Auden's O: The Loss of One's Sovereignty in the Making of Nothing

Six: The Remaking of Philosophy and Religion

PART THREE LOOKING AFTER O SIX The Remaking of Philosophy and Religion So I break off here, provisionally, the reading of The Origin. The encirclement of the circle was dragging us into the abyss. But like all production, that of the abyss came to saturate what it hollows out. —Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting There is a clearing, a lighting. Thought of in reference to what is, to beings, this clearing is in a greater degree than are beings. This open center is therefore not surrounded by what is; rather, the lighting center itself encircles all that is, like the Nothing which we scarcely know. —Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art” Philosophy and Religion: Inside the Perimeter We began with a history in which philosophy and religion, as proprietors of the One, with its long and fruitful reign in Western constructions of reality, held a distinct advantage over art in ordering how we conceptualize the cosmos (or later, the universe) and our human position within it. Theories of art were largely held to a mimetic role: the work of art was to imitate, or reflect back to us, the truth of the world in its unified structure. Mimesis in fact only worked within such a structure: it depends on the binaries of imitation/imitated, reflection/reflected, image/reality, where the first term is grounded in the second as the veritable location of Truth in its divinely singular form. This is how the Imago Dei had customarily been understood— humans are an image of the creator God, and therefore human creations 199 200 AUDEN’S O are the image of the created realm. Western religion, especially in its most comprehensive stages when theology and philosophy had no categorical distinction (the stages when mimetic theory was at its height, and the One had catholic sovereignty), had controlling power in assuring the One its supreme place, and thus in holding art to its subservient place, because the One is a conceptual notion, even the arch‑conceptual notion. The One does not survive outside of philosophy/religion. The ancient Greeks under‑ stood this best when they made mathematics and geometry synonymous with philosophy and religion, and, as with Euclid, conceived of One beyond numbering, and as the basis of numbering. But what of the O? It too is conceptual, but it is also anticonceptual. Better, the O is the place that allows the conceptual first to emerge. It is therefore the place of creative genesis, the nothing as the origin, the gen‑ erative locus of beginning, the tohu‑bohu. How then does it operate within philosophy and religion, if its presence is a countervailing force to unity and unification? Can it operate—or was Parmenides right, that nothing should be precluded completely from all our thought and speech? If philosophy and religion are to admit the O, or penetrate the O, they are not simply to admit the concept of nothing, as a concept (the nothing as something, e.g.—“nothing is”; or an apophaticism).1 They must also admit something (or nothing) preconceptual, the nature of O in its function as a generative mode before conceptuality. That is, they must admit creation, or poesis, unveiled in Part II of our discussion. In the language of the creative, they must admit Caliban, or Caliban as Ariel. Yet despite Western philosophy and religion’s general insistence upon the conceptual as their foundation, they have always admitted this Caliban, if unwittingly, onto their islands of reason. More disturbingly, they have been forced to acknowledge Caliban’s original residency there. Such is the case in our Western religious traditions the moment they introduce “the sacred text,” and such is the case of our earliest Western philosophers such as Parmenides, who could only disclose the Truth through mythos (“didactic” perhaps, but a poem nevertheless), or Plato, for whom mythoi were a continual and nec‑ essary encroachment into the dialogues of logoi, or later Lucretius, whose materialist poem De Rerum Natura is predicated ultimately upon the Void. If we traced One’s drawn‑out reign and eventual abdication of the throne in chapter 1—albeit in the dangerously sketchy and meager form of a selective history of ideas—we now must trace out briefly the rise of the replacement to that throne in the form of O’s insubordinate residence within the philosophical and, in the latter half of the twentieth century, religious...