Between Chora and the Good: Metaphor's Metaphysical Neighborhood

Chapter 9: The Hypostasis: Its Thisness and Its There

237 The Hypostasis: Its Thisness and Its There 9 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 09_chap_Bigger.qxd 04/02/2005 7:26 pm Page 237 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 ■ Between Chora and the Good 09_chap_Bigger.qxd 04/02/2005 7:26...