Between Chora and the Good: Metaphor's Metaphysical Neighborhood

Chapter 5: Deictic Metaphor

152 Deictic Metaphor 5 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 05_chap_Bigger.qxd 04/02/2005 7:14 pm Page 152 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 ■ 153 05_chap_Bigger.qxd 04/02/2005 7:14 pm Page 153 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...