Between Chora and the Good: Metaphor's Metaphysical Neighborhood

Acknowledgments

xxi 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, 000_Prelims_Bigger.qxd 04/02/2005 7:49 pm Page xxi 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 ■ Acknowledgments 000_Prelims_Bigger.qxd 04/02/2005 7:49 pm Page xxii 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...