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273 13 Double Truth Double Truth1 consists of ten chapters that, in responding to other contemporary thinkers, culminate in Sallis’s own distinct perspectives, and in a concluding eleventh chapter that gathers these perspectives. It is introduced by an “anti-preface” along the lines of the one titled “Horismos” in Delimitations (its second edition was reissued in 1995 as well); here it is titled “Chalepon,” “severe, difficult, troublesome, even dangerous” (xiv). “Chalepon” provides what might be called a skeletal enactment of the doublings to come, including a gesture toward their limit: Precisely because truth is the double of that which is, because it is the double of being, truth is one, is unique; it is the double of being, the double that truly doubles being, the true double. Truth is the one true double, even though—troublesomely—there is a double doubling of being, the truth of propositions and the truth of things—hence a doubling of the one true double. (xii) Sallis goes on to say that each of the doubles would be allowed exchange only at the limit, “except, perhaps, in such troublesome cases as that of the earth” (xii). Of the philosophical ascent that may well prove inseparable from the play of the double, Sallis speaks in two figures: “As in the absence of the true one. As in the flight that circles between earth and sky” (xiv). In our finitude, we find ourself closed off from those “originals” which, we suppose (but only suppose), would supply guarantors for our claims of all kinds. We earthbound beings can ascend only so high before an ineluctable descent. While following double truth is surely chalepon, Sallis writes that “it may also prove capable of provoking a wonder not unlike that with which philosophy begins” (xiv). In commenting upon Sallis’s text, I will select those chapters that most directly join the doubling of truth to the troublesomeness to which it is by nature affiliated, and that most clearly open out onto the wonder of which he speaks. 274 S A L L I S S P E A K S D I R E C T L Y Chapter 1, “Doublings” The chapter’s superscript from Hegel seems—but only seems—to disappear as the chapter unfolds. Translated, it reads “First of all (Erst) man doubles himself (verdoppelt sich) in such a way that the universal (das Allgemeine ) is to be for the universal”2 (1). Hegel receives no express mention in this chapter, and the matter discussed does not concern universality. Still farther, Sallis’s dialogical meditations—primarily with Derrida— could hardly be further from Hegelian subjectivity. However, the passage can be reread to suggest the anterior doubling that first makes possible the idea of a subject in the absence of a controlling “original” such as Geist. Hegel as herald of deconstruction!? The image of the second sailing (deuteros plous) from Plato’s Phaedo again serves as a way of access for Sallis to the matter for thought in Double Truth. In this context, the recourse to logoi of the second sailing “is nothing but a way of redoubling the drive to origin [that failed in his first attempt], of posing in every instance the thing itself (to pragma auto) as eidos and thus (re)launching the advance toward the originals” (2). This redoubling opens the space of the difference between the eidē and the things of sense by acknowledging the aporia attendant to negotiating the way both between and joining the things and the eidē. In the Phaedo, Socrates distinguishes his looking into beings from their images, and says: Then I lay down [hupothemenos] in each case the logos I judge to be the healthiest [errōmenestaton], and whatever seems to me to agree [sumphōnein] with it, I set down as true. (Phaedo, 100a). The healthiest logoi are the beautiful itself, the good itself, the great itself, and so on—the eidē. However, the eidē are not present, they are not given in any sense, but rather are posited hypothetically, and thus—in the language of this text—they serve to double the beings given through sense. What is the origin of this hypothesis? Aporia. Sallis discerns a kindred pattern in the thought of Derrida. Again, there is no “original”—for example, no Hegelian Geist—and hence no way to control the doubling. In “The Double Session,” Derrida considers Platonic mimesis another way of doubling. In its simplest form, he calls it a “sort of logical...

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