The fundamental experience which objective experience itself
presupposes is the experience of the Other. It is experience par
excellence. As the idea of the Infinite goes beyond Cartesian
thought, so is the Other out of proportion with the power and
freedom of the I.¹

In this discussion I would like to use a rather mundane notion in physics and geometry to try to nuance out what I think is an important difference in common modes of our understanding and orientation to reality. I would like to bring out an equivocation which is a confusion that covers over an essential difference into an abstract habit of thinking. This habit is derived from a dominate, historically conditioned, leveling over of radical breaks in our notions of what ‘is’. The ancient Greeks did not have the modern ‘luxury’ of this imposed abstraction in reflecting on what ‘is’. More to the point, they had the notion of phusis² which embodied the ancient, archaic notion of ‘growth’ also found in other ancient cultures. In this sense ‘growth’ ranged from what Heidegger phrased ‘what shows itself’ and in my estimation the radical rupture of alterity which imposes necessity from other than its showing. ‘Growth’ in this sense is encounter and exteriority. This approach will try to use some quite rudimentary assumptions in science to tease out these philosophical underpinnings.

In geometry there is the abstract notion of a point. The question which brings existential import to a point (i.e., what ‘is’ a point?), is non-sensical. A point does not exist. We may say that it is infinitesimally small. Perhaps we could say that it has no dimension, zero dimensional. A specific case of a point could be a singularity. From what physicists tell us about a black hole we must concede that it ‘is’ a point in its most extreme form. Physicists are very confident that black holes exist and that they result in a singularity, a radical tear in time-space, an infinitesimally small point. As such, the singularity is a mathematical impossibility. Philosophically, we would say that a black hole is a mathematical contradiction; it is necessarily false. However, let’s notice the shift we have just announced.

We started suggesting that a point is an abstract mathematical concept does not exist empirically; it has no dimension. Zero dimensionality is not conceivable. And yet, we seem to have empirical evidence that a point can exist in a black hole. We may defer this contradiction as a lack of knowledge to be resolved in an unknown, unforeseen, moment in the future. As such, we acknowledge that we must currently leave this matter as a paradox³. Such a point is an argument to ignorance and only defers the immediacy of an answer which now faces us in this discussion. The argument to ignorance does not provide resolution only gives permission to ignore a persistent question.

Let us note that we have attributed qualities to the ‘point’ as “infinitesimally small” and as highly certain that it empirically exists in a black hole. We cannot resolve these conflicting notions in the light of rationality. They must remain ‘infinitely’ recoiled in upon themselves without coming into the light as aufheben (i.e., without being “lifted up”, ” abolished”, “canceled”, “suspended”, or “sublated”). This infinite impossibility can only be preserved in its inability to be able to transcend or exceed itself. It remains as an obligation we cannot refuse in its stark, declarative unmediated, absolute self-contradicted specificity. However, we can ignore it altogether and the direct question it essentially poses to the ‘light’ of knowledge.

In this case ‘light’ is taken hold of by the Latin notion of ratio which was the interpretation of the ancient Greek word logos. Specifically for this treatise, in terms of Heraclitus’ refinement as ‘giving account’, as ‘justice’ and ‘recompense’. ‘Light’ in this sense is the field of sight where idea is nudged towards resolve, towards answer and accountability. Dialectic can only exist in this clearing, this region already ready for an answer. In this sense, idea remains in itself; it encloses itself as Truth. Sight lays hold of its object without referring to abstractions; it simply sees. Therefore, by ‘light’ I mean the Idea as remaining within itself. In analogous terms of physical science, such a notion as Idea remaining in itself might be referred to as an isolated system – no interaction with matter or energy outside of itself. In Hegelian terms we might even venture further that anything ‘outside’ of Idea is still Idea and therefore an absolute impossibility except as yet another idea. It forever must get re-appropriated into the isolation of its Truth.

Additionally, note here that falsity also remains in itself as a deprived mode of Truth often erroneously taken as an opposite. Falsity always resolves itself essentially in contradistinction to Truth. Truth can only assert itself in its privation, its lack as error and thus, remain in itself. For example, light is only known through darkness, good is only known through bad, etc.. Only by the essential ‘not’ can Truth make its eternal claim. Truth remains in logos as an essential condition for sight, for logic to assert its priority in its isolation. Specifically, this condition we refer to as being or ontology as the essential pillar of language, the copula which founds all possibilities of writing. Ontology in this case is what sifts and retains identity from Hesiod’s random chaos (χάος⁴), what must and can only show itself in the clearing of light.

The notion of singularity, as a mathematical point, cannot be seen or conceived and yet ‘is’. Therefore this notion cannot remain within itself. When taken as ‘sight’ a singularity can only be pushed away from itself such that sight cannot contain or make sense of its object. In distinction to Truth, that which remains in itself as the march of being, we have an absolute paradox which somehow still retains the yawning gap of Hesiod, χάος⁵. This essential difference should not be lost in the notion of negation. Negation resolves and levels off this difference by virtue of what it negates. It implies a positive term which then must necessarily be what is negated. The difference I am trying to bring out is that lack of a positive term to negate. This paradox, simultaneously ‘is’ and ‘is not’ perhaps gleamed in the ancient Greek notion of chaos. The paradox cannot be contained on the ‘not’ of negation without doing an injustice. We must open the isolation of this logocentric system which only must remain in itself. With this in mind, lets reflect on what we might think of as qualities of an idea which cannot remain within itself but necessarily points to an unseen, essentially undiscoverable, externality.

Of the idea of infinity, Renes Descartes writes:

Nor should I imagine that I do not perceive the infinite by a true idea, but only by the negation of the finite, just as I perceive repose and darkness by the negation of movement and of light; for, on the contrary, I see that there is manifestly more reality in infinite substance than in finite, and therefore that in some way I have in me the notion of the infinite earlier then the finite⁶

Descartes recognized that the idea of infinity is very different from other ideas. While at times he thought of infinity in terms of negation he also thought of infinity as “manifestly more” and in some way “earlier”. The idea of infinity cannot be shown in the light of the idea of an object like a chair for example. To tease this out further, the idea of infinity cannot rest in itself but can only point away from itself without pointing to a thing, a positive term. The idea overflows itself without resolve, without regard to what it ‘is’.

Calculus is the mathematics of infinity. It can describe infinities in terms of ‘limits’ as infinity approaches a limit. It can describe infinities as ‘converging’ and ‘diverging’. Let’s take the function, ‘1/x’, where x goes from minus infinity to plus infinity (see chart below). You can see on the chart that from -1 to minus infinity the solution reaches a limit of zero. From -1 to just below zero the solution goes to minus infinity. Likewise, from 1 to infinity the solution reaches a limit of zero. From 1 to just above zero the solution goes to infinity. At zero 1/X is undefined.

Therefore, while we have not gained any insight into the notion of infinity, we have described qualities around the, ever exceeding itself, notion of infinity in certain circumstances. Likewise, while we cannot resolve the previously discussed dilemma of the geometrical point as an impossible singularity, we can point out certain behavior around that impossibility. This behavior nevertheless does not undo the Gordian Knot except by leveling it over with negation or ignoring it altogether. This paradox then weaves itself in the field of light without ever being consumed by the light.

From henceforth, we shall we refer to specific reductions such as the function ‘1/x’, converging and diverging on a limit of ‘1’ as providing a degree of diachronic ‘closure’ to the odd idea of infinity; that is, standing alongside the rupture of the idea of infinity without overtaking it. In this type of behavior infinity taken up in history and easily lost in negation and ignore-ance. Likewise, the abstract and inconceivable idea of the point as infinitesimally small, embodied in the impossible contradiction of a black hole, supplements the idea with an existential empiricism that adds a degree of semblance as closure. These further qualifications bring relevance to an inherit excess to the idea of infinity without covering over the radical rupture of the idea. Likewise, we shall refer to qualities which refuse resolution (such as zero dimensional, infinitesimally small, etc.) as moving towards an un-addressable exteriority which opens towards an unbridgeable tear in the interiority of ideas or self-enclosed-ness.

This openness does not open towards a Heideggerian kind of clearing but rather imposes itself in its absolute impossibility which cannot be denied. Interesting enough Heidegger writes:

“Death is the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein [human being, the ‘there’ of being]. Thus death reveals itself as that possibility which is one’s ownmost, which is non-relational, and which is not to be outstripped”.⁷

In my estimation for example, the absolute impossibility of a point which cannot exist and yet must as a singularity does not belong to Dasein or even Being but to what Levinas refers to as otherwise than Being. The rupture I have spoken of is radical tear which cannot be resolved either in Being or Hegel’s Idea. It cannot be taken hold of but must always remain out of reach, without mediation, without relating in any way to one’s ownmost (which brings into question how death can be related to “one’s ownmost AND non-relational).

The tendency to closure of paradox may provide conditional qualities around which we can, in a limited fashion, provide some resolution around a logical impossibility without abolishing the necessary impossibility it enshrouds. To some extent openness provides us a specificity in the bare name such as the word ‘infinity’ which can be pragmatically useful in service to such qualities previously discussed but ultimately fail in their inability to find any complete closure within themselves with their sheer imposing impossibility. The tear in the fabric of rationality is not overtaken by rationality. It is not snuffed out by the forceful wish of dialectic and aufheben. Nor is it tamed by the totality of Being. For the early Greeks it remained as,

Tell me all of this, you Muses who have your homes on Olympus, from the beginning [archê, ἀρχῆς], tell who first of them (the gods) came-to-be [genet’, γένετ᾽].
First of all Chaos came-to-be [genet’, γένετ᾽]⁸

…for Levinas and the gift of Judaism, the provocation of the Other.

_________________

¹ From “Signature”, an essay in:
“DIFFICULT FREEDOM”
Essays on Judaism
Emmanuel Levinas
Translated by Sean Hand
English translation published 1990 by
The Johns Hopkins University Press
2715 North Charles Street
Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363
www.press.jhu.edu
Johns Hopkins Paperbacks edition, 1997
9 8 7 6 5 4 3

² Ancient Greek

See also φύσις in Liddell & Scott (1940) A Greek–English Lexicon, Oxford: Clarendon Press

³ paradox – a seemingly absurd or self-contradictory statement or proposition that when investigated or explained may prove to be well founded or true

⁴ Philosophy Series 4 – The Pre-Socratics – Hesiod

⁵ Philosophy Series 4 – The Pre-Socratics – Hesiod

⁶ Renes Descartes, “Meditations on First Philosophy”, Third Meditation

⁷ Martin Heidegger, “Being and Time”, 53: 307

⁸ Hesiod, Theogony

This started as a footnote to the previous post but ‘grew’…

I would also suggest that this ‘stuff’ we call ‘matter’ may have an exteriority which, as the history of science demonstrates, resists our most concerted efforts to finally understand it, to know it in totality. Could it be that we can learn something about ‘knowing’ from this observation? ‘Knowing’ tends toward totalizing. In the Greek sense of telos, knowing aims and is directed in advance by the desire to understand. Under-standing is desire for arche, for origin. It seeks foundation, founded-ness, to arrive and yet, in view of the history of science or metaphysics, never arrives.

Never arriving is an exteriority to the desire for knowing. Never arriving is an essential teleological characteristic of knowing. Thus, the desire and the impossibility of the desire generate anxiety. Anxiety results in totality and historical metaphysics. Historical metaphysics’ telos aims at first philosophy. However, its history shows us much unapologetic failure. Totality is permeated by historical metaphysics just as historical metaphysics is permeated by totality. Thus knowing wants to ‘take account’ of exteriority, of error, and exteriority is violently appropriated by knowing. In both cases totality desires to take precedence, to understand, to rest. However, for desire to be desire it can never terminate; it can never complete itself in its object. Thus, desire is endless by necessity. The ancient Greeks called this struggle peras and apeiron, simplistically translated form and chaos (void).

Peiron in ‘a-peiron’ is the Ionic Greek for boundary or limit. The older form of this, peras, meant ‘beyond’ or ‘further’. Thus, a-peiron in Ionic Greek from Anaximander is the alpha privative, the privation of boundary and limit or without boundary or limit. Even in the much earlier archaic period of the Greeks, in Hesiod, we have Uranus (father sky) and Gaia (mother earth). Sky suspends, stands off, provides perspective. Sky is the son and husband of earth. Therefore, earth is generative. As the first of the gods, Earth is yet to be differentiated, it is undifferentiated.¹ Earth is the origin of sky. Thus, Earth is arche. In Hesiod, Earth, what we now call ‘matter’, was the first of the gods. Yet, Hesiod’s Muses tells us that first of all was khaos, chaos. Chaos means the ‘yawning gap’, a void. Thus, chaos differentiates and separates (the heaven and the earth). Earth is permeated through and through with chaos, undifferentiated but fertile and generative.

The Ionic Greeks further refined this notion to what post modernism might call the “play of difference” (differance [sic] in Derrida). The play of differentiation and a-differentiation, without difference, is not a confusion of differences or a tautological identity of sameness but an exterior to difference. According to Heidegger Phusis, through Latin, got translated as natura (or the modern word nature) and lost the original meaning of the word which is to grow, to emerge, to unfold. Phusis is generative. Heidegger calls this emerging-abiding sway. He maintains that phusis was the original Greek idea of being. Thus, differentiation, the earliest beginnings of science, of phusis (later physis, later physics) gives context to the already understood (pre-cognitive) notion of ‘is’. Yet, even earlier, we have chaos which is the necessary condition, “first of all”, and by absolute exteriority conditions and generates growth, differentiation and physics by chaos, a yawning gap. What was lost from the archaic period of Hesiod was the gap, the anarchy, which cannot be captured, totalized, brought into the light of knowledge or, as Plato may have written, “the good beyond being”.

In meta-physics we do not have the beyond as later Latin thinkers would have us believe. Aristotle does not use that title since it came much latter. His work currently titled and typically understood by the Latin word Metaphysics is really “τὰ μετὰ τὰ φυσικά” and may have been added by an editor. Aristotle claims the work was about “first philosophy”.² Heidegger thought it was Aristotle’s exploration into Being, ontology. It was not beyond or contrary to phusis but an inquiry into the ‘first’ of phusis. Perhaps we could think it as the great question of Hesiod, “what came first”. As such, the depth and richness of this question begins science; it begins physics, not transcends it. Earth generates sky but undifferentiating does not generate differentiation, it separates it. This separation or gap excludes a middle, an ever mediated in-between. This suggests that what always and ever grows seeks it telos, its completion, in bridging the gap, completing the difference, the error, in a unified totality. However, it can only ever, like Sisyphus push the rock uphill to have it roll down again. The Desire cannot be complete as it would no longer be Desire but the loss of Desire as sameness, totality and Error.

When the place of absolute exteriority is lost in totality and interruption of the other is taken as the same, as the already understood of ‘is’ (materialism, dualism, pluralism, stuff, thing, substance, atom, etc.), the otherness of the other, radical exteriority, can only be effaced. The effacement of the other in its most radical form is genocide. Ethics leaves the gap, the first as other and has always been at work in metaphysics, in the notion of God and gods. The problem is that so has the work of totality. Metaphysics errs by assuming the other as substance just as science can err. However, the virtue found in science is the deference to error, the possibility of falsifiability. To be sure, science can also be defiant and dogmatic as well but its health comes from its recognition of error. Metaphysics as religion has a tendency to forget its propensity for error. Its error then seems to be the error of dogmatism and denial, of another substance called God. The play of alterity in the history of science and metaphysics is what validates or what fails to validate particular differentiations.

The endless play of difference as Desire can never end in totality, the Truth. It can only bridge the yawning gap in violence, in totality and thus fail to achieve ethics. Desire as Eros can never find completion but it can find work. The work of physics-first philosophy as differentiation and the telos of differentiation as completion, fulfillment and wholeness desire finality. Ethics resists finality as totality. Only death as the possibility of the impossible can finalize Desire. Death as the radical alterity of the other overtakes us from without, from an exterior which can never be conquered. We can never have power over death. We can only be absolutely passive beyond all passivity in the face of death. Death is the answer to phusis not totality. Our telos is not in power or truth but in absolute exteriority. As such exteriority is the ethic of Desire. Since finality can never achieve totality, ‘archy’ (arche; origin) can never achieve an-archy. Arche can never find light, meaning, logic or value in anarchy. Anarchy can never ‘make sense’ to arche but it can always interrupt arche and provide the gap which keeps arche from totality, science from absolute knowledge, religion from false god-hood (idolatry). Anarchy is the openness of phusis which comes from without. It makes science and religion possible.

Ethics as Desire is the embodied of work. The work of days achieves value and meaning in ethics. Ethics in this sense stands back from purity or the proper, the achievement of totality. It recognizes limit and boundary. It grows from error and does not die in dogmatism. Totality is the premature termination of Desire, the facade, the semblance. In the play of Desire, what the Greeks termed Eros, we encounter the gap, the absolutely excluded in-between, which is neither mortal or divine. The work of Ethics gives value, meaning and place to the stranger, the wanderer, the homeless, the errant with dignity which can only be reserved for the gods.

_________________

¹ See Reading Hesiod’s Theogony (with Notes and Questions)

“But I want to ask again, do we need to make this assumption of such a “pre-existing undifferentiated field”? I do think it is called for by Hesiod’s words.” Page 13, Heidegger and the Greeks: Interpretive Essays, Drew A. Hyland, ‎John Panteleimon Manoussakis – 2006, See this

² τὰ μετὰ [in the midst of, among, after] τὰ φυσικά [physics] If the editor, Andronicus of Rhodes [50 BC], placed this title on Aristotle’s work, it may simply have meant that he physically placed the material after Aristotle’s books, the Physics. See this and this.

In Metaphysics A.1, “Aristotle says that “all men suppose what is called wisdom (sophia) to deal with the first causes (aitia) and the principles (archai) of things”” (981b28), and it is these causes and principles that he proposes to study in this work. Aristotle’s Metaphysics, First published Sun Oct 8, 2000; substantive revision Mon Jun 11, 2012

Philosophy Series Contents (to be updated with each new installment)

Philosophy Series 1 – Prelude to the Philosophy Series

Philosophy Series 2 – Introduction

Philosophy Series 3 – Appendix A, Part 1

Philosophy Series 4 – The Pre-Socratics – Hesiod

Philosophy Series 5 – A Detour of Time

Philosophy Series 6 – The Origin

Philosophy Series 7 – Eros

Philosophy Series 8 – Thales

Philosophy Series 9 – An Interlude to Anaximander

Philosophy Series 10 – On the Way to Anaximander: Language and Proximity

Philosophy Series 11 – Aristotle and Modernity: The Eternal and Science

Philosophy Series 12 – Levinas and the Problem of Metaphysics

Philosophy Series 13 – On Origin

Philosophy Series 14 – George Orwell and Emmanuel Levinas Introspective: Socialism and the Other

————————————————

Philosophy Series 6

The Origin

To reiterate, here is what Hesiod tells us about the origin:

First of all Chaos came-to-be [genet’, γένετ᾽]; but then afterwards Broad-breasted earth, a secure dwelling place forever for all [the immortals who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus], and misty Tartara in the depths under the wide-wayed grounds and Eros who, handsomest among the deathless gods a looser of limbs, in all the gods and in all human beings overpowers in their breasts their intelligence and careful planning. And from Chaos came-to-be both Erebos [ρεβος, the god of deep darkness, shadow] and dark night, and from night, in turn, came-to-be both Aither [the god of upper air, the mist of bright, glowing light, home of the gods] and day, whom she conceived and bore after joining in love with Erebos. But earth first begat, as an equal to herself, starry sky, so that he might cover her on all sides, in order to be a secure dwelling place forever for all the blessed gods, and she begat the tall mountains, pleasing haunts of the goddess-nymphs who make their homes in the forested hills, and also she bore the barren main with its raging swell, the sea, all without any sweet act of love; but then next, having lain with sky, she bore deep-swirling ocean,¹

This first is not born except in the covering over (the musing of the Muses) and doubling of the question which already assumes origin² but differentiated as chaos, wide open, gap or perhaps fertile void (Śūnyatā in Buddhism) in indeterminateness. It is important to note that chaos is not the ontological difference of beings and Being. In the disjunction of “but then afterwards” the first, chaos, is further differentiated from differentiation without determinations to a radical other, differentiation with determinations. It would appear that in Hesiod, Greek beginnings do not begin in unities, God, matter (hulê, ὕλη), Being (from ὤν (ōn)), form, idea, creation but with chaos thought as gap, yawn (as wide open), void not spatial as difference but not yet differentiated into determinations as “Broad-breasted earth” (home, place, shelter, nurturer, foundation of all), “Tartara” (murky, undifferentiated, indeterminate), and Eros (in-between, middle voice, the middle of opposites or binary, desire, need, want). However, but then afterwards, the first as spoken in the covering over and doubling of the question (logos)…as the origin, the archê, is earth, Tartara and Eros. This doubling of chaos is perhaps Plato’s chora from the Timaeus³, the opening in which afterwards is earth, Tartara and Eros.

Hyland goes on to suggest:

Difficult as it may be to understand, however counter to our intuitions that if Chaos is a gap or separation it must somehow separate something, I suggest we should take Hesiod’s Greek in the passage under consideration to be indicating this truly remarkable thought: that Chaos, gap, separation, comes before, is prior to, any pairings that it might subsequently separate. Difference precedes and is the condition for sameness or identity. The “between” somehow precedes the binaries that it distinguishes. At work in Hesiod’s words, I suggest, is a thought that goes deeper than the argument over which are the first two entities that in fact get separated and distinguished by Chaos-earth and sky, or earth and Tartaros. At work, in addition, is the crucial if very difficult ontological principle that difference somehow precedes sameness or identity.⁴

I would go further to suggest that the “difference” may be pre-ontological. A few years later in Greek thought differentiation without determinations came to be thought by Anaximander as apeiron (ἄπειρον) ⁵, translated as indefinite or infinite. Anaximander was also the first in ancient Greek thinking to think of the unity of opposites or the ‘sameness’ or ‘identity’ in opposites. It might be said that Anaximander was the first to think identity in difference. Apeiron has been thought as the alpha-privative of peirar (πεῖραρ) or in the Ionic Greek form peras⁶ which is translated end, limit or boundary. In this case, the alpha-privative, ‘a‘, makes apeiron without end, limit or boundary. There is also some discussion that apeiron may be related to the alpha-privative of perao⁷ (“to experience,” “to apperceive”) which would make it without experience or perceptive understanding. In our most reliable fragment of Anaximander found in three separate sources necessity [could we say necessity of determinations] was a kind of injustice which required penalty or retribution. The most simple determination of apeiron as an alpha-privative is that apeiron is opposite of peras or perao. Some scholars have suggested that in Anaximander, apeiron generates and destroys opposites perhaps in a similar generative and destructive way which may have predicted what later Latin thinkers extolled theistically as “from him and through him and to him are all things”⁸. In this sense, end, limit and boundary was from apeiron, through apeiron, and to apeiron. Aristotle makes some comments that indicate a sort of generation/destruction idea of apeiron but Kirk and Raven⁹ have issues with some of these sources and with the idea that Aristotle was specifically referring to Anaximander as he did not name Anaximander in these fragments. In more recent scholarship¹⁰ the notion of generation and destruction in the most reliable fragment is thought to have been added in later by the Neo-Platonist, Simplicius. If this is true, the notion of origin may not be a part of Anaximander’s intention in this fragment. The question which emerges from this is, is apeiron the opposite of peras or peraoor is apeiron the source or origin of limit, boundary or experience or is apeiron more like the gap of Hesiod’s chaos? This will be discussed in more detail a little later but for now let’s take note of what Aristotle had to say about apeiron.

Everything has an origin [archê] or is an origin. The Boundless [apeiron] has no origin. For then it would have a limit. Moreover, it is both unborn and immortal, being a kind of origin. For that which has become has also, necessarily, an end, and there is a termination to every process of destruction. (Aristotle, Physics 203b6-10).

This passage indicates that Aristotle echoing the Muses and Anaximander could have understood the riddle, the conundrum, of apeiron. It appears he reasoned that apeiron “has no origin” and yet was a “kind of origin”. Could this difficulty be explained in terms of our discussion of chaos in Hesiod? Could it be that he might have thought this doubling of chaos as differentiation without specific determinations? Hegel certainly could not accept this contradiction.¹¹ Additionally, if apeiron is itself an opposite (i.e., to end, limit or boundary) then it could not be the source (origin) or sink (destruction) of opposites. In latter Latin thinking apeiron came to have a more oppositional meaning to end, limit and boundary. We also have an early account of Anaximander by Diogenes Laertius which suggests that apeiron did not distinguish “air or water or anything else“.

Anaximander son of Praxiades, of Miletus: he said that the principle and element is the Indefinite, not distinguishing air or water or anything else… [Diogenes Laertius n, 1-2 (DKi2Ai])

We also have this account from Aristotle:

We cannot say that the apeiron has no effect, and the only effectiveness which we can ascribe to it is that of a principle. Everything is either a source or derived from a source. But there cannot be a source of the apeiron, for that would be a limit of it. Further, as it is a beginning, it is both uncreatable and indestructible. For there must be a point at which what has come to be reaches completion, and also a termination of all passing away. That is why, as we say, there is no principle of this, but it is this which is held to be the principle of other things, and to encompass all and to steer all, as those assert who do not recognize, alongside the infinite, other causes, such as Mind or Friendship. Further they identify it with the Divine, for it is ‘deathless and imperishable’ as Anaximander says, with the majority of the physicists. (Physics 3.4; 203b)¹²

These accounts tend to disqualify apeiron as origin (archê) or opposite. For Anaximander, in the most certain part of this surviving fragment, it could be that the necessity of determinations as an injustice requiring penalty¹³ would indicate an allusion to the chaos of Hesiod. It is interesting to note that in two of the three sources (see the forth coming section on Anaximander for more details) for this fragment tell us that Anaximander was the first to use the term origin or archê. In one account of this fragment it does write of apeiron as the cause of coming-to-be and destruction. However, both of these sections of the fragment are in doubt by Heidegger¹⁴ and Kirk and Raven¹⁵ as coming from Anaximander. In any case, an interesting question is, did Anaximander think of chaos as a kind of justice? Could it be that differentiation without determination [a-peiron] would exact a penalty for determinations, for “but then afterwards”?

It could be that for Anaximander chaos and apeiron may have had some early similarity in the sense of indeterminate and yet, differential. Both terms could be thought in a Greek sense as a covering over and doubling of origin. Certainly for Hesiod, chaos is thought more from the disjunctive, as “but then afterwards”. Additionally, there appears to be a disjunction in Anaximander’s thinking of apeiron at least in Aristotle’s thinking with how apeiron could give rise to archê. This original confusion could be a result of the Muses playful answer to Hesiod with does not or perhaps cannot answer the question of the first and chaos in a positive relational fashion except with a radical disjunction.

This notion of apeiron would appear to add another hint of an-archy, no origin, and bring it closer to Hesiod’s notion of chaos. The disjunction of chaos and differentiation from determination as origin in earth, Tartara and Eros may have well been at work in Anaximander’s notion of apeiron. This would mark a difference in the later thinking of apeiron as generative, as origin, or as an opposite. It could also explain how archê came to mean rule or authority in Latin much later. It may also mediate some of the mythological indignation that traditional scholarship has wanted to assign to the first Milesian philosophers. While the classic Greek era philosophers may have thrown off the poetic trappings of the mythological heroic era, they may have still been influenced by its theological concerns. I would note that this would not be unheard of for modern philosophers and their sometimes ambiguous relationship with Christianity.

It could well be that Hesiod and perhaps Anaximander are telling us of a radical disjunction, a gap other than distinctions of light and night, being and beings and neutrality and desire. It is important that earth, Tartara, Eros are not begotten, generative or originated by Chaos; there is no conjunction. The odd way in which Hesiod presents them grammatically in the text is first chaos as differential, a gap or void but not yet determined; only then afterwards earth, Tartara, Eros with no explicit or implied causality. Hesiod does not write, as he could have, that chaos was generative of earth, Tartara, Eros. The only relation given is temporal as ‘then afterwards’ but not causal. Chaos does not give birth to earth, Tartara, Eros but first chaos and then afterwards earth, Tartara, Eros. If “the first” is meant as irony and jest of the Muses given the question posed in the Theogony then the temporal meaning of ‘then afterwards’ could also indicate the doubling of this first irony. This could indicate further the radical break of chaos and determination. If the question can only be answered by covering over what cannot be said, perhaps cannot be thought, except by poetic musings the temporal allusion may be more an indication of disruption or quality as kairos rather than a causal, sequential answer to cosmogony.

Xenophanes would remind us of earth and Tartara that “The upper limit of earth borders on air. The lower limit reaches down to the unlimited. [i.e. the apeiron]”.¹⁶ Let’s also remember that earth, Tartara and Eros are dwelling (sheltering, abode, home, lime, boundary), darkness (night, indeterminate, unseen) and desire (the in-between, what Plato tells us of Eros discussed in the next section). Classic scholarship would tell us that, “Strictly speaking, mythical time is timeless, but its sequential flow can articulate qualitative relationships and ontological distinctions”.¹⁷ Therefore, the temporal relationship given by “but then afterwards” may not indicate some kind of pre-existing temporality but rather it marks difference and establishes a primacy. It may be that chaos gets mythologized, taken up, origin-alized or storied in metaphor as earth, Tartara, Eros. Let’s remember that earth gives place or dwelling, Tartara as underneath earth is murky and dark but also undergirds earth and Eros is in-between, incessantly the middle. Eros is desire because Eros is not one or the other but hovers in the midst as some indeterminacy between binaries and opposites. Eros then as desire, would be the necessary condition for polemos (Πόλεμος; “war”) or conflict and strife.

In 414 BC, Aristophanes tells us that

At the beginning there was only Chaos, Night (Nyx), Darkness (Erebus), and the Abyss (Tartarus). Earth, the Air and Heaven had no existence. Firstly, blackwinged Night laid a germless egg in the bosom of the infinite deeps of Darkness, and from this, after the revolution of long ages, sprang the graceful Love (Eros) with his glittering golden wings, swift as the whirlwinds of the tempest. He mated in the deep Abyss with dark Chaos, winged like himself, and thus hatched forth our race, which was the first to see the light.¹⁸

In Aristophanes account, a ” blackwinged Night (Nyx) laid a germless egg” in the “bosom of the infinite [apeiron] deeps of Darkness (Erebus)” and “after the revolution of long ages, sprang the graceful Love” Eros. Our genesis, “hatched forth”, is from Eros who mated “in the deep Abyss with dark Chaos”. According to Aristophanes, our origin is strife (polemos) as chaos, “deep Abyss with dark Chaos” and desire, Eros; not in idea (eidos) or Concept (bergriff).

Philosophy Series 7 – Eros

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¹ Hesiod, “Theogony”, Translated by Drew A. Hyland; “First of All Came Chaos”, Heidegger and the Greeks: Interpretive Essays (Studies in Continental Thought) (p. 9). Kindle Edition; For text see Link, Hes. Th. 115 to 135;

² Doubling is a concept developed by Jacques Derrida. Without getting too technical, think of meaning, transcendental significance which gives place and origin to humans (thus what Derrida calls “transcendental arche”), as ideas, beliefs and values which keep us from falling into a neutralizing emptiness, as Levinas would suggest il y a, the ‘there is’. The necessity for meaning is a command that we must respond to perhaps without ever really thinking about it as a command. In Derrida’s language the requirement for meaning is a restricted economy. An economy measures, judges and appropriates to achieve its goals. This command comes from an other; the other being absolute meaninglessness, the neutralization of all transcendental significance, absolute nihilism. This retreat from the neutral ‘there is’, relegated to our unconscious, shows a more general economy. The general economy is based on repeatable symbols, graphemes or phonemes which are written or spoken fragments of language, signs which can only and always point to other signs and can be reassembled and repeated (iterated) in a myriad of ways. The way a computer processes computer language might illustrate a system of signs which only refer to other signs without any such meaning and significance that humans must find in language and thought, from a restricted economy of these signs. The more general economy is relegated to a trace from the perspective of our restricted economy, the irrevocable commandment for transcendental significance. However, the trace of difference (Derrida names as ‘differance’) always keeps us from hermetically (and hermeneutically) isolating ourselves within our own transcendental ‘metaphysics’. The trace of differance plays at the margins of our restricted economies. Derrida makes this comment in Of Grammatology (see link) about the transcendental metaphysics of origin (archê):

What I call the erasure of concepts ought to mark the places of that future meditation. For example, the value of the transcendental arche [archie] must make its necessity felt before letting itself be erased. The concept of arche-trace must comply with both that necessity and that erasure. It is in fact contradictory and not acceptable within the logic of identity. The trace is not only the disappearance of origin — within the discourse that we sustain and according to the path that we follow it means that the origin did not even disappear, that it was never constituted except reciprocally by a non-origin, the trace, which thus becomes the origin of the origin. From then on, to wrench the concept of the trace from the classical scheme, which would derive it from a presence or from an originary non-trace and which would make of it an empirical mark, one must indeed speak of an originary trace or arche-trace. Yet we know that that concept destroys its name and that, if all begins with the trace, there is above all no originary trace.

This means that in the search for transcendental origin, we can understand that origin, from our restricted economy, is driven not from some absolute origin but from a general economy of signs, signifiers and signified. If transcendental origin was absolute there would not be any difference which would make us aware of any such thing as origin. Only in the face of absence, of our undoing, does transcendental origin come up as an object of concern. Only because underlying origin is the trace of ‘no origin’, an-archy, are we compelled to need or require that ‘the first’, as Hesiod might tell us, is origin and not the incomprehensible gap of chaos (thus the ‘nonsensical’ musings of “First of all Chaos came-to-be”). In this sense differentiation without specific determinations could be thought as Derrida’s general economy. Any restricted economy will work to displace its other, the general economy that would interrupt, rupture, transcendental significance. Therefore in our attempt to master origin we become a slave to the commandment in the trace of ‘no origin’ (to use a Hegelian metaphor). To even think of ‘no origin’ our restricted economy requires us to think of ‘no origin’ as ‘underlying’, giving rise to origin, and therefore, make ‘no origin’ into another functioning origin. This is why he writes of the “arche-trace” which is an absolute impossibility (“there is above all no originary trace“) but also an absolute requirement from our restricted economies. Hence we get this peculiar writing, origin. To continue a little further with Of Grammatology:

The Living Present (lebendige Gegenwart) is the universal and absolute form of transcendental experience to which Husserl refers us. In the descriptions of the movements of temporalisation, all that does not torment the simplicity and the domination of that form seems to indicate to us how much transcendental phenomenology belongs to metaphysics. But that must come to terms with the forces of rupture. In the originary temporalisation and the movement of relationship with the outside, as Husserl actually describes them, nonpresentation or depresentation is as “originary” as presentation. That is why a thought of the trace can no more break with a transcendental phenomenology than be reduced to it. Here as elsewhere, to pose the problem in terms of choice, to oblige or to believe oneself obliged to answer it by a yes or no, to conceive of appurtenance as an allegiance or non-appurtenance as plain speaking, is to confuse very different levels, paths, and styles. In the deconstruction of the arche, one does not make a choice.

Therefore I admit the necessity of going through the concept of the arche-trace. How does that necessity direct us from the interior of the linguistic system? How does the path that leads from Saussure to Hjelmslev forbid us to avoid the originary trace?

In that its passage through form is a passage through the imprint. And the meaning of difference in general would be more accessible to us if the unity of that double passage appeared more clearly. [Of Grammatology, Jacques Derrida (1967), See Link]

The double passage is the inability to say “yes or no” to origin. There is no choice involved in a commandment. However, to face the impossibility of escape from our restricted economies of transcendental signified, to understand difference which plays outside our specific determinations of meaning is to gleam trace, the impossibility of the “arche-trace”, and its doubling in the restricted and general economy.

Another motif Derrida used was writing. Ordinary writing is what Derrida called the “vulgar concept of writing”. Derrida wants to get at a more fundamental dynamic of writing he calls “arche-writing”. In Of Grammatology Derrida lays out a case for how verbal speech, the ‘original natural’ language, required the presence of the speaker to come to its aid, to validate the veracity of the speech, to ‘sign’ and authenticate itself. Writing, on the other hand, displaced the intent of the speaker. Writing reproduces and allows iteration but without a conscious speaker present with the content. Writing serves as a kind of autonomous unconscious from conscious validation, conscious truth, and conscious meaning of the speaker. In this way the speaker serves as a restricted economy and writing as a general economy. Think of the general economy of writing more as signs, graphemes, which only and always refer to other signs, signifiers and signified. Writing plays at the margins of the text (consciousness). Writing is the ‘other’ of speech. It is speech without a speaker. Therefore, it is a double of speech. Since speech is the presence of the speaker, writing is the absence of the speaker, the absence of presence. In this way writing exceeds presence.

I would wish rather to suggest that the alleged derivativeness of writing, however real and massive, was possible only on one condition: that the original,” “natural,” etc. language had never existed, never been intact and untouched by writing, that it had itself always been a writing. An arche-writing whose necessity and new concept I wish to indicate and outline here; and which I continue to call writing only because it essentially communicates with the vulgar concept of writing. The latter could not have imposed itself historically except by the dissimulation of the arche-writing, by the desire for a speech displacing its other and its double and working to reduce its difference. If I persist in calling that difference writing, it is because, within the work of historical repression, writing was, by its situation, destined to signify the most formidable difference. It threatened the desire for the living speech from the closest proximity, it breached living speech from within and from the very beginning. And as we shall begin to see, difference cannot be thought without the trace. [Of Grammatology, Jacques Derrida (1967), See Link]

Speech, historically, has asserted its primacy over writing. It has wanted to show writing as an extension of the speaker, a faithful reproduction, a double that preserves the original intent. One need only look at the Bible to see how Christian history has tried to preserve the truth of the Bible only to unearth a vast plurality of widely varying interpretations. The conscious intent to preserve the presence of God in the Bible has historically been undermined at every step. Particular denominations have denounced ‘other’ interpretations. They have attempted to undermine the truth value of other interpretations. What is at work in this historical dynamic is the written word. The written word can no longer come to the aid of its speech. It cannot clarify and correct directly to the listener. Some Christians have even gone so far as to proclaim protection of the ‘word’ with the Holy Ghost. The Holy Ghost functions as the clarifier and corrector in the absence of the speaker. A consciousness, the consciousness of God, is present in the written word. Those who ‘hear’ the speaker, the Holy Ghost, will interpret the Bible correctly, according to orthodoxy, and those who cannot ‘hear’ the ‘voice’ of the Holy Spirit will fall into error and heresy. What shows itself here is that the written word is no longer guarded by the immediate presence of a flesh and blood speaker. Therefore, those vested in ‘true’ Christianity must continually supplement the unchecked dispersion of the written word to ensure that the ‘true’ meaning is conveyed by the spirit that haunts the book. It is precisely because the written word always exceeds the conscious intent of the spoken word that supplementation is constantly required. This excess functions as absence, as withdrawal, or perhaps as what the ancient Greeks thought as privation.

Perhaps some simpler ways to think about this is the historical notion of the monster. The monster is relegated to outside consciousness. The monster is horrible and inescapable. And yet, in Frankenstein, we have a human double. Frankenstein is on the edge of humankind. Frankenstein is a grotesque double of human life. It undoes humankind by playing at the edges of what is human. Frankenstein mimics (doubles) human kind but is other. This other is terror incarnate which faces us and threatens to extinguish us. The underside of presence is absence. What Frankenstein is cannot be spoken; it can only be feared.

The Gnostics of early Christianity were declared apostate and heretics by orthodoxy. They were outcasts historically in Christianity. Later, in the dark ages, apostates and heretics met with severe punishment and death. Witchcraft was considered the monster of early Christianity. It was relegated and functioned outside the restricted economy. It was the anti-Christian, the arche-trace, which refused the transcendence and metaphysics of ‘true’ meaning. And yet, orthodoxy’s alleged negation of Christianity, heretics, both validated orthodoxy from within its restricted economy and gave a face to the damned other, the other that failed to recognize the face of Christ. Therefore, the “arche-trace” functions as the double, the other and the excess of a restricted economy. This excess cannot be faced only re-appropriated as further confirmation of the restricted economy. Therefore, even though the archê (origin) of the trace is impossible as its absence can never be squelched into presence, it must be made to appear as present, as an origin, a monster, an apostate, a heretic to appease the necessity of determinations, of restricted economies, in the face of the other, the excess, the gap, the chaos, indeterminate difference which would undo it and, of necessity, require retribution for injustice.

³ John Sallis, Chorology: On Beginning in Plato’s Timaeus (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999)

⁴ Drew A. Hyland; “First of All Came Chaos”, Heidegger and the Greeks: Interpretive Essays (p. 13). Kindle Edition, page 13

⁵ apeiron; see Link; also an interesting discussion here]

⁶ peras; See Link

⁷ ἀ-πείρων; See Link

⁸ Romans 11:36

⁹ THE PRESOCRATIC PHILOSOPHERS: A CRITICAL HISTORY WITH A SELECTION OF TEXTS, BY G. S. KIRK & J. E. RAVEN, PUBLTSHED BY THE SYNDICS OF THE CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, Bentley House, 200 Euston Road, London, N.W., American Branch: 32 East 57th Street, New York , N.Y., CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1957, page 110-120

¹⁰ Heidegger, The Anaximander Fragment, page 595, See link

¹¹ See Link, Section 86

“When thinking is to begin, we have nothing but thought in its merest indeterminateness: for we cannot determine unless there is both one and another: and in the beginning there is yet no other.”[Hegel, The Logic]

Hegel thought it incomprehensible for differentiation without determination; for him “in the beginning there is yet no other”. Yet, the Muses tell us, “First of all Chaos came-to-be”. If chaos is taken as the gap, differentiation but without determinations we do indeed have otherness. The confusion, also echoed by the doubling of the question of the Theogony, is thinking the first, “the beginning”, the archê with the gap. The “transcendental arche” in Derrida’s words must necessarily think origin with determination. This “restricted economy” cannot think otherness, differentiation without “one and another”. Thinking differentiation without determination as the “arche-trace” which “…one must indeed speak of an originary trace or arche-trace. Yet we know that that concept destroys its name and that, if all begins with the trace, there is above all no originary trace” (see link).

Derrida quoting Bataille in Writing and Difference (see link), “From Restricted to General Economy A Hegelianism Without Reserve” states that Hegel should have “considered laughter first”. Hegel, as master of the Absolute, should have taken his own master/slave paradigm seriously. The master, the sovereign, cannot be such without giving up his to freedom to the slave, the dialect, the work. Thus the absolute Idea, the begriff, which starts from ‘the first’ and proceeds to the last, the Concept, never takes leave of its origin. As such otherness can only arise within the bounds of its triads, its negations and prohibitions. Nothing exceeds its movement. All is taken up and mastered by the dialectic. Its end, telos, can only be itself, it’s self-determining self. The progression can never exceed the movement of universal dialectic, of negation and Aufhebung. In the end, it must deny differentiation which fails its determinations and prohibitions, which fails to think Hesiod’s chaos as gap, as difference without determination, as “arche-trace” which plays and laughs at its Gordian knot that binds its ‘freedoms’ to its own self-determined chains. The other which cannot begin without “one and another”, without determinations, without its determinations cannot exceed its archê, its beginning, to find the trace of an other. Thus Hegel’s dialectic succeeds in binding itself to itself, prohibiting and prohibition preserve its enslavement. The master of the Absolute has become the slave to its transcendental signified…and, as Hegel himself predicted, but failed to see, the Notion of his own slavery.

The Hegelian Aufhebung is produced entirely from within discourse, from within the system or the work of signification. A determination is negated and conserved in another determination which reveals the truth of the former. From infinite indetermination one passes to infinite determination, and this transition, produced by the anxiety of the infinite, continuously links meaning up to itself. The Aufhebung is included within the circle of absolute knowledge, never exceeds its closure, never suspends the totality of discourse, work, meaning, law, etc. Since it never dispels the veiling form of absolute knowledge, even by maintaining this form, the Hegelian Aufhebung in all its parts belongs to what Bataille calls “the world of work,” that is, the world of the prohibition not perceived as such, in its totality. “And the human collectivity, in part devoted to work, is just as much defined by prohibitions, without which it would not have become the world of work that it essentially is” (L’erotisme). The Hegelian Aufhebung thus belongs to restricted economy, and is the form of the passage from one prohibition to another, the circulation of prohibitions, history as the truth of the prohibition.[Writing and Difference (see link), “From Restricted to General Economy A Hegelianism Without Reserve”]

¹² See Link

¹³ Heidegger, The Anaximander Fragment, page 595, See link

¹⁴ Heidegger, The Anaximander Fragment, page 595, See link

¹⁵ THE PRESOCRATIC PHILOSOPHERS: A CRITICAL HISTORY WITH A SELECTION OF TEXTS, BY G. S. KIRK & J. E. RAVEN, PUBLTSHED BY THE SYNDICS OF THE CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, Bentley House, 200 Euston Road, London, N.W., American Branch: 32 East 57th Street, New York , N.Y., CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1957, page 105-108

¹⁶ DK 21 B 28

¹⁷ (Bussanich, 213); Drew A. Hyland;John Panteleimon Manoussakis. Heidegger and the Greeks: Interpretive Essays (p. 14). Kindle Edition.

¹⁸ Aristophanes, Birds, lines 690-699. (Translation by Eugene O’Neill, Jr., Perseus Digital Library; translation modified.)

Philosophy Series Contents (to be updated with each new installment)

Philosophy Series 1 – Prelude to the Philosophy Series

Philosophy Series 2 – Introduction

Philosophy Series 3 – Appendix A, Part 1

Philosophy Series 4 – The Pre-Socratics – Hesiod

Philosophy Series 5 – A Detour of Time

Philosophy Series 6 – The Origin

Philosophy Series 7 – Eros

Philosophy Series 8 – Thales

Philosophy Series 9 – An Interlude to Anaximander

Philosophy Series 10 – On the Way to Anaximander: Language and Proximity

Philosophy Series 11 – Aristotle and Modernity: The Eternal and Science

Philosophy Series 12 – Levinas and the Problem of Metaphysics

Philosophy Series 13 – On Origin

Philosophy Series 14 – George Orwell and Emmanuel Levinas Introspective: Socialism and the Other

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Philosophy Series 5

A Detour of Time

The continuation of Hesiod’s cosmogenesis cited here declares,

But afterwards she lay with Heaven and bore deep-swirling Oceanus, Coeus and Crius and Hyperion and Iapetus, Theia and Rhea, Themis and Mnemosyne and gold-crowned Phoebe and lovely Tethys. After them was born Cronos the wily, youngest and most terrible of her children, and he hated his lusty sire.¹

In later Roman mythology Cronus erroneously became chronus (χρόνος², time). In Hesiod, Cronus was a child of Earth and Sky. He was a Titan god. Hesiod described Cronus as “Crooked-counseled and terrible”. Cronus castrated his father, Sky and overthrew him. Cronus impregnated his sister Rhea and then ate all the children except one that Rhea hid, Zeus. The Romans associated Cronus with Saturn. Saturn was extremely popular with the Romans. In fact, the popularity lasts to the present day. The seventh day of the Judaeo-Christian week is in Latin, Dies Saturni (“Day of Saturn”) or Saturday. Virgil, a Roman poet, associated Cronus with a heroic king of Italy³. This association made Cronus a hero and not the detestable figure in Greek mythology. However, Ovid, another Roman poet, was primarily responsible for making Cronus (the Greek Titan) into chronus (time) in his book Metamorphoses. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Saturn reigns in the Golden Age which was marred by continual rebellion against the heavens. Ovid associates these upheavals with the beginning of change and becoming. This association was the beginning of the confusion between Cronus (Saturn) and chronus (time).

This ‘confusion’ or ‘forgetting’ is important as it assigns a false note to the historical opus of what ‘temporal’ means. Even more, it may be here that that chronus is canonized as a sequence or succession of ‘now’ moments which proceed from the past to the future. This is ‘clock’ time. Chronus came to mean quantity of time. However, the Greeks had another important concept of time, the fullness of time, kairos (καιρός). Kairos was quality as opposed to quantity. Kairos was the in-between-moments, the right time. It was time that gathers together, pulls in and ruptures the vulgar notion of time as chronus as Heidegger thought chronus. Kairos was not governed by ‘now’ moments. It could not ‘fit’ into a synchronous⁴ (sýnchronos, equivalent to syn- syn⁵– + chrón ( os ) time + –os⁶ adj. suffix) temporal scheme. “Chronos is that in which there is kairos and kairos is that in which there is little chronos [chronos esti en ho kairos kai kairos esti en to ou pollos chronos].”⁷ This is important because for the Homeric era, temporality was not thought in terms of a neutral, generic grid of sequential ‘now’ moments. Quantity did not hold sway over quality. Moments were not equal in ‘essence’ but had quality, the supreme moment. Kairos gathered in time but did not possess it. It was a ‘between’ time that was not this moment or the last moment or the next moment. Hesiod’s chaos had the quality of kairos. It was not eternal.

The ancient Greeks did not even have a concept of ‘eternity’. Eternity, as we think it, was a later Latin, Christian, extension of chronus. If chronus, which came to be thought as a neutral, grid (the common idea of physical time), never ends the Christian notion of eternity would result. Walter Brogan explains the notion of eternity here:

Aidion is often translated as the eternal or eternity-aeternitas. But the notion of the eternal as opposed to the temporal is a later development of Christian thinking. The literal meaning of the Latin aeternitas is not “atemporal,” but “to return always,” and in this way to be everlasting. The Greek word aidion comes from aei and dios. Dios is a word used by Homer to mean the noblest. Thus, it is the word for Zeus, as well as a word for men and women of excellence and of noble nations. It is also used to depict the powers of nature. It means that which is divine-like. Aei means throughout time. Aidion means that which holds itself through time in the presence of the divine and thus is. The aei is the enduring of a being that maintains itself in its “isness.” Thus, Heidegger says: “And aei means not only `without stopping’ and `continuously,’ but primarily that which is presently there (das Jeweilige)-he who is ruling at the time (ho aei basi- leuon), not some sort of `eternal’ ruling”.⁸

Kairos could not be contained or possessed by a generic ‘now’ moment. It could not be held in presence. Kairos exceeded this notion in a similar fashion to the way Descartes thought the notion of infinity exceeded its concept. It may be that Hesiod thought the first, chaos, as kairos. In Hesiod’s other work, Works and Days, he writes what would later become a famous dictum: μέτρα φυλάσσεσθαι· καιρὸς [kairos] δ’ ἐπὶ πᾶσιν ἄριστος; Observe due measure: and best in all things is the right time (kairos) and right amount⁹. It would not make sense to Hesiod to think of what came before or after kairos. Our contemporary logic would inform us that there must be a before or after to Hesiod’s supreme cosmogonic time but that logic (logos) would not necessarily follow for Hesiod or the Muses. The Muses were full of play and gaiety. They basked in kairos as a child in play. The important thing to remember here is that the very first (protista) is not temporalized into a ‘now’ moment or even a-temporality (not temporal). The very first is the fullness of the supreme, in-between-moment, a quality not contained in neutrality either. I will note it here that kairos will become an interesting problem between Aristotle and the Sophists in later discussions.

Perhaps historically, kairos could speculatively be thought along the lines of Kant’s categorical understanding as a-priori. It is also spoken of in Christianity with regard to the fulfillment or redemption of time that occurred in Christ. The latter philosophical notions of the transcendental may also appropriate its temporality from kairos. For Heidegger¹⁰ and the ancient Greek skeptics the historical epoch (epoché, ἐποχή, epokhē, to hold back, suspension, cessation)¹¹ or age (aon) is not a collection of ‘now’ moments but the quality of an era. Better yet, kairos could be thought along the lines of Heidegger’s notion of pre-cognition or pre-understanding which always, already ‘is’. Heidegger would refer to kairos as “the moment of vision” (augenblick, literally “glance of the eye”). Augenblick is the moment of decision. As such, it is conflict and strife (polemus). For Heidegger, augenblick is an event, Ereignis. Thomas Sheehan writes of Ereignis as:

In ordinary German Ereignis means “event,” but in Heidegger’s retrieval of the unsaid in Aristotle, it becomes a name for the structure of the ontological movement that enables all being-significant. Playing on the adjective eigen (“one’s own”), Heidegger comes up with the neologism Er-eignung: ontological movement as the process of being drawn into what is “one’s own”…¹²

Ereignis is the event that pulls (sways) or appropriates meaning or significance as the ‘there’ of Being. This ‘pulling forth’ is also a withdrawal, an expropriation, of logos or as Sheehan states it, ” a differentially structured semantic field is engendered and sustained, is appropriation-by-absence”.¹³ For Heidegger, Ereignis is not temporality or Being but an in-between which gives (es gibt) time and Being. Ereignis as event is not “simply an occurrence, but that which makes any occurrence possible”.¹⁴ The event is the ‘there is’ (il y a) and ‘it gives’ (es gibt) of time and Being. It is the da (there) of Being. This German idiom, es gibt, denotes a passive and an active voice albeit grammatically neutral.¹⁵ It literally means ‘it gives’ as active but the idiom connotes ‘there is’ as pasive. In ancient Greek and Latin there wasn’t a separate word for ‘it’.¹⁶ However, what is meant by ‘it’ in those languages was not as we understand ‘it’ but ranged in meaning from the irrelevant to the demonic (δαίμων, daimôn).¹⁷ For classical Greece the daimôn was not evil as later Latin thinkers envisioned it. In Socrates the daimôn was an oracle, wisdom from unknown otherness. Therefore, the notion of it was not a dead, neutral ‘thing’ but an indeterminate other. Moreover, with regard to es gibt, ancient Greek grammar has a middle voice. The middle voice does not exist in English, German or modern Greek. The middle voice indicates a simultaneous action on both subject and predicate. The middle voice is not forced into an acting or being acted upon but draws together the meanings of codetermined, mutual determination and active reciprocity. Ereignis is not an event that happens to a subject nor is Ereignis an ‘it’ as a thing. Ereignis is not neutral, already understood as mere ‘thingness’.

The abstract notion of ‘thingness’ which arises from the already understood, ontological, orientation to beings as separate and ultimately divisible ‘stuff’ we know as ‘thing’ comes from the equally abstract notion of temporality as a linear succession of ‘now’ moments. When temporality is pre-understood as equally chopped up packets of ‘now’ moments, the ‘stuff’ of time must also be abstractly considered as well as equal packets of matter (ὕλη, hyle) we think as ‘things’. For modernity, the self-evident, simple and superficial presentation of all stuff as things is a simple ‘given’ from an un-thought history; it is a practical component of everyday life which seems ludicrous to question. However, that is precisely what Heidegger and the ancient Greeks addressed in their thinking of being (ontos).¹⁸ From this abstract notion of ontos it is difficult to understand the ancient Greek notion of kairos. Heidegger shows how our everyday experience of being in the mode of instrumentality (i.e., our being with the hammer is such that the hammer disappears in use) counters the notion of being as present-at-hand (when the hammer breaks and becomes conspicuous as present-at-hand) which is also the mode of ‘thingness’ where we already understand beings as separate objects to be observed in their abstract presence and not in our participation with being. He also showed how lived time has a stretch which may slow as in the experience of boredom or anxiety and speed in moments of joy or exhilaration which counters the abstracted notion of time that thinks in terms of ‘clock time’ as linear ‘now’ moments.¹⁹ Likewise, when kairos as the fullness of the moment is thought in terms of a qualitative gathering of temporality, as holding sway for meaning and significance for beings, epochs and ages, it is difficult from a ‘common sense’, ‘intuitive’ point of view (vista) to concretely get past our historical abstractions of chronus. Perhaps some modern ways to begin to think this is with the birth of a child, the death of a mother, the end of communism or the ‘secularization’ of a religious world. Even what Heidegger calls being-towards-death is a moment that holds sway throughout our lives. These practical experiences of temporality as kairos was, in concrete ways, more practical for ancient Greek thinking of temporality than our modern notion of ‘clock time’. The question of what is really real, kairos or chronus was a question for ontos, being, ontology which concerned Aristotle in what the Latin mind thought as ‘metaphysics’.²⁰ However, the ancient Greeks thought of these questions in terms of phusis; the question of physics as it appears, as idea, and as ‘being as such’ or ‘first cause’. It was difficult for the Latin mind, the Christian weltanschauung, to think of Hesiod’s chaos not as ‘eternal’, chronus existing from all time and through all time, but as kairos, the gathering together and holding sway, the fullness, completeness (telos) of moments which was not ‘a moment’ but the in-between of the moments of chronus. Temporality thought as kairos does depend on the abstract and quantized schema of linear ‘now’ moments proceeding from an infinite past to an infinite future but from concrete and practical qualities which determine (hold sway over) beings and being, civilizations and history, forms (peras) and indefinite (apeiron), origin (archê) and chaos.

Philosophy Series 6 – The Origin

_________________

¹ See Link

² See Link

³ Georgics 1.336; 2.406, 539; 3.93; and Aeneid6.794; 7.49; 8.319; 12.830

⁴ See Link

⁵ See Link

⁶ See Link

⁷ Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, Trans. Patricia Daley (Stanford: Stanford U.P., 2005), page 68-9.

⁸ Walter A. Brogan. Heidegger And Aristotle: The Twofoldness Of Being (Kindle Locations 1035-1041). Kindle Edition.

⁹ Hesiod, Works and Days 694 ;Translation of the Works and Days are based on Evelyn-White 1929

¹⁰ Martin Heidegger, Time and Being, trans. by Joan Stambaugh (Harper and Row, 1972), page 9.

¹¹ See Link

¹² GESCHICHTLICHKEIT /EREIGNIS /KEHRE, Thomas Sheehan, Existentia (Meletai Sophias) [Budapest], XI, 3-4 (2001), 241-251. See Link (pdf page 10)

¹³ GESCHICHTLICHKEIT /EREIGNIS /KEHRE, Thomas Sheehan, Existentia (Meletai Sophias) [Budapest], XI, 3-4 (2001), 241-251. See enowning.blogspot.com/2011/02/thomas-sheehan-on-what-heidegger-means.html

¹⁴ Martin Heidegger, Time and Being, trans. by Joan Stambaugh (Harper and Row, 1972), page 19.

¹⁵ Neutrality is a concern that will be addressed in future discussions of Emmanuel Levinas. However, Heidegger should not quickly be read as denoting es gibt as neutral, a mere it, a thing. Much of his critique of the forgetting of Being since the Greeks is based on thinking of Being in the same type as a ‘thing’. We think we understand the being of a thing as an ‘object’ present-at-hand, something we look at in its pure presence. This understanding of Being as an object or a thing has dominated since the Greeks but Heidegger wants to show that there are other ways of experiencing being such as instrumentality, ready-at-hand, in which we experience the being of a thing such as a hammer in its disappearance in use. We are not looking at the hammer as an object present-at-hand lest we hit our finger. We are using the hammer to accomplish a goal but the hammer itself is not experienced as an object present to our vision. The notion of a hammer in use that is still present-at-hand in some abstract sense is not the concrete way we are experiencing the hammer while using it. Even more, Heidegger wants to make the claim that whenever we ‘see’ being, being retreats, withdraws such that the ‘truth’ of what we see or understand of being is conditioned more by its absence than its presence. Therefore, what we ‘see’ is always embroiled in semblance, appearance, a representation, that cannot capture Being per se. Being cannot be brought to presence even as idea – εἶδος (eidos – that which is seen, form, shape) and ἰδέα (idea – form) . There is always a ex- to being, an excess which cannot be accounted for or brought to light and presence. Therefore, neutrality in es gebt is not so much a neutral article as a referent to Being. It is a further question to ask if Being is third person, neutral or first or second person singular, I or you or plural, we or them. It would be natural to think Being as a kind of high order machine or mechanism but that would fail to understand Heidegger. On the other hand, there is a sense of a determination that Being is either a kind of thing or a kind of person, I (Nietzsche) or other (Levinas). This pathos of thought thinks after the universal. It is the thought that Being is either a type of person (he, she, I, thou, other person, etc.) or a not-person (a substance, thing, matter, mechanism, etc.).

This universal dilemma of one or the other, mutually exclusive, may be a false dilemma. As the ancient Greeks would remind us there is always a both-and or mixture that would constitute a third kind in every binary opposition. There is also a hypothetical, none-of-the-above in every binary opposition which may be thought as ‘abstract’ and not ‘concrete’, possible but not actual or even impossible but nevertheless, hangs on as a persistent ghost of sight. This then poses the question what to do of the ghost, the apparition, the phantasm? Is it mere ‘logic’ to dismiss such tangential nonsense? Has such ‘logic’ ever presented itself historically as the ‘violence of the text’? Has there ever been cases in human history where some people were ‘logically’ considered not-people, erasable, marginalized, deemed irrelevant, silenced, etc.? Are there cases where the canonical text created its own anti-thesis? It certainly seems that this is possible albeit not necessarily so. The tension created in the binary opposition of the person and the not-person is a tension that re-presents itself in idealism (Hegel), realism, positivism, pragmatism, structuralism, modernism and post-modernism (Derrida, Foucault). In both cases of the neutral OR the person, an exclusiveness must be endemic to the argument of the opposing case. It must be shown that one cannot be at the same time with the other. In the history of violence, ‘he’ and ‘she’ sit atop the authenticity of being and not-being is relegated to mere stuff, empty, devoid of qualifications which would evoke the ethical concerns for a ‘he’ or a ‘she’. The way non-human ‘animals’ can qualify for the pronoun ‘he’ or ‘she’ and yet hover closer historically to things than non-things is a clear case of how dialectic logic forces opposites but retain a ghost of an in-between, the uncanny, the phantasm. The in-between, the ghosts of our ‘logic’ face us in our day to day which defy our categorical ontologisms.

This kind of problem occupied much of Greek thinking. Is being one OR many? How can that which is also be that which is not? Can being and not-being be predicated of the same? Can being change or does it persist and endure? What is it that endures or changes such that we can still think it as being? How is movement possible if being is changeless? Aristotle’s answer, as we shall see, was more along the lines of both-and as the two-fold of being (see Walter A. Brogan. Heidegger And Aristotle: The Twofoldness Of Being). Post modernism similar to Marx points to phantasm in the world created by text and artifice which appear as being and what is not, permanence and temporal, human and not, logic and nonsense. Is there a commonality to all these approaches that squelches the Other as other? Levinas would pose the question, how is ethics understood? Are there ways in which the other can be leveled off and totalized into a system? Should we be attentive to this possibility? Is there a history of violence which draws upon components of sameness in every idea-ology, the logos of appearance? Do ideas encapsulate themselves in their own essences? Is the idea system closed or open? Can ideas only open up to other ideas, seeing to other sights, light to other illuminations OR can they point beyond themselves to another type or kind? One answer might be that ideas can only ‘see’ other ideas. If ideas can see ‘other’, wouldn’t that other be an idea? Otherwise, how can seeing see what it can’t see? This inquiry goes back to the same types of questions the ancient Greeks asked. How can being both be and not-be? How can Being be one or many? This is the problem Aristotle addressed in what we now call his work Metaphysics. It is also the direction of Levinas’ inquiry. It is in this tension that we will eventually discover what Jacques Derrida quoting James Joyce tells us, “Jewgreek is greekjew. Extremes meet”

Are we Greeks? Are we Jews? But who, we? Are we (not a chrono- logical, but a pre-logical question) first Jews or first Greeks? And does the strange dialogue between the Jew and the Greek, peace itself, have the form of the absolute, speculative logic of Hegel, the living logic which reconciles formal tautology and empirical heterology after having thought prophetic discourse in the preface to the Phenomenology of the Mind? Or, on the contrary, does this peace have the form of infinite separation and of the unthinkable, unsayable transcendence of the other? To what horizon of peace does the language which asks this question belong? From whence does it draw the energy of its question? Can it account for the historical coupling of Judaism and Hellenism? And what is the legitimacy, what is the meaning of the copula in this proposition from perhaps the most Hegelian of modern novelists: “Jewgreek is greekjew. Extremes meet”?[Writing and Difference, Violence and Metaphysics, ISBN 0-203-99178-8 Master e-book ISBN, page 192]

¹⁶ Martin Heidegger, Time and Being, trans. by Joan Stambaugh (Harper and Row, 1972), page 18.

¹⁷ Martin Heidegger, Time and Being, trans. by Joan Stambaugh (Harper and Row, 1972), page 18.

¹⁸ See this for a relatively easy introduction to Heidegger’s thoughts in Being and Time.

¹⁹ Modern physicists have long since disposed of such simple minded notions of time, Einstein comes to mind, but there are many other intriguing notions of temporality in modern physics which also address the ‘stretch’ of time even with regard to another modern notion – ‘subjectivity’, and its fuzzy relationship with ‘objective’ temporality.

²⁰ See link

The word ‘metaphysics’ is notoriously hard to define. Twentieth-century coinages like ‘meta-language’ and ‘metaphilosophy’ encourage the impression that metaphysics is a study that somehow “goes beyond” physics, a study devoted to matters that transcend the mundane concerns of Newton and Einstein and Heisenberg. This impression is mistaken. The word ‘metaphysics’ is derived from a collective title of the fourteen books by Aristotle that we currently think of as making up “Aristotle’s Metaphysics.” Aristotle himself did not know the word. (He had four names for the branch of philosophy that is the subject-matter of Metaphysics: ‘first philosophy’, ‘first science’, ‘wisdom’, and ‘theology’.) At least one hundred years after Aristotle’s death, an editor of his works (in all probability, Andronicus of Rhodes) entitled those fourteen books “Ta meta ta phusika”—”the after the physicals” or “the ones after the physical ones”—, the “physical ones” being the books contained in what we now call Aristotle’s Physics. The title was probably meant to warn students of Aristotle’s philosophy that they should attempt Metaphysics only after they had mastered “the physical ones,” the books about nature or the natural world—that is to say, about change, for change is the defining feature of the natural world.

This is the probable meaning of the title because Metaphysics is about things that do not change. In one place, Aristotle identifies the subject-matter of first philosophy as “being as such,” and, in another, as “first causes.” It is a nice—and vexed—question what the connection between these two definitions is. Perhaps this is the answer: The unchanging first causes have nothing but being in common with the mutable things they cause—like us and the objects of our experience, they are, and there the resemblance ceases

 The Greek plural noun-phrase ‘ta meta ta phusika‘ became in Medieval Latin the singular noun ‘metaphysica‘—much as the Greek plural ‘ta biblia‘ (‘the books’) became the Latin singular ‘biblia‘ (‘the bible’). The word was used both as a title for Aristotle’s book (now thought of as a single entity) and as the name of the “science” that was its subject-matter. The word for ‘metaphysics’ in every modern European language (‘la métaphysique‘, ‘die Metaphysik‘, ‘la metafisica‘…) is an adaptation of the Latin word to the orthographic and phonetic requirements of that language. This is true even of the non-Indo-European languages (like Finnish and Hungarian) that are spoken in Europe. Works written in some non-European languages, however, use words constructed from native materials both to translate the European word ‘metaphysics’ and to refer to writings in their own philosophical traditions whose subject-matter is similar to the subject-matter of Western metaphysics. For example, the Chinese phrase that is the customary translation of ‘metaphysics’ is an allusion to a statement in the I Ching: “that which is above matter is the Tao”; the phrase can be literally translated as ‘[that which is above matter]-ology’, the final word of the phrase being a “discipline marker” that performs much the same function as the English suffix ‘-ology’. The word that is the usual Arabic translation of ‘metaphysics’ means ‘the science of divine things’. Unlike the Chinese phrase and the Arabic word, however, the European words derived from ‘metaphysica‘ carry no internal indications of their meaning. (The word has, as we have seen, an etymology, but as is so often the case, etymology is no guide to meaning.) It is uncontroversial that these words all mean exactly what ‘metaphysics’ means in English—or, less parochially, that all the European words derived from ‘metaphysica‘ mean exactly the same thing..

Philosophy Series Contents (to be updated with each new installment)

Philosophy Series 1 – Prelude to the Philosophy Series

Philosophy Series 2 – Introduction

Philosophy Series 3 – Appendix A, Part 1

Philosophy Series 4 – The Pre-Socratics – Hesiod

Philosophy Series 5 – A Detour of Time

Philosophy Series 6 – The Origin

Philosophy Series 7 – Eros

Philosophy Series 8 – Thales

Philosophy Series 9 – An Interlude to Anaximander

Philosophy Series 10 – On the Way to Anaximander: Language and Proximity

Philosophy Series 11 – Aristotle and Modernity: The Eternal and Science

Philosophy Series 12 – Levinas and the Problem of Metaphysics

Philosophy Series 13 – On Origin

Philosophy Series 14 – George Orwell and Emmanuel Levinas Introspective: Socialism and the Other

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Philosophy Series 4

The Pre-Socratics¹

Hesiod

Theogony 105-133

χαίρετε, τέκνα Διός, δότε δ᾽ ἱμερόεσσαν ἀοιδήν.
κλείετε δ᾽ ἀθανάτων ἱερὸν γένος αἰὲν ἐόντων,
οἳ Γῆς τ᾽ ἐξεγένοντο καὶ Οὐρανοῦ ἀστερόεντος,
Νυκτός τε δνοφερῆς, οὕς θ᾽ ἁλμυρὸς ἔτρεφε Πόντος.
εἴπατε δ᾽, ὡς τὰ πρῶτα θεοὶ καὶ γαῖα γένοντο
καὶ ποταμοὶ καὶ πόντος ἀπείριτος, οἴδματι θυίων,
ἄστρα τε λαμπετόωντα καὶ οὐρανὸς εὐρὺς ὕπερθεν
οἵ τ᾽ ἐκ τῶν ἐγένοντο θεοί, δωτῆρες ἐάων
ὥς τ᾽ ἄφενος δάσσαντο καὶ ὡς τιμὰς διέλοντο
ἠδὲ καὶ ὡς τὰ πρῶτα πολύπτυχον ἔσχον Ὄλυμπον.
ταῦτά μοι ἔσπετε Μοῦσαι, Ὀλύμπια δώματ᾽ ἔχουσαι
ἐξ ἀρχῆς, καὶ εἴπαθ᾽, ὅ τι πρῶτον γένετ᾽ αὐτῶν.
ἦ τοι μὲν πρώτιστα Χάος γένετ᾽, αὐτὰρ ἔπειτα
Γαῖ᾽ εὐρύστερνος, πάντων ἕδος ἀσφαλὲς αἰεὶ
ἀθανάτων, οἳ ἔχουσι κάρη νιφόεντος Ὀλύμπου,
Τάρταρά τ᾽ ἠερόεντα μυχῷ χθονὸς εὐρυοδείης,
ἠδ᾽ Ἔρος, ὃς κάλλιστος ἐν ἀθανάτοισι θεοῖσι,
λυσιμελής, πάντων δὲ θεῶν πάντων τ᾽ ἀνθρώπων
δάμναται ἐν στήθεσσι νόον καὶ ἐπίφρονα βουλήν.
ἐκ Χάεος δ᾽ Ἔρεβός τε μέλαινά τε Νὺξ ἐγένοντο:
Νυκτὸς δ᾽ αὖτ᾽ Αἰθήρ τε καὶ Ἡμέρη ἐξεγένοντο,
οὓς τέκε κυσαμένη Ἐρέβει φιλότητι μιγεῖσα.
Γαῖα δέ τοι πρῶτον μὲν ἐγείνατο ἶσον ἑαυτῇ
Οὐρανὸν ἀστερόενθ᾽, ἵνα μιν περὶ πάντα καλύπτοι,
ὄφρ᾽ εἴη μακάρεσσι θεοῖς ἕδος ἀσφαλὲς αἰεί.
γείνατο δ᾽ Οὔρεα μακρά, θεῶν χαρίεντας ἐναύλους,
Νυμφέων, αἳ ναίουσιν ἀν᾽ οὔρεα βησσήεντα.
ἣ δὲ καὶ ἀτρύγετον πέλαγος τέκεν, οἴδματι θυῖον,
Πόντον, ἄτερ φιλότητος ἐφιμέρου: αὐτὰρ ἔπειτα
Οὐρανῷ εὐνηθεῖσα τέκ᾽ Ὠκεανὸν βαθυδίνην²

Hail, children of Zeus! Grant lovely song and celebrate the holy race of the deathless gods who are for ever, those that were born of Earth and starry Heaven and gloomy Night and them that briny Sea did rear. Tell how at the first gods and earth came to be, and rivers, and the boundless sea with its raging swell, and the gleaming stars, and the wide heaven above, and the gods who were born of them, givers of good things, and how they divided their wealth, and how they shared their honors amongst them, and also how at the first they took many-folded Olympus³. Tell me all of this, you Muses who have your homes on Olympus, from the beginning [archê, ἀρχῆς], tell who first of them (the gods) came-to-be [genet’, γένετ᾽].

First of all Chaos came-to-be [genet’, γένετ᾽]; but then afterwards Broad-breasted earth, a secure dwelling place forever for all [the immortals who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus], and misty Tartara in the depths under the wide-wayed grounds and Eros who, handsomest among the deathless gods a looser of limbs, in all the gods and in all human beings overpowers in their breasts their intelligence and careful planning. And from Chaos came-to-be both Erebos [ρεβος, the god of deep darkness, shadow] and dark night, and from night, in turn, came-to-be both Aither [the god of upper air, the mist of bright, glowing light, home of the gods] and day, whom she conceived and bore after joining in love with Erebos. But earth first begat, as an equal to herself, starry sky, so that he might cover her on all sides, in order to be a secure dwelling place forever for all the blessed gods, and she begat the tall mountains, pleasing haunts of the goddess-nymphs who make their homes in the forested hills, and also she bore the barren main with its raging swell, the sea, all without any sweet act of love; but then next, having lain with sky, she bore deep-swirling ocean”⁴

This is the beginning of the Hesiod’s Theogony, the birth of the gods, the an-archic, origin of origins, written around 700 BC, more than 2700 years ago. Hesiod was a poet and a contemporary of Homer. The Theogony was probably influenced by Hittite and Babylonian cultural trade influences which were known to have happened a few centuries earlier.⁵ The Theogony was an early and important influence on latter Greek thinking. The traditional understanding of chaos is that it is the separation of the earth and sky. Cornford⁶ and Kirk and Raven⁷ understood the cosmogonic, mythopoeic Theogony as another telling of the Babylonian⁸ and Hebrew⁹ cosmogony with regard to the separation of earth and sky.¹⁰ Both of those cosmogonic accounts refer to a separation of the earth and sky at the beginning of creation. The Babylonian and Hebrew accounts start with a propositional statement of assertion, apophantis, about cosmogenesis (i.e., In the beginning God created the heaven the earth). However, the Theogony starts with Hesiod’s interrogative, the openness of his question to the Muses.

Hesiod asks a question of the Muses. The Muses are female goddesses. They are the birth, origin and keepers of art and knowledge.¹¹ Hesiod asks which of the gods was the first that “came-to-be”. A conundrum is embedded in Hesiod’s question. Namely, how can the first come to be? The Muses were fond of play and gaiety. As such, they reply in kind to Hesiod that “truly” and “verily” the first, Chaos, came-to-be. In the very first reply to Hesiod, the ‘truth’ is at play in the Muses. The Muses here are speaking as one even though there are nine Muses. Even in this, there is already play of the ‘one and the many’, harmony and cacophony, the doubling of the signature¹². What is more, Hesiod’s question preconditions the answer given by the ‘one and the many’ Muses. Hesiod asks, “from the beginning [archê, ἀρχῆς], tell who first of them (the gods) came-to-be [genet’, γένετ᾽]”?

Let’s take a closer look at the Muses reply to Hesiod…

First of all Chaos came-to-be

ή τοι μεν πρώτιστα Χάος γένετ’;

Etoi men protista Xaos genet’;

The gist of the words is:

‘The very first’, πρώτιστα (protista), comes from the Doric-Aeolic dialects of ancient Greece. It was also used in Hesiod’s era known as the Poetic or Homeric. The Aeolic dialect is more archaic than the Attic-Ionic dialect used by later Greek philosophers. Just as we have many words in English that come from older languages, the language of ancient Greece also comes from older languages and a confluence of dialects (for a more detailed discussion of ancient Greek dialects and philosophers see Appendix A, Part 1). Πρώτιστα (protista) here is an adjective, singular, feminine and nominative¹⁸ of protistos, the very first, superlative of protos, first. It is where we get ‘proto’ as in prototype.

Chaos (χάος) is the Greek word χάος. It is not confusion, un-differentiation or an unbounded space or place.¹⁹ It is a gap, yawn, breach, separation or void. As such, it implies radical differentiation. However, it is not space as later philosophers thought it to be. Kirk and Raven made the case that chaos as space, water, or disorder was not Hesiod’s idea but a later notion in Greek philosophy.

Three interpretations may be rejected immediately: (i) Aristotle (Phys. I, 208 b 29) took it to mean space. But this concept is much later than the Theogony, occurring first, probably, in Pythagoras, then more clearly in Zeno of Elea, and most clearly in Plato’s Timaeus. (ii) The Stoics followed Zeno of Citium (e.g. SVF I 103), who perhaps took the idea from Pherecydes of Syros (DK 7BIa), in deriving xaos from χέεσθαι and therefore interpreting it as what is poured, i.e. water. (iii) The common modern sense of chaos as disorder can be seen e.g. in Lucian Amores 32, where Hesiod’s xaos is interpreted as disordered, shapeless matter. This, again, may be Stoic in origin.²⁰

Yένετ’ (genet’) is a verb, 3rd person, singular, middle voice used from the early Homeric and Ionic eras. The middle voice is not in modern Greek or modern languages. It denotes a mutual and simultaneous reciprocity of the subject acting on and being acted upon by something or someone. The middle voice only survives in a few languages other than ancient Greek such as Albanian, Bengali, Fula, Tamil, Sanskrit, Icelandic and Swedish. In this case γένετ’ denotes chaos acted on being and chaos was acted upon by being in the phrase ‘came to be’. Yένετ’ comes from γίγνομαι – come into a new state of being²¹ – γένετ’ is also used in γενετικός (genetikos), “genitive” and that from γένεσις (genesis, “origin, source, beginning, nativity, generation, production, creation”), from γίγνεσθαι second aor. γενέσθαι (“to be produced, become, be”).²² Note: This is also were we get our modern day word ‘genetics’. Yένετ’ and archê will become important concepts for ancient Greek philosophers a short time later (this will be discussed more later in the series).

The Muses tell us that being does not arise from ‘the one’ or from an unchanging, unmoved singularity as in monism nor even from a plurality. Being or ‘isness’ refuses consolidation, summation, absolute closure as given in some metaphysical ‘One’ or some synthesis of being and non-being (or nothingness). The Muses tell us that the gap, radical differentiation came to, acted on, ‘isness’ and that the gap, radical differentiation came upon, was acted upon, by ‘isness’. One important consequence of this is that at the beginning of the ancient Greek quest for phusis, for being, radical differentiation requires otherness first for being. Likewise, otherness is acted upon by being. However, the action upon otherness is a retreat; it is not an equivocal reciprocity which reduces to the same. It is not some kind of Hegelian ‘lifting up’ of the abstractions of being and nothing (aufhebung) into becoming and thus, concrete determinacy from abstraction.²³ This effect on otherness of being is privation, a withdrawal which eludes presence, form and idea. This notion of privation is key to understanding the struggle (polemus, strife, war) at work inside ancient Greek thinkers. Becoming is given by differentiation and radical otherness which cannot be brought fully to presence. Otherness is accentuated²⁴ and highlighted by being in its absence, both abstractly and concretely, in theory (θεωρία) and practice (πρᾶξις), in seeing and acting in its relentless refusal of being.²⁵

The Muses, in notably un-myth like language, do not declare a god as the first. Instead, in one voice they playfully undue their unison by first directly answering Hesiod’s question that chaos was first. The unity of the Muse’s voice is undone in their answer of the first, the primal lack of unity and presence. Chaos in this case is given as differentiation without prerequisite. The gap, separation, breach or void begs the question – between what? What does chaos hold open or serve as a gap? For traditional scholarship, the answer is earth and sky. However, the noted scholar Mitchell Miller points out:

What is it, however, that the coming-into-being of Chaos differentiates from what? It is clear that one side of the gap is ‘broad-breasted earth’, which comes to be ‘next’, immediately after Chaos. What is the other side? Cornford’s response is to look outside the text, on the one hand to cosmogonic myth in a host of archaic cultures, on the other hand to sixth and fifth century Greek poetry. In the latter, in particular in Ibycus, Bacchylides, and Aristophanes, he finds uses of xãow to refer to the space between the upper sky and the ground, the space through which birds fly. In the former, especially in Hebrew and Babylonian myth, he finds stories of the formation of the world through an original separation of earth and sky. And so he proposes that the coming-into-being of Chaos is the separation of earth and sky.6 Does the text support this possibility? Cornford finds both corroboration and apparent resistance. Self-evident corroboration, he thinks, is offered by line 700, where, he asserts without argument, xãow ‘denotes the gap or void space between sky and earth’. But the text, he recognizes, appears to resist his interpretation at lines 126-127 [in the Greek text cited above]: there, only a few lines after telling of the coming-into-being of Chaos, Hesiod tells how ‘earth first bore…starry sky’. If, as he presumes, Chaos is ‘the gap separating heaven and earth’ and it ‘has already come-into-being’, there should be no need for earth to go on to beget sky; that begetting ‘duplicates’ the coming-into-being of sky that must have already occurred with the coming-into-being of Chaos.²⁶

Chaos is a differentiation but of what? No typical poetic trope is given by the Muses in their direct answer. The Muses state plainly that the very first was chaos. Then, with deference to the question they add to “First of all Chaos” with “came-to-be”, genet’. Hesiod is asking for the first, how it came-to-be (genet’), and they tell him chaos but with the same supplement in Hesiod’s question, genet’. The wisdom of this statement is along the lines of “First of all Chaos”. How can chaos come-to-be if it was first? Isn’t this a contradiction? Contradiction would not bother a Muse. However, what would bother a Muse is mere contradiction; so boring. Instead, a deeper thread, a secret meaning was always more fun for a Muse. Perhaps, what they were implying is not only what was first, what had no prior origin or birth, but what ‘come-to-be’ is. ‘Come-to-be’ is becoming. Becoming must always come from difference. Difference ‘first’ allows the possibility for determinateness. The possibility for determinateness is the gap, the opening, which makes becoming possible. Instead of the one and many voices of the Muses giving one answer to Hesiod, they give him two in one…now that is more like a Muse. The Muses are not contradicting themselves or giving an infinite regression but giving Hesiod the answer he wants and more. The answer has exceeded the expectation of the question as it MUST since the question marks a limit to what an answer should be (i.e., does ‘what was the first’ ask for a chicken or an egg and how would the answer ever decide the question?). Instead of a declaratory, apophantic, answer, the Muses transcend the limits of the question with a double answer which the Muses testify to as “now surely, truly, verily” “indeed, of a truth”. Additionally, according to Miller²⁷, Hesiod had no way, given the tools of his mythopoeic language, to think the ‘first’ without a coming-to-be. Additionally, the lapse of the mythopoeic style in this one phrase was not a necessary lapse. Hesiod could have written this in a form more true to the overall style of the poem but he didn’t. This can either be ignored as an omission of Hesiod (or an addition of someone else) or intentional and a mark of an emphasis of some type. Even today, when a song or poetic interlude is stated directly and plainly, without the trappings of the current style, it is meant to bring atypical attention to what is stated.

Could it be that the very first, the beginning (archê) Hesiod asks for, is always incomplete, determinate but without specific determinations to come-to-be…to came-to-be…to evoke chora (khora or chora; χώρα, clearing, opening);²⁸ the evocation gestured in the written supplement – “but then afterwards” (αὐτὰρ ἔπειτα; autar epeita). Autar epeita first gives later, the temporal (sorge), the chora of becoming (genet’)? The gaping void requires, necessitates, determines, place (chora), generation (origin), birth, response (the evocative) and temporality. The chaos differentiates but without anything to differentiate, the opening of difference is broken on the disjunctive, “but then afterwards” (αὐτὰρ ἔπειτα; autar epeita). Drew Hyland makes this remark about autar epeita:

With the autar epeita, Hesiod emphasizes the very separation from the subsequent comings-to-be of earth, Tartaros, and eros. Autar, according to Liddell and Scott, means “but, besides, moreover” and is employed “to introduce a contrast.” Epeita, in turn, means, again quoting Liddell and Scott, “when in strong opposition to the former act or state, with past tenses, `thereafter, afterwards.””‘ Since autar establishes precisely such a contrast with the preceding, I have altered Miller’s translation slightly to try to bring out that contrast; hence my “but then afterwards …” rather than Miller’s less strong “then next.” My point, then, is that not only does Hesiod say “First of all Chaos came-to-be”; with the emphatic autar epeita he clearly distinguishes the coming-to-be of Chaos from what comes afterwards: earth, Tartaros, eros, and then gradually the rest of the articulated cosmos.²⁹

Autar epeita is not generative. Earth, Tartara and Eros are not born from chaos. If the Muses meant ‘born’ they could have used a form of genet’ or γόνος (gonos; that which is born, begotten, child, offspring). The “strong opposition” Hyland writes of does not join what follows but demarcates, refuses the cause and effect of progeny, with what follows. Hesiod’s chaos is not-yet temporal. Temporality begins for the Muses with autar epeita not as later Latin history suggested with Cronus.

It is important that in one of the most important accounts at the dawn of ancient Greek philosophy, how being came to be was answered by the jesting Muses in a rare directness, a full moment (kairos), as radical disjuncture, as chaos. Before logos (where we get our word logic) we find the question of origin, of beginning, is anarchy (an-archê, ἀν-αρχία; no origin). Anarchy founds origin from the impossibility of origin. Origin must generate (gene) being in the absolute void of chaos, the gap. ‘Coming to be’ is not completed in logos but left open by chaos. Ancient Greek philosophy must ever after be read from the riddle of origin. Origin must be said from logos which, in its fullest moment, undoes and erases itself as chaos, an unbridgeable gap. Only in this unsettled and unresolved footing does ancient Greek philosophy acquire its richness and dislodge itself from final closure. In this way, being is held open as existence. Phusis is not closed off by some reductive, anthropomorphic mythos but becoming is first opened by chaos, a radical alterity, a gap generative of inquiry, of logos. History and temporality find their start in “but then afterwards” from the face of what undoes it not from some absolute but from groundless suspension over the void (as Heidegger might suggest). Anarchy is not evasion from rule and domination as Latin later postulated and forever embodied it in the metaphysic of individuality, but in the suspension of finality or origin. Existence is never complete. Completion or fulfillment (telos) can never be final because origin can only cover over its chaotic lack. Existence cannot resolve itself as idea (eidos, the form or appearance of things); not even as ‘it’. The notion of phusis as ‘it’, as third person neuter, can only supplement an unsolvable riddle, a Gordian knot, which can only untie itself by tying another knot. The Idea can only be, always and already, a “but then afterwards” which fills the gap, the yawning gap that must withdraw from sight and appearance. In this riddle, play of the Muses, ancient Greek thought attained astounding depth and richness which both posed and opened the question of appearance and being, phusis and ‘beings as such’ or ‘first cause’ (arche) later in the Latin era called metaphysics.³⁰ The priority of metaphysics for Aristotle was a priority of ontos–ology (the logos or study of being) over idea and appearance. Idea must forever be inchoate in origin and finality, perhaps shadows thrown on cave walls from Forms which can only dance over the void, eternally supplementing themselves from desire, Eros, the in-between of mortal and immortal; this radical otherness which cannot take the Form of a modern ‘it’ nor even an idea (the appearance of) of chaos but can only face us in the other. The good beyond being, the disjunction of the primacy of ontology and the impossibility of the never ending supplementation of the Idea can only ‘be’ in the face of the other which has no origin or completion in our gaze and yet, cannot be ignored.

Philosophy Series 5 – A Detour of Time

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¹ The series on the Pre-Socratics relies heavily on THE PRESOCRATIC PHILOSOPHERS: A CRITICAL HISTORY WITH A SELECTION OF TEXTS, BY G. S. KIRK & J. E. RAVEN, PUBLTSHED BY THE SYNDICS OF THE CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, Bentley House, 200 Euston Road, London, N.W., American Branch: 32 East 57th Street, New York , N.Y., CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1957 and Heidegger And Aristotle: The Twofoldness Of Being, Walter A. Brogan, Kindle Edition and Heidegger and the Greeks: Interpretive Essays, First of all Came Chaos, Drew A. Hyland, Kindle Edition.

² See Link

³ See Link

⁴ Hesiod, “Theogony”, Translated by Drew A. Hyland; “First of All Came Chaos”, Heidegger and the Greeks: Interpretive Essays (Studies in Continental Thought) (p. 9). Kindle Edition; For text see Link, Hes. Th. 115 to 135;

⁵ See Robin Lane Fox’s Travelling Heroes and Walcot’s Hesiod and the Near East

⁶ The Unwritten Philosophy and Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950), later reformulated in Principium Sapientiae: The Origins of Greek Philosophic Thought (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1971)

⁷ G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957). Restated and reaffirmed in Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983)

⁸ See Link

⁹ See Link

¹⁰ G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957)., Section “SEPARATION IN NON-GREEK SOURCES”, page 33-34

¹¹ See Link

¹² John Sallis, Chorology: On Beginning in Plato’s Timaeus (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), see the Prologue; Also Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” Limited Inc, trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman (Evanston, Il: Northwestern University Press, 1988)

¹³ See Link

¹⁴ See Link

¹⁵ πρώτιστα – adj sg fem nom doric aeolic poetic – Link, πρώτιστ-ος, η, ον, also ος, ον h.Cer.157:—poet. and late Prose Sup. of πρῶτος,

A the very first, Il.2.228, 16.656, Od.19.447; πολὺ π. Il.2.702, Od.14.220, etc.; ὁ π. χρόνος, opp. ὁ ἐνεστώς, PEleph.10.4 (iii B.C.); principal, primal, θεὰ π. Νύξ Phld.Piet.14; αἰτία Procl.Inst. 12; τῶν φύσει κρειττόνων π. ὁ δημιουργός Hierocl. in CA3p.424M., cf. Iamb.Comm.Math.4, al., Dexipp.Fr.32(b)J., Agath.3.2: neut. πρώτιστον as Adv., first of all, Od.10.462, 20.60, al., Pi.N.5.25, B.8.11, Ar.Lys.555, D.43.75, Antiph.98: also pl. πρώτιστα Il.1.105, Od.3.419, Hes.Op.109, A.Fr.195, S.OT1439, El.669, Ar.Pl.792; ἐπειδὴ π. now that, Alc.15.7; ὅτε π. when aforetime, Call.Aet.Oxy.2079.21; especially, principally, π. ἁλίσκεται ἐνταῦθα τὸ ὄψον Str.12.3.19: also τὸ π. E.Supp.430; τὰ π. Od.11.168. –
Link

¹⁶ See Link

¹⁷ γένετ’ – verb, 3rd person, middle voice used from the early Homeric time. It comes from γίγνομαι – come into a new state of being (see Link) – γένετ’ is also used in γενετικός [genetikos], “genitive” and that from Ancient Greek γένεσις (genesis, “origin, source, beginning, nativity, generation, production, creation”), from γίγνεσθαι second aor. γενέσθαι (“to be produced, become, be”). Link, from Proto-Indo-European *ǵenh₁, Note: This is also were we get our modern day word ‘genetics’.

¹⁸ See Link for information on the Greek grammar.

¹⁹
‘First of all’: On the Semantics and Ethics of Hesiod’s Cosmogony, Mitchell Miller, Ancient Philosophy 21 (2001), Mathesis Publications, See Link (pdf)

²⁰ G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957)., Section ” 4. THE HESIODIC COSMOGONY, AND THE SEPARATION OF SKY AND EARTH”, page 26-27

²¹ See Link

²² See Link

²³ Consider Hegel’s beginning in The Logic where he states: “Pure Being makes the beginning: because it is on the one hand pure thought, and on the other immediacy itself, simple and indeterminate; and the first beginning cannot be mediated by anything, or be further determined.” See Link, Section 86. This beginning is very different from the Hesiod’s beginning where pure ‘isness’ does not begin as indeterminate immediacy but contrarily ‘isness’ begins as differentiation, a gap, which begins as differentiated. The differentiation here is not yet mediated in Hesiod. Remember that in Hesiod’s cosmogony, meditation only starts after the phrase ‘but then afterwards”. Pure thought as idea (eidos) does not yet appear or take form in Hesiod’s ‘first’. Mediation does not lead to determinacy for Hesiod but determinacy leads to mediation. This is an important distinction which may have led the entire Hegelian genius astray. It certainly deserves consideration at a minimum as, if nothing else, an important difference in Hegelian wissenschaft and post modernism with thinkers such as Derrida and Levinas.

Consider this a little latter in the same section:

When thinking is to begin, we have nothing but thought in its merest indeterminateness: for we cannot determine unless there is both one and another: and in the beginning there is yet no other. The indeterminate, as we have it, is the blank we begin with, not a featurelessness reached by abstraction, not the elimination of all character, but the original featurelessness which precedes all definite character and is the very first of all. And this we call Being. It is not to be felt, or perceived by sense, or pictured in imagination: it is only and merely thought, and as such it forms the beginning. Essence also is indeterminate, but in another sense: it has traversed the process of mediation and contains implicit the determination it has absorbed.

In Hesiod’s beginning there isn’t “the other” but otherness. Not long after Hesiod the struggle began to wrestle with precisely what Hegel is articulating. One answer the Eleatics came up with is that in Hegel’s words “we cannot determine unless there is both one and another”. Therefore, the Eleatics came up with ‘the One’. Hegel believes that they erred in naming this being, “they went too far”, When Hegel states, “The indeterminate, as we have it, is the blank we begin with, not a featurelessness reached by abstraction, not the elimination of all character, but the original featurelessness which precedes all definite character and is the very first of all. And this we call Being” he initially states that the indeterminate is not some “featurelessness reached by abstraction” but then goes on to tell us about “the original featurelessness which precedes all definite character and is the very first of all”. Wouldn’t this require that the “original featurelessness” has also been arrived at by featurelessness abstraction? Would it be sacrilege to suggest that at minimum the “original featurelessness” is made up of language and words which may hint a kind of yet another form of “featurelessness reached by abstraction”. This subtle circularity denies in order to reaffirm albeit more seductively. In any case, the logic of determination without one or another is certainly compelling and it is understandable how one might be lead from here to monism or immediacy. However, the inability of even the word ‘immediacy’ to divest itself of language and therefore mediacy and abstraction violently forces a conclusion which cannot be sustained by virtue of its own terms. Hegel’s immediacy can never be what it assumes something other than language and thereby escape the hermeneutical circularity of language. This impossibility should be preserved in thought not replaced with yet another supplement, a façade or appearance, which has the effect of relieving this absurdity (i.e., immediacy). In the Muse’s refusal to resolve chaos as first undifferentiated but instead differentiated without “both one and another” a questioned is opened which, depending on decision, can either be nonsense or some other (Latinized chaos as disorder or the Greek notion of gap).

²⁴ …could we say with Kierkegaard accentuating passion to the infinite …

²⁵ When determination is derived, it becomes dependent on its determinate whether it is ‘immediacy’, abstraction, etc. When determination is differentiation before ‘objects’, the notion of the other does not depend on derivation but upon, as Levinas might suggest, ‘Ethics’. Levinas might suggest borrowing from Plato’s ‘the good beyond being’ as the good otherwise than being (note the radical disjuncture).

²⁶ ‘First of all’: On the Semantics and Ethics of Hesiod’s Cosmogony, Mitchell Miller, Ancient Philosophy 21 (2001), Mathesis Publications, page 5

²⁷ “…what is remarkable is not that Hesiod says of Chaos that it genet[o], ‘came-to-be’ or, connotatively, ‘was born’; he has little choice. Rather, what is remarkable is that, in face of the assumption that what ‘comes-to-be’ must have a parent, he holds back from naming one and instead declares Chaos to have come-to-be ‘first’.” See Link (pdf, page 21-22)

²⁸ John Sallis, Chorology: On Beginning in Plato’s Timaeus (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999)

²⁹ Drew A. Hyland; “First of All Came Chaos”, Heidegger and the Greeks: Interpretive Essays (p. 13). Kindle Edition, page 13

³⁰ See Link