called ‘auto’” (Michael Levin, Language Beyond Postmodernism, 189). Keep this in mind together with Bradley’s immediate experience that is always before us. 37. Deleuze, Bergsonism, 45; Bergson, Creative Evolution, 207–217. 38. Deleuze, Bergsonism, 124, n.16; 47. 39. Durie, “The Strange Nature of the Instant,” 47. Robin’s paper was a seminal influence in my rethinking of my earlier treatments of Plato’s instant. 40. Ibid., 49. 41. Levinas, Beyond Essence, 33. 42. Robert Brumbaugh has written extensively on mathematics in Plato. His indispensable Plato’s Mathematical Imagination is in the grand tradition of Heath, Buchanan, and Klein. In his Plato on the One, which quite frankly fails in its adaptation of a paragraph-numbering scheme like Principia or Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, he interprets the scholium on time (Par., 155E–157A) as a Eudoxian cut. Since the first two hypotheses, namely that being is and Notes to Pages 307–313

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is not one, contradict one another, Brumbaugh proposes that they be taken as subcontraries and their conjunction asserted. “The result is a proof that there must be ‘cuts’ dividing states that are related by ‘transformations’ [from motion to rest, being to non-being, etc., and conversely] but that these cuts cannot be made temporal entities.” The scholium is ‘transcendental,’ and the various theorems investigate the cuts that constitute boundaries in mathematical, physical, and phenomenological fields (Brumbaugh, Plato on the One, 146). Because of the psyche structure of the instant, it is the intersection of being and becoming and is truly transcendental. Cornford gives the scholium a different take (Plato and Parmenides, 194–204). If the one without being could neither be known nor named, the second hypothesis results in a sensible one that becomes, which then raises the problem, the theme of the Scholium: when does becoming take place? The first cases concern coming to be and ceasing to be, and then dividing or unifying. Cornford has Plato answer that there is no stretch of time in which this transformation occurs (200). Change is therefore instantaneous. The difficulty and ambiguity of the text being what it is, one cannot fault Cornford, but Brumbaugh’s reading is more useful, for it permits us to think of the instant not as a point but as a minimal duration, a unity of change which does not itself change. As John Locke said, time is perpetually perishing. If the unchanging unit of change can conjugate the transcendentals, then the instant, like Derrida’s différance, is the engine of repetition, the iteration of the form in the continuity making and time forming now. 43. Sayre, Parmenides’ Lesson, 252. 44. In the light of the Sophist, “not being” should be understood as not being of a kind, as other than what “being” designates, and not the nothingness that haunts theology. In the sequel we will endorse R. E. Allen’s reading of the first hypothesis, even though “The one is” imports an existential sense lacking to the Greek einai. However, there is a veridical sense, “it is the case that. . .” or F. H. Bradley’s “reality is such that . . .” 45. Deleuze, Bergsonism, 37. 46. Ibid., 38–39. 47. Sayre, Parmenides’ Lesson, 351. 48. James, Writings, 1065, 1070. 49. Allen, Plato’s Parmenides, 208. 50. Ibid., 211. 51. Ibid., 311. 52. Sayre (Parmenides, Lesson, 249–253) points out that the Platonic instant is not Aristotle’s now. The now is in time, even if Aristotle says otherwise, for how else would time be continuous? Plato explicitly says that the instant is out of time; this suggests that, on the model of the cut in the infinite dyad of the great and small that Aristotle attributed to Plato (Meta., 987b 20–22), it would be a cut in time. The cut was supposed to generate the ideas, but in Eudoxian-Dedekind case it divides time like cuts in the real 456

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line define the various number classes. For example, the irrational number is a cut that is both greater than all numbers less than it and less than all numbers greater than it. One should consult the translation and commentary on the definitions of ratios in Euclid V (v. II, 116–137) and Catesby Taliaferro (Timaeus and Critias, 29–32). Through these commentaries it is easy to grasp the sense of the inscription over the Academy: “Let no one enter here who is ignorant of geometry.” In his discussion of Euclid III, Def. 5, De Morgan demonstrates how this made it possible to express and even represent ratios among incommensurable magnitudes, such as would be required later in accounts of acceleration (Elements, v. II 121–126). Plato was on the way to a theory of limits and, therefore, infinite magnitudes. The use of these cuts has the advantage of bounding intervals and not just now sequences as Allen favors. Sayre wants to take the ideas as effecting cuts, the way the form middle C would be generated from a cut in the qualitative continuum of sound. The idea would not have the sensible properties of the continua it marks; that is, the Form middle C is not middle C. The instant is not part of the continuum but divides it into earlier and later than (Parmenides’ Lesson, 252). “The Form of the Middle C (unlike the cellists note) is not a sound, and the instant (unlike midnight) is not a time. But the former fact does not prevent a sound produced in performance coinciding with the point marked off by the ‘cut,’ thus instantiating the Form as an audible paradigm. A sound in performance would coincide with the cut of Middle C if (1) it is determinate (analogous to a rational number along Dedekind’s continuum), and (2) it is the lowest of the sounds higher than Middle C or highest of the lower sounds” (252, fn. 37).] Nor does the latter prevent a thing in time from occurring at a point marked off by an instant, thus in fact from occurring at that instant.” (253). 53. Wheeler, “Law without Law,” 182. 54. Varela, “The Specious Present,” 301. 55. Ibid., 302–306. 56. Husserl, Consciousness of Internal Time, 76. 57. Wood, The Deconstruction of Time, 90–92. 58. Durie, “The Strange Nature of the Instant,” 9. 59. Levinas, Existence and Existents, 76. 60. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 200. 61. Levinas, Existence and Existents, 74. 62. Levinas, The Discovery of Existence, 117. 63. Webb, “The Complexity of the Instant,” 202. 64. Von Baeyer, “In the Beginning Was the Bit.” 65. Levinas, Beyond Essence, 33. 66. Marion, Being Given, 295. 67. Levinas, Beyond Essence, 32. 68. Marion, Being Given, 294. 69. Ibid., 295. Notes to Pages 317–322

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70. Marion, God Without Being, 150. 71. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 65–66. 72. Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being, 174–175. Used with permission. 73. Ibid., 176. 74. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 531. Chapter 13 Otherwise than Metaphor 1. Bigger, Kant’s Methodology, 220–224. 2. Heidegger, Being and Time, 360. 3. Llewelyn, Genealogy, 75. 4. Buchanan, Poetry and Mathematics, 36, 145. 5. Maurice Blanchot, cited by P. A. Sitney, “Afterword,” Gaze of Orpheus, 195. More recently there has been a reaction against this elimination by A. S. Byatt with what she calls “self-reflexive transgression,” as when she or Doris Lessing comment within the novel on what they are doing. As a reaction to Barthes, the author can be concerned for truth and accuracy and is less anonymous; the narrator can be in the text, as in Ian McEwan’s Atonement, as the text becomes more imaginative and even metaphysical. 6. Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 142–143, 109. 7. Blanchot, The Gaze of Orpheus, 140. 8. Levinas, Collected Papers, 8–9. 9. Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 10. Used with permission. 10. Ibid., 30. “Image” is what seems to remain after the gaze’s epoché, a proto-phenomenological transformation of appearance; the temporal present of an appearing is now a fixity in the “senseless, shapeless depth” of narrative (Ibid., 32–33). Was Rilke mistaken in believing images to be epiphanies? I think not. 11. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 58. 12. Levinas, Proper Names, 127, 131. 13. Ibid., 58. 14. Ibid., 133. 15. Blanchot, The Gaze of Orpheus, 247. 16. Levinas, Proper Names, 136, 137. 17. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 181. Used by permission of HarperCollins. 18. Ibid., 154. 19. Gendlin, “Dwelling,” 5. 20. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 147, 151, 154, 157. 21. Levinas, Proper Names, 138–139. 22. Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 119. 23. Heidegger, Being and Time, 12. 24. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 37. 25. The reference is to Heidegger’s remarks in the section “Building Dwelling Thinking” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 169-209, concerning the 458

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relation between Bauen (building, poiesis), bauen (dwelling, “being on the earth” which continues to be heard in the German bin and English been), and a thinking that gathers us, as if in the thrusts and counterthrusts of a “ring dance,” into a creative matrix or dwelling place, the place of the fourfold. Heidegger told Joan Stambaugh that in his later writings, “dwelling” replaced “state of mind,” Befindlichkeit (literally, “how one finds oneself” in the midst of the world), which is, with interpretation and understanding, an orienting existential in Being and Time. There is a problem, however, in thinking the “space” of dwelling in terms of building and location. The priority of building, i.e., the river has banks only through the location of the bridge, which, in turn, fuses river, banks, and sky into a common landscape. Dasein carries its spatiality around with it (Being and Time, 143) and is oriented only through the circumspection associated with projects. This is the time of the ready-at-hand that is suspiciously close to the language of will and authenticity. “A space is something that has been made room for, something that is cleared and free, namely within a boundary . . . the boundary is that from which something begins its presencing” (Poetry, Language, Thought, 153). Heidegger would recognize that something monstrous is happening today when Dasein’s disseverance has been handed over to the bulldozer which can make banks and a river, but this focus on the Ge-stell is a latent consequence of his view of space; what is lacking to Dasein is, in Edith Wyschogrod’s phrase, the vulnerability of a carnal body as experienced in enjoyment, in living from and preparing goods; we are not disembodied hands in the service of the ready-at-hand or present-at-hand. If we understand clearing as preparing a place for dwelling, then we do not make nor will we ever find a clearing unless something other than utility and instrumentality is the motive. Our bodies, if we focus and listen—a theme to become familiar through Eugene Gendlin—have their own understanding of chora, and thus have a prior feeling for the earth, the mother. Like the architects of a Greek temple, one approaches a sacred site and then builds, gathers the earth into standing out against the sky in a manner that expresses the sacred presence. Building articulates chora. Space must be seen in the light, not of an understanding of being that makes a serviceable, referential world, but in that of Beauty or the Good. Making, i.e., creating, is finding a metaphor or a dwelling or, for that matter, meaning. These are things that cannot be instituted. Only then will the “thing” gather the fourfold. Granted things (ding, “gathering”), Heidegger is right to say that Dasein’s disseverance comes into play. Then it makes sense to say that we can be closer to things such as the temple of Apollo at Brasse than to the computer on which we write these words. 26. Heidegger, On the Way to Language, 121, 123. Used with permission. 27. Rilke, Rainer Maria, Duino Elegies, “The Ninth Elegy.” Used with permission. Notes to Pages 336–337

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28. This rather fanciful interpretation is motivated by Whitehead’s introduction of extensive and then metrical relations through a perspectival geometry in Process and Reality. J. R. Lucas has given us a magisterial treatment of space and time and a full account of the relation between the various geometries. He is also well aware of how prior interpretations determine the space we find: “We view things in a certain way in order to accord with the topology required of it as the concomitant of consciousness—and then discover the same uniformity and sameness in things and either announce it as a conservation law or rename it tedium, and either boast that we have revealed the underlying uniformities behind the flux of phenomena or complain that time is indifferent to our affairs, not realizing that in both cases we are discerning in our experience of time only what we had constructed into it for our own special purposes” (Treatise on Time and Space, 86–87). 29. Derrida, Chora, 97. 30. Derrida, On the Name, 7. 31. Ibid., 43–44. 32. Levinas, “Wholly Otherwise,” 7. 33. Levinas, Beyond Essence, 46. 34. Derrida, reflecting on the writing of Jan Patoka, explains that this mysterium tremendum is “the dread, fear and trembling of the Christian in the experience of the sacrificial gift, [which] seizes one at the moment of becoming a person [when I knew that, on being responsible for the other, I, and I alone, can give him my death] and the person can become what it is only in being paralyzed, in its very singularity, by the gaze of God” (On the Name, 6). That gaze, the gaze of love, endows me with uniqueness. Love is not a natural but rather a personal relation. How I then gaze upon the Other separates the sheep from the goats on the grounds that those who fed the hungry, gave drink to the thirsty, clothed the naked, visited the sick or prisoner, and the like did it also to Him (St. Mat. 25:26–45). 35. Levinas, Beyond Essence, 198. Used with permission. 36. Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” xvi. Chapter 14 Saying Something 1. Introduction to John Meyendorff, The Triads, Gregory Palamas, 3. 2. Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” 74. 3. Ibid., 102, 101. 4. Levinas, Beyond Essence, 35, 32. 5. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 98. 6. Derrida, Chora, 75. 7. Even in prayer there is no assurance that we really go beyond the text, for the event of prayer is thus already textual and thus a non-event. 8. Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 109. 9. Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” 108–118. 460

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10. “When I said that God is not a being and was above Being, I did not thereby contest his Being, but on the contrary attributed to him a more elevated Being.” The circularity in Eikhart’s hyperousios is not a feature of Plato’s Good. We need Marion’s theology beyond affirmation and negation. 11. Levinas, Difficult Freedom, 17. 12. Caputo, Prayers and Tears, 37. 13. Llewelyn, Genealogy, 196. 14. Levinas, God, Death, and Time, 157. 15. Ibid., 17. 16. Levinas, Beyond Essence, 52, 57. 17. A medial interpretation of this diachronic saying is justified by such metaphors as “denuding of denuding,” “denuding beyond the skin,” “the respiration of the skin prior to any intention,” “a hyperbolic passivity that disturbs the still waters which, without saying, would be crawling with secret designs” (Llewelyn, Genealogy, 49) and the like; but the image we need which will let these emerge into saying is “language speaks” (Ibid., 47). 18. Llewelyn, Genealogy, 103, 97. 19. Hypodoche is ambivalent and can mean receiving (in a hostile sense) or accepting and harboring. That its properties are contradictory suggests that, like “dwelling thinking,” it should be thought medially, as neither and both active or/and passive. We may find these together in erotic “acceptance,” where accepting, apparently passive, reaches out to take responsibility for what is given. 20. Levinas, Beyond Essence, 49. 21. Cutting at the natural joints, a theme from Phaedrus (265C) reflects the more profound image of weaving in Cratylus (387C–390C). In languaging, the word, like a shuttle, must cut, discriminate, and bind; and, like the user, it must look to and articulate a pattern. We as communicants are also bound. What governs these cuts that separate and bind, the themes of analysis and synthesis, is what is seen by the legislator and articulated by the dialectician in making the first cut (422A–423B), the ontological or, better, agathological understanding presupposed in all languaging, which is, of course, this very participation of the verbal (Heraclitus) and nominal (Parmenides), metaphoricity itself. For Heidegger’s dialectic of monstration and articulation in Being and Time, see Chapter 5, Part 1; for the weaver theme, see 159 (H). 22. Language, Heidegger says, is the house of being, a mansion with many connecting rooms. In “Poetically Man Dwells,” poetry is said to cause “dwelling to be dwelling . . . a letting dwell as the distinctive kind of building” (215). Though only one room contains language as discourse, the others contain forms of poiesis, the performing and plastic arts, the formal languages of the sciences, customs and cultural signs, connect and form a dwelling only if through language itself the openness of poiesis “penetrates Notes to Pages 349–354

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and leads them.” But even prior to poetry is the space, the hypodochic matrix, which makes these neighbors. 23. Varela, “The Specious Present,” 300, 298. 24. Heidegger, Being and Time, 138. 25. Eugene Gendlin, Focusing, enriches this discussion with many examples. 26. In “Thinking Beyond Patterns,” Eugene Gendlin suggests that transcultural, perhaps natural, invariances characterize the slot. 27. Gendlin, “Thinking Beyond Patterns,” 7. 28. Gendlin, Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning, 143. 29. Gendlin, “Crossing and Dipping,” 8. 30. Ibid., 9, 2. 31. Gendlin, “Thinking Beyond Patterns,” 61, 62. 32. Some Greek religious institutions were said to have been given a place in dreams. I was told by the Bishop of Samos that the Zoodochus Pege, a monastery in Istanbul that was the source of an icon by that same name, was founded when a monk dreamed that he was to go outside Justinian’s walls and dig until he found an icon. He dug, found the icon, and Theodora, the emperor’s wife, discovered the water that filled the hole had curative powers. She built the original monastery on that spot. In our Disney world, money, machines, and political power can make any kind of place to order at any locus, and we have become destructive, homeless, placeless. Places gather people; the downside is that they can exclude others. 33. Eliot, Inventions of the March Hare, xxvii. 34. Gendlin, “Dwelling,” 5. Chapter 15 The Receptacle 1. Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” 74. 2. The impossible is the wholly other, the alterity that cannot be fitted into our categories and expectations, which will then deconstruct the self. Desire is the possibility of the impossible despite its impossibility and is Levinas’s term for the yearning for what is beyond being, the possibility of the impossible. Derrida himself says that chora is a resistance to crossing borders and, by its opposition, it institutes history without itself being historical, a phenomenon without itself being a phenomenon, etc. Professor Marion places “God” under erasure—by superimposing upon “God” a Saint Andrew’s cross—which is appropriate in the context of a biblical theology that needs a name but in which the term names no-thing. When Heidegger places Being under erasure, this signifies a crossing and a neighborhood (Pathmarks, 311). Were we to place God under erasure, this X would signify the possibility of a creative chiasmus by the Good and the receptacle as well as the x of the incarnate God in whom these natures cross. 3. Marion, In Excess, 148; The Idol and Distance, 153. 4. Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” 104. 5. Derrida, Acts of Religion, 60, 59. 462

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6. Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” 106. 7. Levinas, “There Is: Existence Without Existents,” 30, 32. 8. Kearney, Strangers, Gods, and Monsters, 285 n26. For a representation of the chora icon, see my Kant’s Methodology, xxix. 9. Derrida has discussed chora in a number of texts: (1) “Chora,” an introduction to a work said to be in progress; (2) its somewhat revised 1993 reappearance as Kho–ra, which seems to stand alone; and (3) “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials.” “Kho–ra” also appears in On the Name (89–127) and weighs the discussion toward the problem of naming and the logic of what Kho–ra names that, though indeterminate, somehow answers to its call. Kho–ra makes the text metaphor perspicuous; Derrida is concerned to spell out the “program” of Timaeus that dictates to Plato its law of composition, which is “precisely that of the genos, of the genus of all genders and genera, of sexual difference” (“How to Avoid Speaking,” 106). My concern is with saying, with origins, and thus with the friction this interpretation generates in Derrida’s interpretations. In “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials” Derrida offers the interpretation of the ever-Virgin chora which, as I will try to argue, lets textuality supercede creativity, but at the same time uses Plato as an example of the problems in negative theology that have often plagued his own writings. This textual reading of chora leads to a very important insight. Thanks to Derrida, we are already aware of the homologies between Saint Denys, Meister Eckhart, and Plato, so that chora becomes the place for the inscriptions of prayer, which is a nonpredicative address to God, and thus a way of justifying the “is” in discourse beyond Being if for a moment this address, which defies ontology, points to an outside, to something beyond the text. This insight is most helpful in addressing with Saint Maximus the “Deity beyond being” (St. Maximus, 588c) who out of love for man “envelopes the intelligible in the sensible, what is beyond Being in being, [and] gives form to the unformable and unfashionable, and through a variety of partial symbols, multiplies and figures the unfigurable and marvelous Simplicity” (592b). The “is” now introduces such descriptions as the “unfathomable,” what is [sic] non-Being or beyond Being, as well as metaphor in a canonical text. Palamas’s distinction between the essence beyond Being and the uncreated energies by which God is immanent can be helpful here. Though I remain unpersuaded, John Caputo has given a most compelling and sympathetic account of Derrida’s “transgressive” approach to Chora (Deconstruction in a Nutshell, 71–105). While it is true that chora “becomes none of what she receives,” is she really like the “air that is free of the light by which it is suffused” or “like a mirror that remains unaffected by the images that come and go across its surface”?(95) As hypodoche, yes; as chora, no. However, and this is the problem, this world would be a virtual world. Of course, Plato’s structures and institution deconstruct, but that Notes to Pages 364–366

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pertains to the surds reason encounters on its way down from the works of reason to the virtual, its errant causality and its winnowing motion. Timaeus is a cosmology, and any phenomenological interpretation must respect this world “that is always in the making and being made.” Joyce’s image of Dublin has governed my thinking about Timaeus since I wrote on it as a student in 1946. Several deconstructive alterities are represented by the outsider, the man in the mackintosh (Stephen Hero), the fourth person that breaks apart trinities. This is a world without the Good, and this is why Dublin, and the hypodoche/chora is so sterile. Here again Caputo’s discussion is excellent (Deconstruction in a Nutshell, 181–200). 10. Chora does not belong to the oppositional couple mother-father and “marks a place apart, the spacing which keeps a dissymmetrical relation to all that which, ‘in herself,’ besides or in addition to herself, seems to make a couple with her . . . this strange mother who gives place without engendering can no longer be considered an origin. . . .” (Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” 24). Perhaps the difficulty I have with Derrida’s account begins with his assumption that the father, the intelligible form, and becoming, the mother, make an oppositional pair. This seems to confuse the “becoming that never really is” (Tim., 27D), which I associate with the receptacle, with the creature that becomes. The receptacle itself is neither and both heimlich and unheimlich, and is a better candidate for Blanchot/Derrida than Chora, which, thanks to Gendlin and Levinas, can be shown to be a creative and procreative matrix. 11. Maurice Blanchot says that this point, “unknown, obscure, foreign,” which we, not Blanchot, believe can point to the Good has no existence apart from the movement it solicits. The possibility of this “movement” pertains to the receptacle, its supplement to which, in a formal sense, it is related as apeiron is to peras. 12. Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Ethics, 193. 13. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, 93. 14. Derrida, Chora, 270. 15. Derrida, Chora, 272. 16. In a somewhat similar context in Spurs (121), Derrida remarks that in his explanation of the Ereignis, i.e., es gibt sein, Heidegger “demonstrates that both the giving and the gift, which in fact amount to nothing (to neither a subject’s being nor an object’s being), cannot be thought in terms of being. Because they constitute the process of propriation, the giving and the gift can be construed neither in the boundaries of Being’s horizon nor from the vantage point of its truth, its meaning.” 17. Derrida says that the discourse begun by Socrates seems to terminate in the words of Solon in an “irony that destabilizes theses and themes” and leaves the discourse without a father (On the Name, 124). We must go behind the assured words of philosophical discourse which “proceeds by oppositions of principle and counts on the origin as a normal couple . . . toward a pre-origin, which deprives us of this assurance and requires at the same time 464

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an impure philosophical discourse, threatened, bastard, hybrid. These traits are not negative. They do not discredit a discourse, which would simply be interior to philosophy; for if it is admittedly not true, merely probable, it still tells what is necessary on the subject of necessity” (On the Name, 125–126). 18. Jacques Derrida, On the Name, 126. 19. John Sallis’ Chorology sees the formation of the state in Timaeus on the basis of the several arts as a continuation of the construction of justice in the Republic; these are “works of reason.” The gap between Socrates’ account and the story then told about the matrix in the “works of necessity” is said to repudiate techne-oriented metaphysics, which is replaced by a genetic or narrative model in which stories inherit from stories. I question this, for the creature is a demiourgos whose art is persuasive, as befits a living nature, but no matter: Sallis makes the important point that a state ordered by techne, the rationalist ideal, is unanimated, without eros, and “is too singular to be forgotten” (Tim., 18D); it will never accommodate history, a possibility introduced by the matrix. This will transform a virtual reality into a world of things; but unless there is also a transcendent solicitation, the result will be the nihilistic world of Nietzsche’s countervailing forces that mark the death of God. 20. Timaeus assumes that physical science is a myth, a likely story, but he uses metaphors and images to demonstrate, to bring one to see what would otherwise pass unnoticed. Since this is presumably “beyond Being,” it is perhaps better to say that these stories are unlikely, mad, bizarre, and even unbelievable. Like prophetic utterance, these have less to do with facticity than with “seizing hold of us” in an impossible catachresis and effecting a radical reorientation, one that moves us through the never-never land of narrative to an experience of creativity. Derrida seems to reject such images or metaphors to characterize the receptacle: “it is perhaps because its scope goes beyond or falls short of the polarity of metaphorical versus proper sense that the thought of the chora exceeds the polarity of the mythos and the logos.” Plato is not concerned with logic of terms but with the complex relational structure of participation; metaphor has an analogous form. 21. “Neither/nor” (exclusion) is the sense of the Sheffer stroke-function, a functionally complete operator from which Nicod constructed a single axiom for the sentential calculus. As functionally complete, it can also define “both/and.” One wants to say that in radical exclusion something, x, excludes everything that is other and that, all relations being external, there is mutual transcendence or alterity, while the participatory “both/and” makes relations internal so that this alterity is also a same. Wouldn’t it be better to explain these exclusions and participations within the transcendental logic of same, other, one, many, (rest, motion), and being with which Plato characterizes soul, the demiourgos of participation, and see the dynamics of the receptacle as the event-like locus of the divisible same, other, and being which Plato mingles with indivisible same, other, and being and then articulates by musical proportions? Notes to Pages 369–370

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22. Derrida, Chora, 267. 23. Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” 109–110. 24. Ibid., 124. 25. To grasp the point of this all-important image, contrast what Plato says with Aristotle’s discussion of analysis in both the substantial and material and formal partitive modes in Metaphysics Z (1034b 20–1036a 25) that seems to have been written with this text in mind. This example of the gold that is always gold and never golden is the strongest support I can find for Derrida’s virginal interpretation, but, again, I see this as an image of a becoming which never really is, that diversifies the receptacle and is never domesticated to form, as gold would be were the ring said to be golden. Aristotle, unlike Plato, is a vitalist. Hyle in the substantial mode differs from hyle in its material, partitive mode. In its partitive modes, substance is form (schema) and matter, i.e., gold, rather than as in the substantial mode, i.e., golden, where it functions according to an inseparable formality. For Plato, biochemistry would be the same whether in vivo or in vitro; for Aristotle a vital context would make a difference. 26. The image of the perfume base that allows things to persist without itself being ostentatious is the basis for the receptacle’s archival role and thus for history, for the persistence and “binding force of cultural constraints” (EC BP, 33). Place binds us into a world with others through myth and symbol, memory, custom, affects, through “a past that has never been present.” 27. Bigger, Participation, 16–30. 28. Heidegger, Question Concerning Technology, 20–21. 29. Derrida, Margins, 21–27. 30. Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” 106. 31. Derrida, Chora, 280. Derrida’s oscillating dialectic institutes différance within Timaeus; it weaves its pattern between the woof of exclusion (neither this nor that) and the web of participation (both this and that) in governing discourse of this third kind. This oscillation is between intelligible/sensible, logos/mythos, icon/paradigm, form/formless, and the like (Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” 89–91). 32. Derrida, Margins, 10–12; John Protevi, Time and Exteriority, 22–30. 33. Derrida, Chora, 268. 34. This theme from the Republic is heard again in Levinas’s Totality and Infinity. Socrates’ descent to the Piraeus, which echoes Odysseus’s descent to hell, is into a war-like place, mirrored in Thrasymachus. Many of those with Socrates will die defending their freedom from the Thirty. This is the place where the Good first appears . 35. Derrida, On the Name, 121–122. 36. Derrida, Chora, 281. 37. John Jones gives an illuminating account of this movement from the light of affirmative theology into the divine darkness of apophatic theology in the Introduction to his translation of Denys’s Divine Names (SD 1980, 466

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15–27). Plato’s metaphors of light apply to the threshold, not to the darkness of the Good that, like the sun that cannot be seen, engenders being without being a being, without being known. 38. Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, 121–147. 39. Cited by Jean-Luc Marion (God Without Being, 18). Marion says that “the icon opens in a face, but where man’s sight envisages nothing, but goes back infinitely from the visible to the invisible by the grace of the visible itself.” The experience of an icon is that of a trace that leads, not to the transcendent, but to the beyond, the infinite love of God by which we are transformed in and, according to his icon, pass from glory to glory (2 Cor., 3:18). 40. Marion, God Without Being, 20. 41. Marion, God without Being, 62. 42. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 62, 61. 43. The belonging together of opposites, earth and sky, in the rift design presupposes the receptacle and the Good. That which “juts forth” from the nondiscriminable receptacle is discriminable and discrete place. This discreteness, which John Llewelyn associates with the feminine, appertains to the hypostasis and not to the il y a (JL GE, 94–95). In my mythology this is always and already the work of the Zoodochus Pege. 44. Granted chora and the possibility of “betweenness,” the receptacle is a matrix of connectedness and has the sense of topos, i.e., the space of topology. 45. I would have said Socrates is the receptacle, but no matter. Making chora primary suggests, as in Aristotle, that the conditions of betweenness expressed in the receptacle will be internalized, made into psychological functions. Since we define the self or person as the medial hypostasis that is always social and never, as in the Latin tradition, hidden and private, some of these difficulties can be avoided. Even feelings, modes of Dwelling or Befindlichkeit, are social forces diversifying the receptacle. Otherwise how could there be liturgy or celebration, how could metaphor move us so deeply? Chapter 16 À Dieu 1. The final sentences of this paragraph are poor and halting representations of John Llewelyn’s magisterial “Levinas and Language,” in The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, 132–136. 2. Levinas, Beyond Essence, 46. 3. De Saussure, General Linguistics, 114–122. 4. Ibid., 69, 121. 5. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 46. 6. Contrast, a dynamical play of difference, has a similar role in Whitehead. I have borrowed his distinction between relational and intrinsic essence. Charles Taylor’s remarks on how these differential fields are supposed to work are illuminating: “Things only have meaning within a field, that is, in relation to the meanings of other things. This means that there is Notes to Pages 377–384

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no such thing as a single, unrelated meaningful element; and it means that changes in the other meanings in the field, semantic, conceptual, or sensory can involve changes in the given element. Meanings can’t be identified except in relation to others, in this way resembling words. The meaning of a word depends on those words with which it contrasts, on those which define its place in the language (e.g., those defining ‘determinable’ dimensions, like color or shape), and so on.” (“Hermeneutics and the Sciences of Man,” 11–12). F. H. Bradley taught that such fields depend on internal relations, which constitute a thing’s relational essence, but these fields require that the thing does not lose its identity, for otherwise there would be nothing to relate. Relations require relata external to the field, an intrinsic nature or essence. Derrida’s chora is the condition for a closed, linguistic field in which all is disseminated in a sort of entropic decline. 7. Llewelyn, Genealogy, 153–155. 8. Levinas, Beyond Essence, 87. 9. Ibid., 113. 10. Visker, “And Cain Said to Abel,” 39, 91. 11. In the Divine Names, Saint Denys says that God “charms” all being “by goodness, charity, and desire (eroti) since he loves all things with a beautiful and good eros, by the hyperbole of desiring goodness” (712b). If one has a problem in thinking of the Good as aitia, it may be mitigated by his statement that the Good as aitia defies categorical determination because “everything is at once predicated of it and it is nothing of all these things” (824b); its priority over Being is expressed in the formula that it is the principle of beings whence issues, as well as all beings whatsoever, Being itself (1000b) and “all beings [even non-being] come from the beautiful and the Good” (704b). Isn’t this the desire in which Levinas finds traces of the Good? 12. Marion, God Without Being, 76. 13. Levinas’s amphibious method turns the nothing of mysticism back on us. This is not unlike an important move in Heidegger, but in this case the “nothing that we are” is an open to the other. His account of being, which is so close to Rosenzweig’s, allows us to avoid the imputation of nothing as in creation ex nihilo. 14. Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, 24. 15. Gregory Schufreider cites the relevant texts in his fine translation and commentary on Saint Anselm, 284, 305n. 16. Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, 26. 17. Ibid., 109. 18. Ibid., 27. 19. John Caputo makes an excellent case for taking Joyce’s Ulysses as a paradigm for deconstruction and the source of so many of Derrida’s insights; but quite unintentionally he also shows what a textual or virtual world would be like were there only the immanent resources of an archival hypodoche without Spirit and anything transcendent for it to mediate. “The 468

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irrepressible energy of Joycian textuality is not pure abandon, sheer play and gambol, but a structured movement of acquisition, an accumulation, ingathering, en-circling, encyclopedic movement which seeks to summarize the ‘infinite memory of humanity.’ What is going on in Ulysses is, thus, to be compared to a Hegelian Erinnerung, inwardly appropriating and making one’s own the entirety of the preceding historical process, not by way of lifting it up (aufheben) ‘vertically’ into an ingathering, spiraling concept (Begriff), as in Hegel’s Logic, but . . . by way of releasing ‘horizontally’ the infinitely associative power of the signifiers to link on to other signifiers across an endless surface of language” (Deconstruction in a Nutshell, 185). I also confess that Ulysses is the basis for my interpretation of the Timaeus which—I later learned from Joyce’s brother, Stanislaus—was formative in his thinking. 20. Bigger, Participation, 166. 21. In his baffling, irritating, and, yes, compelling and brilliant “Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce” (Acts of Literature, 256–307), Derrida brings to bear his profound linguistic sensibility to a consideration of all the 369 yeses in Ulysses. Of special importance is the final “yes, yes” that concludes Molly Bloom’s great soliloquy. John Caputo’s “Re-Joyce, Say Yes” (Deconstruction in a Nutshell, 180–200) is a useful, often necessary, commentary. 22. Gendlin, “Thinking Beyond Patterns,” 79. 23. Jaroslov Pelikan, Christianity and Classical Culture, 12. 24. Gresich, “Idipsum,” 252. 25. Marion, Cartesian Questions, 141. 26. We must assume that Anselm’s argument is a matter of faith seeking understanding of a God who is supremely great because he is supremely good (Monol. I, 9–11) and who as love is beyond understanding: “Know the love of God which passes knowledge that you may be filled with all the fullness of God” (Eph. 3:19). “The overeminence to reach God does not belong to Being or essence, but as what designates Him as beyond Being and essence, namely the good or charity” (Marion, Cartesian Questions, 157). Moreover, the premise of the argument denies that we have a concept of “that than which a greater cannot be thought,” the form of the argument familiar in Descartes’s fifth Meditation. 27. Marion, Cartesian Questions, 155. Used with permission. 28. Schufreider, Confessions of a Rational Mystic, 269–283. 29. Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 90–91. 30. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 439. 31. Ibid., 443–444. 32. Ibid., 439. 33. Though Heidegger assembles the Gestell in The Question Concerning Technology, his most succinct statement occurs in the subsequent “Turning.” The Gestell holds sway (“essences”) as “the setting upon gathering into itself which traps the truth of its own coming to presence with oblivNotes to Pages 388–393

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ion. The entrapping disguises itself, in that it develops into the setting in order to everything that presences as standing reserve (Bestand), establishes itself in the standing reserve, and rules as the standing reserve.” 34. P. Sherwood, “Introduction,” St. Maximus the Confessor: The Ascetic Life, 40. 35. Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 95. This move makes history provisional and impossible to take up into God. 36. Gonda, “The Indo-European Medium 1,” 53. 37. St. Maximus, The Ascetic Life, 151. 38. Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 46 and n. 39. Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, 61. 40. Ibid., 59. 41. Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament, 162. 42. St. Maximus. The Ascetic Life, 151–152. 43. Pelikan, Mary through the Centuries, 87.

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Bibliography

The following authors are cited interlineally: Aristotle is cited from The Revised Oxford Translation of the Complete Works of Aristotle, 2 vols, edited by Jonathan Barnes. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. The citations from Saint Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica (ST) are from the translation by the English Dominican Province, 5 vols. Westminster, Md: Christian Classics, 1981. Plato is cited from the translations and texts in the Loeb Classical Library, Plato: The Collected Dialogues, Edith Hamilton and Dorian Caines, eds. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961; and Plato: Complete Works. Edited by John M. Cooper. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997. The “A” and “B” Kant citations are from the Kemp Smith translation of the first Critique. The third critique is cited as IK CAJ in the translation of James Meredith, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1911. The Presocratics are cited as DK from Herman Diels, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 6th ed., rev. by W. Kranz. The more complex citations from the standard editions are interlinear, but the particular sources for Plotinus, Duns Scotus, Saint Denys, and Saint Maximus are given below. On occasion I will combine more than one citation from adjacent texts in the order of occurrence in a single endnote, otherwise some pages would be quite cluttered. Agamben, Giorgio Language and Death. Translated by Karen Pinkus and Michael Hart. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1991. Potentialities. Edited and translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. 471

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Saint Augustine Confessions. Translated by Henry Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Saint Denys (The Aeropagite) The Divine Names and Mystical Theology. Translated by John Jones. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1980. Saint Maximus the Confessor St. Maximus the Confessor. The Ascetic Life and The Four Centuries of Charity. Edited by Polycarp Sherwood. New York: The Paulist Press, 1955. The Church, the Liturgy, and the Soul of Man: The Mystigogia of St. Maximus the Confessor. Translated by Dom Julian Stead. Still River, Ma: St. Bede’s Publications, 1982. Sallis, John Delimitations. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1986. Chorology. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1999. Force of Imagination: The Sense of the Elemental. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2000. Sambursky, S., and S. Pines The Concept of Time in Late Neo-Platonism. Jerusalem: The Israel Academy of Sciences, 1971. Sartre, Jean-Paul Being and Nothingness. Translated by Hazel Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press, 1993. Sayre, Kenneth M. Parmenides’ Lesson. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1996. Scarry, Elaine On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. Scholowski, Robert Husserlian Meditations. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974. Schufreider, Gregory Confessions of a Rational Mystic. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1992. Scott, Charles “The Middle Voice of Metaphysics,” Review of Metaphysics. 42 (1989). “Seyn’s Physicality.” Existentia, v. 10 (2000), Fasc. 1–4. Budapest. Scotus, Duns Duns Scotus: Philosophical Writings. Translated by Alan Wolter. Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1962. Oxford Commentary on the Sentences. Translated by James Walsh. In Philosophy in the Middle Ages. Edited by Hyman and Walls. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1972. God and Creatures, The Quodlibetal Questions. Translated by F. Alluntis and A. Wolter. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961. 486

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Sheldrake, Rupert A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Morphic Resonance. Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 1995. Morphic Resonance and the Presence of the Past. Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 1996. Sidney, Sir Philip An Apology for Poetry. Edited by Geoffrey Shepherd. Edinburgh: Nelson, 1965. The Sense of Being Stared At and Other Unexplained Powers of the Human Mind. New York: Crown Publishers, 2001. Siegel, Daniel Sorabji, Robert Matter, Space and Motion Theories in Antiquity and Their Sequel. London: Duckworth, 1988. Soskice, Janet Martin The Developing Mind. New York: Guilford Press, 2001. Steinberg, Leo Leonardo’s Incessant Last Supper. New York: Zone Books, 2001. Stravinsky, Igor “Eau de Vie: An Interview on Beethoven.” In The New York Review of Books: Selected Essays from the first 30 Years. New York: New York Review of Books, 2001. Metaphor and Religious Language. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1987. Taliaferro, R. Catesby Plato: The Timaeus and Critias. Introduction by Catesby Taliaferro, translated by Thomas Taylor. Bollingen Series III, Old Dominion Foundation. Washington: Pantheon Press, 1952. Taylor, Charles “Hermeneutics and the Sciences of Man.” Review of Metaphysics, 25. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989. Thompson, D’Arcy Wo On Growth and Form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959. Tillich, Paul Dynamics of Faith. New York: Harper Collins, 2001. Tsu, Lao Tao Te Ching, Translated by Gai-Fu Fend and Jane English. New York: Vintage, 1972. Varela, Francisco “The Specious Present.” In Naturalizing Phenomenology. Edited by Jean Petitot, et al. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. Visker, Rudi “Dis-possessed: How to Remain Silent ‘after’ Levinas.” Man and World 29, 119–146, 1996. Bibliography

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Index

Affectivity, 11–14, 17–19, 33, 43, 62, 72, 134, 139–47, 200, 252, 305 Agamben, Giorgio, 84, 173–75, 183–86, 262 Agape (charity, love), xvii, 135–36, 140–41, 146–47, 322, 347, 390 Albinus, 416n71 Allen, R. E., 316–18 Anaximander, 58, 229 Annunciation, 7, 217, 329 Aquinas, Thomas, Saint: being first in the apprehension, 11–15, 58; individuation, 254–55 Aristotle, 386, 392–93, 397, 440n23; on metaphor, 28–29, 208–15; on the soul, 39–40, 74–75, 103; marks of the good, 141; on ideas, 98–99; properties, 248; time, 291, 296; Zeno, 316–17; 456n51, 266n25 Auden, W. H., 123, 175 Augustine, Saint, 40, 35, 50, 56, 77–78, 101–102, 165, 167, 171 Ballard, Edward, 18, 59, 216, 401n2 Beaudelaire, Charles, 161–62 Beauty, 17, 60–61, 71–72, 108, 161, 165–66, 168, 378

Bergson, Henri, 33–34, 80, 168, 282, 296, 300–302, 409n14, 452n30 Between, xiv, 10, 29–30, 63–65, 77–82, 424n41 Bigger, Charles, 442n28, 426n59 Black, Max, 216–17 Blanchot, Maurice, 326–33 Bloom, Molly, 388, 406n31 Bohm, David, 20, 27, 91, 280–81, 295, 405n23, 445n3 Borch-Jacobson, Mikkel, 43, 305 Bradley, F. H., xvi, 67, 155, 160–61, 432n38 Brentano, Franz, 188–89 Brumbaugh, Robert, 312, 314–15, 317, 455n42 Buchanan, Scott, 169, 326, 333–34 Butchvarov, Panayot, 423n17 Byatt, A. S., 148, 159–60 Cajatan, 226 Calvino, Italo, 75 Cameron, Sharon, 64–65, 417n25 Caputo, John, 58, 129, 427n58, 463n9, 468n19 Celan, Paul, 169, 204–207 Chisholm, Roderick, 249–50 491

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Chora, 24, 50, 50, 82, 223, 335–36, 341, 348, 362–96 passim, 407n2, 444n14, 461n10. See also matrix, topos, hedra, and hypodoche Comforti, Michael, 250, 328, 409n14 Cornford, F. M., 455n42 Crossing, 19, 80, 355, 434n33, 437n24 Damascus, 60, 216, 292–94, 345–46 Damasio, Antonio, 72–74 Deduction (Levinas), 68–69, 177, 238, 270–72, 303 Deleuze, Gilles, 301, 310–11, 315, 452n30 Denham, Alison, 8–9 Denys, The Aeropagate, Saint, 366, 400, 426n55, 427n61, 468n11; God’s love, 101–102, 105; the good and beauty beyond being, xvii, 111, 178, 180, 208, 238, 346–50; God’s dwelling place, 343, 347–48 Derrida, Jacques, 110, 129, 464n16, 469n21; chora, 19, 50, 67, 362–76 passim, 341, 463n9, 464n17, 465n20; deconstruction and difference, xviii, 72, 267, 294; 338–39; 466n31; metaphor, 210–15; negative theology, 413n31 Descartes, 2, 43, 141–49, 301 Dickinson, Emily, 64–65, 417n25 Durie, Robin, 301–302, 311–12, 319 Dwelling, 17, 19, 195, 225, 332 Dyson, Freeman, 66 Eckhart, Meister, 112, 349 Emerson, R. W., 216 Eros, xvi, 104, 172–78, 220–21, 238–39, 371. See also agape Euclid, 19, 28, 407n3, 411n17, 412n27 Evil, 112–14 Facticity, 154, 173–75 Farrer, Austin, 112, 406n35, 439n1 Feeling Intellect, 25, 100. See also Wordsworth Fine, Gail, 99, 424n27 492

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France, Anatole, 162 Froment-Meurice, Marc, 166 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 71, 149, 198–99, 205–206, 393 Gaea, 29, 58–59, 139, 335 Gendlin, Eugene, 56–57, 343, 353–61, 366–67, 407n40 God, xvi–xiv, 101–120 passim, 116–19, 154–55, 386–400; death of, 1–3, 13, 23; as the Good, 7, 12, 23–24, 70–71, 128–38 passim, 178–81; mystical theology, 36, 343–51; as soliciting goodness, 59–61, 103; as spirit, 71, 91, 121–27, 321–24. See also agape, idea of the Good, logos, Saints Augustine, Denys, Maximus, and Palamas, Trinity, world soul) Goethe, 440n5 Gonda, Jan, 37, 217, 300, 395, 412n30, See also middle voice Good, idea of, 59, 101–116 passim, 121, 129, 141, 149, 188, 214–15; agape, 124, 187, 469n26; beyond Being, xiii–xiv, 12, 29–30, 37, 414n40; cause of Being and truth, 84–85, 198, 398–99; chiasmas, 185, 111–20, 346, 418n30, 421n9; deflection on the Other, 186, 268, 340; distance (incomprehensibility), 122, 122, 187, 391, 426n53, 443n30; erotic propositions, 71, 238–40, 468n11; God, xv–xvi; 178–81; 440n3; kinoses, 55, 70, 187, 268; saying, 198, 343–47 Goodman, Nelson, 227–28 Goodwin, Brian, 283, 285, 409n14 Gopnik, Kuhl, and Meltzoff, 145–47, 405n29 Gregory of Nazianzus, 393–94, 396 Gregory of Nyssa, 395, 411n19 Griffith, David, 59 Haecceitas (thisness), 41, 153, 237, 246–62 passim, 423n17 Hartshorne, Charles, 405n23 Hatab, Lawrence, 43, 45

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Hebblethwaite, Brian, 112 Hedra (place, seat), 66–67, 165, 240, 267, 388. See also chora, hypodoche, and topos Hegel, G. W. F., 78, 228–29, 233, 345 Heidegger, Martin, xvii, aletheia (unconcealment, truth), 189–90, 203–204, 436n16, art, 164–67, 199, 201–205; Befindlichkeit (mood, affections), xvii, 96, 173–74, 200, 354; Being and its beyond, 49, 386; dasein, 244, 455n32, 469n33; language, 202, 353–38; metaphor, 14, 195, 359, 436n23; nihilism, xvi, 2; ontological difference, 5, 12, 127, 145, 179, 195, 223, 229, 251 Henry, Michel, 43, 141–44, 305 Hick, John, 111–12 History, 4–5, 393–94 Ho, Mae-Wan, 278, 301 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 188, 195, 211 Hopkins, G. M., 217 Hume, David, 446n21 Husserl, Edmund: ideas, 95, 156–58, 234; intentionality, 182, 235, 259, 439n1; linguistic focus, 19; time, 303–312, 422n9, 442n19; transcendental ego, 219 Hypodoche (receptacle, place), 50–51, 54–71, 65, 122, 130, 326, 336–37, 343, 362–64, 378–80, 407n2, 428n7, 428n8, 429n14, 461n19, 467n45 Hypostasis (person), 41, 154, 237–46, 406n30 Icon (eikon), 48, 93, 167–68, 249, 290, 378, 467n39 Ideas, 80–116 passim, contexts, 116–20, Husserl and Plato, 118–19, 154–58, 415n70; transcendental, 30, 117, 231, 247–48, 313, 413n70, 418n30, 465n21 Identity, 63, 81, 87, 215. See also metaphor Incarnation, 153, 196, 264, 379, 399 Instant, 46, 129, 296, 312–24 passim

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Jacobson, Roman, 186–87 James, William, 33, 107, 144 Josipovici, Gabriel, 8–9 Joyce, James, 464n9. See also Molly Bloom Kahn, Charles, 222–23, 240 Kant, Immanuel, 15, 25, 27, 157, 270, 297, 303, 309, 371–72, 440n4, 454n20 Kearney, Richard, xv, 113, 175, 242, 365, 425n43, 426n55, 430n36, 435n55 Kosland, D. E., 48 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 169 Leibniz, 129, 406n35, 416n70 Levinas, Emanuel: affectivity and satisfaction, 135–138, 141, 161, 223–24, 245, 270–71, 346, 449n24, 449n27; Alterity, 65, 138, 141, 177, 181, 266–68, 274; art and reality, 164–73, 206–297; Being, 343, 410n19; creation ex nihilo, 224, 296; Descartes, 142–43; the Good, 107, 181, 202, 267, 346; Husserl, 54, 133, 233, 307, 312, 442n19; hyperbole, xiv, 350; hypostasis, 41, 241; incarnation, 101, 438, 154; il y a, 115, 129, 163, 263–68, 272–75, 336, 346; language, 85–86, 100, 339–40, 448n11; metaphor, 158, 442n20; saying, 79, 251, 230–33, 363, 340, 352; singularity, 269, 271 Lille, Alain de, 187 Llewelyn, John, 263, Alterity, 44–45, 325, 448n20; ex nihilo, 424–25; Good, 106; language, 251; metaphor, 224–25; middle voice, 36–37, 39, 421n9; ontological difference, 70; time, 310 Logos, 28, 21, 378, 433n55 Lossky, Vlademir, 179–80 Lucas, J., 460n28

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Macintyre, Alasdair, 303–305 Marion, Jean-Luc, xviii, 122, 391, 403n8, 420n56, 425n43, 462n2, 467n39; Alterity, 122; anamorphosis, 47–48 116; Anselm’s proof, 391, 469n26; art, 27–28; Being, freedom from, 329–330; givenness,14, 25, 135; icon, 467n39; persona and prosopon, 141, 153–54, 175, 191, 432n36; saturation, 34–35, 108, 378, 413n3, 423n17, 425n43; self–affection, 252 Matrix, 3, 51–82 passim, 66, 69–70, 206, 238, 340, 373. See also chora, hypodoche, topos, hedra, Maturana, Humberto, and Varila, Francisco, 116, 280–81, 283 Maximus the Confessor, Saint, 111, 178, 237–38, 392–94, 400, 419n52, 463n9 McCabe, Mary M., 445n3 Metaphor, 192–95, 229, 341–42, 390, 402n4, 406n39, 436n16, 437n23; constitutive, 149–51; crossing, 77–82, 114, 130–32, 148 ; deictic, 162–81 passim; Derrida, 222–230; disclosive, 7–10, 16–18, 22, 88; identity theory, 9–10, 16, 26–32, 66, 79, 197–98, 227; as imaginative variation, 30–32; classical roots, 32–37; objections to, 22, 24, 211; resemblance theory, 3, 8–11, 16, 20, 25, 80, 92, 100, 226, 229, 356, 358; truth, 188–98 Middle voice, 34, 25, 36–50 passim, 217, 251, 300, 412n30 Moody, Ernest, 231 Murdoch, Iris, 94, 155, 160, 175, 221, 66 Neighborhood, 65, 198–207, 438n28 Nietzsche, Friedrich, xvi, 23, 25, 410n19, 441n18 Nominalism, 10, 25, 100, 214, 228, 355 Ockham, William of, 231, 249, 446n26 494

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Origen, 393 Palamas, Gregory, Saint, 180, 349, 365, 396, 426n43, 463n9 Participation, 6, 26–30, 69, 89–95, 149, 187–88, 191–93, 287–89, 395–96, Patristic koinoia and metoche, 187–88, 268, 396 Pearson, Heath, 301 Peirce, Charles, 423n16 Plotinus, 20, 216, 245–46, 292–94 Proclus, 295 Progogine, I., 71, 91, 250, 286, 288–89 Proportions; 28, 32, see also logos, psyche Protevi, John, 68 Proust, Marcel, 218–20 Provinelli, Daniel, 41, 405n29 Psyche (Plato), 16–18, 30, 32–36, 61–63, 409n14, 411n19, 412n71 Ramachandran, Vilayanur, 41–42 Ricoeur, Paul, 196, 229, 360, 411n21, 446n13 Rilke, R. M., 16, 23, 25, 35–36, 69–70, 458n10 Rosen, Stanley, 403n10 Rosenzweig, Franz, 224, 267, 381–86 Royce, Josiah, 426n50 Sallis, John, 60, 63, 73, 419n50, 465n19 Sartre, J. P., 245 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 382 Saying, 24, 79, 198, 246, 258–61, 325, 336, 438n23, 438n24 Sayre, Kenneth, 313, 317, 456n51 Scarry, Elain, 161, 165 Schufreider, Greg, 391, 441n1 Scott, Charles, 38–39, 421n9, 446n18 Scotus, Duns, 95, 130–133, 246–62. 403n15, 446n22 Shakespeare, William, 94 Sheldrake, Rupert, 283–85, 409n14, 450n13 Siegel, Daniel, 432n45 Singularity, 152, 146–62 passim, 269–71 Sirridge, Mary, 257 Smock, Ann, 329

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Sokolowski, Robert, 218 Sorabji, Robert, 429n15 Spinoza, 244, 343–44 Spirit (anima mundi, world soul, Holy Spirit), 56–57, 121, 123–26, 283, 317, 365, 396–98, 420n4 Supplements, 25, 59, 66, 70, 78, 89, 130, 369, 378 Taliaferro, Catesby, 156, 412N27, 451n24 Tao, 3 Taylor, Charles, 41, 75, 419n36, 467n6 Tillich, Paul, 30 Tom, René, 409n14 Topos (space), 50, 66–67, 429n14, 467n44; see also chora, hypodoche, hedra Trinity (hypostazed agape), xv, 106, 196, 243, 252–53, 254–55, 318–19, 349, 365, 390–400 Varela, Francisco (see also Manturana), 136, 318, 354 Virgin Mary, 122–24, 263–75, 350, 377, 398–99 Virtual reality, 31, 20, 67–68, 75–76, 131, 402n23 Visker, Rudi, 115, 129, 265, 294, 385–86, 404n23 Wall, Thomas, 170

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Walter, E. V., 51–53 Warren, Rosanne, 166 Webb, Daniel, 290, 296, 320 Weedon, William, 447n39 Weil, Simone, 154, 260 Wheeler, John, 91, 127, 287, 317 Whitehead, A. N., xvii, xix, 233, 440n2, 452n30; affectivity, the hypodoche (receptacle) as, 54–55, 71, 383, 432n38; creativity, 46, 71, 296, 320; God, 422n15 (see Spirit); propositions as lures, 59, 103–104, 421n8; participation (prehension) as hermeneutical, 193–94; and as truth, 197–98, 449n1; time and Zeno’s arrow, 276–79, 296–97 Winnicott, W. D., 405n24 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 80, 225, 355, 383, 408n12 Wolter, Alan, 251, 258–49, 446n26 Wordsworth, William, 17, 25, 145–47 Worf, Benjamin, 7 Wyschogrod, Edith, 56, 269, 294 Zeilinger, Anton, 9, 125–26, 286–89, 302, 450n19 Zeno, 291, 296, 316 Zizoulas, John, 242–43, 396, 423n9 Zoodochus Pege, 124–25, 166, 263, 318, 376–78, 462n32

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Perspectives in Continental Philosophy Series John D. Caputo, series editor

1.

John D. Caputo, ed. Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida.

2.

Michael Strawser Both/And: Reading Kierkegaard—From Irony to Edification.

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Michael D. Barber Ethical Hermeneutics: Rationality in Enrique Dussel’s Philosophy of Liberation.

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James H. Olthuis, ed. Knowing Other-wise: Philosophy at the Threshold of Spirituality.

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James Swindal Reflection Revisited: Jürgen Habermas’s Discursive Theory of Truth.

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Richard Kearney Poetics of Imagining: Modern and Postmodern. Second edition.

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Thomas W. Busch Circulating Being: From Embodiment to Incorporation—Essays on Late Existentialism.

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Edith Wyschogrod Emmanuel Levinas: The Problem of Ethical Metaphysics. Second edition.

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Francis J. Ambrosio, ed. The Question of Christian Philosophy Today.

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Jeffrey Bloechl, ed. The Face of the Other and the Trace of God: Essays on the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas.

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Ilse N. Bulhof and Laurens ten Kate, eds. Flight of the Gods: Philosophical Perspectives on Negative Theology.

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Trish Glazebrook Heidegger’s Philosophy of Science.

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Kevin Hart The Trespass of the Sign: Deconstruction, Theology, and Philosophy.

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Mark C. Taylor Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard. Second edition.

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Dominique Janicaud, Jean-François Courtine, Jean-Louis Chrétien, Michel Henry, Jean-Luc Marion, and Paul Ricoeur Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate.

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Karl Jaspers The Question of German Guilt. Introduction by Joseph W. Koterski, S.J.

17.

Jean-Luc Marion The Idol and Distance: Five Studies. Translated with an introduction by Thomas A. Carlson.

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Jeffrey Dudiak The Intrigue of Ethics: A Reading of the Idea of Discourse in the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas.

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Robyn Horner Rethinking God as Gift: Marion, Derrida, and the Limits of Phenomenology.

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Mark Dooley The Politics of Exodus: Søren Keirkegaard’s Ethics of Responsibility.

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Merold Westphal Toward a Postmodern Christian Faith: Overcoming Onto-Theology.

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Edith Wyschogrod Jean-Joseph Goux and Eric Boynton, eds., The Enigma of Gift and Sacrifice.

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Stanislas Breton The Word and the Cross. Translated with an introduction by Jacquelyn Porter.

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Jean-Luc Marion Prolegomena to Charity. Translated by Stephen E. Lewis.

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Peter H. Spader Scheler’s Ethical Personalism: Its Logic, Development, and Promise.

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Jean-Louis Chrétien The Unforgettable and the Unhoped For. Translated by Jeffrey Bloechl.

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Don Cupitt Is Nothing Sacred? The Non-Realist Philosophy of Religion: Selected Essays.

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Jean-Luc Marion In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena. Translated by Robyn Horner and Vincent Berraud.

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Phillip Goodchild Rethinking Philosophy of Religion: Approaches from Continental Philosophy.

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William J. Richardson, S.J. Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought.

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Jeffrey Andrew Barash Martin Heidegger and the Problem of Historical Meaning.

32.

Jean-Louis Chrétien Hand to Hand: Listening to the Work of Art. Translated by Stephen E. Lewis.

33.

Jean-Louis Chrétien The Call and the Response. Translated with an introduction by Anne Davenport.

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D. C. Schindler Han Urs von Balthasar and the Dramatic Structure of Truth: A Philosophical Investigation.

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Julian Wolfreys, ed. Thinking Difference: Critics in Conversation.

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Allen Scult Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger: An Ontological Encounter.

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Richard Kearney Debates in Continental Philosophy: Conversations with Contemporary Thinkers.

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Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei Heidegger, Hölderlin, and the Subject of Poetic Language: Towards a New Poetics of Dasein.

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Jolita Pons Stealing a Gift: Kirkegaard’s Pseudonyms and the Bible.

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Jean-Yves Lacoste Experience and the Absolute: Disputed Questions on the Humanity of Man. Translated by Mark Raftery-Skehan.

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