Between Chora and the Good: Metaphor's Metaphysical Neighborhood

Chatper 12: The Originary

298 The Originary 12 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 12_chap_Bigger.qxd 04/02/2005 7:30 pm Page 298 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 ■ 299 12_chap_Bigger.qxd 04/02/2005 7:30 pm Page 299 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...