Philosophy, Art, and the Imagination: Essays on the Work of John Sallis (Studies in Contemporary Phenomenology, 21) 9004507086, 9789004507081

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Philosophy, Art, and the Imagination

Studies in Contemporary Phenomenology Editorial Board Gert-Jan van der Heiden, Radboud University, Nijmegen (Editor-in-chief); Antonio Cimino, Radboud University, Nijmegen Advisory Board Arnaud Dewalque, University of Liège, Theodore George, Texas A&M University, Sophie Loidolt, Technical University of Darmstadt, Jos de Mul, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, Peter Reynaert, University of Antwerp, John Sallis, Boston College, Hans-Rainer Sepp, Charles University, Prague, Laszlo Tengelyi†, Bergische Universität, Wuppertal, Georgia Warnke, University of California, Riverside, Sanem Yazıcıoğlu, Istanbul University Founding Editor Chris Bremmers, Radboud University, Nijmegen

volume 21

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/​scp

Philosophy, Art, and the Imagination Essays on the Work of John Sallis Edited by

James Risser

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Risser, James, 1946-​editor. Title: Philosophy, art, and the imagination : essays on the work of John Sallis /​edited by James Risser. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2022] | Series: Studies in contemporary phenomenology, 1875–​2470 ; volume 21 | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “John Sallis has been at the cutting edge of the Continental philosophical tradition for almost half a century, and it is largely due to his contributions that we have come to understand “Continental” as designating an original philosophical, not a geographical, tradition. His work, with its uncommon scholarly rigor, has come to define the best of that tradition and to expand its horizons in creative ways through a genuine philosophical imagination. The essays gathered here are dedicated to assessing Sallis' contribution and to indicating some of the ways in which his works might shape the future of philosophy”–​Provided by publisher. Identifiers: lccn 2021052935 (print) | lccn 2021052936 (ebook) | isbn 9789004507081 (hardback) | isbn 9789004507098 (ebook) Subjects: lcsh: Sallis, John, 1938-​ Classification: lcc B945.S154 P49 2022 (print) | lcc B945.S154 (ebook) | ddc 191–​dc23/​eng/​20211106 lc record available at https://​lccn.loc.gov/​2021052935 lc ebook record available at https://​lccn.loc.gov/​2021052936

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/​brill-​typeface. issn 1875-​2 470 isbn 978-​9 0-​0 4-​5 0708-​1 (hardback) isbn 978-​9 0-​0 4-​5 0709-​8 (e-​book) Copyright 2022 by James Risser. Published by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau Verlag and V&R Unipress. Koninklijke Brill nv reserves the right to protect this publication against unauthorized use. Requests for re-​use and/​or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill nv via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-​free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

To John and Jerry Sallis

∵

Contents  Foreword On Leaving Footprints: Some Remarks on the Legacy of John Sallis ix Dennis J. Schmidt  List of Figures xiv  List of Abbreviations xv  Notes on Contributors xvii  Introduction 1 James Risser and Walter Brogan

part 1 Directions within Greek Philosophy 1  “Beneath the Earth and in the Heavens”: John Sallis in His Elements 15 Michael Naas 2  Philosophy and Monstrosity, an Ode to Artemis 32 Sara Brill 3  Boundless Images: John Sallis and the Ancient Gods 46 Claudia Baracchi 4  “Shaggy, Lustful, Partly Animal”: John Sallis on Plato’s Symposium 71 S. Montgomery Ewegen 5  The Stretch between Limitless Flow and Absolute Stasis: Figuring the Flow of Nature and the Determinacy of Being 86 Walter Brogan

part 2 On Art and Translation 6  Freeing the Eye 99 Alejandro A. Vallega

viii Contents 7  Interpreting the “Sense” of Art 118 James Risser 8  To Speak of Art … at the Limit 129 Jeffrey Powell 9  On Translating John Sallis 145 Drew A. Hyland

part 3 Concerns of Philosophy 10  On the Way to the Sensible: Disrupting Simple Directions 157 Peg Birmingham 11  John Sallis’ Liminal Phenomenology 173 Daniela Vallega-​Neu 12  Elemental Ecology: Reading John Sallis in an Age of Earth Crisis 187 Jason M. Wirth 13  Force of Imagination as Critical Turning Point: Sallis and the Future of Philosophy 200 Bernard Freydberg  Response 210 John Sallis  Index 233

Foreword

On Leaving Footprints: Some Remarks on the Legacy of John Sallis Dennis J. Schmidt The essays gathered in this volume are devoted to a critical appraisal of the work of John Sallis. That body of work—​which spans over five decades, more than twenty books, and countless articles, translations, and talks—​is impressive in both size and scope. It is no surprise then that these essays on Sallis’ writings cover such a wide range of topics and questions. From art and the imagination, translation, language, poetry, painting, and novels to music, landscape, science, cosmology, and nature, Sallis has addressed a remarkable number of themes and demonstrated the importance of each for philosophical questioning. Similarly, Sallis’ work has addressed an equally remarkable number of philosophical figures and texts. His work on ancient Greek thought has been ground-​breaking: Being and Logos changed how Plato was read and, lest we thought Plato was settled, Chorology opened the Timaeus in radically new ways. Likewise, Sallis’ writings on German philosophy have defined pivotal discussions of our time and, of course, the same must be said of Sallis’ engagement with Derrida and French thought. In short, the sweep of Sallis’ work, his erudition and scholarship, his research and reach, and his uncanny ability to find access to texts, ideas, and questions that open new avenues for thinking never cease to amaze and to captivate while defining the cutting edge of thinking. One quickly realizes that Sallis’ work is marked by a readiness to learn from worlds and experiences beyond the customary horizons of philosophical concerns and that he does not shrink those experiences to fit philosophical concepts or categories, but rather lets those experiences enlarge his sense of the philosophical. This is one feature of Sallis’ radicality: his continual shattering of the expectations we have and his rewriting of the starting points of our understanding. Sallis’ work is distinguished by what seems to be an unerring homing instinct for what is original, for a return to sources, to the birthplace of what needs to be thought. Appropriately, Sallis’ work has itself given birth to so much; it has opened up new ways of understanding and with that previously unimagined futures. The legacy of his work is just beginning to be explored and the aim of this volume is to unfold some of promises of that legacy. While Sallis’ writings will endure and continue to stimulate discussions and philosophical imaginations, it is important to recognize that his legacy is not only the result of those written works. Indeed, Sallis’ contributions to the intellectual life of our times—​and, in particular, the way in which he has opened up

x Foreword possibilities for others—​should not be forgotten. It is striking just how many spaces for discussion and for nourishing the work of philosophy owe their existence to John Sallis. So, to understand Sallis’ legacy, one needs to acknowledge the way in which he has carved out new and enduring spaces that have enabled important work by so many. There are three especially important ways in which Sallis has quietly, but powerfully, shaped the contexts of philosophizing today and all deserve mention. First, Sallis has founded institutions and sponsored events that highlight the work of others. One thinks, for instance, of the journal, Research in Phenomenology, which has become among the most important resources for those working in the Continental tradition since Sallis founded it in 1971. That journal has published the work of younger scholars, established figures, and some of the most famous philosophers today. In this way, Research in Phenomenology has defined the tradition of Continental thought, launched the careers of younger philosophers, and disseminated some of the most innovative and important scholarship in the tradition. What’s more, Sallis’ book series with Indiana University Press has set the standard for cutting edge work in Continental thought and has been effective in promoting scholarship and works of great philosophical imagination. Over decades, that series has demonstrated Sallis’ unerring instinct for talent and his capacity to cultivate the work of a younger generation. Along with his contribution to publishing, Sallis has been the driving force behind many important events and traditions. In particular, his role as a founder and enduring pillar of the Collegium Phaenomenologicum has helped shape that international gathering for over four decades. During that time, well over a thousand graduate students, younger faculty, and more established figures have come together for discussions, lectures, seminars, and informal conversations that have generated many dissertations, books, articles, and cultivated intellectual friendships of real significance. It also needs to be said that Sallis’ energies have yielded genuinely important public events that have made something visible which might otherwise have simply been overlooked: one thinks here of countless conferences that Sallis organized as well as the magnificent art exhibitions he curated on Paul Klee and on Cao Jun. All of these events and institutions have widened and made livelier the possibilities of philosophy in our time—​and for times to come—​and in his efforts Sallis has changed, enlarged, and enriched what philosophy is today. One further legacy that Sallis has already left for philosophy’s future and that promises to continue to ripple in time for a very long time to come is found in Sallis’ remarkable force as a teacher, mentor, and inspiration for his students. Many of Sallis’ former students are themselves among the leading

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philosophers of the present age and the number of students he has taught, the number of dissertations directed, and students mentored into their own careers is astonishing. Sallis continues to work closely with students and to supervise dissertations, but his own students have also carried on this tradition and now they too help to form the work of so many working in philosophy today. A third generation of philosophers can now trace their heritage back to John Sallis—​and not only in North America, but also in Britain, Europe, Asia, and South America. In this deep commitment to teaching and to helping students find their own voice, Sallis has carried forward a tradition that has defined and endured throughout the best of philosophy’s history. Perhaps one of the most important contributions of philosophy to culture is the new sense of what it means to teach. In ancient Greece, one sees this highlighted in the different senses of teaching found in Homer and in Plato. In the Odyssey, Telemachus has Mentor as his teacher. Telemachus is described as “napios”—​e.g., inarticulate and disconnected from what matters—​and his Mentor sees it as his task to put “menos”—​e.g., strength and integrity—​into Telemachus. In the figure of Mentor, Homer presents a vision of the teacher as someone who possesses wisdom and passes it along to the young from a position of superiority. But Socrates is a different sort of teacher, one who does not speak from a position of a presumed superiority or any special knowledge; he never presumes to teach what needs to be known, but only how to learn, how to understand. Socrates demonstrates that one who is able to teach must be open to learning. Plato recognized the rarity of such a teacher and wove into the very idea of philosophy such a relation to teaching and learning. Understanding and unfolding this sameness of being, logos, and ergon—​ this commensurability of word and deed that defines Socratic practices and that we witness in the dramatic life of the dialogues—​is one of the great achievements of Sallis’ Being and Logos. It is also at the heart of Sallis’ gift as a teacher, a mentor, and a presence in the lives of so many. Because Sallis understands that teaching is inherently a philosophical activity, because to teach, to intensify the life of understanding and to engage in a discussion that has been carried on for millennia, is constituted as a philosophical practice for him it is clear that the bond between classroom, student, and written work is essential for Sallis. That is why the genuine curiosity, openness, and excitement—​one is tempted here to speak of wonder—​that animates the classroom finds its way into Sallis’ written work. One way in which this is manifested in Sallis’ work is evident in his readiness to engage almost anything philosophically and to do so with an innocence, openness, and even devotion to the phenomena at issue—​in short, with the readiness to learn and be surprised.

xii Foreword One sees this alchemy of an open mind, intense focus upon the matter at hand, and a sense of the wonder of birth in all of Sallis’ writings, but one sees this with a special clarity in his writings on nature, a topic that has only increased in importance for Sallis in recent years. Three characteristics of Sallis’ work on nature make this especially evident. First, Sallis argues that nature is not a region of already constituted objects lodged in a causal realm; rather, nature needs to be understood as the region of birth, of natality, and of appearance that continually renews itself. Second, such an understanding of nature as a place of becoming, of being born, means that one becomes aware of an insuperable limit beyond which our capacity for reflection cannot reach; one is reminded that birth and death—​the real movement of nature—​always mark something that resists the efforts of all reflective intrusion. Third, this sense of nature comes to be understood as a place of appearances of a remarkable sort: these appearances of nature are, as Sallis points out in his reading of the Theaetetus (155c), what Plato calls “hyper-​phyos” and as such they are the source of the wonder that marks the beginnings of philosophy. Sallis’ sense of nature as elemental and a source of wonder points to something at the heart of all his work. The sense of nature he formulates, the wonder it incites, is ultimately the expression of a profound affirmation. Sallis reminds us that properly understood, wonder is not just the “incitement” to a knowledge which then dissolves wonder itself, but that true wonder only ever intensifies itself. This renewal of a sense of wonder, this affirmation of a world, marks all of Sallis’ work. The essays that follow—​ each in its own way—​ unfold something of Sallis’ work. Collectively, these essays work to trace the enormous scope of Sallis’ work and to speak about the arc it has followed over the years. Taken together they demonstrate that Sallis has unerringly riveted his thought to something quite unique and one sees as well something of the most enduring hallmarks of Sallis’ own work and of his sense of the task of philosophy. Natality, birth, incipience, sensitivity and respect for a limit beyond the intrusions of reflection, for the elemental, and finally, but perhaps most importantly, an unfailing sense of wonder, a wonder without reason—​these are the sturdiest roots and open secrets that nourish John Sallis’ thought, his work, his teaching, and his contributions to a world in which philosophy is able to be carried on today. Whether he is writing about stone or Plato, Cao Jun or Hegel, Shakespeare, a mountain top or bird song, be it Hegel, Derrida, Nietzsche, Kant, Aristotle—​or any other of countless figures—​be it music or translation or Kandinsky, one comes to see that John Sallis is always quite delicately and decisively tracing and lovingly renewing this life of nature, of birth, of the elemental, and of wonder.

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Sallis’ work stands as a reminder that when it is done well, when it is most alive, thinking is exceedingly generous. His work demonstrates that philosophy can indeed renew the world, and that to love and care for the world in this way is to want to take responsibility for it. Such a body of work, such contributions to teaching and to creative spaces, serves as an example of why a life in philosophy has a meaning, a task, a reason beyond reason. What could be a better legacy? The essays in this volume mark a critical appraisal of a body of work that continues to unfold and surprise us. In the spirit of that work, these essays press forward sympathetically, push back critically, and open avenues for moving that legacy forward.

Figures 3.1  Dionysus riding a Cheetah, pella, iv c. bce, open domain 60 3.2  Doe at the edge of the woods, Boalsburg, 2004, photo permission by John Sallis 61 3.3  Cao Jun, boundless, 2013, with permission by artist 62 3.4 and 3.5  Goddess on the swing, Heraklion, Archeological Museum, pictures by chapter author 63 3.6  Athens in daylight, open domain 68 3.7  Athens at night, Creative Commons, https://​commons.wikimedia.org/​ wiki/​File:The_​Parthenon_​at_​Night.jpg 69 6.1  Monet, Wheatstacks, “Sunset” (1891), public domain 104 6.2  Camille Pissarro’s Washerwoman, Study (1880), public domain 111 6.3  Alejandro Vallega, Untitled, San Torini (2019), public domain 113 6.4  Vincent Van Gogh, Self-​Portrait with Straw Hat (1887), public domain 115 14.1  Claude Monet, The Red Kerchief, c. 1868–​73, Cleveland museum of Art 220 14.2  René Magritte, Hegel on Holiday, 1958, © 2021 C. Herscovici / ​Artists Rights Society (ars), New York 225

Abbreviations Books Authored by John Sallis b l

b m c n c t d p t d e d e h e i f i f n g r k m k s l i l t lw t o p l p r

Being and Logos: The Way of Platonic Dialogue. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1975. Second Edition. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1986. Third Edition. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. On Beauty and Measure: Plato’s Symposium and Statesman. Edited by S. Montgomery Ewegen. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2021. Crossings: Nietzsche and the Space of Tragedy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Chorology: On Beginning in Plato’s Timaeus. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Delimitations: Phenomenology and the End of Metaphysics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Second, expanded Edition, 1995. Double Truth. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995. Elemental Discourses. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018. Echoes: After Heidegger. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Ethicality and Imagination: On Luminous Abodes. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2022. Force of Imagination: The Sense of the Elemental. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. The Figure of Nature: On Greek Origins. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016. The Gathering of Reason. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1980. Second Edition. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. Klee’s Mirror. Albany: State University of New York Press, in collaboration with Zentrum Paul Klee (Bern), 2015. Kant and the Spirit of Critique. Edited by Richard Rojcewicz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020. Logic of Imagination: The Expanse of the Elemental. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012. Light Traces. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014. The Logos of the Sensible World: Merleau-​Ponty’s Phenomenological Philosophy. Edited by Richard Rojcewicz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019. On Translation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. Platonic Legacies. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. Phenomenology and the Return to Beginnings. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1973. Second Edition, 2002.

xvi Abbreviations r n The Return of Nature: On the Beyond of Sense. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016. s l Senses of Landscape. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2015. s n Songs of Nature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020. s p Shades: Of Painting at the Limit. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. s r Spacings—​Of Reason and Imagination. In Texts of Kant, Fichte, Hegel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. s t Stone. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. ta Transfigurements: On the True Sense of Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. t g Topographies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. v p The Verge of Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

Notes on Contributors Peg Birmingham is Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University. She is the author of Hannah Arendt and Human Rights: The Predicament of Common Responsibility (Indian up, 2006), co-​editor (with Philippe van Haute) of Dissensus Communis: Between Ethics and Politics (Koros, 1996), and co-​editor (with Anna Yeatman) of Aporia of Rights: Citizenship in an Era of Human Rights (Bloomsbury, 2014). She has recently completed a monograph, “Hannah Arendt and Glory: Political Immortality in an Age of the Superfluous.” She is the editor of Philosophy Today. Claudia Baracchi is Professor of Moral Philosophy at the Università di Milano-​Bicocca. Among her publications are Aristotle’s Ethics as First Philosophy (2008), Bloomsbury Companion to Aristotle (editor, 2014), L’architettura dell’umano (2014), Il cosmo della Bildung (with R. Rizzi, 2016), and Filosofia antica e vita effimera: Migrazioni, trasmigrazioni e laboratori della psiche (2020). Her research focuses on ancient philosophy (in relation to Eastern traditions and archaic thinking), psychoanalysis, philosophy of art, philosophy, and theater. She is a practicing analyst with a philosophical orientation in Milano. Sara Brill is Professor of Philosophy at Fairfield University. She works on the psychology, politics, and ethics of Plato and Aristotle, as well as on broader questions about embodiment, life, and power as points of intersection between ancient Greek philosophy, literature, and contemporary critical theory. She is the author of Aristotle on the Concept of Shared Life (2020) and Plato on the Limits of Human Life (2013), and the co-​editor (with Emanuela Bianchi and Brooke Holmes) of Antiquities Beyond Humanism (2019) and (with Catherine McKeen) of the forthcoming Routledge Handbook on Women and Ancient Greek Philosophy. Walter Brogan is a member of the Philosophy Department at Villanova University. He is on the board of directors of the Collegium Phaenomenologicum in Italy, and is a past member of the executive committee of the American Philosophical Association (Eastern) and the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. He is the co-​founder of the Ancient Philosophy Society and a past editor of Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy. His publications

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include a book on Heidegger and Aristotle, several edited volumes, and an array of articles on ancient philosophy and contemporary Continental Philosophy. S. Montgomery Ewegen is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Trinity College in Hartford, CT. He is author of The Way of the Platonic Socrates (2020) and Plato’s Cratylus: The Comedy of Language (2013), as well as multiple articles on Plato. He is also co-​ translator, along with Julia Goesser-​ Assaiante, of Martin Heidegger’s Heraclitus (2018) and Martin Heidegger /​Karl Löwith: Correspondence (1919–​ 1973) (2021). He currently lives in Middletown, CT. Bernard Freydberg is the author of The Thought of John Sallis: Phenomenology Plato, Imagi­nation (Northwestern, 2012) and 9 other books. His most recent book is titled Toward a New  Foundationalism: From Carnap to Kripke, and from Husserl to Sallis (Cambridge  Scholars Publishing, 2021). He has published over 50 papers on various subjects in Continental Philosophy, Ancient Philosophy, and Kant and German Idealism. After 30 years teaching at Slippery Rock University, PA, he taught at Koç University, Istanbul and became Scholar in Residence at Duquesne University. Drew A. Hyland is Charles A. Dana Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Trinity College, Hartford, CT. He has also taught at the University of Toronto, The New School for Social Research, Boston University, and Suffolk University. He is the author of books and articles on Ancient Greek Philosophy, 19th and 20th century Continental Philosophy, Philosophy of Art, and Philosophy of Sport. His recent publications include Plato and the Question of Beauty, Questioning Platonism: Continental Interpretations of Plato, and Finitude and Transcendence in the Platonic Dialogues. Michael Naas is Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University. He works in the areas of Ancient Greek Philosophy and Contemporary French Philosophy. His most recent books include Class Acts: Derrida on the Public Stage (Fordham University Press, 2021), Don DeLillo, American Original: Drugs, Weapons, Erotica, and Other Literary Contraband (Bloomsbury, 2020), and Plato and the Invention of Life (Fordham University Press, 2018). He is co-​translator of several works by Jacques Derrida, including Life Death, Seminar of 1975–​1976 (University of

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Chicago Press, 2020) and is a member of the Derrida Seminars Translation Project. He also co-​edits the Oxford Literary Review. Jeffrey Powell is Professor of Philosophy at Marshall University. He is the editor of Heidegger and Language and co-​translator (with Will McNeill) of Martin Heidegger’s The History of Beyng, both with Indiana University Press. He is also co-​editor (with Maria Acosta) of Aesthetic Reason and Imaginative Freedom: Friedrich Schiller and Philosophy with suny Press. He has published essays in various areas of 20th century Continental Philosophy and German Idealism. His current research focuses on the notion of power and its relation to contemporary political philosophy. James Risser is Professor of Philosophy at Seattle University and is a Senior Research Fellow at Western Sydney University. His published works include Hermeneutics and the Voice of the Other: Re-​reading Gadamer’s Philosophical Hermeneutics (1997) and The Life of Understanding: A Contemporary Hermeneutics (2012). He is the editor of Heidegger toward the Turn: Essays on the Work of the 1930s (1999) and coeditor (with Walter Brogan) of American Continental Philosophy (2002). His research is in the area of aesthetics and contemporary Continental Philosophy. He has recently completed a new study in hermeneutics. John Sallis is Frederick J. Adelmann Professor of Philosophy at Boston College. He is the author of more than twenty-​five books. He is the recipient of numerous awards. including the Humboldt Research Prize and an honorary doctorate from the University of Freiburg. He has previously held endowed Chairs at Loyola University of Chicago, Vanderbilt University, and Pennsylvania State University, as well as Visiting Professorships at Wuhan University (China), University of Bergen (Norway), Staffordshire University (UK), University of Freiburg (Germany), University of Tübingen (Germany), and Warwick University (UK). He has lectured throughout Europe, Asia, and South and North America. His writings have been translated into more than a dozen languages. Dennis J. Schmidt is Research Professor and Head of the Philosophy Department at Western Sydney University. He is the author of Idiome der Wahrheit (Klostermann

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Verlag), Between Word and Image (Indiana University Press), Lyrical and Ethical Subjects (suny Press), On Germans and Other Greeks (Indiana University Press), and The Ubiquity of the Finite (mit Press). He is the editor of the “suny Press Series in Continental Philosophy,” which has over 180 titles. His works cover areas such as Ancient Greek philosophy and literature, ethics, nature, hermeneutic theory, literary theory, aesthetics, and the post-​Kantian tradition of Continental Philosophy. Alejandro A. Vallega is Professor of Philosophy and Head of the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Oregon. Among his book publications are Heidegger and the Issue of Space: Thinking on Exilic Grounds; Sense and Finitude: Encounters at the Limits of Art, Language, and the Political and, Latin American Philosophy from Identity to Radical Exteriority. He has published extensively on aesthetics, hermeneutics, phenomenology, deconstruction, and Latin American thought. He is also a practicing painter and together with John Sallis co-​author of Light Traces. Daniela Vallega-​Neu is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oregon. Among her books are Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy: An Introduction (Indiana  University Press, 2003), The Bodily Dimension in Thinking (suny Press, 2005), and Heidegger’s Poietic Writings (Indiana University Press, 2018). She also is co-​ ­editor of Research in Phenomenology. Jason M. Wirth is Professor of Philosophy at Seattle University, and works in the areas of Continental Philosophy, Buddhist Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Environmental Philosophy. His recent books include Nietzsche and Other Buddhas: Philosophy after Comparative Philosophy (2019), Mountains, Rivers, and the Great Earth: Reading Gary Snyder and Dōgen in an Age of Ecological Crisis (2017), a monograph on Milan Kundera Commiserating with Devastated Things (2016), Schelling’s Practice of the Wild (2015), and the co-​edited volume (with Bret Davis and Brian Schroeder) Japanese and Continental Philosophy: Conversations with the Kyoto School (2011). He is the associate editor of the journal, Comparative and Continental Philosophy. He is currently completing a manuscript on the cinema of Terrence Malick as well as a work of ecological philosophy called Turtle Island Anarchy.

Introduction James Risser and Walter Brogan This volume is an attempt to critically engage with the philosophical work of John Sallis with the aim of contributing to new avenues of philosophical exploration.1 By any account, Sallis’ work is extensive in scope and does not lend itself to easy classification. While his work is deeply rooted in the tradition of continental philosophy, such a general statement does little to capture the true scope of his ideas. In his research, one finds a deep engagement with phenomenology, but also with hermeneutics, deconstruction, and other strands within continental philosophy. Equally, one finds an overriding attention to the history of philosophy. Sallis is rightly known as one of the most profound and ­creative readers of this history, most notably in the area of ancient Greek philosophy, but also in regard to the philosophies of Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and other figures in modern philosophy. And yet, Sallis remains a contemporary philosopher. In his more recent work, Sallis has devoted considerable attention to the question of art—​particularly painting and music—​and to what one might call, with proper qualifications, a philosophy of nature and the elemental. But this general description of his work still says too little, for it gives no indication of the originality of his work, which is unmistakable. One sees this originality in his unique reading and interpretation of texts. Much more than a simple exegesis, Sallis has an uncanny ability to open meanings within a text to greater clarity and new directions. What is most remarkable about his creative readings is just how faithful they remain to the matter at issue in the text and how persuasive they are for just this reason. One could say that the creative aspect of his reading of texts has to do with imagination, in the best sense of the word. It is just this word that comes closest to a name for the philosophy of John Sallis. Throughout his various writings, Sallis gives considerable attention to the imagination, freeing it from its location in the metaphysical tradition and its determination through the functioning of reason. In this regard, his “imagination trilogy,” composed of Force of Imagination (2000), Logic of Imagination (2012), and, most recently, Ethicality and Imagination: On Luminous Abodes (2022), can be said to be his most signature work.

1 The initial impetus for this collection of essays came as a result of a small conference at the Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center at Duquesne University in 2018.

© James Risser and Walter Brogan, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004507098_002

2 1

Risser and Brogan

A Brief Overview of the Work of John Sallis

Given Sallis’ large body of work and its incredible depth and breadth, it is difficult to summarize and highlight all that is offered. But there are some common threads that one can trace throughout Sallis’ corpus. Below, we elucidate four themes that can operate as exemplars of how Sallis approaches traditional philosophical concerns. In each case, we aim to show how Sallis engages in philosophy in an original way such that philosophy is set free to think differently in its concerns. 1.1 Beginning on the Verge Sallis’ first book was Phenomenology and the Return to Beginnings (1973). The theme of beginnings and endings remains a philosophical concern throughout Sallis’ career, as is evident from the titles of several of his works, e.g., Delimitations: Phenomenology and the End of Metaphysics (1995), Chorology: On Beginning in Plato’s Timaeus (1999), The Verge of Philosophy (2007), and The Figure of Nature: On Greek Origins (2016). In his essay in this volume, Michael Naas refers to Sallis’ claim in The Return of Nature: On the Beyond of Sense (2016) that: “It is by ‘returning to the beginnings of Western philosophy’ (rn 59) […] that we are best able to confront or to encounter a contemporary thinking that ‘borders on post-​phenomenological thought’ (rn 75), for this contemporary thinking at the end of metaphysics bears ‘a certain solidarity with the Greek beginning.’ ” For Sallis, philosophy itself begins on what he calls “the verge” and is determined in a movement out of the verge. He says: “All originary determination is situated on the verge. All determination in and through which something is brought about that is entirely unprecedented takes place on the verge” (vp 3). For Sallis, therefore, it is as a result of being situated on the verge that philosophy is able to enact its task of determining being, as Plato did in positing being as idea. For this reason, Sallis is thoroughly committed to the recovery of this verginal, archaic beginning, a beginning seemingly erased and concealed at the end of ancient Greek thinking. Sallis argues that it is not just the beginning of philosophy that occurs on the verge, the end of philosophy occurs on the verge as well. But to undertake philosophy on the verge will require a crossing or transition that is attuned to something other than what shows itself within the normal parameters of philosophy. Yet Sallis says that one who is attentive to this verginal moment and seeks to enact this transition faces a peculiar dilemma: “No longer claimed by the first beginning, it has nonetheless at its disposal nothing but the means stemming from this beginning, for it has not yet crossed over to another

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beginning” (vp 7). Sallis refers to this as the “duplicity of the verge” that is both within and beyond philosophy. All of Sallis’ work hovers in the space of this duplicity. Sallis philosophizes on the verge, deploying archaic moments within philosophy that, in some decipherable way, retain the space of the verge. 1.2 At the Limit of Philosophy: Sense and Imagination In her essay in this volume, Daniela Vallega-​Neu refers to Sallis’ philosophy as philosophy at the limit, and she calls his work liminal phenomenology. Such a description is indeed appropriate, for it captures Sallis’ distinctive way of engaging in the task of philosophy at the end of metaphysics. For Sallis, philosophy at the limit is philosophy freed from its commitment to the purely intelligible, such that it is able to reinstall the circulation within the sensible that traditional philosophy precludes in its commitment to the stability of the intelligible. Thus, philosophy at the limit does not deny the movement and fluidity that belongs to the self-​showing of the sensible. Philosophy at the limit is, in this sense, a philosophy of emergence and movement, of genesis and kinesis; that is to say, philosophy at the limit is a philosophy that can draw out both the creative and repetitive nature of what is. In order to trace what Sallis calls “installing the circulation within the sensible” (fi 74), philosophy at the limit needs to deconstruct the traditional appeal to closure of the sensible by employing what Sallis calls a double reading. Such a double reading brings out an intrinsic counter-​movement, an irreducible non-​presence, that occurs in every attempt to grasp the sensible within a metaphysics of presence. According to Sallis, the deconstruction of the history of philosophy that retraces—​and thereby begins again—​the circulation of this repressed counter-​movement is a necessary part of philosophizing at the limit. But deconstruction is not itself adequate to give birth to philosophy at the limit. What is required is that philosophy undergoes a self-​metamorphosis or, in Sallis’ terms, a mutation. This mutation enacts a radical reorientation of philosophy away from mere presence and toward the showing of things themselves from themselves. And it is this turn that Sallis claims will finally return phenomenology to itself. This turn to the self-​showing of things themselves is inseparable from what Sallis calls the force of imagination. Sallis is very careful to differentiate his treatment of imagination from the task of describing, analyzing, or understanding the treatment of imagination within the history of philosophy. Of course, his treatment of imagination is still intertwined with that very history, but its effect is to bring about a certain mutation of that history. Here too one finds a double reading, one that, in its analysis of significant moments in philosophy’s treatment of imagination, also reimagines and reinscribes

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an unspoken and disruptive dimension in what it is that philosophy seeks to accomplish. Thereby, this double reading releases a way of attending to the sensible thing—​what Sallis calls a double seeing, which directs itself to that from which the sensible thing arose—​outside of its being bound to the intelligible. By focusing briefly on the case of Sallis’ view of imagination, we can make an important feature of his overarching view clear: that, at a certain point, philosophy “turns back upon itself” (fi 28), even despite its apparent totalizing and its hierarchical direction. It is by situating his thinking within this recoiling character of philosophy that Sallis is able to perform a certain mutation of philosophy that occurs at its limit. His claim is that it is this recoil that frees sense from the purely intelligible and thus allows philosophy to begin again “gifted with sense” (fi 28). This gift of sense is what philosophy at the limit attends to. But this can only be achieved by practicing a certain fidelity to sense, by doubling the sensible rather than subjecting it to the intelligible. This doubling of the sensible—​a doubling that repeats without going beyond the sensible—​is, of course, philosophy’s recovery of its imagination. So, the recovery for philosophy of the gift of sense occurs by letting the recoil of that history occur again. The staying with the sensible that occurs at the limit of philosophy is what Sallis calls pragmatology (fi 41). This word serves to indicate Sallis’ phenomenologically-​inspired insistence that the appearing things are themselves the things themselves (Greek: pragma). Yet, this pragmatology is at once a monstrology. By using the term monstrology, Sallis wants to emphasize just how philosophy’s turn from a metaphysics of presence to a self-​showing of the sensible is not a matter of merely producing an adequate discourse. For Sallis, philosophical logos has the character of monstrosity (Latin: monstrum) insofar as the philosophical commitment to showing cannot escape from the monstrous character of the sensible as such. It cannot escape from the kind of negativity unknown to dialectical reasoning, in which the sensible displays a deviation of sorts, giving the sensible an unfathomable and uncapturable quality. What Sallis recovers for philosophy by allowing it to recoil and by the deployment of the sensible in its double seeing is its capacity to dwell on—​and in—​the monstrous immanence of things. 1.3 The Elemental and the Return to Nature In the very first pages of his monumental work, Force of Imagination: The Sense of the Elemental, Sallis writes: “On certain occasions (in Umbria, on the Aegean islands, at the site of the temples, etc.), in such places, there comes an appeal that enlivens imagination and attests to the elemental” (fi xii). This opening of an elemental time and place, the temporal and spatial site of originary manifestation, provokes in Sallis an intensification of imagination.

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That is, it provokes a recovery of the force of imagination. Though experienced by Sallis as an appeal that has remained unaddressed, it is more than a disowned, impartial witnessing. Rather, it is an attempt to give expression to the elemental that, on unique occasions and at special sites, showed itself to him. For example, when experiencing nature or art. For Sallis, the elemental is of a character that on its own withdraws in order to give sense to things. It shows itself only in the tracing of itself as figure and horizon, a tracing that occurs in the drawing into sensible being of what is. On its own, the self-​showing of the elemental is impossible. Instead, it is only in the doubling that occurs in certain artistic works that the self-​showing of the elemental is manifest. The sense of the elemental, a kind of self-​showing of phusis itself, requires its imaging in art, or its repetition and doubling in philosophical wonder. Philosophical wonder is what so often occurs when reading Sallis’ books. This reconnection of philosophy and art in the force of imagination is made explicit by Sallis toward the end of his Force of Imagination when he comments on the excessive, hypernatural wonder experienced by Theaetetus that Socrates calls the only beginning of philosophy. Sallis writes accordingly that: “The beginning philosopher—​and presumably this beginning is something the philosopher never leaves behind, not even (perhaps least of all) when at the limit—​is something of a monstrosity” (fi 220). This claim underpins Sallis’ attempts to offer a philosophical account of the wonder one undergoes in the face of the elemental. In this regard, his philosophy is, perhaps, best referred to by a word he himself coined: “elementology.” But this is not to say that the elemental is to be understood as the unknown ground of things. The language of ground would set the elemental within the theoretical as if it were a nature—​in the mode of an intelligible idea—​beyond nature. For Sallis, the elementals are older than the difference between fundamental and what is based on it. The elementals cannot be set apart from sensible things; they can only be understood in relation to natural things. The being together of elements and things thus replaces the ancient order of intelligible and sensible. Thus, Sallis’ holds that rather than asking about a ‘what,’ about an intelligible idea, it would be more proper to ask about the sense of the elementals, for they show themselves as being of the sensible without being themselves sensible things. So considered, earth and sky are natural elementals. 1.4 Space and Time Sallis distinguishes between tractive and poetic imagination. Of tractive imagination, which is carefully distinguished from the kind of imagination that might be attributed to the interiority of the soul or to the perceiving subject, Sallis writes:

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As configuring the self-​showing of things, imagination neither produces nor reproduces something seen in advance. It is neither productive nor reproductive, but rather tractive. Its dexterity allows it to draw the horizons around the upsurge of presence, its lines of force constituting  the field of protraction and retraction between the present aspect of the thing and the horizon that encloses it, gathering the non-​sense of sense to sense. (fi 138–​39) One can certainly recognize in this description the memorial and textual character of tractive imagination, which attends to the space and perspectival spacing of what is in tangible ways. The kind of dexterity that allows imagination to configure the self-​showing of things in their singularity occurs in an exemplary way in art and in certain kinds of discourse. There is, then, a clear link between what is here called tractive imagination and what Sallis later calls poetic imagination, which Sallis’ defines as the activity to effect a self-​showing not of nature but of the nature of nature, a doubling of nature. Both these forces of imagination are at play in the work of the artist and in the poetic word. One of the intriguing and difficult aspects of Force of Imagination is the way that Sallis sustains a commitment to the possibility of a showing of the Sache: the things as such, as they are in themselves, both in their horizonal, worldly character and in their singularity. Sallis argues for both the self-​identity of things and, going beyond Kant, for the possibility of an exposure of this identity (even while creating spaces for the reserve and the secret dimensions of sensible things, a reserve that Sallis treats with utter reverence and appreciation). It is this commitment to the self-​showing of a thing in the fullness of its being that lets us call Sallis a phenomenologist—​or perhaps a hyper-​phenomenologist—​since even though imagination allows for the self-​showing of the sensible, there is always also the space of doubling that holds in reserve the impossibility of full self-​showing as appearance. The key to understanding how this impossible self-​showing nevertheless occurs in imagination is found in Sallis’ lengthy and careful treatment of space, or better, what he calls “spacings.” Of course, Sallis’ quasi-​phenomenological analysis of space is intricately linked to an account of time, as is evident when he writes: “Time offers itself (and has its proper locus) there where things show themselves. There is time precisely at the site of manifestation” (fi 188). In Sallis’ analysis, originary time occurs in the spaces and in the expanse of things that are. Time is topological; it belongs to place. It is the time of light, of the sun, of the sky. This time of space is important to an understanding of the peculiar sense of the self-​identity of things to which all of Sallis’ thinking

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is committed. For it is not a reified, eternal identity that Sallis has in mind. It is rather what he calls “a perpetually recommencing self-​identity,” a gathering into one that cannot be, and yet nevertheless is, by virtue of imagination and the force of imagination. It is a self-​identity that retains utterly its temporality and spatiality, and thus has almost nothing at all to do with the sense of identity that is bound up with intuition and interiority. While Sallis’ work thus remains a kind of phenomenology, because of its commitment to the thing itself, the identity of the thing no longer is tethered to apprehension, and in fact is an exorbitant, excessive identity. In Sallis’ account of sense and imagination, therefore, the very sense of identity and limit is recirculated and put into play, and what is recovered is the showing of the pure gift of being-​there. 2

This Volume, in Outline

There are thirteen chapters in this volume divided into three different thematic areas. The first section addresses Sallis’ formative readings of ancient Greek philosophy with a special focus on the Presocratics and Plato. The second group of essays focuses on Sallis’ pioneering contribution to the study of art and his unique understanding of the movement of translation that occurs between philosophy and art. The last section is a group of four essays that address in various ways how Sallis’ thinking has directed philosophy into new directions and how it has created a space for future developments that would otherwise not have been possible. Below, we give a brief summary of each thematic area. 2.1 Beginning with Greek Philosophy One of the remarkable features of Sallis’ work is the pervasive and continuous role of ancient Greek philosophy in his thinking. Sallis has sustained a dialogue with Plato over several decades and this dialogue has not diminished in the least as his own voice and the originality of his thinking has gained recognition. But this is not at all a matter of pursuing two disjointed interests at the same time, namely, contributing to the future of philosophy, while, at the same time, contributing to an understanding of ancient Greek philosophy. Rather, his interest in the early Greek thinkers and Plato is closely intertwined with the originality of his thinking. This is not primarily because of a hermeneutic commitment to the tradition or even because of a belief, rooted in a sense of history, that philosophy must engage in a return to its origin in order to progress beyond it. It is this as well, but it is also much more than this. Sallis is

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constantly engaged with Plato, because of a sense that genuine philosophizing occurs on the edge of philosophy and at the threshold, and that it is by going back to these beginnings that philosophy can achieve its release. Sallis’ sustained dialogue with Plato is made perspicuous in three notable books: Being and Logos: Reading the Platonic Dialogue (1975/​1996), Chorology: On Beginning in Plato’s “Timaeus” (1999), and Platonic Legacies (2004). It would not be an exaggeration to call his first book on Plato, Being and Logos, a classic in the field. Its impact on scholars and students of philosophy is unmistakable. Towards the end of that work, Sallis meditates on what might be accomplished by those who attempt to engage with him in a careful and thoughtful reading of the Platonic dialogues. Certainly the experience would involve an appreciation of the immense demand Plato’s dialogues place upon those who read them in the way Sallis taught his students to read. For Sallis, to read a Platonic dialogue, or any philosophical text, in a philosophical way is to begin oneself to philosophize and to rekindle again the force and movement of original thinking that Plato’s thought underwent. This undergoing is what, Sallis says, he had hoped would occur in the readers of his book and, by extension, in the students who attended his many Plato seminars over the years, namely that the undertaking would lead to “an engagement in that movement which the dialogues themselves aim to provoke, the movement into philosophy, the movement which coincides with the beginning of philosophy” (bl 533). Sallis, then, is thoroughly committed in all of his thinking to the recovery of this archaic beginning. His thinking occurs on the verge of Platonism that begins with Plato, a verge from which the path of philosophy emerges and will emerge again. Above all, in this opening of philosophy that occurs with Sallis’ reading of Plato, it becomes clear that Plato is certainly no “Platonist.” What belongs to Platonism in its beginning is reawakened, namely “its choric cosmology, its ear for music, its proximity to the question of politics” (vp 10). In the first essay in this section of the volume, Michael Naas focuses on Sallis’ most recent work on early Greek thinking and Plato, and argues that  Sallis’ turn to nature as a central focus of his reading of the ancients makes explicit a theme that has quietly governed Sallis’ reading of the ancients from the beginning. Naas shows how Sallis’ work on phusis in his texts on ancient thought—​for example, his many texts on Plato’s Timaeus—​ is related to his work in contemporary cosmology and his writings on black holes and dark matter. In the second essay, Sara Brill calls attention to Sallis’ emphasis on the themes of human vulnerability and self-​ transcendence in Plato, and to

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the larger themes of excess and monstrosity (both in Plato and in Sallis’ own thinking). In the third essay, Claudia Baracchi emphasizes Sallis’ proto-​phenomenological commitment to adhere to what appears. In her discussion of what it means to say, “Everything is full of gods,” Baracchi draws from two of Sallis’ most salient books, Chorology: On Beginning in Plato’s Timaeus and Topographies, to develop an account of how Sallis understands the relationship between phusis and techne in ancient thought. S. Montgomery Ewegen, in the fourth essay of this volume, offers an analysis of Sallis’ careful readings of a specific Platonic dialogue, emphasizing the Dionysian dimension of Plato and of the work of John Sallis. Finally, in the last essay of this section, Walter Brogan comments on one of Sallis’ most recent books, The Figure of Nature: On Greek Origins, a book that moves from a discussion of the early Greek encountering of phusis to a transformative reading of the account of nature in Plato’s Theaetetus and Phaedo. 2.2 On Art and Translation It is well established that we misread Sallis’ work on art if we expect to find in it a philosophy of art in the ordinary sense. Strictly speaking, Sallis has no philosophy of art, because he is no ordinary philosopher writing about art. He refuses to subject art to a determination by philosophy, to a determination that privileges the concept of aesthetics when it comes to art. Put differently, Sallis’ rejects the claim that there can be a determination of art as aesthetics, as was initially conceived in modern philosophy. Thus, Sallis rejects any theory of the sensible that is taken from the perspective of reason. For that matter, Sallis disallows any determination of art as truth, even from the perspective of the Heideggerian notion of the truth of being. And yet, Sallis’ work on art is all about the sensible and a relation to truth. The difference in this regard is quite simple. Sallis, more so than any other contemporary philosopher, will write about art as art. In a 2006 interview, Sallis makes the point that philosophical texts have a tendency to be too insular—​they are often written in the margins of other philosophical texts. So, for the sake of a more direct engagement with painting and not just an engagement with texts, he wanted to try to write about painting differently. He wanted to write about painting more directly and in a way that could be instructive for philosophy. To achieve such a shift in his writing requires a different style, one that is not simply conceptual and does not subordinate the sensible to the conceptual. It is a matter of letting the painting show itself as a sensible phenomenon, a matter of being able somehow to

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explicate the painting, while at the same time undermining the saying so that the painting can appear. On this very idea, Sallis writes in Klee’s Mirror: One could say, then, that Klee’s work carries through, precisely in the works themselves, a major task that also imposes itself on philosophy today, namely, to free itself from the hold of the classical opposition between intelligible and visible. Whether carried out in the artwork or in thinking, what counts most of all is that the classical opposition not be simply negated or inverted, but that a return be made to the point at which, from which, it first arises, a return toward a place where visibility and inscription can be traced in a more originary and anterior way. (km 118) In the first essay in the second section of this volume, Alejandro Vallega focuses on the place of painting in the work of Sallis. Vallega explores Sallis’ notions of transfigurement—​that is, of the doubling of visibility that occurs in art and the crossing from philosophy to painting (e.g., from texts to the things themselves)—​and explains why Sallis turns to painting to enact the reconfiguration of the relationship between the sensible and the intelligible. His essay makes apparent the broad scope of Sallis’ interest in painting, which includes not only interpretations of Monet, Klee, Mimmo Paladino, and other Western artists, but also ancient Chinese art and contemporary Chinese artists such as Cao Jun. Each of these interpretations demonstrate how Sallis’ work lets come into appearance and shine forth what he calls “the look of things.” James Risser, in the second essay in this section, investigates the relationship between texts and works of art, and finds in Sallis’ works on art a complication of this distinction that evokes the crossing and weaving between text and image that occurs in interpretation. In bringing Sallis’ thought into connection with hermeneutics, Risser also shows how Sallis develops his logic of imagination, which goes beyond Gadamer’s approach to hermeneutics. In the third essay in this section, Jeffrey Powell focuses on Sallis’ treatment of imagination in his reading of Kant in such works as The Gathering of Reason. He argues that in marking the limits of metaphysics and the limits of philosophical discourse, the possibility opens up within philosophy for a turn to art. Finally, the section concludes with an essay by Drew Hyland on Sallis’ work on translation. As Hyland makes clear, all of the essays in this volume represent translations of the work of Sallis. Hyland reflects on what this means and what occurs in such translating. He highlights Sallis’ discussion of Schlegel’s translation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream to explore both what is lost in translation and what possibilities are opened that would otherwise

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never be offered. His essay helps to draw out Sallis’ confrontation with literature, but also with poetry and music. 2.3 Concerns of Philosophy The directness of the title of this section of essays is noteworthy: Concerns of Philosophy. These essays, each in their own way, attempt to address Sallis the philosopher and to point to what characterizes both his philosophy and his original contribution to philosophy. So much of what occurs in Sallis’ philosophy could be characterized as forms of memorial discourse; the twisting free of the language of tradition that memorializes and honors that tradition and, at the same time, lets the tradition of philosophy speak again in new and original ways. So much of Sallis’ work involves the recovery and re-​ enlivening of originary words in the tradition, and his work so often engages a repetition of narratives that draws out from them, in deepening layers, the sense of the elemental in the history of philosophy. For this reason, any discussion of Sallis’ originality as a philosopher needs to be understood in the context of his engagement with the history of philosophy and his conviction that reaching what is new in philosophy occurs by way of a renewal and a twisting free—​the enactment of a doubling—​of one’s own thinking in ­relationship to that history. This is why the essays in this section each demonstrate Sallis’ originality as a thinker in relationship to his readings of the history of philosophy. Peg Birmingham contributes the first essay in this section. She returns to one of the figures in philosophy who had the earliest influence on Sallis’ thinking and was at the center of Sallis’ first publication: Maurice Merleau-​ Ponty. She shows that one of the most important and persistent themes in Sallis’ work—​the relation between the intelligible and the visible—​was first articulated through his encounters with Merleau-​Ponty. She then goes on to show how Sallis’ engagement with Merleau-​Ponty played a formative role in his thought and in his turn to Heidegger. This is particularly clear in his reading of how sensible things, such as hammers, appear in the world. In the following essay, Daniela Vallega-​Neu shows that it is still correct to say that Sallis is a phenomenologist, even granting the vast scope of Sallis’ work and his many contributions to post-​phenomenological movements in philosophy. For example, his contributions to philosophy as deconstruction and his current work on the force of the elemental. What is at stake for Vallega-​Neu is not just establishing continuity in Sallis’ thought, but also showing that Sallis’ practice of phenomenological thinking has always been liminal, at the threshold of phenomenology, and yet the matter for thinking remains about the phenomenon, the sensible, and what appears.

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The third essay in this section of the volume focuses on an aspect of Sallis’ work that might well be the cutting edge of his current thinking. In this essay, Jason Wirth explores the impact of Sallis’ work on ecology with a special focus on what one might call Sallis’ earthbound thought, some of which is about stones and landscapes, but all of which is about the need in philosophy for a return to the sensible. Wirth contextualizes his discussion of these aspects of Sallis’ thought by setting Sallis’ work in conversation with Japanese and Chinese thought, shan shui painting, and Bashō poetry. In this way, Wirth reminds us of Sallis’ intense engagement with Eastern philosophy and Chinese painting. The final contribution to this volume is by Bernard Freydberg. He discusses Sallis’ multilayered work, Force of Imagination: The Sense of the Elemental, and argues that so much of the corpus of Sallis’ work is interwoven into the fabric of this text. For Freydberg, it is as if Sallis is drawing all of his other writings into a gathering, not under the mantel of some single concept, but as if to offer perspectival views of the Sache that drives his philosophical project. These repetitions allow his other works—​Stone, Spacings, Echoes, Double Truth, Crossings, Chorology, and so forth—​to circulate again in this work, and to thereby give expression to the elementary sense uncovered and put into play at the limit of his thinking. Freydberg traces in this work the central role that Sallis played in a decisive turn in modern philosophical thought.

pa rt 1 Directions within Greek Philosophy

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­c hapter 1

“Beneath the Earth and in the Heavens”: John Sallis in His Elements Michael Naas Beginnings are rarely simple.

john sallis, The Figure of Nature: On Greek Origins

∵ Nature returns regularly in the works of John Sallis, almost as regularly as the seasons themselves, that is, as regularly and as surely as spring follows winter and the Indiana University Press’s fall catalogue follows the spring. Whether under the name of nature itself, the English word nature, inflected by Emerson or Thoreau or the American naturalist Henry Beston, the French nature, the German Natur, the Latin natura, or, and perhaps especially—​though this already raises a series of questions—​the Greek physis, nature has, in all these guises or under all these names, regularly returned in Sallis’ work (rn 9). From Logic of Imagination (2012), Topographies (2006), and Platonic Legacies (2004), back to Force of Imagination (2000), Chorology (1999), Stone (1994), and Spacings (1987), all the way back to Being and Logos (1975), one could say that Sallis’ overarching theme has been nothing but nature and that, as a result, what he himself has said about the early Greek thinkers could equally well be applied to him. Sallis writes in a recent book: “Among the ancients there persisted a basic orientation to physis—​hence to nature and birth. … with only the slightest hyperbole, one could say that these thinkers thought nothing but physis” (rn 30). Nature, then, and nothing but nature: what a stunning lack of imagination someone might say about those early Greek thinkers. But then what an even greater lack of imagination, an ill-​meaning critic might go on to suggest, in a contemporary philosopher who, with the benefit of two and half millennia of problems in ontology, epistemology, ethics, politics, aesthetics, and so on, continues to think nothing but this one thing. Sure, nature loves to hide, he or she might concede, but that does not mean that one has to go looking for nature

© Michael Naas, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004507098_003

16 Naas under every rock or beneath every concept. As Sallis writes—​or confesses—​ in The Figure of Nature: “Everything comes back somehow or other to nature” (fn 26). Well, in what follows I will demonstrate that it is this stunning persistence and single-​mindedness in investigating a single theme that has allowed Sallis to think through so much of the entire history of Western philosophy from the pre-​Socrates through Heidegger and Derrida—​not to mention a good deal of the history of Western art and architecture. I will argue that it is a consequence of this persistent focus on nature that Sallis has been able to rethink everything from being, thought, and language, to art, technology, and even that notion of imagination that our imaginary critic might claim Sallis and his ancient Greek predecessors were missing. In short, I will suggest that it has been this singular focus that has allowed Sallis to take up so many thinkers, themes, and problems from the beginning of Western philosophy right up to today, including questions of climate change and the relationship between philosophy and science, questions that, as Sallis has recently argued, we as philosophers can ignore only at our own peril. That, then, is why nature returns so regularly in Sallis’ work, why nature marks or scans his work with such a regularity and periodicity, and why we have come to expect a new work from his hand with just about the same regularity. And that has been the case for decades now, despite undeniable climate change and shrinking publication budgets. But a couple of years ago, in 2016, Sallis did something rather unique and more than a little surprising. He finally, after all these years, published a book with the word nature in its title. Actually, he published two books in that one year, both of them not only on nature, as always, but with the word nature in their title, namely, The Figure of Nature and The Return of Nature, italics on the “of” in both cases. Two books, then, in the same year, the first of these bearing the subtitle “On Greek Origins.” The Figure of Nature, as its subtitle suggests, treats the Greek notion of physis in the Presocratics, in Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, and Empedocles, but then especially in Plato, with two long chapters on Theaetetus and Phaedo, while The Return of Nature, by contrast, is concerned with the return to, or the renewed interest in, nature—​sometimes through a return to those same Greek origins—​in American transcendentalism, German idealism, and contemporary philosophy. There would thus be the figure of nature and then, which is to say after, its return, the figure of nature in the Greeks and then its subsequent return, the figure of nature and then Sallis’ return to the figure or theme of nature later that same year. But that’s where things get a bit complicated, and I suspect intentionally so, for while it is tempting to want to place the figure of nature

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before its return, both books are dated this way: “Boston May 2016.” These books are thus, in a certain sense, contemporaneous, simultaneous, the figure simultaneous with its return, as if the return of nature—​the returning of nature—​were an essential part of its figure. While it might seem at first blush that one text precedes the other, since The Return of Nature refers in a couple of places to The Figure of Nature, while the latter makes no reference to the former, everything Sallis says about the necessary return of nature seems to suggest and to perform an original complication or complicity between the figure of nature and its return.1 The final chapter of The Figure of Nature, a long chapter on the Phaedo, is in fact already entitled “Earthbound: The Return of Nature,” this subtitle becoming—​as if already announcing a sequel—​the title of that other book published in May 2016. And yet the notion of return is actually already there in The Figure of Nature from the outset, indeed from its opening words. Here is how that work begins: “To return from nature to physis is not merely to substitute for a modern word or concept its ancient equivalent. Rather, it is to reverse a history of translation that, beginning with the Latin rendering of physis as natura, has distanced what is said in the translation from what was once said in the word physis” (fn 1). The Figure of Nature, then, would be a book about physis, a return to the question of physis, and to the question of what it means to speak or to give a discourse—​a logos—​about physis. Thus, the book The Figure of Nature could well have been titled or subtitled Physis and Logos, another way of saying, perhaps, Being and Logos (see fn 100, 214), a suggestion or translation that would give further ammunition to that ill-​intentioned critic who would suspect Sallis of not having progressed very far over these past five decades. Now, I begin with this publishing curiosity regarding two books explicitly on nature, two books with nature in their title and published in the same year and month, because I think the two of them independently and in conjunction say something crucial both about Sallis’ work as a whole and about philosophy today, philosophy as it has been practiced by Sallis and as he has recently been encouraging us to practice it. In what follows, I will focus on the interface, the relation, and the rhythm between these two publications, in order to pose a couple of questions, in conclusion, about Greek origins and contemporary science. In the end, everything will revolve around a return to nature within nature and a return to Greek origins in contemporary thought that will require 1 Sallis writes in a footnote on page 57 of The Return of Nature: “See my discussion in The Figure of Nature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016), chaps. 2–​4.” Later in the same work, in the course of a brief discussion of the Theaetetus, Sallis sends us again in a footnote to The Figure of Nature (rn 106).

18 Naas us to think a potential difference, a potentially unlimited difference, between our contemporary thinking of nature—​if nature or physis is still the right term for it—​and those Greek beginnings. Sallis begins The Return of Nature by suggesting that we must return to nature in order to rethink the return of nature. We must return to in order to experience and rethink the return of, return to nature in order to rethink nature as space or as place, as the “place of birth” (rn 3; see 28–​29), the place of growth and generation, “the place where living creatures prosper and also suffer decline and death” (rn 3), nature, then, as the place of living creatures, but then also of the elements, “stones, soil, mountains” (rn 30), not to mention earth and sky, elements arranged and organized, perhaps like letters (­stoicheia), as in Empedocles (see rn 30), or else worked over in a paradigm of production, as in the Timaeus, where the Father or Demiurge uses the elements to construct the cosmos (see rn 30–​31, fn 39, 53, and 232n42). That is the first sense of the return to nature in The Return of Nature. But Sallis also returns to nature by returning to modern attempts to return to nature. For example, Sallis returns to Emerson, for whom the return to nature is a return to oneself; and to Hegel, for whom nature must be thought in relation to spirit (see rn 11–​18, 52); and to Schelling, for whom nature reveals itself or becomes most manifest in imagination, a privileged notion in the history of philosophy, according to Sallis, for the way it holds together contradictory notions and thereby resists appropriation by metaphysical thought. By returning to Schelling, Sallis is able to give an account of imagination not as the power or possibility of a subject, but as something like the event of appearance or manifestation itself (see rn 2–​3, 19–​27, 31, 93–​103). In each case, then, Sallis returns not to something we once knew or possessed and so wish to know and possess again. Rather, he returns to something we have never wholly possessed or understood or thought, something that is perhaps only imagined and so remains perhaps still in reserve. What Sallis thus gives us in these two books with nature in their titles is a rather exceptional course in the history of the philosophy of nature, from Thales through Heidegger and Derrida. But since, for Sallis, the philosophy of nature is in a sense coextensive with philosophy itself, what Sallis gives us with these two books is an exquisite course in the entire history of Western philosophy, a course in the various returns to nature, the various returns to nature as return, in relation always to an excess that can never be the object of such a return. But then there is something more, something in addition to two additional philosophy books, however important, comprehensive, and instructive they may be, on the theme of nature and the history of philosophy. There is a further claim being made about the very nature of philosophy and the very future

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of philosophy itself. Sallis writes: “Philosophy will become—​though differently, very differently—​what it was in the beginning. Where will it come to be? It will return to the beginning, will station itself in proximity to the beginning” (rn 74). The Return of Nature is thus not just a book on the theme of nature in philosophy from the pre-​Socratics to the present; it is a rethinking of the task of philosophy itself, a rethinking that today seems to be necessitated by the things themselves. For if nature has always been a place of birth and death, a place of exposure—​to the elements, to what are called the forces of nature (see rn 7, 51–​52)—​this fact has never been clearer than it is today, as technological advances and resources at once protect us—​or at least some of us—​ from those forces with an efficiency and a power that are unequaled in human history and at the same time expose us all to unprecedented forms of climate destabilization that threaten the planet and all the living beings upon it. Sallis’ return to nature is thus compelled, it seems, by a return of nature in forms that are far less peaceful, pacifying, or life-​enhancing than we might have thought. For nature’s return would today be taking less the form of a promise than of a threat, a return that does not invite us to some kind of communion with it but warns us, in effect, to run for our lives or run for the hills in order to try to stay above the rising tide. And that no doubt explains why Sallis’ regular return to nature has become accelerated and even more explicit in these recent works. These books on nature and thus on the history of philosophy are books that wish to address the age of ecological disaster and climate change in which we find ourselves (see rn 7–​8, 19, 73). To say that we are at a point of crisis is to say too little, according to Sallis, and his suggestion seems to be that philosophy—​which has thought about nothing else than nature for the past twenty-​five hundred years—​is particularly well situated to addressing questions of climate change by rethinking or posing differently the question of nature. As Sallis writes: “[I]‌n order to counter such claims and to address the denaturing effects released through a technology governed by the politics of unlimited production and consumption, the sense of nature as such must be recovered and redetermined” (rn 8). Sallis is thus arguing that the return to nature cannot be just another academic task or intellectual project; it is an “imperative” for anyone trying to think what is happening to us today.2 So how does Sallis go about this rethinking? How does he try to answer this imperative? Well, by going back and forth, by weaving together, especially in The Return of Nature, two scenes or two moments, one ancient and the other

2 There is in fact a chapter in The Figure of Nature titled “Radical Gatherings. The Imperative of Philosophy” (fn 42–​57; see also, for example, rn 8, 44, 74, 80, 92–​93, 102).

20 Naas hyper-​contemporary. The first of these is Plato’s discourse on chōra in Timaeus, since it is there that “the intelligible/​sensible dyad,” as Sallis calls it, is most powerfully disrupted and “the emergence of another sense of nature” is made possible (rn 53). Sallis thus himself returns, just as he did in Chorology, to this strange “nature”—​for Plato himself calls it a nature (see Timaeus 50b-​c)—​that receives all natural bodies without itself being one of those bodies, this strange nature called chōra that holds or situates or receives the elements before they have become organized into things, indeed before they have even become themselves.3 The discourse on chōra is thus exceptional insofar as it speaks of a “scene [that] lies before the birth of the heaven; it is a nature that preceded nature, a nature older than sensible nature” (rn 54; see 56–​57, 104). In chōra, we thus find a nature or something of nature that exceeds the totality of natural beings without, however, being a nature beyond nature, like some transcendental eidos of traditional metaphysics. The second moment or the second scene is much more current. Indeed, it could not be more so: the contemporary understanding of dark matter or black holes. Now, this is something rather new and very surprising, and not just in Sallis but in contemporary philosophy more generally. From Logic of Imagination to The Return of Nature, this has become a significant theme in Sallis’ work. But why? Why does Sallis put such emphasis on these strange phenomena in contemporary physics or astrophysics? First, because black holes challenge the very limits of visibility, of phenomenality, of manifestation, and, in the end, of being itself. While there are things that are visible to the human eye and its instruments, and things that are not yet visible to any human eye or instrument but that one day may become so—​the stars of faraway galaxies, for example, that may one day become visible through ever more powerful telescopes and space probes—​black holes are and will forever remain invisible to both the unaided and the aided human eye. Due to their enormous density, no light can escape from a black hole, making them now and forever absolutely invisible and so detectable (if that is still the right word) only mathematically or “hypothetically.” Sallis writes: “Black holes are, then, entirely different in their basic structure from terrestrial things, from natural elements, and even from the more familiar cosmic forms such as stars and galaxies” (rn 89; see 57, 87–​90, and li 264–​267).

3 Sallis writes in The Figure of Nature: “It must be thought as operating in and as certain elements that belong to the place where things are illuminated but that are not simply reducible to things” (fn 37). And in The Return of Nature: “It is within the chōra that the elements are situated, even when they are not yet quite themselves” (rn 76).

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As a result, and this is a second reason why black holes and dark matter are so interesting to Sallis, it is unclear whether these enormous things called black holes or this odd stuff called dark matter can really be called natural. Non-​terrestrial in their way of manifesting themselves (or not), it is unclear whether black holes can be compared to any natural element or whether they can be said to belong to nature or even to physis. For what would it mean to speak of a nature or an element within nature that cannot appear? Can we imagine something natural or something that is a part of nature that not only does not participate in the rhythms of the earth, in the rhythms of withdrawal and return, in the withdrawal and manifestation of all good things under the sun, but that does not and will not appear at all? And if one is tempted to write off these non-​phenomenal things as interesting little epiphenomena, interesting little exceptions to the general rule of appearance and phenomenality, it is worth recalling, as Sallis does, that such non-​terrestrial things can be larger than the earth itself, indeed larger than our entire solar system. In fact, dark matter alone may constitute anywhere between one fourth and three fourths of the entire universe (see rn 90). Moreover, if these kinds of strange, non-​ manifesting matter are not just “out there,” separate and isolated from what does appear, but, as many scientists now believe, interwoven with everything that does appear, then perhaps our very sense of nature, of appearance, and thus of being needs to be rethought. Chōra and black holes, then: The connection might seem random or forced, except when one considers that in both cases we are talking about something  that exceeds the phenomenal or the sensible without itself being ­something intelligible, without being some idea or essence. In both cases, then, we have something that challenges the opposition—​the dyad—​between sensible and intelligible (see rn 55–​57). Just as chōra requires us to think of a scene that comes before the birth of the heavens, a “nature” before the distinction between the sensible and the intelligible, so do “such monstrous hyperphenomena as black holes” challenge our very sense of what it means to be a phenomenon, what it means to be a thing, and perhaps even what it means to be (rn 91). Sallis asks: “Can it any longer be supposed as a matter of course that everything that in any ways is, everything in this vast expanse, is manifest in the same manner as the things and events found on or near the surface of the earth? Is there not sufficient provocation to call into question such earthbound thinking?” (rn 85). By raising the question of whether things might actually manifest themselves in different ways in the universe, or whether manifestation might not be the right way to understand the “being” or the “force” of such things, Sallis seems to be suggesting that the so-​called metaphysics of presence might be not only a Western prejudice or model but also a distinctly terrestrial

22 Naas one, the sign of a distinctly earthbound metaphysics. Sallis seems to be asking, like Husserl in his now famous 1934 fragment on the earth as Ur-​Arche, whether it is time to “put an end to the confinement of thinking to the terrestrial surface” (rn 85), and whether failing to do so might be the sign of a philosophical “myopia” and “provincialism” (rn 85). After logocentrism, phallocentrism, anthropocentrism, and so on, there would remain a recalcitrant geocentrism, a planetary provincialism that needs to be shaken up or shaken off if we wish to come to terms with the most compelling discoveries of contemporary physics. As Sallis puts it, returning us to the very beginning of philosophy, these discoveries of contemporary science “evoke wonder,” and “philosophy … cannot justify remaining aloof from [them]” (rn 86). The Return of Nature, whether alone or in conjunction with The Figure of Nature, is thus a remarkable back and forth between the ancient and the contemporary, a back and forth, first, between the Pre-​Socratics and Plato, on the one hand, and Kant, Schelling, Fichte, Emerson, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida, on the other, but then a back and forth, a withdrawal and a return, if you will, between Plato’s Timaeus, and especially the chōra, and our contemporary understanding of the cosmos, and then, finally, a back and forth between our experience of nature, of natural things, along with the elements, the horizon of those things, and something that will never become the object of our experience if experience is to be limited to what manifests itself.4 The Return of Nature, alone or in conjunction with The Figure of Nature, thus at once describes these various kinds of withdrawal and return and performs or enacts them in its writing.5 Now, the aim of this back and forth between the ancient and the contemporary, between some of our most ancient philosophical sources and some very recent and still poorly understood scientific discoveries, between various conceptions of nature and physis, is, in part, to return to hidden or withdrawn 4 This back and forth runs so deep and is so prevalent that, to give just a single example, when Sallis in The Return of Nature is trying to describe the way in which the ground of nature as ordered and orderly becomes in Schelling an unordered and unruly ground or archē that is always just below the surface, always ready to erupt into any ordered realm, he compares that unruly ground not just to chōra but to the unexpected entrance of Alcibiades in the Symposium (see rn 40). 5 And yet, what is said by Sallis about Heraclitus could well be applied to him: “his writing, however elusive, as if imitating physis itself, could not have been more appropriately titled than with the title Peri Phuseōs” (fn 28). There is a kind of performativity of physis in Sallis’ work that makes it difficult to say—​and perhaps for essential reasons—​that the return of nature is markedly and definitively different from the figure of nature and the Greek origins that are revealed there.

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understandings of physis itself, whether in Plato or the Presocratics or elsewhere. Sallis thus speaks of “an entire history of interpretation [that] must be deconstructed in order that nature say what is said in physis” (fn 28). It is by “returning to the beginnings of Western philosophy” (rn 59), Sallis suggests, that we are best able to confront or to encounter a contemporary thinking that “borders on post-​phenomenological thought” (rn 75), for this contemporary thinking at the end of metaphysics bears “a certain solidarity with the Greek beginning” (rn 75). But Sallis also seems to suggest that, as a consequence of the back and forth, this “solidarity” between beginning and return will give way to some significant—​perhaps irremediable—​differences.6 That is why Sallis speaks of a turn or a return that would, on the one hand, repeat, and, on the other, differ from all the other returns to nature in the history of philosophy, a turn that would at once repeat and differ from the history of philosophy as the return to nature (see rn 81). Such a turn or return would thus risk opening up a difference—​a potentially unlimited difference—​between beginning and end, that is, between a Greek notion of physis and all subsequent notions of nature, on the one hand, and something else, another nature, or perhaps something other than nature, along with another sense of wonder to accompany it.7 Sallis seems to prepare us for this difference by following or developing a series of differences or distinctions that I can only summarize here. First, Sallis underscores the distinction that was essential for the Greeks up through Aristotle, then forgotten and reopened or reelaborated by Schelling: the difference between nature or physis as such and ta phusei onta, that is, natural things or the things of nature (see fn 14, 27, 29, and rn 41, 56). Next, Sallis suggests, in the wake of Nietzsche’s inversion of Platonism, that we replace the distinction between the sensible and the intelligible or the supersensible with the dyad between things and the elements, or the elemental, as Sallis begins calling it (see rn 61–​63, 66, 70). Sallis prefers the term “elementals” to “elements” because we are talking not about bits of earth, air, fire, and water that 6 Sallis argues that “if the entire course of metaphysics were already enclosed within the beginning … would it not, then, be incumbent upon us to “think backwards”? … Would we not need to open ourselves to the possibility that the past might well come to meet us from out of the future, or that in returning to the beginning we might well find a way beyond the end?” (rn 114). 7 In addition to everything else, there is a difference in methodology that needs to be taken into account. Sallis writes: “The cosmological turn would require of philosophy that it take up critically and discerningly certain traces that can be provided only by observation-​based research, supplemented by instrumentation and theoretical-​mathematical elaborations” (rn 91).

24 Naas then get combined into things, but about massive, encompassing elemental phenomena that situate things within them or against the backdrop of them. Sallis writes: “The most comprehensive of the elementals are earth and sky. These delimit the space in which natural things come to pass and become manifest. It can appropriately be called enchorial space in order to indicate that it represents a way of rethinking what in the Timaeus was called … the chōra” (rn 76). Elementals—​sky and earth, though also “sea and forest, wind and rain, thunder and lightening”—​are thus different from things in terms of their encompassing, open nature. They are fundamentally different because of the way they both expose and shelter humans and other beings within them (rn 77). That is particularly true of the sky. As Sallis simply and inimitably puts it, “The sky … has no other side” (rn 79).8 What he means by this is that elements or elementals are not bounded or limited in the way things are. They are not unlimited, exactly, but they are also not limited in the way natural things or the things within nature are. They are larger than things, enormous, like earth and sky, and yet they are still somehow of nature, and no one would say otherwise. Indeed, one would be tempted to say that they are nature in its most palpable or pressing sense. There is thus an “elemental turn” and then, or in conjunction with it, a “cosmological turn” in Sallis’ work (see rn 73–​80, 81–​91), which begins to open up, it seems, a difference or a rift between nature or the elements, nature as the elemental, and the cosmic (rn 58), with hyperphenomena such as black holes and dark matter, not to mention the sheer, unthinkable enormity—​the limitlessness—​of the cosmos itself. One can see the progression or the expansion, if you will, of Sallis’ focus from the lived space around us, nature and the things of nature, to an “openness to the elemental,” the earth and the “encompassing sky,” the great dome of the sky, to the “enormously expansive cosmos” (rn 3). Here, at the limit, thought begins to meet new forms of resistance, and it becomes imperative to ask—​in this supposed return to an even more primordial, perhaps even more enchorial space—​whether the cosmos really is simply an expansion of the elements or of nature, or whether something else needs to be thought. While nature has always been tied to presence and to the earth, to manifestation under the sun, the cosmos would open up a way of thinking what is beyond presence and, perhaps, beyond all of our conceptions of nature (see rn 58–​59). What returns, then, we begin to see, is the whole question of the

8 Elements or elementals, unlike things, have no other side, no back side; a tree has a back side, but not the wind or the sky (rn 78–​80).

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relationship between the beginning and the end, the question of whether the end really is a repetition of the beginning, yet another beginning, or something else altogether, the question of whether, through the elemental and then the cosmological turn, we are not brought to another philosophy of nature and to a very different sense of nature if not to something other than nature itself. Now in giving as a title for these remarks “ ‘Beneath the Earth and in the Heavens’: John Sallis in His Elements,” I was, of course, referring to one of the two informal charges that Socrates says is being made against him in the Apology, namely, the charge that he was in effect a nature philosopher. In The Figure of Nature, Sallis himself addresses this scene and tries to defend Socrates not, interestingly, by defending him against this charge by showing that he was not a nature philosopher, but by arguing that nature was indeed Socrates’ theme if not his obsession from beginning to end. Here is how Sallis begins recounting this scene in a long chapter devoted to the Phaedo: Early in his trial [Socrates] identifies the prejudices, the “old false accusations,” which, though not included among the official charges brought against him, are nonetheless being relied on by Meletus as support for the actual charges. One such prejudice is that Socrates investigates things “beneath the earth and in the heaven.” Not only does he reply directly, declaring that he “does not pursue these things” (Apology 19b-​c), but also, shortly thereafter, he counters the prejudice with the question “Do you think you are accusing Anaxagoras?” (Apology 26d). (fn 197–​198) So far, so good; there is nothing novel or objectionable here: Sallis is simply following Socrates’ own defense against the charge in the Apology. But then comes Sallis’ own defense of Socrates, in the midst, still, of his reading of the Phaedo: “What is remarkable is that now—​in this other trial, this trial before his friends, this trial in proximity to the death to which he was sentenced in the other trial—​Socrates is indeed pursuing inquiries into things beneath the earth” (fn 197–​198). Sallis thus appears to be arguing that Socrates always was—​or at least in the Phaedo certainly is—​guilty of the informal charge of being a nature philosopher. While Sallis would surely never agree that Socrates was guilty of making the weaker argument the stronger like a sophist, or that he was guilty of corrupting the youth, he seems to agree that Socrates was, in effect, a nature philosopher, though not one who could be easily assimilated to Anaxagoras or anyone other thinker with whom he was being confused in the Apology. He was a philosopher who did indeed investigate things “beneath the earth” and perhaps also “in the heavens,” but always in an attempt, it seems, to help us rethink

26 Naas just what earth and heaven and nature mean. When Socrates thus goes on in the Phaedo to explain to Cebes and others his turn from a certain version of nature philosophy—​namely, a philosophy that tried to explain phenomena by means of causes such as heat and cold and fermentation—​Sallis reads Socrates not as turning away from nature or physis as such, but as attempting to rethink physis, to return to it, in fact, in a more radical way, as if Socrates were the first to return to nature in this way. Such a return was necessary because Socrates had already once turned to physis in a wholly inadequate way. Sallis cites Socrates’ own self-​criticism in Phaedo: “For I, Cebes, … as a young man was wondrously desirous of that wisdom they call inquiry into nature [peri phuseōs historia]. This wisdom seemed to me magnificent—​to know the causes of each thing, why each thing comes to be and why it perishes and why it is (96a)” (fn 231).9 This then sets the stage for Sallis’ recounting of Socrates’ second sailing, which is in effect spurred on by Socrates’s encounter with a work by Anaxagoras, one that would ultimately leave him disappointed, but that would nonetheless motivate his later conversion from physis to logos. Sallis writes: Continuing his narrative, Socrates tells of hearing someone reading from a book by Anaxagoras, “which said that it is nous that sets all in order [diakosmeō] and causes all things” (97b-​c). This book would have been, according to the ancient sources, Anaxagoras’ sole book, and it was reportedly titled On Nature. (fn 234) So there it is, Socrates would have been turned away from an inquiry into nature and natural causes by a book titled none other than On Nature, Peri Phuseōs, a title that is said to have been used, as Sallis reminds us at the beginning of The Figure of Nature, by Anaximander, Anaximenes, Xenophanes, Heraclitus, Zeno, and Empedocles, and, as we see here, Anaxagoras (fn 9).10 Socrates’ second sailing would have thus been provoked by hearing a work of Anaxagoras on nature being read in the agora, a work with which Socrates would ultimately be disappointed because while it promised to show how everything was organized by mind, by nous, as some kind of ordering power or principle, it spoke instead of all kinds of causes for things other than nous. 9 10

Sallis seems to affirm in a note Burnet’s speculation that Socrates would be referring here “to Archelaus, a disciple of Anaxagoras and reportedly the teacher of Socrates” (fn 231n39). Sallis reminds us of the relation between Socrates and Anaxagoras. “Originally from Clazomenai, Anaxagoras spent most of his life in Athens and reportedly was close to Pericles. Like Socrates, he was brought to trial on the charge of impiety (around 450 bc). He was banished and withdrew to Lampsacus” (fn 235n44).

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But Sallis then adds something to Socrates’ account of Anaxagoras, something Socrates himself does not mention. He writes of Socrates’s encounter with Anaxagoras’ On Nature: “Socrates would perhaps have heard a passage such as the following: ‘Everything else has a portion of everything, but nous is unlimited [apeiron], autonomous, and mixed with no thing, but it is alone all by itself …’ ” (fn 234). Sallis reminds us that nous can be thought of as unmixed, autonomous, and unlimited, even if it is not yet clear what unlimited might mean. Before turning, then, to that all-​important notion of the unlimited, let me simply recall that Sallis will go on to offer a very powerful reading of Socrates’ second sailing as a voyage not away from nature as such but towards it, in a rethinking of it, a rethinking that will help explain, according to Sallis, Socrates’ emphasis on the body and the earth throughout the dialogue, his long mythological account of the earth at the end of the dialogue, his elaborate and unexpected “song of the earth,” that is, his “celebration of the earth and of all that belongs to the earth” (fn 245). This rethinking is also what orients Sallis’ interpretation of Socrates’ final words as a recovery not from the illness of the body or from embodiment as such but from everything that would, in short, turn humans away from nature and the body.11 For Sallis, then, beneath or before a second sailing that would simply move from physis to logos, there is, as it were, another or a second second sailing that attempts, through logos, to return to physis, a second second sailing that accounts, finally, for Sallis’ way of reading philosophy in terms of return and a new beginning. Here is Sallis once again in The Figure of Nature: Philosophy begins, then—​it makes a new, a second beginning—​with a turn from the sensible, from natural things. … And yet, this turn is no flight into a beyond that would leave the body and the sensible behind. Rather, it is a turn to logoi as they call forth the beings themselves, the looks, the original causes. (fn 240)

11

This helps explain Sallis’ interpretation of nature—​and even in the Phaedo, this supposedly Platonic-​Pythagorean dialogue—​as the between, the stretch or the span, as it were, between sensible things and the eidē, which Sallis translates not as “forms” or “ideas” but as “common looks.” Sallis writes, for example: “Nature lies neither merely in sensible things nor in the common looks to which sensibles are made to stretch. Rather, nature consists in the complex in which the looks exceed sense and yet belong to sensible things. To be sure, nature does not ultimately lie in a nature beyond nature, but neither does it consist of natural things alone” (fn 136).

28 Naas But let me now return briefly, in order to conclude, to this notion of the unlimited, that is, to the question of limits, which seems so crucial to both of these Sallis books on nature. It is a question that is always on the horizon, unresolved, and I suspect for very good reasons, in Sallis’ analyses in both of these books and elsewhere of both chōra and the Good beyond being. Near the end of The Return of Nature, Sallis recalls the question that Derrida once posed to him, but also to himself, it seems, regarding the relationship between the Good as epekeina tēs ousias and chōra, a question regarding the “hyperontological affinity” between these two things called chōra and the Good. Derrida asks in a text devoted to Sallis’ work: “And yet why does not Plato say that chōra is epekeina tēs ousias? Why is that so difficult to think?” (rn 116).12 Despite its apparent simplicity, it is a monstrously difficult question, so difficult that rather than even try to broach an answer to it, I would wish instead to pose another question: Why does Plato never bring either chōra or the Good beyond being into proximity with to apeiron, that is, with the unlimited? Even more, why is the unlimited never, as far as I can tell, as positively charged in Plato as either chōra or the Good beyond being? If the chōra is what situates or receives all determinate things within it, why is it so difficult to say or to think that it itself is unlimited or the unlimited? And something similar might be asked about the Good? Why does to apeiron appear to be, for Plato, a threat to philosophy rather than a chance for a new beginning? Sallis does not ask this question, at least not in this form, but he does speak a great deal about the unlimited and about limits in relation to nature. He comments, for example, on the double origin of the word apeiros, at once “without limit” and “without experience,” and on Plato’s own play on that double origin.13 Moreover, in the first chapter of The Figure of Nature, Sallis looks in some detail at the pre-​Socratics and their elemental identification of the archē, water in Thales, fire in Heraclitus, air in Anaximenes, and then the unlimited in Anaximander. While Sallis spends the greatest amount of time in 12 In Platonic Legacies, Sallis goes some way toward providing an answer by pointing out that at the end of the philosopher’s ascent described in the allegory of the cave, the philosopher is able to see the sun itself (the visible counterpart of the Good) “in its chōra” (pl 55). 13 Sallis comments, for example, in his reading of the Theaetetus: “[Socrates] observes that such philosophers as Thales are laughed at for falling into wells and into “all kinds of perplexity [aporia] because of inexperience [apeiria]” (174c). The pun may be taken to call attention to the double meaning of apeiria: as the privative of peira (experience), it means inexperience, as with one who has not ventured into anything, who lacks enterprise; but as the privative of peras (limit, bound), it means boundless, without limit, limitless. … they [thus] fall into perplexity because they lack limits” (fn 117).

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this chapter, which is titled “Open Air,” not with Anaximander’s unlimited but with Anaximenes’s air, he does so, it seems, because of the elemental or even cosmological character of air, and because of the fact that, for Anaximenes, air is precisely unlimited (fn 13–​25).14 Sallis comments: “To say that it is unlimited (apeiron)—​like the archē of Anaximander—​is to say that it has no peras, no limit or extremity at which it would end or from which it could begin” (fn 22). The unlimited as air thus seems to have at least two aspects. On the one hand, it—​not unlike chōra—​appears to be an element or an elemental that lets things and elements appear. It is “operative in letting things come forth into the open” (fn 24), since “it is there, in the open air, that all things come to light” (fn 24). As a sort of forerunner of chōra, or of a kind of Lichtung, air “empowers the coming forth of things into manifestness” (fn 24). The elements thus become manifest against or within an archē that has itself withdrawn, in accordance, it seems, with the “self-​concealing propensity of physis” (fn 10; see 34). These elements, then, not only appear against the backdrop of nature as air or as unlimited; they also “serve to delimit nature itself,” writes Sallis (fn 2; my emphasis). That is because there is another aspect of the unlimited that Plato, for his part, seems to have rejected, or at least tried to limit, namely, the unlimited as the absolutely indeterminate, the endless flow that completely undoes the capacity for designation and speech. Sallis writes in the context of his reading of Theaetetus and Socrates’s critique of Protagoras and others: “To withdraw all determinacy, to dissolve it into the unlimited flow of becoming, can only leave the speaker bereft of words, reduced virtually to silence, capable only of words that, denying determinacy, are dissipated the moment they are uttered” (fn 129–​130). Sallis will thus contend that the central question of the Theaetetus will be “the question of how natural things appear” (fn 80), and this appearance seems to require a certain minimal determinacy. Sallis asks: “How can the flow of physis be granted and yet a certain moment of determinacy be maintained? How, within the flow of physis, can a certain determinacy come to hold sway and to limit the flow?” (fn 98). Sallis wants to argue that Plato in the Theaetetus is attempting to think at once determinacy and flow, the limited and the unlimited, at once a determinacy that makes language possible and

14

With regard to the cosmological dimension, Sallis writes: “aēr refers to the so-​called lower air, the denser atmosphere from the surface of the earth up to the clouds; thus it is to be distinguished from aithēr, the shining upper air, above the clouds, beyond which there is only ouranos, the heaven” (fn 20).

30 Naas the endless flow that is “internal,” so to speak, to every natural thing or every perception of a natural thing.15 But then there is this, and it precisely here, I think, that The Return of Nature comes to supplement The Figure of Nature in a way that should cause us all to think or to wonder what is or should be happening to philosophy today. For the Greeks, who were concerned both to acknowledge the unlimited and, precisely, to limit or determine it, to limit the unlimited nature that is “internal,” as it were, to all things, there was also the more or less accepted belief or presupposition that this unlimited took place or had its place within, so to speak, a closed and limited totality. Sallis in The Figure of Nature reminds us of this when he cites Anaximenes Fragment B: “As our soul, being air, holds us together, so do wind [or breath—​pneuma] and air enclose the whole cosmos” (fn 24–​25). Sallis reminds us in this instance that this enclosing—​periechei—​ was the common assumption of all Greeks. Anaxagoras too, then, would have identified the cosmos as a single enclosed system, with earth at its center. Indeed, it would not really be before Copernicus that humanity as a whole would begin to experience the revelation or the revolution, the trauma, of the puncturing of this conception of an incorruptible dome that was assumed to encircle or englobe the universe, the puncturing of the great dome that was assumed to encircle, englobe, and thus limit the universe (see rn 83–​84). Sallis reminds us of this in The Return of Nature, a “return” that now threatens to distinguish quite radically our contemporary return to nature—​if that is what it should still be called—​from those Greek origins.16 For what the discovery of other galaxies in the universe has given us, the discovery not just of one, two, or ten other galaxies, but, to cite again The Return of Nature, “as many as ten billion galaxies in the universe” (rn 84), is another sense of the unlimited, that is, the unlimited in the guise of the monstrously and unthinkably large and

15

16

Sallis writes, for example: “Both in the Theaetetus and in the Timaeus, the figure of physis is that of sheerly or largely indeterminate things (that are therefore not yet things) on which a determinacy from beyond these (non-​)things supervenes, so that, clinging thus to being (to determinacy), they become nature things rather than remaining mere phantoms engulfed in the Protagorean flow” (fn 99). When Sallis speaks in The Return of Nature about the way the Stranger in the Sophist seems to distribute otherness, including the other of being, namely, non-​being, into the very heart of being, it is tempting to read such comments in the light of what he writes in the same book about “black holes,” which, because they are never manifest, also seem to challenge our very notion of being. But, as I argue here, Sallis seems to be suggesting that these phenomena of contemporary science not only evoke but distinctly challenging these Greek ways of thinking.

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expansive, a notion of the unlimited that is perhaps incompatible with those Greek origins. Now it can, of course, always be argued that we are simply confusing here good and bad unlimiteds, good and bad infinites. But Sallis’ point seems to be that we have, perhaps, not quite digested or worked through the first of what Freud calls the three traumas that humankind will have undergone since the sixteenth century: the displacement of earth as the center of the universe in Copernicus (to be followed by the displacement of the human as a unique species of created beings in Darwin, and the displacement of consciousness as the controlling center of human psychic activity in Freud). Sallis seems to be suggesting that contemporary science has shown or has suggested that we are far from having exhausted the significance or the effects of that first trauma—​ which has been a source of anxiety as well as of wonder. In other words, in that back and forth between the ancient and the contemporary that I have been tracking here, Sallis seems to be suggesting that there is a difference between the two that has put the very nature of nature into question (see rn 10–​11). For while nature or physis might name everything between earth and the heavens—​that is, everything beneath the earth and up into the heavens and that encompassing dome, everything, it might even be said, between chōra “below” and the Good beyond being “above”—​it is uncertain whether it makes sense any longer to speak of nature or of physis extending out beyond that dome to dark matter and black holes and galaxies billions of light years away, galaxies that exist beyond any spatial or at least perceptual horizon, and that exist, in a certain sense, only mathematically or hypothetically. Those, then, are just some of Sallis’ questions of late. He is asking, wondering, imagining, if I understand him correctly, whether metaphysics might not be different elsewhere, or whether it might not need to be different here today on earth now that we know what we do about the cosmos—​and thus about nature. He is asking whether and how we would think differently elsewhere, elsewhere than on earth, in a place where there might be more than one sun, more than one moon, and so seasons with a radically different periodicity, seasons with a rhythm so different that the name season would no longer be appropriate. How much is philosophy determined, he is asking, by the rhythms of nature that occur on this earth, this earth and no other? And what would happen to philosophy if those rhythms—​all our terrestrial rhythms—​were changed, disrupted, or thrown off? What would that do to our conception of nature, to our understanding of physis, among other things? Those are the kinds of questions I think Sallis has been asking us to consider of late, the kinds of questions he has been insisting it is imperative for us to consider. Talk about imagination.

­c hapter 2

Philosophy and Monstrosity, an Ode to Artemis Sara Brill John Sallis opens The Figure of Nature: On Greek Origins with an invocation of Artemis as a figure in whom a perceived truth of nature resided well before any ‘philosophic’ contemplation of the topic. Within this context, to study phusis was to ask to be received by the court of the goddess, and anyone wishing to do so would be well-​served by recalling the fate of Actaeon who, if we could ask him, would tell us that to be exposed to truth is to be undone by truth. But, of course, we couldn’t have asked him, because truth, in the figure of Artemis, had already demanded his silence and, when he failed to give it, she silenced him, turning him into a stag and having him torn apart by his own hounds. That other ill-​fated lover of Artemis, Hippolytus, is at least allowed to lament his undoing by his own team of horses—​“O hateful horses my own hand has fed, you have destroyed me, have killed me” (1355–​56)—​and to have the presence of the goddess at his side: “Do you see me, lady, see my wretched state?” “Yes,” replies Artemis, “but the law forbids me to shed tears” (1395–​96).1 And yet, Hippolytus’ ‘enlightenment’ as to the source of his suffering—​Aphrodite’s anger—​comes as a bitter pill: “Oh! Would that the race of men could curse the gods” (1415). But we already knew from Aeschylus that it is through suffering that we learn; a claim that lends a tragic cast to that desire for knowledge by which, according to Aristotle, all humans are possessed (Meta. 980a21). From the agony of self-​awareness staged in Greek tragedy, to the alignment of self-​understanding with the confrontation of one’s mortality in the tradition that told practitioners to ‘know’ themselves, to the lament of life’s vissicitudes limned in epic poetry, the deranging power of truth provided the means by which a variety of ancient Greek intellectuals measured their practice and the anxieties that accompanied it. In Plato’s hands, this self-​diremption is marked by the sign of the beyond, of what is beyond being and beyond nature, of a demonic excess, of a mania, of, in a word, a monstrosity. I know of no one who has made this point more forcefully or better than Sallis, from his first published work on Plato, Being and Logos, through his study of the Timaeus (Chorology) and his tracing of the origin and reception of Platonism (Platonic 1 Euripides. Hippolytus, trans. George Kovacs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).

© Sara Brill, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004507098_004

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Legacies), to his most recent study of phusis (Figures of Nature). To study Plato with Sallis is to follow a thread down a winding path filled with monstrous forms: the Minotaur of the Phaedo, the Typhon of the Phaedrus, the Chōra of the Timaeus, the dissolution of being and logos in the Theaetetus, and the good of the Republic. A focus on monstrosity requires us to linger on what is unclear, to avoid glossing over too quickly what is difficult or obscure, to resist the temptation to ‘improve’ Plato’s text, and to eschew reading its philosophic content as somehow arising in spite of its dialogic form. Indeed, Sallis’ attention to the dialogic character of Plato’s texts was groundbreaking and, as has been demonstrated repeatedly, utterly essential. He anticipated by several decades the attention to Plato’s use of myth and image, his “hankering for the hybrid” as Andrea Nightingale puts it, that pervades recent Plato scholarship.2 To be sure, Sallis’ work has tended to be more concerned with developing a phenomenologically-​ inflected approach to the dialogues than with locating itself within the various contemporary schools of scholarship and commentary on Plato. This is in part because so much of the scholarly conversation during his early engagement with Plato continued to be dominated by the ambition to identify Platonic ‘doctrine’ that yielded the developmentalist versus unitarian debate. Many of the essential terms and assumptions of this debate did not sit easily with an emphasis on textual polyvocity and the decentering of authorial intent, both 2 Andrea Nightingale, Genres in Dialogue: Plato and the Constuct of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Nightingale’s study of the construction of philosophy within the Platonic dialogues was followed shortly thereafter by Ruby Blondell’s equally powerful The Play of Character in Plato’s Dialogues (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) and shortly after that, Nightingale’s Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy: Theoria in its Cultural Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Christopher Rowe’s Plato and the Art of Philosophical Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) would follow a few years later. For recent scholarship on Plato’s use of myth and image, see in particular Kathryn Morgan, Myth and Philosophy from the Presocratics to Plato (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Elizabeth Pender, Images of Persons Unseen: Plato’s Metaphors for the Gods and the Soul (Sankt Augustin: Academia Verlag, 2000); Catalin Partenie, Plato’s Myths (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); James Porter, “Plato and the Platonic Tradition: the Image Beyond the Image,” Yearbook of Comparative Literature 56 (2010): 75–​ 103; Daniel Werner, Myth and Philosophy in Plato’s Phaedrus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Robert Brock, Greek Political Imagery from Homer to Aristotle (London, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). See also the three volumes in the Mnemsyne Supplements series, Pierre Destrée and Fritz-​Gregor Herrmann, eds., Plato and the Poets (New York: Brill, 2011); Catherine Collobert, Pierre Destrée, and Francisco Gonzalez, eds., Plato and Myth: Studies on the Use and Status of Platonic Myths (New York: Brill, 2012); and Pierre Destrée and Radcliffe Edmonds, eds., Plato and the Power of Images (New York: Brill, 2017).

34 Brill of which, as Sallis reminds us, are required if we are to engage with Plato’s chosen mode of writing, a mode in which “Plato never says anything” (bl 2).3 All of this, of course, has bearing on what one takes philosophy to be and on the anxiety of philosophy’s origins. Sallis is acutely aware of an impulse to decontextualize the Platonic text from the intellectual and material conditions of its production, a tendency he also explicitly warns against: “it is necessary to insist most stringently that the project of philosophical interpretation not become an excuse for philological irresponsibility” (bl 3). But Sallis is equally concerned to ensure that we do not gloss over the lengthy historically-​and geographically-​protracted processes of translation of the Platonic dialogues,

3 Sallis’ approach has proven to be foundational for a broad range of phenomenologically-​ inflected approaches to Plato that share an emphasis on the autonomy of the text, the value of polysemy, and the positive force of aporia. See e.g., Drew Hyland, Finitude and Transcendence in the Platonic Dialogues (Albany, NY, suny Press, 199); Drew Hyland, Plato and the Question of Beauty (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008); Claudia Baracchi, Of Myth, Life and War in Plato’s Republic (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002); Marina McCoy, Plato on the Rhetoric of Philosophers and Sophists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Bernard Freydberg, Philosophy and Comedy: Aristophanes, Logos, and Eros (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008); Jill Gordon, Plato’s Erotic World: From Cosmic Origins to Human Death (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Anne-​Marie Schultz, Plato’s Socrates as Narrator: A Philosophical Muse (New York: Lexington Books, 2013); S. Montgomery Ewegen, Plato’s Cratylus: the Comedy of Language (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013); Jeremy Bell and Michael Naas, eds., Plato’s Animals: Gadflies, Horses, Swans and other Philosophical Beasts (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2015); Ryan  Drake, “The Death of Painting: After Plato,” Research in Phenomenology 41 (2011): 23–​44; Ryan Drake, “Adrift on the Boundless Sea of Unlikeness: Sophistry and Law in the Statesman,” in Plato’s Statesman: Dialectic, Myth, and Politics, ed. John Sallis (Albany, NY: suny Press, 2017), 251–​368; Sean Kirkland, The Ontology of Socratic Questioning in Plato’s Early Dialogues (Albany, NY: suny Press, 2012); Eric Sanday, A Study of Dialectic in Plato’s “Parmenides” (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015); Walter Brogan, “Plato’s Phaedo: Impossible Memory in the Wake of Socrates,” in A Companion to Ancient Philosophy, eds. Sean Kirkland and Eric Sanday (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017), 123–​134; Walter Brogan, “The Politics of Time: On the Relationship of Sovereignty and Law in Plato’s Statesman,” in Plato’s Statesman: Dialectic, Myth, Politics, ed. John Sallis (Albany, NY: suny Press, 2016), 69–​84; Sean Kirkland and Eric Sanday, eds., A Companion to Ancient Philosophy (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017); and Michael Naas, Plato and the Invention of Life (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018). A similar approach to Aristotle can be found in Claudia Baracchi, Aristotle’s Ethics as First Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Claudia Baracchi, ed., The Bloosmbury Companion to Aristotle (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2014); Christopher Long, Aristotle on the Nature of Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Adriel Trott, Aristotle on the Nature of Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); and Eli Diamond, Mortal Imitations of Divine Life: The Nature of the Soul in Aristotle’s “De Anima” (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015).

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which produced a philosophical vocabulary that was to have decisive impact for millennia. Greater attention to the translation practices that informed the construction of ‘basic’ philosophical concepts has led a number of thinkers to reconsider the nature of Plato’s contribution to the line of inquiry that would come to be called metaphysics, and to a broader questioning of the ‘search’ for philosophic origins.4 The Platonic dialogues, of course, contain one of the earliest rehersals of these anxieties and embedded in Plato’s monsters are concerns about the relationship between truth, being, and logos, as well as an analysis of our aspirations for the love of them and our fears about the hatred of them. In the remainder of this chapter, I will follow Sallis’ thread to see what we might learn from their many and varied shapes. 1

Plato’s Monsters

We would rob ourselves of Plato’s artistry if we ignore his monsters’ particularities and collapse them into one form. The Minotaur that stalks the Phaedo is overdetermined, acting at once as the cypher of death and as the sacrificial beast, both killer and killed, and when Socrates himself adopts the visage of this beast he does so in order to remind his friends that their love of him is misplaced, that they should love philosophy first (Phd. 91c). And to do this, they, like him, must embrace their own death as a source of freedom in order to avoid being tyrannized by it, and thus avoid being robbed of the single-​minded and ardent pursuit of being that marks them as philosophers. The true threat of the Minotaur, in this sense, is not death, but too much love of life (see, e.g., Phd. 117a), the threat that in singing his swan song, even Socrates will become so enamored of its sound as to be distracted from its sense. Typhon too serves as both a call to and a warning about self-​knowledge; a reminder that when one seeks after oneself one must be prepared not to like what one sees. This preparation is structural for philosophy so far as Plato is concerned—​to love wisdom is to already have understood that it is absent, an object of desire longed for and pursued. If the beauty of the beloved serves as reminder of the truth one once had and lost, this is so because in 4 See Ahmed Alwishah and Joshua Hayes, eds., Aristotle and the Arabic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Danielle Layne and Harold Tarrant, eds., The Neoplatonic Socrates (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014); Lloyd Gerson, Plato and Platonism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013); and Debra Nails, “Two Dogmas of Platonism,” Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy 28, no. 1 (2013): 77–​101.

36 Brill one’s possession of logos one already has caught a glimmer of one’s orientation toward truth and of the claim upon one’s being—​as a being possessed by logos—​that truth makes. And yet, we also rob ourselves of something essential if we fail to notice what they all have in common: they all attest to truth as a power, a capacity, a doing, a making, and a generating. In effect, that is, they all point to the power of truth to generate and, in keeping with the trope of monstrosity, to do so excessively. In the Phaedrus, this fecundity is particularly obvious; what is referred to almost synonymously as being or truth not only nourishes the soul and thus sustains zōē, it also determines bios, as it is one’s proximity to it that determines whether one will be a philosopher, or a doctor, or a tyrant. Here, then, we find a fantasy of birth in which truth displaces father and mother, producing seed whose fruit precisely is a way of life (Phdr. 248d-​e). In the Republic, it is the causal operation of the good, its ability to generate not only truth but also being, that marks it as beyond truth and beyond being (Rep. 509b). In the Timaeus, to grasp the truth of what is one must grasp, through bastard reasoning (Tim. 52b), a generative force so fecund and powerful as to exceed all possible terms and to leave, in its wake, the signs of nurse and mother. A life spent in pursuit of this truth is a life spent in search of a generativity that threatens one with destruction. Philosophy for Plato demands the endurance of derangement, the unflinching undoing of oneself, and this is so even as we may discern where Plato flinches. To understand Platonic philosophy as Sallis read it, then, we must follow this thread’s winding course as it connects power, truth, generativity, birth, and death in an excess that occasionally shows its face and makes a sign. This is apparent, for instance, in the indissoluble connection between phusis and phuō, whereby the excesses that are marked as monstrous are also part of the stochastic processes of growth; e.g., the spasm, the leap, and the swerve. This is to say that phuō is already connected to what is huperphuēs, that nature contains its own overcoming, that the huper-​marks the site of the paroxysm of growth. Or, as Sallis puts it: “monstrosity consists precisely in an exceeding of nature that nonetheless—​and in the utmost tension—​belongs to nature” (fn 58). By contrast, Aristotle retains this sense of growth, but attempts to excise the hint of its monstrosity; phusis is limit-​marking, a claim Aristotle makes not only in his study of phusis, but also in his studies of living beings. Even the wildest animal will grow docile if its source of food is plentiful, he tells us in the History of Animals (608b30–​609a4). Even the hyperfertility of the ‘king’ bee—​which would capture his attention in the Generation of Animals—​is balanced by the sterility of the drone, “and this arrangement has been so well constituted by nature [phusis]

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that the three kinds continue ever in existence and none of them fails, although not all of them generate” (ga 760b1–​3).5 We can see an alignment of fecundity, growth, and excess not only in Greek thinking about phusis, but also in a strand of Greek theorizing about zōē. And here too we encounter the monstrous, often read through the anxiety of reproductive excess represented by figures like Hesiod’s Pandora or the converse anxiety of reproductive lack—​of bareness—​represented by figures like the grieving Demeter and Artemis herself. Moreover we encounter the monstrous in the trope of feminine excess more broadly, as with Scylla and Charybdis, the Sirens, the Lastrygonian Queen, etc. To be generative is to flirt with the twin dangers of excess and lack, of hyperfertility and sterility, and this is true of the generativity of truth as well. But this suggests, in turn, that the undoing truth performs, its excessive and monstrous generativity, is also a remaking, a returning to life, a re-​birth. The mark of the return here announces Plato’s contribution to this theorizing of life: birth as a recursive gesture, as though life were that coming to be that is also a returning to be, a return marked in the human register by the recollection that announces a connection with being, and by the efforts in various dialogues to present biodiversity as a function of human ethical failing. This point is made explicitly in Republic 10 when Socrates announces that not only must they conclude that the soul in its true nature is immortal, but also that there are always the same number of souls, ceaselessly reborn into bodies (Rep. 611a). But we hear it in the Phaedo as well, most vividly in the assertion that all living beings come from the dead (Phd. 70c), a Socratic approach to the tragic coupling of birth and death, of mortality and natality, which we hear when Clytemnestra revels in the gushing blood of Agamemnon as like life-​ bringing spring rain (1600–​1605) or, again, in Antigone’s dirge, lamenting her tomb as her marriage bed (1026), or in Medea’s proclamation that she would rather stand in battle three times than give birth once (251). For Sallis, this interweaving of creation and destruction is endemic to the very study of the “ambivalent force” of phusis itself “that it both threatens and nurtures, that it both imposes deprivation and grants abundance, that it is the scene both of death and of new life” (fn 8). They collide particularly powerfully in the figure of Artemis, at once birth-​protecting and death-​bringing. But also, light-​carrying, as though this very intertwining of birth and death is generative, bringing something to light, making something manifest. Artemis

5 Aristotle, Generation of Animals, trans. Arthur Peck (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1943).

38 Brill balancing the scales, a life for a life, the sacrifice of young girls’ hair in memory of Hippolytus’ broken body, rent apart by his own steed; Acteon’s dismemberment by his own beloved hounds, alerted to his presence by his inability to keep silent. In Plato’s hands, this alignment is woven in to the appropriation of reproductive power and the eroticization of philosophy that unfolds in a number of dialogues. It is evident throughout the Republic, for one, and especially in those passages in which Socrates defends philosophy against the twin charges that its practitioners are either useless or vicious, weaving philia and eros together early on in the discussion of philosophic natures in Book 5 and offering a description of the insatiable character of the philosophic love of learning (475c) that paves the way for his description in Book 6 of the culmination of philosophical study as a fecund consummation: So then, won’t we make a measured defense in saying that it is the nature of the real lover of learning to strive for what is; and he does not linger over each of the many things opined to be but goes forward and does not blunt his passionate love nor cease from it before he grasps the nature itself of each thing which is with the part of the soul fit to grasp a thing of that sort; and it is the part akin to it that is fit. And once near it and coupled with what really is, having begotten mind and truth, he knows and truly lives, and is nourished and so ceases from his labor pains, but not before. (490a8-​b7)6 What is remarkable in this passage is the mixing of reproductive terms and familial roles: the real lover of learning, striken by eros, pursues the object of love single-​mindedly, couples with it, begets (usually attributed to the male), not ceasing from its labors (usually the pangs or throes of childbirth), until it is nourished (a passive construction often employed in the context of ­childhood). In begetting, in giving birth, in being nourished, the ‘real lover of learning’s’ passion ensnares it in the roles of father, mother, and child. Plato’s melding of erotic and reproductive life here is striking, and I take the connection Plato is drawing here to be one he finds in their effects; both are profoundly generative. That is, the melding of erotic and reproductive life is a function of the seductive force of generativity, as the primary expression of power, which runs rough-​shod over the distinctions so necessary for the polis. And, in fact, this emphasis on the erotic leanings of the philosopher paves the way for Plato’s 6 Unless otherwise noted, all translations of Plato’s Republic are my own.

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clear and succinct assertion that a city will remain imperfect unless philosophers rule or, “a true erotic passion for true philosophy” flows into its rulers or their sons (499b). This conception of philosophy echos the portrait of the true-​born philosopher Socrates draws early on in the Phaedo, whose death represents not something to be feared, but, again, the consummation of life’s erotic passion: Would it not be very foolish if [true philosophers] should be frightened and troubled when this very thing happens, and if they should not be glad to go to the place where there is hope of attaining what they loved all through life—​and they loved wisdom—​and of escaping from the companionship of that which they hated? When human loves or wives or sons have died, many men have willingly gone to Hades led by the hope of seeing there those whom they longed for, and of being with them and shall he who is really in love with wisdom and has a firm belief that he can find it nowhere else than in the other world grieve when he does and not be glad to go there? (67e7–​68b2)7 When Plato moves beyond the realm of philia—​of affection for wisdom—​to the realm of erōs and the passionate pursuit of being, he draws to being the very attachment, terror, and thus also hatred that accompanied the erotic ideal. This is a fecund alignment. To philosophize, at least in this Socratic mode, is to birth and, like Artemis, to birth not one’s own children, but those of others. Paternity belongs to the source of the seed; that is, the source of the logos—​ truth. But what of maternity? Here it is worth observing the dialectic by means of which this appropriation is at once an erasure of human maternity, and in this supports the structural misogyny that Plato elsewhere questions, and also a maternalization of philosophy in the guise of the mid-​wife, a dialectic that has proven to be a spur for contemporary engagement with Plato in feminist theory.8 Logos emerges from this model of philosophy as the expression of truth’s power, as the conduit by means of which it travels, as both effect and vehicle of its effects. And here too Sallis observes the sign of the monster: “It is 7 Unless otherwise noted, translation of Plato’s Phaedo is that of Fowler for the Loeb Classical Library. 8 I have in mind here recent work by Stella Sandford and Emanuela Bianchi. See Stella Sandford, Plato and Sex (London: Polity Press, 2010); and Emmanuela Bianchi, The Feminine Symptom: Aleatory Matter in the Aristotelian Cosmos (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014).

40 Brill precisely when words of a certain order are set in deed together in the staging of a certain kind of scene that monstrosity comes—​almost paradoxically—​to ally itself with truth” (fn 58). And so we read of logos as truth’s seed (Phaedrus) as the song of the soul when it touches truth (Timaeus), as that which must at all costs be brought back to life, and what is most worth mourning if it cannot be (Phaedo). This reminder of the mortality of logos—​of its vulnerability and of the human ability to forget itself—​serves also as a reminder that in failing to risk the undoing philosophy invites, we open other risks: the risk of self-​ betrayal and the risk of misology. 2

Misology

In the Phaedo, misology rises amongst those who believe themselves to be wise, because they alone have detected “that there’s nothing sound or steady in anything, whether logos or anything else; but all the things that are simply toss up and down, as happens in the Euripus, and nothing is stable for any length of time” (Phd. 90c). That is to say, the risk of misology arises out of a sense of betrayal—​having naively (artlessly, aneu technēs, 89e, 90b, 81c) put one’s trust in an argument, one subsequently discovers its weaknesses, feels betrayed by it, and leaves it. And yet, asserts Socrates, the loss—​or, to follow his language even more carefully, the death—​of the logos is more worthy of mourning than the death of a person, and they should stop at nothing to resuscitate the logos, literally to return it to life [anabiōsasthai] (Phd. 89b). As part of Socrates’ larger efforts in this dialogue to get his friends “to give little thought to Socrates and much more to the truth” (Phd. 91c), this is a particularly illuminating and poignant moment, and Socrates’ concern for his interlocutors is highlighted by his sense of the damaging effects of misology, a condition that he claims is worse than misanthropy (Phd. 89d). Socrates’ privileging of logos over person is not a simple rejection of the value of the human, but rather a response to the misologist’s repudiation of what makes one human. For to hate this or that person is not the same as simply hating people, and even the misanthropist still loves at least one human being—​e.g., him or herself—​enough to continue to cling to life. But to hate logos is to hate what for Plato stands as the very marker of the human as such; it is to hate the principle of one’s humanity, a principle with divine origin. That is, to hate logos is to hate the divine in the human. The sense of betrayal that resides at the heart of misology is given fuller description in a passage in the Republic, whose terms illuminate the affective scene/​context at work here. Those who are exposed to dialectic too early in their

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education are like adopted children who discover the truth about ­themselves only later in life and, feeling betrayed by their ‘parents,’ conclude that filial piety is false and worthless and fall into the fold of a decadent and deforming culture of flattery (Rep. 538a-​b). So too, in being raised by “convictions” [dogmata] as by parents, these early dialecticians discover the weakness and falsehood of those opinions and, in their betrayal, conclude that there is nothing true in logos at all, and flee into smug and empty displays of argumentation. The adolescent and familial context is crucial to understanding what is at stake here, as it makes an existential claim. For Plato, we arrive into logos as mysteries to ourselves, but filled with assumptions/​opinions/​beliefs by which we attempt to make sense of the world; that is, “surely we have from childhood convictions about what’s just and fair by which we are brought up as by parents, obeying them as rulers and honoring them” (Rep. 538c). Through our developing capacities for argument—​we are “like puppies enjoying pulling and tearing with argument at those who happen to be near” (Rep. 539b)—​we come to see the falsehood of these convictions, and our sense of ourselves and of the world collapses, and we turn, angry and betrayed, to a cynical manipulation of words and thoughts: Then when they themselves refute many men and are refuted by many, they fall quickly into profound distrust of what they formerly believed. And because of this, they themselves and the whole activity of philosophy are thrown into disrepute with other men. (Rep. 539b9-​c3) We can detect in the young dialectician’s childish rebellion against the truth a nostalgia at the heart of his lawlessness, a longing for return to the very condition whose loss has sparked such a deep sense of betrayal, a natal longing for carefree and unproblematic connection to his source. To flee from the truth in logos is to flee from what would reveal one’s true source, the source of all being, whose generative excess Glaucon, invoking Apollo, describes as demonic (Rep. 509c). Philosophy emerges as an antidote to this self-​and logos-​sickening by replacing a childish and naive trust in logos with a more artful and circumspect approach to one’s linguistic and rational capacities, an approach that replaces ambivalence about one’s source with a love of one’s source and the possibility of sharing in the power of that source. But this requires a very specific form of education, which in turn requires a very specific political structure. And if we are to fully understand what is at stake in the possibility of a human hatred for reason as Plato understands it, we have to recognize that it appears to be those who have a talent for argument and thus a natural predilection for philosophy

42 Brill who are most at risk. The city cannot afford to not take philosophy in hand because deformed philosophic natures—​natures who are not nurtured properly, who are not given the proper soil they need—​become amongst the most dangerous figures in the city (Rep. 491bff). That is, those who have tasted the pleasures of dialectic and are drawn to them are the ones most in need of careful rearing.9 Socrates himself enacts this very tension in the Phaedo—​he warns his interlocutors that he is not in a philosophical frame of mind, that in his eagerness to avoid misology and convince himself of the soundness of logoi he resembles more a lover of victory than a lover of wisdom (Phd. 91a-​b) and that they should protect themselves from him by loving the truth more than they love him. They should, he says, strain against him, without apology or regret, if what he says seems to them not to be true, taking care that he doesn’t leave this world having deceived both himself and them “like a bee that’s left its sting behind” (Phd. 91c). To refuse to by undone by truth, to inoculate oneself against truth, is a refusal of its generativity, and specifically a refusal of one’s humanness and the possession of logos that accompanies this and thus also a refusal of human access to the world. This, in turn, results in the loss of a world entire, in the dissolution of all, a different kind of undoing, but one that could easily be confused with the other. This is the danger that Plato’s Theaetetus asserts philosophy courts, as Sallis’ reads it. The risk of misology, then, is native to philosophy as Plato has painted it and is connected to the erotic investment in truth/​being that is the hallmark of the philosopher. Thus, for all of his praise of logos, Plato is acutely aware of the vulnerability the human possession by logos brings. It is this capacity that makes the Socratic effort to follow the logos possible, but also the transformation of people into crowds or—​to follow the language of the Republic—​into the beast whose manipulation is the true sophist’s art (Rep. 493a-​b). Both humanizing and dehumanizing, both truth-​seeking and truth-​obfuscating, the human use of logos marks a vulnerability that makes love of logos on its own insufficient for a philosophic life. What is necessary, first and foremost, is a love of being and from this a willingness to submit to logos as a vehicle for attaining proximity to being. In the absence of this passionate orientation toward being, a love of logos can quickly lead to the kind of betrayal that turns to a hatred of logos. And because Plato treats this risk as endemic to human life—​that we will come to hate the very thing that marks us as human—​we read from 9 “And particularly from these men come those who do the greatest harm to cities and private men, as well as those who do the good, if they chance to be drawn in this direction. No little nature ever does anything great either to private man or to city” (495b).

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multiple dialogues that a philosophic life does not seek self-​knowledge as an end, but rather as an engine for self-​overcoming. Sallis’ attention to this self-​overcoming and to the larger themes of excess and monstrosity in Plato are valuable not only for the light they bring to Plato’s conception of philosophy, but also for their illumination of Plato’s sense of philosophy’s specifically political valence. To put power into question—​a practice exemplified by Socrates’ gadfly philosophy—​is to risk the very destabilization opened by the monstrosity of truth, a risk that lies at the heart of philosophy. To sever it from this risk is to sever it from its generativity. I am reminded of a very different, but resonant, reception of monstrosity. This one comes from Greta Garbo, on the event of her first viewing of Jean Cocteau’s Le Belle et la Bête. In the moment of transformation, when beast becomes prince, when what is wild becomes conventional, Garbo is rumored to have shouted at the screen: “Give me back my beast!” It is to Sallis that we owe a sense of the Platonic nature of this response.

Bibliography

Alwishah, Ahmed, and Joshua Hayes, eds. Aristotle and the Arabic Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Aristotle. Generation of Animals. Translated by Arthur Peck. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1943. Baracchi, Claudia. Of Myth, Life and War in Plato’s Republic. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002. Baracchi, Claudia. Aristotle’s Ethics as First Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Baracchi, Claudia, ed. The Bloosmbury Companion to Aristotle. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2014. Bell, Jeremy and Michael Naas, eds. Plato’s Animals: Gadflies, Horses, Swans and other Philosophical Beasts. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2015. Bianchi, Emanuela. The Feminine Symptom: Aleatory Matter in the Aristotelian Cosmos. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014. Blondell, Ruby. The Play of Character in Plato’s Dialogues. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Brock, Robert. Greek Political Imagery from Homer to Aristotle. London, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. Brogan, Walter. “Plato’s Phaedo: Impossible Memory in the Wake of Socrates.” In A Companion to Ancient Philosophy, edited by Sean Kirkland and Eric Sanday, 123–​134. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017.

44 Brill Brogan, Walter. “The Politics of Time: On the Relationship of Sovereignty and Law in Plato’s Statesman.” In Plato’s Statesman: Dialectic, Myth, Politics, edited by John Sallis. Albany, NY: suny Press, 2016. Collobert, Catherine, Pierre Destrée, and Francisco Gonzalez, eds. Plato and Myth: Studies on the Use and Status of Platonic Myths. New York: Brill, 2012. Destrée, Pierre, and Radcliffe Edmonds, eds. Plato and the Power of Images. New York: Brill, 2017. Destrée, Pierre, and Fritz-​Gregor Herrmann, eds. Plato and the Poets. New York: Brill, 2011. Diamond, Eli. Mortal Imitations of Divine Life: The Nature of the Soul in Aristotle’s “De Anima”. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015. Drake, Ryan. “The Death of Painting: After Plato.” Research in Phenomenology 41 (2011): 23–​44. Drake, Ryan. “Adrift on the Boundless Sea of Unlikeness: Sophistry and Law in the Statesman.” In Plato’s Statesman: Dialectic, Myth, and Politics, edited by John Sallis, 251–​268. Albany, NY: suny Press, 2017. Euripides. Hippolytus. Translated by George Kovacs. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Ewegen, Shane. Plato’s Cratylus: the Comedy of Language. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013. Freydberg, Bernard. Philosophy and Comedy: Aristophanes, Logos, and Eros. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008. Gerson, Lloyd. Plato and Platonism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013. Gordon, Jill. Plato’s Erotic World: From Cosmic Origins to Human Death.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Hyland, Drew. Finitude and Transcendence in the Platonic Dialogues. Albany, NY, suny Press, 1995. Hyland, Drew. Plato and the Question of Beauty. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008. Kirkland, Sean. The Ontology of Socratic Questioning in Plato’s Early Dialogues. Albany, NY: suny Press, 2012. Kirkland, Sean, and Eric Sanday, eds. A Companion to Ancient Philosophy. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017. Layne, Danielle, and Harold Tarrant, eds. The Neoplatonic Socrates. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Long, Christopher. Aristotle on the Nature of Truth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. McCoy, Marina. Plato on the Rhetoric of Philosophers and Sophists. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Morgan, Kathryn. Myth and Philosophy from the Presocratics to Plato. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

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Naas, Michael. Plato and the Invention of Life. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018. Nails, Debra. “Two Dogmas of Platonism.” Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy 28, no. 1 (2013): 77–​101. Nightingale, Andrea. Genres in Dialogue: Plato and the Constuct of Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Nightingale, Andrea. Spectacles of Truth in Classicasl Greek Philosophy: Theoria in its Cultural Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Partenie, Catalin. Plato’s Myths. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pender, Elizabeth. Images of Persons Unseen: Plato’s Metaphors for the Gods and the Soul. Sankt Augustin: Academia Verlag, 2000. Plato. Platonis Opera, 4 vols., ed. by John Burnet. Oxford University Press. 1903. Plato. Plato in Twelve Volumes, vol. 1. Translated by Harold North Fowler; Introduction by W.R.M. Lamb. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1966. Porter, James. “Plato and the Platonic Tradition: the Image Beyond the Image.” Yearbook of Comparative Literature 56 (2010): 75–​103. Rowe, Christopher. Plato and the Art of Philosophical Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Sanday, Eric. A Study of Dialectic in Plato’s “Parmenides.” Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015. Sandford, Stella. Plato and Sex. London: Polity Press, 2010. Schultz, Anne-​Marie. Plato’s Socrates as Narrator: A Philosophical Muse. New York: Lexington Books, 2013. Trott, Adriel. Aristotle on the Nature of Community. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Werner, Daniel. Myth and Philosophy in Plato’s Phaedrus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

­c hapter 3

Boundless Images: John Sallis and the Ancient Gods Claudia Baracchi 1

Prologue: “Everything Is Full of Gods”

Encountering John Sallis’ thinking, one might at once be reminded of a saying traditionally ascribed to Thales, and say again: “Everything is full of gods,” panta plere theon einai. The sentence occurs in Plato’s Laws (899b) without attribution. The briefest consideration of the Platonic discussion in which the statement occurs will readily dispel any confidence regarding its obviousness and, above all, regarding the meaning of the word theos. We are in Book x, the Athenian and Clinias are touching on the psuche, which, invisible to us, leads the visible bodies—​that of the sun as well as that of any other living being (898d). For the psuche “leads all things [periagousa … panta],” indeed, “leads, cares for, and orders the circular motions of the sky”—​ whether “one” psuche alone “or more” is unclear (898c).1 Nor is it clear, the Athenian admits, how exactly it does this: perhaps by “being in” the body it “carries around everywhere [peripherei … pantei],” whether it be the body of the sun or our own; or perhaps “by force”—​that is, getting some body “from outside” and hurling body against body; or perhaps, utterly deprived of any sort of body, in some other unspecified way, by “some other exceedingly wondrous powers” (898e-​899a). In contemplating these three possibilities, the Athenian says that they might not be “altogether wrong” (898e), although the issue is not further determined, effectively suspending the question of the aliveness of the celestial bodies and the cosmos as a whole. For, while the first hypothesis involving the inherence of the psuche would necessarily yield a perspective on the heavenly bodies as living beings, animate just like all other animals, the second hypothesis tells us of motion initiated by the psuche “from outside” and then continuing mechanically, as the action of body on body. The third hypothesis, radicalizing the infinite distance and extraneousness of psuche, which is said to be “bare of body,” deprived of the garments of embodiment, only exacerbates the sense of inaccessibility surrounding this inquiry.

1 Here and for the rest of the essay the translations from Greek are mine.

© Claudia Baracchi, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004507098_005

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However, regardless of the way(s) in which psuche operates, one thing is affirmed with binding force: psuche must be regarded as a god, theos (899a). And, just as the moving psuchai may indeed be more than one, so may the gods. It is at this point that the Athenian gathers the various foregoing elements into the sentence Thales is said to have uttered: Regarding all the stars and the moon, and regarding the years and months and all the seasons, what other account shall we give than this very same, namely, that since it was shown that the psuche or psuchai are causes of all these things … we shall say that the souls are gods, whether they order the whole sky by being in bodies, as living beings, or whatever the mode? Is there anyone who, agreeing with this, will deny that all things are full of gods? (899b) As was previously announced, psuche is “the cause of all things [panton … aitian]” (896d). Whatever its ways, psuche moves and, in this sense, lies at the very root of becoming: it is the “first cause of the generation and destruction of all things” (891e), “the oldest and most potent change [metabolen] of all” (895b), the “first generation and motion [genesin kai kinesin] of what is, has been, and shall be” (896a). It is such a primordiality that qualifies it as theos. Later in Book xii the Athenian will echo these convictions with a certain precision: all things that are, under and within the starry sky, unfold according to the guidance of psuche. Being “the oldest and most divine of all things” in motion (966d-​e) and “immortal,” it “leads [archei] all bodies” (967d). In light of these statements, the perplexity concerning the ways in which the psuche moves (whether by inhering in bodies, or from the outside, etc.) appears to be mitigated. The Athenian’s rhetoric almost imperceptibly slides towards the affirmation of the absolute pervasiveness of the psuche or psuchai: for psuche, he notes, “keeps house and dwells in all things everywhere,” dioikousan kai enoikousan en hapasin tois pantei (896d). All things are full of gods. But this means the ubiquity of life—​the immanence of psuche—​in all things generated and becoming, across the phenomenal expanse. As “the cause of all things,” psuche names “the cause of all change and motion of all things” (896a-​b), the “principle of movement,” archē kineseos (896b). And, in light of the foregoing remarks, movement should not be understood in terms of mechanical locomotion, of moving from one place to another, as it were, but rather in terms of the vibrant aliveness of place. Far from a matter of empty, neutral, homogeneous extension, places are moving, animated, metabolic. Phenomena taking place, disclosing themselves, are infused with life. At stake is the dynamic quality of being there, the motility of place.

48 Baracchi But if phenomena come into manifestation within an utterly non-​static field, a flowing and shaking openness, their boundaries move. Lines and surfaces are deep, profiles unstable. 2

Archaic Experience

“All things are full of gods.” It is Aristotle who, in reporting this pronouncement, attributes it to Thales and relates it to the ancient view according to which the psuche would be “mixed in the all”: “Some say that soul is interspersed [memichtai] in the all [en toi holoi]; and it may have been this that led Thales to think that all things are full of gods” (Aristotle, De anima, 411a7–​9). “The all” would, then, be pervaded by psuche or psuchai: living, pulsating, moving, and, in this sense, “full of gods.” Aristotle’s remark illuminates Plato’s line of thinking as echoing archaic insights—​first and foremost, the divinity of psuche (or psuchai) and its (their) spreading across the entire cosmos. The thought of psuche as the origin of motion is likewise ascribed to the Ionian predecessor, as Aristotle observes in an earlier passage: “Thales as well, according to what is reported, seems to have considered the soul as moving, if indeed he said that the loadstone has a soul because it moves iron” (405a19–​21). The resonance between Plato’s discussion in the Laws and the fragmentary sayings of Thales on the psuchai as gods stirring the all, signals not so much a dogmatic alignment or inheritance. Rather, it points to the survival, in Plato, of very ancient motifs enduring even in anonymity, unattributed and hence not formally distanced—​a nameless, vertiginously archaic thread woven into Plato’s immense polyphony. So they said: All things are full of gods. Or of daimonia, according to a later version (Aetius), reflecting a changing sensibility, a phase of antiquity growing uncomfortable with the oceanic conjunction of divinity, life, and nature. Thales’ proposition relating all things teeming with gods is “absurd,” atopos, Simplicius will say a few centuries later, with his characteristic blend of condescension and severity (in Aristotelis De anima, 20r). The experience of the aliveness and divinity of all that is has progressively faded, to the point of becoming an extravagant posture. And the god, now one and alone, is identified with the intellect (nous) and understood as disembodied, withdrawn from nature, moving it from its remoteness, while the task of covering all distance is taken up by the daimonia: Thales held that the intellect of the cosmos is god, and that the all is animated [empsuchon] and, at the same time, full of daimons [daimonon

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pleres]; through [dia] the moist element there penetrates a divine power that moves [dunamin theian kinetiken] it. (Aetius vii.1)2 Yet, Aristotle did not seem to find problematic the bond holding together gods and everything that is, is alive, and everywhere. In the Metaphysics, he acknowledges Thales as the initiator of the tradition thinking the archē in terms of matter; and so much more. For, indeed, an entire poetic, imaginative repertoire forms a kind of semantic halo around the formulation of water as archē, indefinitely enriching its sense: As to the number and form of this principle, not everyone says the same; but Thales, the initiator of this philosophy, says that it is water (because of this he also affirms that the earth rests on water), probably getting the belief from seeing that the nourishment of all beings is moist and that warmth itself comes out of moisture and lives in it (for that out of which all things come is their origin); and getting the belief also from the fact that the germs of all beings have a moist nature, while water is the origin of the nature of what is moist. And there are those who hold that the ancients, who were long before the present generation and first speculated about the gods, had the same belief regarding nature; for they poetically portrayed Okeanos and Tethys as the parents of generation, water being that by which the gods swear, Styx as the poets call it; for that which is oldest is most revered, and that which is most revered is that by which one swears. Whether such an opinion concerning nature is indeed archaic and ancient may be unclear; but Thales is said to have stated such an opinion regarding the first cause (983b18–​984a3). Aristotle clearly acknowledges Thales as a philosopher: as belonging in the community of those “coming to investigate beings and seeking wisdom concerning the way things are [philosophesantas peri tes aletheias]” (983b2). All the same, he is keenly aware of the proximity of those who came first, “before us” (983b1) to a world, to an experience of the world, vastly discontinuous with his own—​an experience intimately connected with poetic word and imagination, but also relating a sense of ubiquitous numinosity. So attentive is Aristotle to the remoteness of that world, that he moves with the utmost caution, pointing

2 G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven, and M. Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 97.

50 Baracchi to the obscurity of the matter and the conjectural character of anything he can say about it. On Aristotle’s part, this is a noteworthy operation, lying at the very inception of a nascent narration of philosophical genealogy, indeed, at the very inception of philosophy as such. For Thales, as well as most other pre-​Socratic thinkers coming under Aristotle’s scrutiny, neither knew himself nor was addressed by his contemporaries as a philosopher, a term making its appearance only in the 5th century bce. Instead, he always appears in the lists (there are different versions) of the 7 sages of the 6th century bce: not a philosophos, but a sophos. What is included in Aristotle’s survey of the predecessors is, thus, philosophy before philosophy. But before philosophia as we know it—​instituted in Plato’s and Aristotle’s discourses—​there was sophia. What precedes philosophy is not myth condescendingly understood as the primitive domain of naïve, child-​like phantasies, but rather sophia as a condition always already lost to philosophia. Erotically motivated, moved by longing, philosophia is what remains after, in the wake of a loss. 3

John Sallis and the “in Which”

“Everything is full of gods” says that the gods, or psuchai,3 permeate the all, dwell everywhere, interlaced en toi holoi (De anima 411a7). The question beginning to form here concerns “that in which” the gods would inhere, enlivening and inflecting everything coming to take place there. But that “in which” (en hoi) things come to be and unfold is what Plato called chora (Timaeus 49e). After one has encountered in thought, the way Sallis has, something like the enigma of chora, and has laboriously come into an attunement with the unsettling, dismantling consequences of this exposure, then what remains is place: place as a problem that has ceased to be a merely “philosophical problem.” Place as a problem with which, within which, one lives. No longer controlled by the metaphysical dichotomy that would secure the fluctuation of everything phenomenal (the seismic shakings of chora, the flowing of the earth as Rhea) to conceptual measurement and stabilization. After such an encounter, one does not even confront head-​on the enigma that haunts place as such: that it is an intuitive singularity that is nonetheless not an intuitable singular 3 See also Aristotle, Generation of the Animals, 762a21.

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thing. The enigma that place as such is intuitive without being intuitable as such, that it is singular without being a determinate singular thing, an individual. This enigma is linked to another: that place cannot be accommodated to the traditional, metaphysical opposition between the intelligible and the sensible, that it is neither intelligible nor sensible nor something mid-​way between intelligible and sensible. Drawing upon place itself in order to express this enigma, one could say that it falls outside the opposition between the intelligible and the sensible, outside in another place, in a place other than that of the opposition. … (tg 3) What remain are, thus, “places,” in the plural: “singular places that are indeed intuitable, that offer their shape and their spectacle to our senses.” Places that are “evocative” and, therefore, “disclosive,” “opening upon the elements” (tg 4). Thus, one finds oneself there, enfolded in an unresolved problem—​in (a) place, along with the things that come to take refuge there in their flickering radiance, hanging on, lingering for a while. Thus one lives, we live, in the midst of phenomena resplendent to varying degrees, in a luminosity we call beautiful when most shining (to ekphanestaton), in whose motility and intensity we occasionally have the fleeting impression of seizing the passage of a god or of retrieving traces thereof. Let us briefly consider how Sallis got there. The itinerary unfolds towards a certain freeing of place and its language, from the sway of abstraction, emptiness, and frictionless calculability—​from a domain in which the formality of intuition merges with the reasons of geometry and consigns place to space and spatiality. 4

Chora

Sallis’ descent into the most archaic stratum of Plato’s Timaeus points to chora in its ineffability, in its withdrawal from both imaginative and noetic apprehension, to the extent that they are mapped upon the opposition of sensibility and intelligibility. Such a descent in, of, and through discourse leads to the threshold of silence—​to a ceasing of logos and of sense. Sallis follows Timaeus’ discourse as it somehow allows chora to emerge as the “in which” (en hoi) of generation and the “from which” (ekeithen) of corruption. In this connection, one may be reminded of the Symposium, of the beautiful “in which” giving birth (gennesis, tokos) is said to occur (206b, 206e). Or one may think of the Stranger in the Sophist, addressing chora as the place of the glow of being, wherein the philosopher is as hard “to see” as the sophist

52 Baracchi in the dark place of non-​being, for many “cannot endure turning their sight towards the divine” (254a-​b). Becoming, thus, occurs as a movement in and away from chora. Accordingly, decay would be a matter, quite literally, of passing away—​not a return to some originary locus, but a departure, loss, and indeterminate receding from the place of unfolding. Chora seems to name the sheltering of what comes into being. However, chora can in no way be assimilated to the order of becoming, visibility, or sensibility. Nor does chora belong in the order of the eidē. Neither being (the being of beings), nor a being, nor beings as a whole, chora, strictly speaking, is not even a “kind.” Chora, then, appears as alien to the horizon of the contrast between idea and image; in fact, to horizon in general, hence to the categories of space, place, matter, as well as to the order of the categorial; to order tout court. In striving to say (“touch”) chora, discourse comes to encounter its own impossibility and silence, the interruption of meaning, and the contestation of structures of signification. Logos encounters itself as chalepon, severely difficult, arduous. So extreme is the imperviousness of chora, that chora proves to be untranslatable; that is to say, barely thinkable. Indeed, one wonders what (as if the question concerning “what” were still pertinent here) may be thought in and through such a noun or name: “Then it would have to be said that the third kind has no meaning and that the name … chora, if it is a name, has no meaning. Both the chora and the word chora would be meaningless.” Or, “if it should turn out that somehow … they have something like a meaning, it would have to be a kind of meaning beyond meaning, just as the third kind … is a kind of kind beyond kind” (ct 111). In this way, Sallis notes, chora would exceed, i.e., at once make possible and disrupt, the order of production (techne)—​that order of production, presupposing the dichotomy of idea and image or likeness, privileged by Timaeus in his first logos on the origin of the cosmos (in which the divine artisan is said to look at the eidē and produce their likenesses). Chora, the “in which” of generation and “from which” of corruption, would grant and, at once, altogether shatter poiesis and the eidetic/​eikastic opposition it assumes. In the transition from the first beginning to an other beginning, then, a slippage would take place, away from an understanding of the cosmos as the image or likeness fashioned thanks to imitation (eidetic contemplation and subsequent reproduction)—​away from an understanding that would refer the cosmos back to the primacy of the eidē. Accordingly, the chorology, this bastard discourse, would indeterminately exceed the eikos logos, i.e., the discursive mode embraced by Timaeus in the first beginning. For, indeed, the eikos logos, discourse pertaining to the order of

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the imaginal, would still presuppose the relation, in fact the subjection, to the order of noesis and the discourse appropriate to it. As Sallis points out: [i]‌f one were to take metaphysics to be constituted precisely by the governance of the twofold, then the chorology could be said to bring both the founding of metaphysics and its displacement, both at once. Originating metaphysics would have been exposing it to the abyss, to the abysmal chora, which is both origin and abyss, both at the same time. Then one could say—​with the requisite reservations—​that the beginning of metaphysics will have been already the end of metaphysics. (ct 123) Thus, on one hand, the Timaeus as a whole is illuminated in terms of a slippage: in terms of a movement away from the privilege of technical production, from the authority of the original over the copy, from the reduction of the imaginal to the imitative, and, therefore, even, from imaginal (i.e., imitatively adequate) discursivity (eikos logos) (ct 96). In brief, away from the workings of metaphysics. Chora is no reproductive matrix. And yet, on the other hand, precisely because of what Sallis himself observes concerning the “already” of the end, the inherence of the end in the beginning, even in the first beginning—​one may wonder whether perhaps it may not be so much the matter of a slippage from the techno-​metaphysical twofold to choric indeterminacy and from a discourse dominated by eidetic propriety to a bastard discourse. One may wonder whether, perhaps, an unnamed disruptive force may be at work since the beginning, the first beginning—​prior to the discourse on chora, prior to the naming taking place in the chorology. This amounts to wondering whether, perhaps, even in the first discourse the question of production may be less schematic, less schematizable, less stable, in brief, more problematic, than it appears. This might then imply that what has come to be called metaphysics is but one possible (re)construction of the Greek inception—​not a necessary path, but one taken with the responsibility of a series of interpretive and narrative choices. Which, again, might imply that the ancient Greek experience harbors possibilities and suggestions yet to be reckoned with. The end in the beginning seems precisely to name such potentialities. This warrants a short detour. 5

A Technical Paradigm?

In his analysis of Timaeus’ first discourse, by reference to other dialogues as well, Sallis establishes a certain semantic equivalence of techne and poiesis.

54 Baracchi Poiesis would be nothing other than technical production, production accomplished through technical skill or mastery (i.e., under the directive of the eidetic). Though this identity is disturbed by a moment in the Sophist, in which it is said that techne can be acquisitive as well as productive or poietic, poiesis and techne would indicate the same mode of production. At most, poiesis might be exceeded by techne, which may also be other than productive (ct 16). And yet, poiesis is clearly shown in its non-​identity with respect to techne both in Ion and Phaedrus (245a), to limit ourselves here to the most pertinent discussions. More specifically, in both dialogues poiesis is associated with a bringing forth that, far from occurring on the ground of technique and technical mastery, appears to be a matter of divine possession, of inspiration in the sense of enthousiasmos, mania, ek-​stasis. The non-​identity of poiesis and techne in these dialogues is exposed in terms of poiesis exceeding techne (and not vice versa). Far from being a region or sub-​field of techne, poiesis seems rather to indicate a mode of production otherwise than eidetically controlled, the occurrence of bringing forth in its mystery, exuberance, and exorbitance. Irreducible to the technical paradigm, human production appears as also other-​than-​human—​ or else it reveals creative possibilities that vastly surpass the execution of conceptually laid out plans through the requisite technical dexterity. Granted, the poiein of children, the paidopoiia discussed in the Republic and recalled in the Timaeus, seems to indicate less the phenomena of conception, child-​bearing, and birth than the ultimate attempt at mastering the regenerative, self-​perpetuating workings of life, of phusis itself. Yet, in the development of the dialogue the claim to the control of procreation is withdrawn; namely, in Book viii, in which the Muses, speaking through Socrates, disrupt the project of political engineering and reveal the unfathomable depth and inaccessibility of such calculations. Moreover, in texts such as the Symposium (208e-​210d) the language of poiesis crucially joins that of pregnancy, of creation and procreation according to phusis—​or, which may be the same, according to the mystery of eros.4 4 A problem destined to remain unaddressed in the present discussion is the relation between techne/​poiesis and generation, i.e., the bringing forth of/​by nature (natality, fecundity). In strategically emphasizing the slippage from the eikos logos to the chorology and from production to procreation, Sallis seems to suggest that there may be a real separation or, minimally, discontinuity between human production and the production of/​by phusis. But the poietic or other-​than-​technical dimensions of techne/​poiesis, its irreducibility to eidetic conformity, point to an interpenetration of exquisitely technical and other motifs in production. After all, human production (and not only reproduction) seems quite critically to exceed conceptual control, most notably in the modes of creativity connected with ek-​static experience, but even in the cases of craftsmanship in a narrower sense.

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Not only, however, does poiesis seem to exceed the technical paradigm. More crucially still, techne itself does not seem to be “merely technical,” reducible to eidetic sovereignty, after all. Accordingly, the language of techne and that of poiesis may indeed converge, but they come to indicate a bringing forth infinitely more complex than the schematic translation from original into copy, than the movement from intelligible contemplation into the manual realization of artifacts, effectively making all the presupposed dualisms and hierarchies tremble. In this regard, it is precisely the Republic, the dialogue allegedly affirming techne in its strictest, schematic, and programmatic version, which in many ways proves to be illuminating. Consider, first of all, how techne/​poiesis is enacted by Socrates in the making of the city in logos. It is quite remarkable that Socrates should proceed to produce the copy (city) in order to make the original (soul) at all accessible, visible. This making (poiesis, 369b), far from bringing forth the likeness of a conceptually grasped original, occurs in the lack, unavailability, or invisibility of the original. This is what the stipulations in Book ii involve: the polis is brought forth in speech, without a discernible model. Indeed, such a construction is prompted by the essential impossibility of contemplation and involves,

This is not so much in order to establish, without any further qualification, an obvious continuity between the polis and phusis. But simply alleging their discontinuity is just as problematic. The issue would rather involve showing the necessary, yet utterly impervious character of their togetherness. The suggestion here is that the belonging even of techno-​ politics in phusis in no way means that such politics is phusei, according to phusis, by nature. The point is certainly not a naturalization of politics and political fabrication. The way in which the polis may belong in nature while not being (determined) by nature deserves the closest, most vigilant, and sustained scrutiny, lest certain (political) determinations end up appearing as clearly and self-​evidently “natural” or, for that matter, unnatural. Take, for instance, the “technical” city of Republic Book ii-​v in its allegedly “unnatural” character, contra naturam. Is the project of such community “most unnatural” or is it an exploration of what is possible in, if not determined by, nature? How would delving into possibility result in something unnatural? Is there one “natural community” and does it necessarily coincide with “familial community” (ct 20–​21)? Are the “fabricated community” and the “natural community” necessarily mutually exclusive? What if the familial setting would be but one possibility for humans, only surreptitiously enforcing itself as necessary and as exhausting the range of the “natural”? What remains unthought in the unquestioning assumption of this order as natural? Is this not a collapse of nature and convention (indeed, a naturalization of convention)? One is reminded of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, of the tenor of his reflections on Oedipus marrying his closest kin (especially §9). Yet, most animals do exactly this. The remembrance of parenting and filiation fades as the offspring grows. Any adult individual mates with any other. That this may not be the case for humans is a profoundly mysterious, perplexing datum, whose status (whether natural or otherwise, and in what sense) and extraordinary character deserve relentless examination.

56 Baracchi above all, groping in the dark. The interlocutors produce an eidolon in order to make up for the eidos they cannot see. The entire dialogue revolves around the disorderly and precarious process of a making that brings forth the “original” or at least lets it emerge, disclosing it as paradoxically secondary, through a process at once productive and clarifying. Here, techne emerges as a making, a poiein, that is no mere presupposition and copy of an eidos, but rather a creation without paradigm or, at any rate, a creation prior to any paradigm—​at the limit, the creation of the paradigm. But this means that techne as controlled by the duality of eidos and copy, intelligibility and sensibility, is a myth already in Plato, even in the Republic. So much so that, aside from the level of Socratic enactment, in this dialogue even the thematic account of techne is not free from astonishing complications. It suffices to mention, here, the discussion at the beginning of Book x, in which, despite the initial references to the divine origin of the “idea itself” (596b-​597b), it turns out that that the measure and reference of production is not so much an eidetic model, but rather the community of “users,” the community of those to which a given techne is addressed. It is their good and that of their undertakings that techne supports. Because of this, it is in them that techne finds its governing principle(s). The user (chromenos) is the one possessing episteme, proper knowledge of the eidē (601d-​602a). Such a knowledge, then, would arise from the depth and density of engagement with phenomena—​with their gradations, striations, fluid mutability, habits, and stipulations. Once again, the text outlines an understanding of techne operating without the original, oriented to and by the practices of those benefiting from and involved in it. By the same token, one can hardly find here the simple project of a techno-​politics, of a political construction eidetically controlled—​as is clear from the beginning, notably in the exchanges between Socrates and Thrasymachus. For, according to Socrates’ vision, those finding themselves in ruling positions of whatever kind would, in what they “say and make,” foster the well-​being and realization of the ruled (342e). This means that their elaborations and constructions would be governed by, would take their directives from, the ruled. Techne, then, comes to appear as that activity not primarily resting on the maker’s knowledge (eidetic contemplation) but, rather, informed by and responding to a knowledge coming to it from the multiplicity of experiences and communal praxeis. It is such a knowledge that would be directive of human making and show it in its tentative and explorative character. In this light, Hannah Arendt’s line of interpretation, attributing to Plato the subordination of politics or action to techne (understood in its contemplative detachment and deliberate manipulation), seems

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deeply problematic.5 Sallis remarks this much and retrieves, in the discourse on chora in the Timaeus, resources for displacing the technical imposition of form upon matter and concomitant dualisms (eidos vs. hule or eikon, being vs. appearance, intelligible vs. sensible …). Such resources allow for thinking of “sensible things” as coming to be “outside of being,” in an “inaugural emplacement outside being, in the outside of being” (pl 43). And yet, one would have to wonder whether such overall displacement and emplacement “in the outside of being” may not always already be at work, prior to and aside from the chorology—​in the Republic, as intimated above, and a fortiori in Timaeus’ prolusion introducing the very terms of the dualistic scheme. After all, not only the “contemplative creator” of the cosmos, but even the very dichotomy of being and becoming, are framed within a “likely,” “imaginal” discourse, a logos that is a muthos: the distinction between being and appearing is cast in appearance, is imagined, and this emphatically marks a gesture at once positing and unsettling, establishing and destabilizing, placing and displacing. But if the “model” of techne seems to be radically (originarily) given-​as-​ displaced; if it is introduced into an always already problematic context, into a context that cannot not contest, dislocate, and confuse the formulations it allows—​then perhaps chora, invisible and unthinkable, may, however obliquely, be glimpsed in such concurrence of grounding and disruption of the order eidos/​eikon. Radical indeterminacy bespeaks the perplexing givenness of order as never simply given, granted, or grounded. In this sense, the workshop of the cosmic artisan may be seen as a figure of chora before the chorology, an anonymous anticipation of the receptacle of generation—​an image brought forth by a discourse that is imaginal, but not in the sense of its coordination with and subjection to prior knowledge of ideas; by a discourse, rather, whose imaginal character is due to an errancy that is no mere divergence from the intelligible and, instead, initiates the very myth of intelligibility. Metaphysics, if we were to remain within this language, which might nevertheless be altogether unfit for an approach to ancient discourse, would be a matter simultaneously of institution and destitution. No sooner would its words be deployed than their arrangement would be shaken and undone. Its affirmation would tremble from the start. From the start, the grounding gesture would transpire as groundless—​being as spectral.

5 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1958).

58 Baracchi 6

It Began and Never Was

Thus, it may turn out that metaphysics has been at an end from the very outset; i.e., that it never did hold and operate as it purports to do, its claims notwithstanding. Here, after brushing with silence (a silence necessary and inescapable), after plunging into the depth of a problem persisting in its invincibility, after reckoning with the unsustainability, even the extinction of a discourse compromised by its metaphysical strictures (the twofold structures), here we come down (again? for the first time?) to the possibility of experience in its nakedness, in the nearness of immediacy. Here, the possibility opens up again of a language of experience, of a language born of and adhering to experience. Neither according to the logic of conceptually controlled meaning nor meaninglessly: pursuing a “kind of meaning beyond meaning” (ct 111). And so, after an involving, demanding, lengthy reckoning with “metaphysics,” somehow brushing with the possibility of clearing the space of layered debris and of re-​energizing worn out words, one speaks of “place” again. One speaks of place, each time a singular site in which “some alterity or exorbitance or something archaic or elemental” may come to be “disclosed” (tg 1). A site, each time, of vision: theater. In which images, phenomena, and things archaically belong; in which they appear, light up, are harbored and protected for a while, before transiting away. One speaks of images again—​of the imaginal, of vision—​no longer implying their subordination to the ordering discourse of knowledge, but rather in a freedom that resembles errancy, and yet, far from nonsensical, is rooted in sense, in all the senses of the word sense. Having encountered (remembered, recovered) the mystery of chora, the enigma of place as an “intuitive singularity” that is no “intuitable singular thing” (tg 3), the task then is that of freeing experience, making oneself available to it again, thinking images, sensing images, outside their dependence on the eidetic, indeed even seizing the eidetic in its imaginal constitution. Thus, the image returns, images return, in light not of intelligible control, but of their divinity. And the divinity of images here bespeaks their boundlessness and freedom, their pulsating aliveness and instability. In following with magisterial clarity Nietzsche’s discourse on tragedy, Sallis had already encountered images in their numinous character: images lighting up (on the theatrical stage and, mutatis mutandis, on the stage of the world) in virtue of the “brotherly” (if abysmal) bond of shining Apollo and boundless, imageless Dionysus—​two gods, two modes of natural creative drives (cn 85). In that study it was already abundantly clear that, even aside from Dionysian excess, Apollo’s radiance itself appears altogether irreducible to any and every order of reason. Luminosity, visibility in its source and sharpness, seems to be

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no less mysterious, no less profoundly problematic, and no less intoxicating, inebriating, unfathomable than the most extreme withdrawal and self-​seclusion. In so many ways, Prometheus is Dionysus. Far from inert copies under the sovereignty of categorial determination, far from surfaces receiving their meaning and delineation from outside, beyond, or behind themselves, images are thick, vibrant, boundless in their shivering movement away from the forced, petrified contours of the concept. Visibility bears within itself a reserve, a withholding—​its secret. Disclosure is never simply the dispelling of closure. 7

Epiphanies

What do gods have to do with images? The gods “love to hide,” hold themselves in reserve, mostly undetected even as they pass us by. They may not be elsewhere, away from the community of earth and sky, yet they abide concealed, invisible. And “who could, with the eyes, see a god unwilling to be seen, gliding here and there?” (Odyssey x.573–​4). But at times they show themselves. They arrive: come to the light, shine through, unveil their otherwise veiled abiding. They come strange, unlikely, in an overwhelming epidemia—​literally, coming to the demos, to the region, from outside. The ancient gods always appear foreign—​not simply or literally because coming from afar, but above all because in appearing they reveal the unquiet, inscrutable depth of shining surfaces. Like Dionysus—​the god who, says Walter Otto, most unexpectedly lights up, “whose appearance is far more urgent, far more compelling than that of any other god. He had disappeared, and now he will suddenly be here again.”6 (See Figure 3.1) They emerge from inscrutability, as if spilling through a momentary uncertainty, a fissure in the separation between worlds, a transgression of the boundaries mostly keeping worlds apart—​and, for a moment, looked at, they look back, in an abysmal contact. Slipping “in and out of presence,” “[l]‌ike all wild things” (tg 147). (See Figure 3.2) They let themselves be envisioned, drawn out of their unimaginable retreat, of their imagelessness, divined in their unlikely secrecy—​as in this painting, portraying the earth (“all-​mother,” the Homeric Hymn calls her), the self-​ confined ground goddess, the unapparent ark of our sojourn, bursting out of

6 W. F. Otto, Dionysus: Myth and Cult, trans. R. B. Palmer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 79.

60 Baracchi

­f igure 3.1  Dionysus riding a Cheetah, pella, iv c. bce

herself in an expressive, expansive gesture of self-​transcendence—​overflowing with infinite abundance, “streaming upward like a boundless natural fountain.”7 (See Figure 3.3) Gods appear in what is called an epiphany, epiphania, epiphaino, appearing above, over-​appearing, appearing a little more—​even in the sense of an overlay, accretion, intensification due to recurrence or superimposition. Epiphania indicates arrival into shining, coming to shine, or landing into appearance. As in Crete, for instance, the coming of the goddess, descending in the guise of a girl on a swing, announced by birds (those living beings of the air), the two

7 John Sallis, ed., Cao Jun: Hymns to Nature (Boston: McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, 2018), 93.

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­f igure 3.2  Doe at the edge of the woods, Boalsburg, 2004

poles delimiting the place of her manifestation, as if forming the gate across which her transit (her translation) to visibility occurs. (See Figure 3.4, 3.5) The light descends and, as it leans on things, lights them up, merges and becomes one with them. The goddess is the girl. The girl is the goddess. Experience of divine epiphany: seeing the phenomenal in phenomenality, seeing phenomena glow more brightly. Or shake, flicker, and be agitated from the inside. Not fully, firmly, or fixedly visible. Crete in the bronze age is, of course, not just a random example. It names an utterly singular physical and anthropological domain, in which the joyful discipline of vision reaches a felicity, an intensity, both unprecedented and with no comparable sequel, even in cultures remote from that land. A large island, morphologically varied, high mountains pierced by caves, mirrored in the waters of the Aegean and Libyan seas, settled since 130000 years ago, in the Paleolithic. It was the center of the first European civilization, beginning of 3rd millennium bce, whose script, Linear A, is to this day undeciphered. No evidence of fortifications until the Mycenean invasion, mid-​2nd millennium. A visionary place, a place of vision, a culture taking delight in vision to the point of designating, outside of the residential complexes at Knossos and Phaistos, rectangular areas devoted to the amplification of this experience, with rows of steps for the bystanders on two sides (one short and one long): a first theatrical structure. A place of the discipline of vision, favoring the experience of communion with

62 Baracchi

­f igure 3.3  Cao Jun, boundless, 2013

the divinity, recognized and celebrated in every mode of appearance: the outburst of spring in colorful flowers and plants, the animals beneath the surface of the sea (dolphins, octopus), roaming the earth, filling the sky above it (even insects, drawn with tremendous care), the crowds gathering to enjoy games and festivals. In the magnificent, infinitely creative variations on forms and colors, Minoan painting, sculpture, seal carving, and the other crafts let transpire an experience of nature enduring in its constant metamorphosis, returning to itself in the ever-​new circle of the year, an ever-​living unity constantly regenerating itself, becoming other, abiding as self-​differing. Such would be the epiphany of the deity: “the look of something eternal,” to borrow Sallis’ words from an altogether different context. Eternal “not in the abstract sense of an unlimited and undifferentiated present, but in the sense of something forever renewed in the cycle of the seasons”: “eternity belonging to nature rather than set apart from the expanse of natural things and elements” (tg 20). Such, then, would be, towards the middle of the 2nd millennium bce in Crete, traces of an experience of the deity manifest in nature, an experience of inscription within

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­f igures 3.4 and 3.5 Goddess on the swing, Heraklion, Archeological Museum

64 Baracchi life unending, of living as mortals within a movement of life invincible, radically excessive, and joyously opulent. 8

“A Practice of Adhering to What Appears”

But the apparitions of the gods must be attended to, looked for, awaited. A cultivation is called for, a kind of attunement, an availability to being outside the domain of one’s own, a readiness to let oneself into the open. It is a discipline. A certain way of shaping human indeterminate possibility. A mood, heightened susceptibility. A certain way of being there, not in space-​time, as though along geometric coordinates, but rather in place, in a place. A certain way of being, of experiencing oneself, in the most basic, elemental inscription. It is, then, first of all a matter of attention, of wakeful receptivity. Of mindfulness. Through phenomena to vision. We may be in the vicinity of the problems Heidegger poses in “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” when he grafts the task of thinking in the end of philosophy upon the question of experience and, in a quest for a pre-​ philosophical, other than metaphysical, comprehension of experience, turns to Parmenides (Proem, lines 28–​30). The goddess herself is speaking here: […] chreo de se panta puthesthai emen Aletheies eukukleos atremes etor ede broton doxas tais ouk eni pistis alethes. Heidegger’s translation could be translated into English thus: […] but you should experience [erfahren] all: the untrembling heart of unconcealment [Unverborgenheit], well-​rounded, as well as the opinions of mortals, lacking the ability to trust the unconcealed.8 Chreo de se panta puthesthai becomes in Heidegger’s translation “you should experience all.” But how is Erfahrung to be understood here? The Greek puthesthai, aorist infinitive of punthanomai, is usually translated as “learning”

8 Martin Heidegger, “Das Ende der Philosophie und die Aufgabe des Denkens (1964),” in Zur Sache des Denkens (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1969), 74.

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(just like manthano, which appears on line 31). But the term emphasizes especially the posture assumed in learning, the way in which the inquiry is carried out and the overall circumstances of the quest. It belongs in an especially ancient group of words related to the root bheu-​dh-​, with corresponding forms in numerous languages. It suffices to mention here the Sanskrit bódhati, “being awake, alert, attentive, open and comprehending” (from which, in Pali, the past participle Buddha, the awakened one), but also (attested in the Avestan baodaiti) “sensing, feeling, perceiving,” and consequently “observing, noting.”9 Experience involves perceptual openness, the vibrant intensification of sense in all its senses, the utmost concentration of sensibility accompanied by keen awareness. Thus, quite rigorously, Heidegger notes: The meditative [or sensing] man [der sinnende Mann] is to experience [erfahren] … the place of stillness [or silence] [Ort der Stille] … the place of stillness [or silence] from which alone the possibility of the belonging together of being and thinking … is first given. (75; my emphasis) In the Parmenidean poem, the goddess sets the disciple on the way to “all experiencing” (panta puthesthai): experiencing everything, from the silent, unmoving, hospitable center of all that moves, to the loud and ever-​changing crowd of phenomena coming to take place there. There is no argumentation, no further reference or discursive ground. Such an experience can only be trusted. Only in this way can discourse find rest in that which indeterminately exceeds and perturbs it. And it is this trust (pistis), this ability to confide and entrust oneself to the uncontrollable, that, according to the poem (line 30), constitutes the ultimate challenge for the mortal tribe. As if the philosopher (or the sophos) inaugurating an epoch had prophetically caught a glimpse of the epoch in its end (the epoch of doubt, of the inability to trust). Trusting the perceived, that which comes forth of its own accord and presents itself in its discernible outline, seems to be the most elusive, arduous endeavor. At stake, then, is a disciplined attention to place, sensed in its “evocative force” (tg 1): place that calls forth, draws together, attracts; place to which time adheres, as a phenomenal, visible trait. Sallis observes: “Focusing upon the place would, then, consist simply in becoming receptive to the scene offered” (tg 2). In such an exposure in and to place, in such “a practice consisting in the watchful adherence to that which appears” (tg 63), “experiences are especially fragile, requiring a certain forgetting,” an unencumbered posture: letting go of 9 P. Chantraine, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque (Paris: Klincksieck, 1968), 955.

66 Baracchi myself, entrusting myself to this place so that I may “install myself differently” in it (tg 2–​3). And yet, in this exercise I am not simply disclosing, as if laying bare appearances. Phenomena taking place reveal unfathomable depth and dynamism. Not only do they resist being resolved into pure unconcealment, into pure surfacing, but, precisely out of their reserve, they release themselves in infinite plasticity and resourcefulness. Here can be glimpsed the profound unity of vision in its many senses, the inseparability of its many senses—​sensuous, imaginative, noetic, and visionary: Evoked by the place, this focused receptivity would in turn open our senses decisively to the place’s unique power of evocation. Or, more precisely, the place visited may evoke both focused receptivity and, yoked to it, a play of imagination. (tg 2) In their taking place, phenomena at once shine forth, conceal themselves, and call for (evoke) further imaginative developments—​as if imagination, far from a faculty of the soul or an operation of the perceptual unity, were a power of nature, naturally unleashed in the communing of phenomena in the open. Vision traverses and exceeds phenomena, without leaving phenomena behind. It divines the unapparent in the apparent, the possible in the actual, what it might be or become—​if it maintains itself receptive, basically able to receive, to trust. Rooted in such an experience lies “the possibility of the belonging together of being and thinking,” or, as Sallis writes: Through this double interplay, of receptivity and imagination and of both with the scene itself, a new thoughtfulness may emerge, a thinking that draws from the place rather than imposing on it, a thinking that draws from the place by letting itself be drawn to the place. (tg 2) Thinking coming to take place and arising from place, in a hidden yet powerful moving contact with place, each time singular: something of this sort might perhaps be heard, however faded its trace, in certain archaic fragments. Recounting his sailing on the Aegean, East of Samos, Sallis is reminded of Thales’ intuition of water as archē: “[T]‌here is reason to think,” he writes, that Thales’ proposal was not the senseless fantasy that later philosophers would take it to be but rather that it results from a practice of adhering to what appears, to what is manifest. For what is more manifest—​what

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would have been more manifest to a philosopher at this originary site on the sea—​than that the world consists of water (of seas) in which various expanses of earth are set? (tg 63) Likewise, here the possibility perhaps of a regeneration of the order of discourse announces itself; the possibility of giving rise to discourses nourished by the intimacy with images, informed by the deep syntax of things as they show themselves in place, by the silence and speechlessness of sensuous or visionary immediacy. A language of experience, letting experience shine through, even in ways radically other than those of discursive mediation: As soon as we boarded the main ferry at Mikonos, I stationed myself outside at the rear corner of the deck. There were others on the deck, but most were sitting on long benches. Throughout the entire trip back to Naxos I stood silently looking out at the sea, feeling the wind and the sun, trying to sense to the utmost what was afforded by being at sea in such a place. I was quite aware that what could be sensed then and there would be elusive, that it could easily slip away from the words with which I would say it—​even that it would necessarily exceed its expression, that the word blue would never quite be a match for the blueness of the Aegean. (tg 115) 9

His Thinking Is “Full of Gods” (Perhaps They Have Not Fled)

Through the years we have grown accustomed to the appearance of gods in Sallis’ thinking—​various guises of alterity breaking through the visible with haunting vividness and sudden precision, at once surfacing to visibility and utterly discontinuous with the visible. The lasting inherence of the gods in temples (Greek or Eastern), on the face of stone, in the gestures of the elements, in the exposure of landscape. “For it was in and from nature—​in and from the sea, the earth, the sky—​that the gods appeared” (tg 56). I would like, then, to end with the simple evocation of Sallis’ voice, to savor the piercing perceptiveness whereby he retrieves reverberations of an other shine, of unlikely, perturbing epiphanies, even in the most exploited and worn places. Sallis divines their lastingness, inconsumable. The strange adhesion of time, even in its dissipation, to the surface of stones, to the skin of places.

68 Baracchi

­f igure 3.6  Athens in daylight

The arrivals, multiple and repeated, of the foreign, haunting the overly familiar from within—​so that it may not become quite a monument, and live: Though one knows that even there above the city the noise and pollution will not be entirely absent, the very way in which the Acropolis appears gives it the look of something other, makes it look as though it belonged to a world quite other than that of the modern city. For it appears as though it were an island floating above the city, offering refuge to those who would escape the imminent dangers lurking in the rapid currents swelling around it. It not only appears to float above the modern city, but also, precisely thereby, interrupts the space of the modern city. Within that space, at the very center, it opens upon that other world, the world of originary Greek history. For in the ruins atop the Acropolis, that history has left a legible trace. Once the Acropolis has been seen, once the traces have begun to congeal into an outline of that other world, the interruptive force spreads throughout the city so that every place—​regardless of whether it affords a view of the Acropolis—​will be haunted by the specter of these remains of antiquity. It will be as if the Acropolis hovered over the entire city or as if, like the rocky coast of an island, it not only withstood the force of the waves but also deflected them back across the sea. (tg 51–​2)

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­f igure 3.7  Athens at night

And again, at a different time: We sat in an outdoor restaurant just across from the Acropolis, indeed just opposite to the Parthenon. It was illuminated, and, as we looked up and across at it, it looked almost surreal, this most familiar of Greek temples, pictured everywhere, even replicated in an American city. … The sight would have seemed less odd had the temple been illuminated simply by moonlight. Yet the odd effect had a peculiar appropriateness, for the artificial lighting intensified the impression already created by the temple’s elevation above the hustle and bustle of the city: it appeared as if it belonged to an entirely different order, as if its presence were a presence of an entirely different sort from that of the things below in the city. It shone forth as if untouched, even untouchable, by all that was going on beneath it, as if its very existence belonged to a higher plane, as if, being there, it belonged also apart. This appearance, though intensified by the conditions, was no doubt linked to all that was evoked by memory of what the temple once was, the abode of the goddess who oversaw the incomparable beginnings achieved in the ancient city. Even if now it shone differently—​in modern

70 Baracchi lighting, in ruins, with the goddess conspicuously absent—​it appeared nonetheless apart from the mundane human preoccupations, no less so than was the goddess herself. (tg 101–​2)



Bibliography

Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1958. Aristotle. On the Soul (De Anima). Translated by W. S. Hett. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964. Aristotle. Generation of the Animals. Translated by A. L. Peck. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979. Aristotle. Metaphysics. 2 vols. Translated by Hugh Tredennick. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936. Chantraine, P. Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque. Paris: Klincksieck, 1968. Heidegger, Martin. “Das Ende der Philosophie und die Aufgabe des Denkens (1964).” In Zur Sache des Denkens. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1969. Homer. Odyssey. Translated by A. T. Murray. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995. Kirk, J. S., J. E. Raven, and M. Schofield. The Presocratic Philosophers. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Otto, W. F. Dionysus: Myth and Cult. Translated by R. B. Palmer. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965. Plato. Laws. 2 vols. Translated by R. G. Bury. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1942. Plato. Republic. 2 vols. Translated by Paul Shorey. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969. Plato. Timaeus. Translated by R. G. Bury. London: William Heinemann, 1929. Sallis, John, ed. Cao Jun: Hymns to Nature. Boston: McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, 2018.

­c hapter 4

“Shaggy, Lustful, Partly Animal”: John Sallis on Plato’s Symposium S. Montgomery Ewegen Everything that follows—​and perhaps everything that came before—​is about ugliness, specifically, the ugliness of the Platonic Socrates. In this chapter, I analyze John Sallis’ recently published text on Plato’s Symposium, a lecture course (from the Fall of 2011) in which he, among many other things, offers an engagement with Socrates’ ugliness (bm).1 Indeed, it seems to me that Sallis’ entire effort in these lectures—​if not his entire effort in all of his dealings with Plato’s Socrates—​is a confrontation with Socrates’ ugliness, an attempt to let it show itself as it truly is (i.e., as ugly). In what follows, I trace Sallis’ encounter with Socrates’ ugliness in this lecture course, sometimes letting my own thoughts intermingle with his. Owing to Sallis’ continual use of the terms “Apollonian” and “Dionysian” throughout his lecture course, it is impossible to read them without thinking of another person for whom Socrates’ ugliness was so central: namely, Friedrich Nietzsche. Sallis’ reading of Plato’s Symposium is tightly intermingled with Nietzsche’s thought, even though he mentions him only once, just at the outset of the lectures, and then only to say that he himself, like Nietzsche—​or, rather, even more so than Nietzsche—​will practice a kind of “slow reading” when dealing with the Platonic text (bm 3). Because of this largely unspoken intermingling with Nietzsche, I will need first to address Nietzsche’s encounter with Socrates’ ugliness, an issue that was always a problem for Nietzsche and one which, I will suggest, he never quite solved. I will begin, then, by analyzing Nietzsche’s engagement with Socrates in Twilight of the Idols, with occasional reference to other texts. Then, I will trace Sallis’ lectures on the Symposium with special emphasis on his engagement with Socrates’ ugliness. Finally, I will turn briefly to Plato’s Apology in order to test, as it were, Sallis’ insights regarding Socrates’ ugliness. In the end, I hope to show that Sallis indeed reads more slowly and carefully than Nietzsche ever did, and in a manner that is more sensitive to the Platonic text. The result of 1 The lecture course in question is Part One of bm.

© S. Montgomery Ewegen, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004507098_006

72 Ewegen such a slow reading, I claim, is a truer reckoning of the nature of Socrates’ ugliness and, indeed, a truer reckoning of the nature of Socrates himself. 1

“The Last Thinker of Metaphysics”2

From the very outset of the section entitled “The Problem of Socrates” in Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche is concerned with Socrates’ ugliness:3 Socrates belonged, in his origins, to the basest folk: Socrates was a pleb. One knows, and can still see for oneself, just how ugly [hässlich] he was. But ugliness, which in and of itself is an objection [Einwand], was among the Greeks practically a refutation [eine Widerlegung]. Was Socrates even Greek at all?4 As Nietzsche goes on to say, Socrates’ ugliness rendered him opposed to the Greeks and to their classical ideals of physical beauty and the sort of celebratory and life-​affirming posture that accompanies such beauty. The strength of this opposition was such as to call into question whether Socrates even belonged among the Greeks; that is, if he was even one of their kind. Nietzsche offers two possible explanations for Socrates’ ugliness. According to him, “ugliness is, in many cases, the expression of a development that has been crossed [gekreuzten] and inhibited in some way. In other cases it appears as declining development [niedergehende Entwicklung].”5 In Socrates’ case, as various passages throughout the Twilight of the Idols make clear, Nietzsche decides in favor of decline, ultimately explaining Socrates’ ugliness in terms of décadence. As further passages (and, indeed, etymology) make clear, décadence for Nietzsche is to be thought in terms of decay, disease, and corruption. In other words, décadence is to be thought of as the movement of a thing away from itself, away from what is proper to it, away from the kind of thing that it properly is. As such, Socrates’ ugliness is understood by Nietzsche as being the result of a process of degradation whereby Socrates broke away from the kind to which he most properly belonged: namely, the Greeks.6 2

Martin Heidegger often refers to Nietzsche with the above appellation. See, for example, Martin Heidegger, Heraklit (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1979), 84 and 223. 3 All translations of Nietzsche’s texts are my own. 4 Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke VI.3 (Berlin: Gruyter, 1969), 62. 5 Ibid. 6 See “Skirmishes of an Untimely Man” in Twilight of the Idols: “Nothing is ugly except the degenerating man [entartende Mensche] […] The ugly is understood as a sign and

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For Nietzsche, this decay, this décadence, is to be seen above all in Socrates’ hypertrophied faculty of reason and in his concomitant movement away from—​or overt rejection of—​the instincts. One sees this in the following passage: The most dazzling daylight, rationality at all costs; a life bright, cold, circumspect, deliberate, and without instinct—​indeed, in opposition to [Widerstand gegen] the instincts: this was itself a disease, just a different kind of disease […] To have to struggle against the instincts—​that is the formula of décadence.7 Insofar as the life-​affirming/​instinct-​loving posture against which Socrates turns is associated by Nietzsche elsewhere in the text with Dionysus,8 Socrates’ ugliness, as anti-​Greek, must be understood as essentially anti-​Dionysian in character. By being set over-​against the Greeks and by being essentially opposed to them, Socrates is set over-​against Dionysus.9 Socrates’ illness, his ugliness, is his decay, his breaking away from the Dionysian and into its opposite. Such an understanding of ugliness is thoroughly governed, I am suggesting, by a logic of opposition: ugliness is to be understood as the decline of something toward its opposite. Phrased otherwise, ugliness as décadence is the movement of a thing away from its proper kind, a movement of opposition or repulsion that alters the character of a thing in the direction of its logical opposite. Socrates’ ugliness is to be understood as his degradation away from everything that is properly Greek, everything that properly belongs to that kind. As a result, Socrates (the Greek) is to be understood as the anti-​Greek (antigriechisch): that is, as the Greek who had decayed into un-​Greekness. One sees such an oppositional logic operative throughout Nietzsche’s consideration of Socrates in the Twilight of the Idols, if not also beyond.10 symptom of degeneration [Degenerescenz]” (Nietzsche, Werke VI.3, 118). He goes on to say that such an ugly person is hated because he represents “a decline of his type [den Niedergang seines Typus]” (ibid.). See also David McNeill, “On the Relationship of Alcibiades’ Speech to Nietzsche’s ‘Problem of Socrates’,” in Nietzsche and Antiquity, ed. Paul Bishop (Rochester: Boydell and Brewer, 2004), 266. 7 Nietzsche, Werke VI.3, 67. 8 “Affirming life itself even in its strangest and harshest moments; the will to life, rejoicing in its own limitlessness even while sacrificing its highest types—​that is what I called ‘Dionysian’ ” (Nietzsche, Werke VI.3, 154). 9 One sees this clearly in The Birth of Tragedy, where Nietzsche writes: “This is the new opposition: the Dionysian and the Socratic.” Nietzsche, Werke III.1 (Berlin: Gruyter, 1972), 79. 10 According to Nietzsche, Socrates’ excessive emphasis on reason (in the form of dialectic) was “anti-​Greek [antigriechisch],” it was “opposed to life [zum Leben zu stehn]” (Nietzsche,

74 Ewegen I would further suggest that, owing to this logic, Nietzsche—​very much despite certain overt efforts on his part—​is bound to think of Socrates in terms of that god whom Nietzsche opposes to Dionysus throughout his writings: namely, the god Apollo. In thinking of Socrates as a hater of life who turns away from his instincts toward sobriety and self-​measure, Nietzsche associates Socrates in various ways with the very god of measure. As Anne-​ Marie Schulz puts it, “in Nietzsche’s eyes, Socrates abandons what he knows to be the Dionysian roots of authentic experience and turns toward the pristine comfort of Apollonian insight into the nature of reality.”11 In other words, for Nietzsche, Socrates comes to intermingle with Apollo at the expense of Dionysus. Nietzsche himself says this quite clearly in the following posthumously published fragments: “Socrates—​the Apollonian individual [der apollonische Einzelne], who […] comes forth against [gegen] Dionysus.”12 Then, in an even stronger formulation: “In Socrates, one side [eine Seite] of the Hellenic, that Apollonian clarity, was embodied without any foreign admixture intermingled [ohne jede fremdartige Beimishung] […] Socrates was the first great Hellene who was ugly [hässlich].”13 Here, one sees that Nietzsche thinks Socrates as unmixed, as homogeneous—​that is, as belonging to a single, self-​ same kind—​and that this homogeneity is precisely the cause of his ugliness. In Socrates, there is only the Apollonian—​one finds no other god, and certainly not Dionysus, intermingled. It is this homogenous association with Apollo and corresponding disassociation with Dionysus that heralds for Nietzsche the end of tragedy and, along with it, the ascendency of dialectic, of reason, and of the hatred of life, instinct, and the body that accompanies it. The death of tragedy is, for Nietzsche, the birth of metaphysics, with the Apollonian Socrates as its progenitor. Werke VI.3, 62.). Moreover, his privileging of reason was against (gegen) the instincts of the older Greeks and his taste for dialectic was a great overturning (umschlägt) of traditional mores. Throughout his reading, Nietzsche thinks of Socrates as over-​against the Greeks, as opposed to them, as anti-​Greek, and to this extent as operating within the strictures of a logic of opposition. 11 Shultz argues that this also marked, in Nietzsche’s eyes, “the beginning of the movement away from the traditional Greek understanding of the overlap and interrelationality between the two domains of experience that the two gods represent.” Anne-​Marie Schulz, “Socrates and the Narrative Art of Self-​Care: An Apollinian and Dionysian Synthesis,” in Socrates and Dionysius: Philosophy and Art in Dialogue, ed. Ann Ward (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2013), 141–​142. In other words, where Nietzsche sees the early Greeks as intermingling with both Dionysus and Apollo, he sees Socrates as marking a decisive departure from Dionysus in favor of Apollo. 12 Nietzsche, Werke VII (Berlin: Gruyter, 2015), 84. 13 Nietzsche, Werke III.2, 30.

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Metaphysics begins when the Greeks, by way of a process of decay or degradation, become purely Apollonian. And it is this metaphysics, this “Socraticism,” this Christianity, that Nietzsche will rage against until the very end, seeking to overturn it with its most essential opposite: Dionysus. To be sure, such an argument as I have made here is in tension with various other claims of Nietzsche’s regarding Socrates’ independence from—​or outright antagonism toward—​the Apollonian. For example, in The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche claims that Socrates is “an entirely newborn daemon” who is neither Apollonian nor Dionysian. Elsewhere, he goes so far as to claim that Socrates is the “destroyer of Hellenic Apollonian art.”14 Throughout The Birth of Tragedy, one finds an effort on Nietzsche’s part to think of Socrates as marking a radically new stage in historical development and as thus being wholly other to the Apollonian/​Dionysian dyad. And yet, despite Nietzsche’s efforts in this regard (and as the above analysis and passages make clear), it is as though Nietzsche cannot help but think of Socrates in terms of the Apollonian, and therefore to think of him as opposed to Dionysus. This, I suggest, is owed to Nietzsche’s unbreakable bondage to a logic of opposition, at least when it came to his encounter with Socrates (and, above all, with his ugliness). It is as though Nietzsche saw something in Socrates that was other than the Apollonian and was thus in excess of the Dionysian/​Apollonian dyad, but could not, owing to his immersion in a logic of opposition, understand or express it. Such inescapable immersion in a logic of opposition is owed in part to Nietzsche’s fateful decision against intermingling (Kreuzung) and in favor of décadence, a decision that results in Nietzsche’s inability to grasp the true ugliness of the Platonic Socrates. It is for these reasons that Socrates’ ugliness remained, for Nietzsche, an irresolvable problem. 2

“In Plato’s Dialogues, There Is No Logic”15

In his lectures on Plato’s Symposium, Sallis makes a claim that, in the face of everything that has been said, cannot but seem confused and muddled—​ indeed, almost to the point of ugliness. During his analysis of the dramatic scene near the end of the text where Alcibiades compares Socrates to satyrs and the statues of Silenus (Symp. 215b ff.), Sallis writes: “Whatever virtues Socrates will be shown to have […] they will be shaped by [his] connection

14 Nietzsche, Werke VII, 12. 15 li, 26. See also bm, 3.

76 Ewegen to Dionysus” (bm 62). Then, even more startlingly, Sallis writes: “This image of Silenus […] suggests that Socrates also harbors within himself a certain Dionysian wisdom” (bm 64). Such a claim—​namely, that Socrates would bear a connection to the god Dionysus—​borders on the grotesque, even the monstrous, not to mention the illogical. That Socrates, the great champion of Apollonian self-​knowledge, would at all keep the company of Dionysus, the destroyer of self-​identity, seems almost impossible to consider. This is all the more so when one thinks of Plato’s Apology, that text in which, perhaps more than any other, Socrates testifies to his intimate interminglings with “the god of Delphi.” It was this god who told Chaerephon that there was nobody wiser than Socrates (Ap. 21a), a pronouncement that set Socrates on his path of self-​knowledge and sober philosophical reflection. Through his practice of interpreting the god’s pronouncement, Socrates came to stand as something like a representative of this god, working on his behalf in order to demonstrate to the people of Athens the radical ignorance that stands at the core of their very being.16 The Apology thus seems to show Socrates’ decisive connection to Apollo, that god associated with the bright light of sober and clear-​minded theory. How, then, is one to understand Sallis’ claims that Socrates associates with Apollo’s opposite, Dionysus? As I intimated at the outset, it all comes down to the matter of ugliness, to the ugliness characteristic of the Platonic Socrates. It also comes down to a matter of logic or, rather, to a lack of logic that pervades the Platonic text. What one sees in Sallis’ lectures on the Symposium is an attempt to account for Socrates’ ugliness as operating independently of a rigid logic of opposition, an attempt that precisely for this reason is able to bring the true nature of Socrates’ ugliness to light. As Sallis’ lectures show, Plato’s Symposium is focused from its very beginning on the question of order. More precisely, it is focused on an attempt at establishing an order that necessitates the banning or eradicating of disorder. One sees this from the outset in the various attempts made by certain characters to exclude the flute-​girls (and thus the feminine) from the get-​together, to limit the consumption of alcohol throughout the evening, and to prescribe a topic of discourse as well as the order of speakers (Symp. 176e ff.). As Sallis 16

Even Sallis, in his early Being and Logos, writes the following about this association: “After the interpretation [of the god’s pronouncement] has been accomplished, Socrates’ practice of questioning becomes explicitly what it simultaneously proves to have been from the beginning: service to Apollo” (bl, 53). Sallis goes on to gesture toward the various ways in which Socrates’ connection to Apollo plays out in Plato’s Phaedo (ibid., 53n20), that dialogue where Socrates is seen composing music to the god.

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argues, such gestures are emblematic of a broader attempt at play within the text to erect and sustain a prescribed order to the exclusion of disorder and disarray. Moreover, Sallis argues that to the extent that the orderly can be associated with Apollo—​and the disorderly with Dionysus—​what one sees in the Symposium is an attempt to establish and maintain a sober Apollonian order precisely by excising Dionysian chaos (bm 37). However, the real intent and accomplishment of Sallis’ lectures is to expose the irrepressible and ineradicable nature of disorder, of the Dionysian, and thus the inevitable failure of any attempt to excise or eliminate it.17 For Sallis, one sees this irrepressible Dionysian force in various ways throughout the Symposium: for example, in the mania of Apollodorus referenced at the outset of the text (bm 6), in the hiccups and sneezing of Aristophanes (bm 27), and in the threat of hubristic excess of which Aristophanes speaks when telling of the origin of human beings (bm 33). However, it is only near the end of the text, when Alcibiades crashes the party (with his flute girl in tow), that Dionysus makes his most forcible appearance. For Sallis, Alcibiades is the very embodiment of Dionysus, and his arrival at the party—​which Sallis calls “dramatically speaking, the most significant moment of the Symposium” (bm 59)—​marks that very moment when the attempt at erecting Apollonian order and self-​stability dissolves into bacchanalian disarray.18 Yet, as Sallis goes on to show, in a certain sense Dionysus had been at the party all along, even before Alcibiades showed up; or, at very least, the Dionysian had been there from the moment that the ugly Socrates arrived late for the get-​together, after attending to his thoughts on the porch of Agathon’s neighbor. For, as comes to light through Sallis’ reading, Socrates himself is to be understood as containing or expressing a certain fundamentally Dionysian moment. In other words, through the guise of the character Socrates, what is shown is that the Dionysian is present throughout the text, even at those moments when it seems to have been most decisively repressed or excluded. Be that as it may, the connection between Socrates and the Dionysian is not made explicit until Alcibiades’ speech, a speech that has everything to do with Socrates’ ugliness. At the outset of his speech, Alcibiades’ offers an image of Socrates, one that is crucially important for Sallis’ understanding of the 17 18

As Sallis intimates numerous times throughout the lecture course, such disorder is itself intimately connected to nature, to φύσις. Nietzsche himself marks a certain opposition between Socrates and Alcibiades, and in so doing seems almost to think the latter in the direction of Dionysus. See Nietzsche, “On the Relationship of Alcibiades’ Speech to the Other Speeches in Plato’s Symposium.” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 15, no. 2 (1991), 4.

78 Ewegen Symposium. As Alcibiades puts it: “I say [Socrates] is most like the Silenus-​figures that sit in the statuaries’ shops. […] And I further suggest that he resembles the satyr Marsyas.”19 Regarding this comparison, Sallis writes that “Silenus was a jovial fat old man with horse’s ears who was a companion of Dionysus’s and who helped him make—​and drink—​wine” (bm 62). As Sallis further notes, the satyrs were “grotesque creatures, mainly of human form but with some bestial parts, usually the legs of a goat,” who were also attendants of Dionysus (bm  63). Thus, more than simply drawing attention to Socrates’ ugliness, these comparisons drawn by Alcibiades serve to draw an association between Socrates and Dionysus, suggesting that Socrates intermingles somehow with this god. Such intermingling becomes most visible in Socrates’ relation to eros, which differs from the sort of non-​sexual and purified “Uranian” eros that is typically attributed to him. As Sallis puts it: “whereas the Apollonian eros would elevate the lover beyond mortal flesh, up into company with the gods, Socratic eros retains its connection to the shaggy, lustful, partly animal forms represented by Silenus and the sileni” (bm 63). Unlike a purely Apollonian eros—​an eros that would remain as much as possible oriented away from the body and toward the soul—​Socratic eros remains animal-​like and lascivious, shaggy and stinky, and thus remains in decisive connection to the body and bodily. (One perhaps thinks of the Charmides here (cf. 155d).) Far from dismissive of life, then, Socratic eros, as containing a Dionysian moment, would remain oriented toward life, toward the living, toward even the highly sexual. To connect this to another of Sallis’ engagements with Socrates: Socratic eros would not float away to disembodied Uranian heights, but would rather remain decisively bound to the earth.20 As Alcibiades goes on to explain, this Dionysian moment in Socrates is largely responsible for the effect that Socrates has on him, an effect more potent, according to Alcibiades, than the bite of a snake.21 Regarding this power that Socrates yields, Sallis writes: “Alcibiades takes all those present to have experienced the power of the philosophical λόγοι to which Socrates gives birth, their power to induce philosophical madness and Bacchic frenzy—​in other words, their Dionysian power” (bm 65). The power of Socrates—​his philosophical power—​is owed to the Dionysian moment operative within him. To push this point even further than Sallis does, one might say that Socrates’ effect on Alcibiades is such as to cause him to forget about himself, to forget 19 20 21

Symp. 215b. See John Sallis, “Speaking of the Earth: Figures of Transport in the Phaedo,” Epoché 13, no. 2 (2009), 371. Symp. 218a.

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even about the city, and to fall into a state where he no longer knows up from down, left from right, good from bad.22 In a word, owing to the Dionysian power operative within Socrates—​which is nothing other than his philosophical power—​Alcibiades is brought to a place lacking all differentiation and decision, a place of radical ἀπορία, a place where he no longer knows himself. Of course, the greater thrust of Alcibiades’ speech is that this maddening force—​this Dionysian moment—​is offset by, and intermingled with, another  force, an opposite force: namely, the Apollonian. This force is most conspicuous in those moments where Socrates, according to Alcibiades, resists the intoxicating effects of alcohol, the destructive effects of cold weather, or the seducing effects of Alcibiades himself. The Socrates that Alcibiades’ presents, then, is one who stands as the site of the intermingling of the Apollonian and  the Dionysian, of order and disorder, of moderation and excess, of human and a­ nimal. Near the end of his lecture course, and referencing the very end of the Symposium, Sallis marks this intermingling in the following way: Socrates had endured the collapse—​that is, the descent—​of the party into a Bacchanalia. And though he silently affirmed the images Alcibiades presented of him, images that link him to the Dionysian, he also displayed virtues (such as moderation and endurance) that provide him with resistance to the destructive side of the Dionysian. This resistance is indicated by the fact that no matter how much wine Socrates drinks, he does not get drunk. (bm 67) The resistance to which Sallis refers is, of course, owed to that Apollonian moment within him, that temperate and clear-​headed moment that allows him to moderate the effects of the Dionysian. One sees, then, that Socrates is the site of the intermingling of distinct kinds, of kinds that are thought not to belong together—​indeed, of kinds that are thought to be opposed to one another. By contrast, one recalls the Socrates from Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols, that Socrates who was ugly precisely owing to the manner in which he had decayed totally away from the Dionysian kind and into its opposite, Apollonian kind. For Sallis, Socrates’ ugliness consists rather in the way in which the Apollonian and the Dionysian—​two ostensibly opposed kinds—​are brought together into a monstrous union. In a word, where Nietzsche decides in favor of décadence, Sallis decides in favor of intermingling (Kreuzung).

22 See Symp. 216b.

80 Ewegen Yet, it is crucial to note that such intermingling is not such as to bring two opposed kinds together so as to preserve the unity of each. Rather, the intermingling is of a much more radical sort. One sees this most clearly in the way in which the Dionysian itself is characterized by a further intermingling of kinds. As noted above, it is the Silenus or satyr-​like element in Socrates that marks most saliently the Dionysian within him. As further noted, Silenus and the satyrs are hybrid creatures consisting of the intermingling of human, animal, and divine parts. The Dionysian moment itself, then, consists of a radical intermingling of kinds, a blending of kinds otherwise thought to be opposed. Such blending of kinds is keeping with the very character of the Dionysian, which Sallis elsewhere describes thusly: In Dionysian ecstasy, in being-​outside-​oneself, one transgresses the limits that ordinarily would delimit one’s self, one’s individuality, one’s subjectivity. These lines separating man from man and man from nature would be annihilated, and man would be reunited with both man and nature.23 The Dionysian, then, consists of a thoroughgoing intermingling of kinds, so much so that the lines between those kinds dissolve. Phrased more strongly, with the Dionysian one sees an intermingling of kinds of such radicality as to eliminate entirely their identity as kinds. In short, the Dionysian brings about an utter dissolution of identity or, what amounts to the same, an utter dissolution of difference. Of course, where the Dionysian stands as the dissolution of difference—​or, as I’m calling it, the thoroughgoing intermingling of kinds—​the Apollonian stands as the very assertion of difference, the very solidifying of kinds: Apollo is, as Nietzsche puts it, the principium individuationis.24 Thus, Socrates, as the site of the intermingling of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, is the site of the  intermingling of the principle of individuation and the erasure of such individuation. However, owing precisely to the Dionysian moment, one would no longer be able to say that the two kinds, the Apollonian and Dionysian, were blended together, for in that case one would be asserting distinct kinds precisely where the possibility of such kinds has been undermined. In this way, once one has granted the Dionysian moment, one reveals the impossibly of 23

Sallis, “Nietzsche’s Platonism,” in Between the Last Man and the Overman: The Question of Nietzsche’s Politics (Vol. 4 of Nietzsche: Critical Assessments), ed. Daniel W. Conway (London: Routledge, 1998), 5. 24 Nietzsche, Werke III.1, 129.

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establishing one stable kind over against another. In other words, once one has granted the Dionysian moment, the very possibility of sustaining the difference between the Apollonian and the Dionysian collapses. To phrase this more generally: once the Dionysian has been granted, a logic of opposition becomes impossible to maintain. Socrates, as the site of the intermingling of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, would be the site of this impossibility. In his book Crossings, Sallis addresses exactly this situation with regard to Nietzsche’s understanding of the relation between the Apollonian and the Dionysian in The Birth of Tragedy. There, Sallis describes the relation as “a strange logic” (cn 54), a disruptive logic that ruptures the stability of the self and brings about the dissolution of limit whereby the self would be delimited (cn 55). However, as “an ecstatic logic” that transgresses the limit of the self, it would also reinstate that limit as what is to be transgressed, only to again transgress it so as to destroy its nature as the limit (cn 55). This strange logic is, for Sallis, a recurrent “Dionysian logic,” a logic that exceeds utterly any logic of opposition by dissolving the supposed manner by which limit and excess—​ Apollo and Dionysus—​would be opposed. For Sallis, Nietzsche himself undertakes such excessive thinking as he attempts to understand the nature of Dionysian excess (cn 59). Yet, I would like to suggest that, although this may be true in the case of Nietzsche’s encounter with Dionysus, it is in no way true in the case of his encounter with the Platonic Socrates. As shown above, such an encounter is firmly entrenched within a logic of opposition, a logic that follows upon Nietzsche’s decision in favor of décadence and thus against intermingling. Moreover, to the extent that Nietzsche continually thinks Socrates as “anti-​ Dionysian,” his attempt to understand the Dionysian remains connected to such an oppositional logic. In other words, despite certain gestures toward thinking an excessive logic of the Dionysian, Nietzsche remains bound to a logic of opposition, a logic that traps him within an inescapable binary. By contrast, I would like to maintain that Sallis himself, in his lectures on the Symposium, has discovered a strange logic—​an excessive logic, a Dionysian logic—​at play within the Platonic text. Through his careful attending to the Platonic Socrates—​through his “slow reading”—​Sallis discovers the presence of an irrepressible Dionysian moment that serves to disrupt not only any purported Apollonian moment within him, but also the coherence of rigorously seeking to differentiate the two. Thus, to temper Sallis’ provocative claim that “in Plato’s dialogues there is no logic” (li 26), one might say that, if there is a logic in the Platonic dialogues, it is a logic of excess—​a strange logic, a logic of the Dionysian—​a logic, one might say, of interminglings.

82 Ewegen Earlier, I said that Sallis’ comments about the Symposium were “muddled,” “confused,” “ugly,” and “illogical.” One now sees that this is the very best thing about them. Owing to his sensitivity to the text, and owing to his independence from a rigid logic of opposition, Sallis is able to allow the ugliness of Socrates to come to light as it is: namely, as the confusion, the muddling, of kinds. By bringing an illogical analysis to bear upon the Platonic text—​that is, by reading that text in such a way as to avoid imposing an anachronistic logic of opposition upon it—​Sallis is able to let the true character of Socrates’ ugliness show itself. Such ugliness consists of the manner in which Socrates, owing to the presence of the Dionysian within him, remains disruptive of a stable identity—​disruptive, that is, of the Apollonian moment otherwise thought to belong to him. One sees this at the very end of Sallis’ lecture course, where he marks this confluence of forces at play within Socrates, noting also a certain distance to the Apollonian that it implies: After Socrates left Agathon’s, he went to the Lyceum, a garden with covered walkways next to the temple of Apollo […]. Here he passed his day in his usual manner: philosophizing. Having endured the Dionysian—​ retaining, like the sileni and satyrs, this bond to it—​Socrates resumes philosophizing at a place not within, but next to, the temple of Apollo. (bm 67) Thus, Socrates remains outside of the Apollonian, even while remaining oriented toward it. Once the utter dissolution of kinds has occurred that follows upon the granting of the Dionysian moment, there can be no possibility of establishing a stable Apollonian principle or, for that matter, a stable principle of any kind. Phrased more provocatively: once one grants the Dionysian its due, one becomes incapable of erecting a stable logic by which to oppose one force to the other. In light of this, one could say that, insofar as Nietzsche’s opposing of Socrates to Dionysus places the beginning of metaphysics with Socrates, Sallis’ understanding of the intermingling of the Apollonian with the Dionysian in the figure of Socrates demonstrates the manner in which such a metaphysics was foreclosed before it ever began. If, for Nietzsche, Socrates stands as the death of tragedy and the birth of metaphysics, for Sallis, Socrates stands as the death of any attempt to erect metaphysics from out of the Platonic text. This is owing, I am suggesting, to Sallis’ sensitivity to this logic of interminglings.

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“Who Is Socrates?”25

What, then, of the Apology? What, then, of that text in which Socrates attests to his connection to the “god of Delphi,” that god whom Nietzsche understood to be Apollo,26 that god who stood as the very opposite of everything that Dionysus represents? How is one to think this text in light of Sallis’ reading of the Symposium and the ugliness of Socrates therein? In short, where does one see Dionysus in this text that seems so decisively to affirm the Apollonian character of Socrates? There are various moments throughout the Apology where one might mark certain Dionysian elements. As Anne-​Marie Schultz has argued, one might see this in the way that Socrates speaks in a disordered manner, a manner that upsets the order of the court and provokes the occasional outburst on the part of the jury.27 Moreover, one might see a Dionysian moment in the manner in which the youth follow Socrates around the streets, fascinated by his public interrogations of the men of Athens.28 To take this thought way too far: one might imagine Socrates as Silenus, companion to Dionysus, wandering through the streets of Athens followed by a procession of mantic revelers, drawing them along with his madness-​inducing voice. One imagines Alcibiades foremost among them, as drunk on his love for Socrates as on whatever quantity of wine Dionysus had compelled him to consume. Most of all, however, one might see a decisively Dionysian moment in the fundamental gesture of Socrates’ philosophical enterprise. One might argue that the entire project of self-​examination that one sees depicted in the Apology (and elsewhere) is a matter of destroying the self’s pretense to wisdom, of thereby obliterating the identity thought to belong to the self. In other words, it is a matter of bringing the self to the point where it recognizes that it was not the self it thought it was, that it was not the individualized self that it feigned to be. Rather, as the Socratic project reveals, such a self, in being essentially without knowledge of anything worthwhile, is “worth little or nothing.” Moreover, because this is true for human beings as such, the Socratic project reveals that all people—​all selves—​are the same with respect to wisdom: they are all equally empty, equally bare; there is no difference between them. Phrased differently, the self is shown by Socrates to lack any distinguishing characteristic, 25 26 27 28

According to Sallis (bl 25–​26), this is the proper question to which the Apology addresses itself. See Nietzsche, Werke III.1, 85. Schultz, “Socrates and the Narrative Art of Self-​Care,” 146. Ap. 23c.

84 Ewegen any principle of individuation. In this way, Socrates’ philosophical practice would remain intermingled with a certain Dionysian moment of self-​erasure, of self-​dissolution, of self-​destruction. The project of erasing the self and bringing it to the point of radical ἀπορία would align with the Dionysian power of, to borrow Sallis’s phrase, “the utter disruption of determinate selfhood.”29 The work of Socratic philosophy would destabilize the coherence of the self, bringing about, to quote Sallis on the Dionysian again, “an abysmal loss of self” (cn 55). In a word, Socratic philosophy would destabilize any pretensions toward Apollonian coherence and order. In light of these Dionysian moments, it is interesting to note that, in describing the god with whom he so closely associates himself, Socrates never in the Apology refers to this god by the name “Apollo,” calling him only “the god” or “the god at Delphi.”30 This latter appellation would seem to force one to conclude that it is Apollo who is meant, given Apollo’s prominent presence in Delphi. Yet, it is worth noting that there was a well-​established cult to Dionysus in Delphi as well.31 (Indeed, it is even said that his tomb was housed there.)32 Socrates’ various references to “the god” or even “the god at Delphi” thus remain nebulous, for it is not unambiguously clear to which god he is referring. When Socrates ends his speech with a reference to his own self’s obliteration, offering the words, “But now the time has come to go away: I go to die, and you to live; but which of us goes to the better lot, is known to none but the god [τῷ θεῷ]” (Ap. 42a), one may well wonder: To which god is Socrates referring? Apollo? Dionysus? Or perhaps some radical intermingling of the two, such as would call the rigid division between them into question? In the end, and owing to Sallis’ engagement with the Platonic texts, one is left imagining Socrates as the hideously ugly satyr, with his horse tail and goat hooves, standing in front of the men of Athens as he delivers his ἀπολογία. As this site of the thorough intermingling of kinds, Socrates would come to stand not as the initiator of a tradition of rigid oppositions—​i.e., the father of metaphysics—​but rather as he who would call such rigid oppositions into question, he whose very character would challenge the coherence of such rigid 29 30 31 32

Sallis, “Nietzsche’s Platonism,” 6. See Gregory Vlastos, Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 252. See also Mark McPherran, The Religion of Socrates (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1996), 163. See Schultz, “Socrates and the Narrative Art of Self-​Care,” 145. It is also said that Apollo would vacate his temple at Delphi during the winter months, during which time Dionysus would occupy the temple in his stead. See David Fearn, Bacchylides: Politics, Performance, Poetic Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 182.

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oppositions (such as those between animal and human, reason and instinct, obscurity and clarity, sensation and thought, sensible and supersensible, concealment and unconcealment). This Socrates—​a Socrates I have come to know through my interminglings with Sallis—​would then be the figure who marks the impossibility of metaphysics: a strange Socrates, an excessive Socrates, an ugly Socrates who disrupts, in advance of its forming, the very tradition attributed to him.

Bibliography

Fearn, David. Bacchylides: Politics, Performance, Poetic Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Heidegger, Martin. Heraklit. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1979. McNeill, David. “On the Relationship of Alcibiades’ Speech to Nietzsche’s ‘Problem of Socrates’.” In Nietzsche and Antiquity, edited by Paul Bishop. Rochester: Boydell and Brewer, 2004. McPherran, Mark. The Religion of Socrates. University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1996. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Nietzsche Werke. Volume VI.3. Edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1969. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Nietzsche Werke. Volume III.1. Edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1972. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Nietzsche Werke. Volume VII. Edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2015. Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On the Relationship of Alcibiades’ Speech to the Other Speeches in Plato’s Symposium.” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 15, no. 2 (1991): 3–​5. Sallis, John. “Nietzsche’s Platonism.” In Between the Last Man and the Overman: The Question of Nietzsche’s Politics (Vol. 4 of Nietzsche: Critical Assessments), edited by D. W. Conway. London: Routledge, 1998. Sallis, John. “Speaking of the Earth: Figures of Transport in the Phaedo.” Epoché 13, no. 2 (2009), 365–​367. Shultz, Anne-​Marie. (2013). “Socrates and the Narrative Art of Self-​Care: An Apollinian and Dionysian Synthesis.” In Socrates and Dionysius: Philosophy and Art in Dialogue, edited by Ann Ward, 138–​58. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2013. Vlastos, Gregory. Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

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The Stretch between Limitless Flow and Absolute Stasis: Figuring the Flow of Nature and the Determinacy of Being Walter Brogan In the Prologue to The Figure of Nature: On Greek Origins, John Sallis offers a schema of what is to come; he pre-​figures for us the flow and the threads that constitute the path he follows in the book, a book that moves from a discussion of the early Greek encountering of phusis to a characteristically careful, subtle, and transformative reading of the account of nature in Plato’s Theaetetus and Phaedo. Sallis announces, for example, that what occurs in retracing the figure of phusis is a reversal of a history of translation and interpretation, one that renders imperceptible “much that originally sounded in the word, not least of all the echoes of mythic discourse” (fn 1). As Sallis will argue at length throughout this work, the ancient Greek understanding of phusis is “neither a concept abstracted from the many natural things nor itself one such thing alongside others” (fn 1). In a very literal sense, Sallis’ book reopens the space between and before this dichotomy; a spacing or stretch of the between that has been closed off so often and so extensively in our Western tradition. What has become clear in the course of my reading of this book is that Sallis is not enacting a mere reversal of the tradition that interprets the Greek notion of phusis as an “anterior determinant, as a nature beyond nature” (fn 1) or as a concept abstracted from the many natural things and understood to be their prior archē. In other words, Sallis is not merely arguing for the reverse position that nature is nothing other than the sensible and bodily as opposed to the intelligible. Rather, what he lets be seen and shine forth is a phusis that is neither one of these apart from the other, neither a prior principle of determination alone nor an incessant flow of undifferentiated and indeterminate being. At the heart of Sallis’ account of phusis is the question of how we know what nature is; that is, how we are able to disclose and let show forth the being of things. His answer cannot be easily summarized, but it involves following the movement of the things of phusis, which is a movement that recurs, a movement of retrieval, a moving back that allows for the tracing of the continuity of things. This way of mimetic knowing that follows phusis

© Walter Brogan, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004507098_007

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is what Plato calls anamnēsis, a remembrance that reenacts and reengages and thus re-​gathers together into a look (eidos) the manifoldness of natural things. But Sallis identifies many ways and paths to this retrieval that attends to the delimitation of phusis and thus lets it be seen in its emergence and flow. The one path that is traced in great detail in the first third of the book is the path undertaken by the early Greek thinkers. It is the elementary gathering that Anaximenes names air and Heraclitus names fire and Empedocles names the earth in which the fourfold takes root. Sound is yet another way to hear and let show the silent sounding that determines the flow of being, and Sallis beautifully describes and evokes the music of the cosmos in this work. But finally—​and perhaps most importantly—​there is logos, which is so pervasively treated in its connection to phusis that it is not even listed in the Greek index at the end of the book. It is no accident that Sallis begins this book with a chapter on Artemis, who is the protector of birth and life, and who at the same time holds within her power the connection of nature to destruction and death. Sallis writes: Artemis is the maieutic goddess who brings her reign to the confluence of pain and deliverance, of the threat of death and the promise of new life. She is the goddess whose name invokes the reign of phusis and who, herself unseen, reigns over all creatures that are born (phuomai) and that accordingly belong to the domain of phusis. (fn 8) The light-​bearing Artemis, the twin of Apollo, who holds light torches in both hands, prefigures Heraclitus and the illumination of fire as the power of phusis to “allow all things to shine forth, each in its own distinctive way” (fn 9). What Sallis accomplishes for us in these few pages devoted to Artemis is a showing of how revelatory Greek muthos is for an understanding of phusis. This sets the stage for an attentiveness to the role of muthos in Plato’s dialogues, where traces of an originary sense of phusis can be located and where Plato so often turns in order to disrupt more reductive accounts. Throughout this book, then, it is essential for the perceptive reader to pay attention to the play between muthos and logos. If I were to characterize in all timidity what is accomplished in Sallis’ reading of Anaximenes, Heraclius, and Empedocles, I would say it is much more than a preface to his reading of Plato in the later chapters. It is also something like a training ground for the reader who would follow Sallis on his path of tracing back the meaning of nature in Plato’s dialogues and an introduction to how one can read Plato otherwise. One example of this is in his discussion of air in Anaximenes. Sallis writes:

88 Brogan the archē names neither the hidden identity of things (what they ‘really’ are) nor the element from which they are composed. Rather Anaximenes can be taken as setting forth aēr as that from which all things come forth into their presence, into their manifestness. … It empowers the very appearing of things themselves. (fn 20, 24) What Sallis goes on to show is that the aēr that accompanies all that is—​each of the other elements—​is the source of their differentiation and at the same time does not appear itself apart from this differentiating relationality. This is made evident in Fragment 7, which declares that aēr is only visible, its look is only present to sight, in its differentiation from something else. After laying out this deep connection between phusis understood as air and the things that are differentiated by virtue of and from it, Sallis says something that on my first reading caught me by surprise. He says: “Thus is measured the distance, the differentiation, from Plato for whom being most equable, being utterly selfsame, defines the very sense of eidos” (fn 23). This comment sets the stage for the reading of Plato to come, which in the Theaetetus and Phaedo problematize how we are to understand this selfsameness of the look in relationship to the things that are manifest in and through it. That is to say, how are we to understand and make manifest the anteriority of phusis that Anaximenes indicates is in and of itself withdrawn and invisible, and yet at the same time can be seen in its look only inasmuch as it is in relation to the things that it makes manifest. How can we gain access to the withdrawal that Anaximenes announces? Sallis provides the clue when he turns at the end of this chapter to a discussion of air as breath: “Breath can sound, can be brought to sound in certain ways, and thus evolve into voice and speech” (fn 25). The clue is logos. Sallis writes: “Through logos we gather to ourselves what appears, while also raising its manifestness to a higher level, broaching the advent of knowing in an originary sense” (fn 25). Logos will become a central thematic in the discussion of phusis in the reading of Plato’s dialogues. I want to trace a similar thematic and similar problematic in Sallis’ reading of Heraclitus. The core passage that I would like to highlight is on page 33. There Sallis says of Heraclitus’ sense of phusis: Phusis is that from and through which things are brought to light as they are, in their distinct and proper being. Phusis is what lets illumination happen—​a what, therefore, that is prior to those whats that Platonic discourse will call eidē and regard as that which preeminently comes to light, which gets illuminated. More determinately, phusis is that which grants a space of illumination … the spacing of phusis. (fn 33–​4)

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Again, a certain provocation is set forth regarding how to read Plato’s sense of eidos in relationship to this originary sense of phusis in Heraclitus. And Sallis gives us a clue here of what is to come as he takes up these provocations in his readings of the Theaetetus and Phaedo. After interpreting the famous fragment 123 where Heraclitus announces that phusis loves to hide and the close proximity of day and night—​illumination and darkness—​, Sallis says: “One will perhaps wonder and ponder how it happens that the question of nature and its limits brings one back to the question of the earth” (fn 41). Sallis’ wonder about the relationship of the fire of heaven and the closure of earth—​as well as the secluded region of the shades beneath the earth—​will guide us as we move forward in his text. In his reading of Empedocles, one issue that looms large in his book comes to the fore. It is the issue of origin. Based on a reading of Empedocles Fragment 11, Sallis writes: “There is no coming to be, hence no origin of being, but only coming to be manifest, coming forth there before our senses. … Things do not simply come to be, but only come to be manifest” (fn 47). Thus the four roots are those, in their intertwining, from which “things emerge and grow into the light” (fn 52). Sallis concludes that there is hardly a trace in Empedocles’ thought of phusis as an original form that is imposed upon matter from outside in order to make things be. Again the issue of form—​of eidos—​emerges and we see that for Empedocles things are formed and come to be manifest in their look as the result of the mixing and separating of the roots. These issues of manifestness and of how things stay in their look—​how they appear as distinct and separate and yet together as one—​are issues that emerge from the reading of the early Greek thinkers and become central to Sallis’ interpretation of Plato that is to follow. I cannot exaggerate the importance of Sallis’ reading of the Theaetetus for those of us who have had a lifelong devotion to this dialogue. It is vintage Sallis. You will find there a close, intense, passage-​by-​passage reading that draws out so much of the dramatic complexity of the dialogue and situates it with careful attention to its many historical references. The title of this paper was motivated by an observation about stretching that Sallis makes in his account of Plato’s treatment of perception in the Theaetetus: he remarks: “Perception [thus] requires the transition in which the manifold of perceptions conveyed through the senses stretch together into or toward one look” (fn 131). I want to cite just one additional passage from Sallis’ chapter on the Theaetetus where he captures so much of his thesis. He asks: How can the flow of phusis be granted and yet a certain moment of determinacy be maintained? How, within the flow of phusis, can a certain

90 Brogan determinacy come to hold sway and to limit the flow? How can oneness and being be dissolved without the determinacy also vanishing? If there is no determinacy within the flow of phusis, then logos will be virtually silenced, at least in its capacity to say things as they are, to speak kata phusin. (fn 98) Sallis argues that in the Theaetetus it is precisely this paradoxical coupling of flow and determinacy that Plato articulates. It is a coupling that allows beings that belong to phusis to go beyond themselves, while at the same time staying in their being. Sallis calls this peculiar doubling a logic of excess. He says: It is only by way of such a logic that phusis can gain a certain determinacy. On the one hand, the determinacy must come upon phusis from beyond; it must as such exceed phusis. Yet, on the other hand, in order to be the determinacy of phusis and not merely something externally imposed, it must also somehow belong to phusis. (fn 99) In a book that fundamentally undermines centuries of received scholarship on Plato, Sallis shows in his reading of the Phaedo that only by giving an ode to the earth can the proper antidote be found for the poison administered to Plato by those who interpreted his philosophy as detached from and hostile to the body and the earth. His chapter on the Phaedo is just such an ode that offers an eloquent affirmation of earth-​bound philosophy and a sound rejection of the Molieresque-​like comic portrayal of a philosopher who would forget that the human condition is embodied. In reading this chapter, I had the experience of ascending to the heights of meditative thinking as he worked through scene after scene in the dialogue, showing over and over again that Socrates remains firmly a philosopher whose feet are on the ground, even as he ascends to the heights. Philosophy, for Plato—​and also for Sallis—​occurs in the play between these heights and depths. In Sallis’ rendition of this dialogue, Socrates’ discussion of the ascent of the soul above the mundane busyness of everyday pursuits remains throughout for the sake of the earth and a celebration of the human condition of mortality. Socrates frames the whole conversation in the Phaedo around what he calls his mutholegein about his imminent departure—​his going away and his return home—​to Hades; and he asks what we are to think of it (Phaedo 61e). Here, he is declaring that the practice of philosophy consists in the care of dying, in the anticipation and waiting for death, and that philosophizing occurs in the period between now and sunset. But it becomes immediately clear that philosophizing in this way—​while we are in the middle of things—​requires

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a thinking about being-​apart and the radical condition of being-​away that because of death cannot be circumvented. This point is dramatically signaled in the explanation for the delay in Socrates’ execution at the beginning of the dialogue, which was caused by the annual sending of the ship to Delos to honor Theseus’ slaying of the Minotaur and the saving of Athens, a feast dedicated to Apollo, the god of light and purification. In a sense, Sallis argues that Socrates’ most authentic philosophizing occurs in the space of this delay. The Phaedo is a dialogue that takes place during the last hours of Socrates’ life. Phaedo declares that he and the others were filled with a wondrous affect during the conversation they had with Socrates. Since Socrates was so placid, he did not feel pity as would be appropriate at a scene of mourning. Instead, he felt a wondrous mixture of pleasure and pain, sometimes induced to laugh and at other times to weep. The pain of death was brought together with the pleasure of philosophy. This initial description of the coming together of these two opposite affects becomes a recurrent theme throughout the dialogue. Sallis comments: “Yet all those present at the scene of Socrates’ death were ‘sometimes laughing, sometimes weeping.’ It appears that the Phaedo is not simply a tragedy but rather a strange, unusual, out-​of-​place mixture of tragedy and comedy” (fn 170). Having set the mythological framing of the dialogue, Sallis turns, in a section called “Down to Earth,” to one of many questions about separation that occurs at the very beginning of the dialogue and that are framed by Socrates’ imminent departure and separation from life; namely, the separation of poetry and philosophy. Sallis asks: “Does Socrates, in what he says in the face of death, remain, in some way a poet?” (fn 173). This question leads Sallis into a long and insightful discussion of Pythagorean philosophy and Orphism. Of course, the discussion has much to do with a certain relationship to the Muses and to harmony, and to the mathematical character of music. But the discussion of poetry and music is deferred for the most part to two additional references. The first is a reference to a comment Socrates makes about the whole discussion of the immortality of the soul, provoked by Cebes and Simmias, and that Socrates says is motivated by a fear of death that is childlike. It is as if philosophy can only occur when this childlike fear of death is overcome. And Socrates suggests: “one must sing to the child” (fn 214). Sallis writes that the song “Socrates will sing will be a comic song” (fn 214). The comic song one sings to the child who is preoccupied with fear is precisely the story of the absolute purity of the forms and the freedom from contamination from the body and from the senses that one who aspires to escape mortal being would tell. It is the story of Platonism. In the end Sallis proclaims: “What in Socrates’ depiction seems to be an ascent to pure being thus begins to look like a presumptuous

92 Brogan flight oblivious to human emplacement in a body on the earth” (fn 121). At the conclusion of this parody of the philosophical quest for truth and for an access to the truth of beings, there is only silence. In such an ascent that is a flight from the human condition, nothing can be said. There is no logos and thus no philosophy. As Sallis comments: “In falling silent, Socrates—​who is no Pythagorean—​is parodying the Pythagorean vow of silence” (fn 224). The song of philosophy cannot genuinely be sung under such conditions. Sallis draws out the contrast between this comic song that ends in muteness and Socrates’ own swan song at the end of the dialogue that ends in logos; it is the song of the earth. The discussion that ensues at the center of the dialogue considers the question of the immortality of the soul. Each of the arguments for the immortality of the soul deals in one way or another with the problem of opposition and contradiction. It is this war of opposites, it is the separateness of each that nevertheless achieves in life an impossible coming together, that is the main theme of the dialogue, and the reason Sallis argues that the dialogue is misread if it is read as an argument for an end to this movement of opposition in favor of a notion of the soul resting purely apart from the body. Certainly, the opposition of life and death—​their utter apartness and yet their inseparability—​is the primary discussion, but the theme is pervasive and shows up also in the discussion of the coming together of logos and muthos, of soul and body, of the sensible and intelligible, and of likeness and unlikeness, to name a few examples. The questions the Phaedo raises for us and the questions I think Sallis tries to answer are: Is the care for the soul, as other than the body, a dishonoring and rebuking of the body and its divinities? Or is the choice to honor other gods a way of freeing the body from its chains and prison like condition? How is it that holding oneself apart from and maintaining a certain distance from bodily pursuits is the condition for a free relationship to the embodied being that constitutes our mortal condition? The call back to earth that Sallis shows is resonating throughout the dialogue is a call to philosophy to not understand the thinking of difference that philosophy initiates as aiming to destroy the circulation of opposites and of opposition. The purpose of thinking these apart from each other—​for example, the soul apart from the body—​is precisely for the sake of thinking this impossible coming together of opposites that is life. Sallis’ answer to the question of why Socrates insists or seems to insist on the philosophical task of thinking apart what is bound together in mortal life is found, I think, in his discussion of transport and directionality. Sallis declares: “This configuration of philosophy and death has to be brought down to earth, that it has to be brought into connection with the earth” (fn 178). And

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the dialogue is truly all about these spacings of relationality: down to the earth, departing from the body, ascent from bondage, emigrating and sailing on, etc. Thus, the dialogue is about movement, circulation, and transport and is not about fixed regions above or below. In other words, the dialogue is a way of thinking about opposites that is utterly relational and the task of philosophy is to think this circulating orientation. If this is the case, then when Socrates puts his feet on the ground, it is not in order to get for himself a solid footing that will bring a halt to the movement and ascent of the soul to the heights. Rather, we are to think of this ground of philosophy—​this earthly grounding of philosophy—​no longer in terms of a dichotomy between heaven and earth as fixed and reified regions of purity on the one hand and contamination on the other, but as an ungrounding, mobilizing ground. Now, Sallis introduces a third and most important point of all; namely, that all these figures of ascent and descent in the dialogue and the very movement of carrying over that occurs through them are oriented by the earth. Thus, even the soul as a movement of ascent and departure that transports us away from the body is indebted to the body and governed by its relationship to it. Sallis portrays the desire of the soul to achieve separation from the body and to experience itself all by itself in its pure identity apart from the body as a comedy put into the mouth of those “true-​born philosophers” who acknowledge that this spiraling to the heights is impeded by the return again and again of the noise and trouble of the body. For the lovers of wisdom are, after all, lovers and filled with the desire to be (oregethai ton ontos). And there is no desire without the body. The very desire—​the eros that impels the striving of the philosopher to reach beyond the body—​belongs to the body. Thus, the body is a double movement, a movement of desire that reaches beyond itself, but also a movement of earthliness that resists and grounds this movement. What Sallis shows in the discussion of remembrance—​which occurs in the context of Socrates’ arguments for the immortality of the soul—​is that Plato is undermining yet another dichotomy, that between the interior and the exterior, the inside and the outside. Cebes understands remembrance as a movement that draws out into the open the silent logos within. As if the relationship of the human being to what she encounters outside herself is made possible by virtue of recalling a prior, hidden, interior, invisible experience within the soul of what is encountered by the body; an experience that is, by virtue of its separation from perception, fundamentally determinative of sensation. In his conversation with Cebes and Simmias, Socrates brings about a shift from this understanding of anamnesis to one that Sallis suggests is more akin to a doubling that demonstrates “the bond of remembrance to perception,” and hence to the body (fn 205).

94 Brogan For Socrates, recollection and learning occurs when one thing reminds us and makes manifest another; when, for example, we see that one thing resembles another. And the movement of remembrance from the one to the other—​ from the perception of one thing to the recognition of its being like or unlike another—​is a movement of connection and relation, of showing one thing as like or unlike another; that is, as one thing in relation to another, moving from one to the other. The sense of doubling here is precisely that a connection is drawn but also a difference. Knowledge understood as remembrance is the binding-​together that not only makes sense perception possible but is sense perception. For being in touch is only possible if beings touch one another; that is, if there is already in perception a doubling of perception. When Socrates asks: “So when … does the soul get in touch with truth?” Sallis comments: “It is not insignificant that in the formulation Socrates has slyly introduced a reference to touch (haptō), for, even more than sight and hearing, the sense of touch is inseparably tied to the body” (fn 187). Remembrance sets in motion the apparently reified images and lets them appear in their belonging together. It is a transporting away that nevertheless remains grounded in perception and lets a more profound manifestation of what is perceived occur. This is why remembrance is about similarity and difference, the discovery of which is essentially reliant on perception, but also on a movement beyond perception to hold onto what is seen and recognize what it is in its connection to and difference from others. What Sallis points out is that “in order to recognize something as falling short of—​as distinct from—​ something else, that which it falls short of, must have been seen beforehand” (fn 210). Sallis concludes that the senses: constitute a condition for knowledge. Within remembrance as bringing again to mind something forgotten, nature installs itself through the role played by the senses. To the ascent in which knowledge would be attained, nature returns, both as a moment of nature within human beings (the senses) and as a comportment of the human to nature (by way of the senses). (fn 211) But this movement of the soul that depends on perception and returns to perception is not reducible to perception alone. This is, in my assessment, the crux of Sallis’ reading of Plato. He affirms—​at the same time as he insists on the intractability of sense perception and thus of the body—​that the soul, in order to perceive, must reach beyond sense perception if only to genuinely make perception possible. Thus, he does not attempt at all to read out Plato’s claim “that the soul must have seen in advance the beings themselves (fn 212).”

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The task is to think through how the transcendence of thought is an inescapable corollary to the immanence of the senses in their relation to beings that are. The key to this relationship is remembrance and, in another context, one might say imagination. One of the most vivid and comical figures of the soul that Sallis uncovers in the dialogue is that of the soul after death, disseminating like the wind and vanishing in an aimless wandering that loses any sense of identity. The comedic contrast to this picture of the soul is of course a soul whose purity and self-​ identity apart from the body is such that no wandering is any longer possible. Such a soul, Sallis points out, would indeed be dead and no thoughtfulness, no desire to be, would any longer be possible. Sallis comments: “Indeed a soul that ceases its wanderings, that remains always the same, utterly selfsame, and that no longer lets itself be transported from something seen to something else made manifest from it would have entered a state, not of thoughtfulness, but of cessation of thought, a state of alleged deathlessness virtually indistinguishable from death” (fn 221). It is the relationship to the body that makes the stretching beyond and ascent of the soul possible, but it is also the body that grounds the soul and keeps its wandering from going astray. Each of these examples of how Socrates weaves his tale of the grounding of ethereal desires in the body and on the earth leads to the final scenes of the dialogue, where Socrates takes up the consideration of philosophical logos. Here, Sallis presents us with the culminating Socratic resolution of the need for the philosophical movement of ascent to remain connected to the earth. Socrates calls his turn to logos a second sailing and says: Well, then, after these, since I had renounced this looking into beings, it seemed to me that I had to be on my guard so as not to suffer the very thing that those people do who behold and look at the sun during an eclipse. For surely some of them have their eyes destroyed unless they look at the sun’s image in water or in some other such thing. I thought this sort of thing over and feared that my soul would be blinded if I looked at things with my eyes and attempted to grasp them by each of the senses. So, it seemed to me that I should have recourse to logoi and look in them for the truth of beings. (Phaedo 99d-​e, fn 236) At one point in the Phaedo (63d), Socrates is warned by Crito that dialegesthai—​engaging in dialogue—​will cause the pharmakon, the poison he is about to take, to lose its effectiveness. Sallis writes: “Thus, in deed Socrates pits speech, which brings heat and so prolongs life, against the pharmakon, which brings on coldness and death” (fn 182). Philosophical logos defers the tragic

96 Brogan effect of the pharmakon. Philosophy is the space of this deferral of dying, the space in that sense of living in the face of death. The Phaedo is dramatically set during the time in which the ship of Theseus has set sail for Delos and as a result of which the execution of Socrates has been delayed. The whole dialogue—​and especially the turn to logoi—​occurs during the time of this delay and in the space of the deferral of death. An interesting addendum to Theseus’ slaying of the Minotaur is what happened afterwards. King Minos was infuriated at the architect Daedelus and imprisoned him and his son Icarus in the labyrinth. But Daedelus carved out wings for himself and his son. They flew up towards the heavens and when they got close to Apollo, the sun god, Icarus, exhilarated at his ability to ascend, could not resist coming close to the sun. Whereupon he was scorched by the intense heat and radiance and his wings melted and he plunged down to the earth and into the sea. The philosophical power to ascend to the heights remains connected to the descent to the depths. The danger of forgetting that we are human and thus being blinded and scorched by the attempt to identify with the gods and to see pure being alone by itself is what the Greeks call the danger of hubris. The philosophical remedy for hubris is a logos that allows us to ascend beyond the limitations of the senses but in a human way. Thus, Sallis concludes: Philosophy begins, then—​it makes a new, a second beginning—​with a turn from the sensible, from natural things. It is in this limited sense that it can be called the practice of dying, that is, a withdrawing of the soul from the engagement that the body sustains with sensible things. And yet this turn is no flight into a beyond that would leave the body and the s­ ensible behind. Rather it is a turn to logoi as they call forth the things themselves, the looks, the original causes. Yet through this turn there is accomplished a return in which these things become manifest in their look, in the look that shines through them and determines them in their being. In the second sailing the soul does indeed draw itself away from nature, but only in order that there might be a return to nature in the manifestness of its being. (fn 240–​1)

pa rt 2 On Art and Translation

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­c hapter 6

Freeing the Eye Alejandro A. Vallega Coming before the elemental requires emptying our deliberate attentiveness into the elemental that lies before us, letting it solicit our vision and our other senses to open to it. When we then abide with the elemental, something elemental is disclosed within ourselves, an elemental within, or rather, multiple elementals that belong to our very propriety-​proper, in distinction from natural elementals.

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john sallis, Logic of Imagination

You had better haul up a pair of eyes from the bottom of your soul and put them on your chest; then you will find out what’s happening here. paul celan, Collected Prose

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The painter recaptures and converts into visible objects what would, without him, remain walled up in the separate life of each consciousness: the vibration of appearances which is the cradle of things. Only one emotion is possible for this painter … that of the continuous rebirth of existence. maurice merleau-​p onty, “Cézanne’s Doubt”

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© Alejandro A. Vallega, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004507098_008

100 Vallega

Section i

1 Locating Painting in Sallis’ Work In an interview given in the summer of 2006, John Sallis begins discussing his work by turning to his writing on painting: Let me begin with the case of painting, with a certain crossing that I have ventured from philosophy to painting. One of the things that motivated me to start writing about painting a few years ago was a certain dissatisfaction with philosophical texts that seemed too insular—insular in that they were for the most part discussions of other philosophical texts … philosophers in what we call western or continental tradition were writing their texts in the margins, as it were, of other texts. I wanted to try a kind of writing that, while taking account of major traditions and major figures in philosophy, while keeping these always in the background, would be a more direct engagement with “things themselves” … and not only with texts. I began trying to do this by writing about painting.1 At the heart of Sallis’ crossing is the concern with finding a path back to the things themselves, a way to begin to think about beings in and with the ­movement of their presencing and absencing, and in this sense in their eventuation. It is the turn towards painting and studying what painting does that provides such an opening towards thinking in and with the sensible. Painting, as Merleau-​Ponty points out in Eye and Mind as well as in his earlier writings on painting, is a distinct way of thinking that may illuminate the path of a philosophy that seeks to get at things in a more direct manner.2 Sallis says in the interview: I was trying on the one hand to write in a more direct fashion, by approaching art, and at the same time I was trying to mark some parallels, so that a kind of mutual information may take place; so that the study of painting could be instructive for philosophy, and conversely.3

1 Dawn McCance and John Sallis, “Crossings: An Interview with John Sallis.” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Journal 40, no. 1 (March 2007): 1–​2. 2 Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” in The Merleau-​Ponty Aesthetic Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. Galen A. Johnson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 121–​149. 3 Dawn McCance and John Sallis, “Crossings,” 2.

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This already indicates that the works on painting—​as well as works on art—​that one finds more and more frequently in the later period of Sallis’ work are not meant to offer justifications or definitions about what the meaning of art or painting is. Indeed, Sallis is clear that such discourses would miss what painting does if that was their aim. As far as writing and painting are concerned, Sallis works on a “style of writing” that “sort of speak.” A style of writing, that is, that “touches the painting but at the same time releases the painting.”4 For him, examples of such delimitation and release may be found in Paul Klee and Mimmo Paladino.5 In Transfigurements, Sallis refers to Paul Klee’s paintings for example. As he points out, Klee often offers lengthy narrative titles to his works or includes the titles in his paintings, performing a kind of crossing out of the purity, homogeneity, and perhaps superiority of language over image or vice versa (ta 190). 2 The Break of the Sensible-​Intelligible Duality In a 2006 interview, Sallis explains what he finds in painting, beginning with his work on Monet’s “Wheatstacks” series. In his writings on Monet, Sallis aims to analyze the way “Monet’s paintings capture the momentary look of things. The way in which his paintings capture a very concrete sense of time, of time of day, of time of season, and so on.6 Impressionism offers ways of engaging the sensible that, according to Sallis, are parallel to innovations and specific turns in philosophy. This parallel relates specifically to Nietzsche’s inversion of the opposition between the sensible and the intelligible. This inversion does not merely subvert the metaphysical ordering of the intelligible as original and the sensible as image of the idea, but it displaces it. The result is that not only does the sensible become the primary concern of philosophy, but the sensible as such must be rethought; the sense of the sensible must be engaged not through the intelligible, but through the sensible as such. In this way, the sensible becomes a semblance adrift, a fecund mask to be rethought in its senses and modalities. Sallis writes in Transfigurements: “What is required is not that the double character previously ascribed to painting be put aside, but rather that it be radically rethought. What is required is that this double character be reconceived within the context of the sensible, that the doubling be set, as it were, entirely within the visible” (ta 19). The doubling in painting between sensible and intelligible, depiction and idea, is a kind of simultaneity and must 4 Ibid., 3. 5 On Mimmo Paladino see “Very Ancient Memories: Paladino’s Recondite Images” in Shades of Panting at the Limit (sp 117–​165). 6 Dawn McCance and John Sallis, “Crossings,” 2.

102 Vallega now be folded back into the sensible to be thought concretely. That is, the intelligible-​sensible difference must be thought in a kind of turn to arché, in its concrete appearing in being visible. Thus, to say it in terms of Sallis’ search for a more direct way to think with things, the philosophical question of the sense of existence that was once ascribed into the intelligible becomes a question of seeing, as the givenness of the senses of existence occur through the visible. (Here the term visible holds together sensible and intelligible.) And it is painting that offers a path towards rethinking the sensible and, I must add, also for rethinking the intelligible folded back and out of the sensible. 3 What Painting Does In Transfigurements, Sallis says explicitly that what would be lost in repeating the classic way of addressing painting is “painting’s disclosive power” (ta 19). As he explains: art has a double character. This double character, this two-​sidedness, is perhaps most conspicuous in the case of painting. There is, most evidently the side of sense: in a painting something is depicted, and the depiction is set before, the visible image, is set before our sight. Then there is also another side: for a painting does not merely depict something, does not merely provide an image resembling what is depicted, but also, through the depiction, through the image, the painting presents something beyond the merely visible; it presents something supersensible, essential, intelligible. (ta 13) Two basic turns occur here. On the one hand, although painting may depict something, this does not delimit what painting does. On the other hand, through the image painting exposes “something beyond the visible; it presents something supersensible, essential, intelligible.” At this point the obvious question is: what is meant by “beyond the visible? At the same time, whatever this may mean it is already understood beyond the separation of sensible and intelligible as sustained by the history of Western thought. Sallis goes on: “This capacity is what is most wonderous and philosophically provocative about painting: that a painting can present the invisible in the very midst of the visible, that it can let something that never appears to the senses—​that cannot appear as such to the senses—​be present in and through the very shining of the sensible” (ta 14). Thus, Sallis argues that painting exposes in sensible ways that which never would appear to the senses otherwise; that is, in the common perception of the present and, I would add, the ideas present for us. In other words, a dimension of the presencing of things

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and ideas is exposed through the means—​the sensible means—​of painting. In Sallis’ words: “In philosophical terms, a painting is something visible through which something invisible is presented. More generally, an art work is something sensible that shines forth to the senses in such a way that something beyond the sensible, something purely intelligible, comes to be presented” (ta 15). But this coming to presence—​be it in painting in particular or in works of art in general—​cannot be named or claimed or subsumed by either a pragmatic understanding in terms of things and images, nor in terms of any essentialism or metaphysics. This is because the division of sensible and intelligible proves insufficient for what occurs in painting or the work of art; namely, the sensible coming into presence of “something purely intelligible.” 4 Visibility Sallis quotes an incisive statement by Paul Klee: “Kunst gibt nicht das Sichbare wieder, sondern macht sichtbar,” “Art does not reproduce the visible, but makes visible.”7 As Sallis explains, repeating the basic point made above and still interpreting Klee’s words, “the goal of art is to make visible something that otherwise would go unseen” (ta 20). Here, it is worthwhile to consider the longer passage: Through the configuration of forms, lines, colors on the canvas, something would be made visible, something that, if not utterly visible, nonetheless borders on invisibility. It is this bordering on invisibility, this being virtually invisible, that is decisive in characterizing that which painting is now taken to present. For what painting is now taken to present is an invisible that belongs to the visible … The invisible that painting is now taken to present is an invisible of the visible. (ta 20) The subject of painting is, then, a certain invisibility operative in the coming to presence of things, the intelligible supersensible is understood in terms of the presencing of things. At the same time, that which is made visible is neither a thing nor an idea. Sallis characterizes it as an appearing at the limit of visibility and invisibility, as “not utterly visible” and even bordering on invisibility. Two painters that serve as specific cases of study for Sallis are Paul Klee and Monet.8 As we see above, Monet’s Wheatstacks turn towards a sense of the not quite visible that borders in invisibility. The theme or subject of the paintings 7 Paul Klee, Kunst-​Lehre (Leipzig: Reclam, 1987), 60. Sallis quotes this line in Transfigurements (ta 19). 8 All works shown in this essay were taken from public domain.

104 Vallega

­f igure 6.1  Monet, Wheatstacks, “Sunset” (1891)

serves only as a fulcrum, to use Monet’s own language. The Wheatstacks serve as a mirror that allows us to see something else than the mere presence of a thing. The paintings serve as a point around which something else becomes apparent. In the paintings, through the world of things as mirrors, through the static appearance of things, our focus is drawn to one feature in particular: light. That is, a light that spreads everywhere and through which the visible may appear. A light that Monet calls “the envelope.” In a sense, it is the spread of light that is presented in the paintings, the painting is not about capturing a thing—​in this case a wheatstack. Moreover, the light is an envelope, it is an atmosphere or environment in and through which things appear. This aim of the paintings is made all the more evident in that the details of things are neglected and the envelope of the appearing becomes visible. That is, it is not the visible that is repeated, but one is brought to engage—​to see—​the shining through which appearing occurs. In Sallis words, Monet’s paintings “make visible the light that grants to things their visibility” (ta 21). And this takes us to experience what Sallis identifies as the most astonishing capacity of painting: “the capacity of painting to present the invisible through the shining of the visible” (ta 21). This formulation takes an even more direct form in Klee’s work. When Klee says that painting makes visible, he is referring to the painter’s engagement in the originary arising to being of the world. Thus, for Klee, painting does not exactly represent something invisible of the visible, but participate in the very originary arising of the visible and intelligible (in the sense of ideas and mental images). As Sallis points out, Klee’s works are often concerned with the genesis of things, “the virtual invisible genesis that lies behind the surface appearance of things

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yet is essential to such things and to their appearance” (ta 20). And it is exactly such concern that leads Klee to tell his students that painting “makes visible.”9 5 The Looks of Things In chapter five of Transfigurements, Sallis writes: “In the artwork the sensible must indeed be present, as, specifically in painting, color and then everything else are sensibly present. And yet, this presence is sensible without being material” (ta 79). Referring to Hegel’s discussion on painting, Sallis points out that painting is ultimately a surface (Oberflache) that is something sensible, that has been detached from materiality.10 As such a surface, painting is liberated from materiality and remains a two-​dimensional sensible articulation of the visible’s coming to be. The sensible does not only refer to its elements (line, color, form), but, more importantly, the sensible appears in its shining (erscheint). Sallis writes: “There is a shining forth, and in this very ­shining the appearance or look of something comes forth” (ta 79). What appears is the look of things—​their very shining or appearing—​liberated now from thing-​hood, materiality, and the metaphysics grounded on the fixation of classical thinking with the materiality of things (and its corresponding idea). And if one considers the envelop of light, one may say that it is in the shining that things may manifest or come to presence. At issue then is not just shining phenomena, but, specifically, the looks of things in their becoming visible. Such a claim is evident in Monet’s “Summer” wheatstack. This is the characteristic that makes painting a path towards the things themselves for Sallis. This is the characteristic that brings painting and thought together. This calls for a thought that is neither material nor abstract, but, rather, a thinking remaining with the vibrancy of the appearing in its doubling as intelligible-​sensible appearing. It is the sensible in its specificity or concrete sense—​in its presencing intensity—​that one will engage; that is, its distinct vibrant carnation. Before moving to the next section and in order to begin to understand—​that is, to undergo and stand-​with—​this turn to the sensible, I will turn for a moment to one of the central chapters in Logic of Imagination, entitled “The Look of Things.”

9 10

See Alejandro A. Vallega “Paul Klee’s Vision of an Originary Cosmological Painting,” Paul Klee, Philosophical Vision: From Nature to Art (Boston: McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, 2012), 25–​34. It is of interest that Derrida refers to this as the “subjectile” in his work on Artaud. This is a theme and surface that in its ambiguous spacing proves to be the undoing of the ground of the work of art. See Jacques Derrida, “To Unsense the Subjectile,” in The Secret of Antonin Artaud (Cambridge: mit Press, 1998), 51–​148.

106 Vallega As its title indicates, the accent in this chapter is not on things, but on “the look.” What concerns us is the shining as shining—​or the appearing that is the look in a dynamic originary sense—​as distinguished in the introductory remarks to the chapter where Sallis writes: Art has the capacity to render the look of things visibly manifested in a way and to a degree that surpasses what mere perception can accomplish in all but the most exceptional cases. The painter, in particular, renders visible what would otherwise remain virtually invisible: the fleeting glance of something passing by: the look of an ocean wave as it crests or as it crashes against a rocky shore; the reflection on a silver vessel (a teapot for instance) of the otherwise unseen windows in the room where it is located; the spread of light across a landscape where in ordinary perception we see the objects illuminated but hardly, if at all the lighting itself. (li 127) These last words take one back to Monet’s “Wheatstacks,” to that which we called the envelop and to the shining Sallis refers to in Transfigurements. The passage also refers one back to John Berger’s insight on The Shape of a Pocket; namely, that painting catches that which is passing, fleeting, and yet concrete in the givenness of experience.11 Moreover, I think that at this point the issue is not only no longer understanding painting as the painting of some-​thing, material, or ideal. Rather, one seeks to catch the fleeting moment in appearing, one is tempted to seek in painting the engaging of the temporalizing movement that plays out in and with the concrete appearing of things. Indeed, the term “trans-​figurement” refers not to the transfiguration of something into something else, but to the way appearing is made visible in Transfigurements, in the eccentric exposure of dynamic presencing of the sensible through the sensible in panting and the work of art “in a true sense” (to recall the subtitle of Transfigurements.) Moreover, the Wheatstacks capture precisely the concrete (literally con-​crescere, growing-​with) of things in their spacing and, hence, also in their concrete temporalizing appearing.

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“Painting is, first, an affirmation of the visible which surrounds us and which continually appears and disappears … painting is an affirmation of the existent, of the physical world into which we have been thrown” John Berger, The Shape of a Pocket (New York: Pantheon Books, 2001), 14. Part of the point here is to be clear that things are not abandoned or rarefied in our discussion, but, on the contrary, the point is, as Sallis states from the outset in his interview, to get to things. In my terms, the point is to get to, living, concrete experience.

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6 A Most Delicate Vibrancy With this last observation, one stands at a limit with respect to the looks of things, since our discussion has led us to the limit of the visible and invisible, to a realm of the disclosure in painting, which Sallis calls in Transfigurements the “not utterly visible, [which] nonetheless [at the same time] borders on invisibility” (ta 20). In Chapter Four of Logic of Imagination, Sallis touches on the ephemeral and delicate, the fragile realm of these intelligible-​sensibles. Sallis distinguishes between mere sense-​images and the sense of the looks of things. Taking a step back from things in their appearing, taking a step back from the looks of things and touching on the most fragile, Sallis writes: Even prior to the level where the look emerges, the sense-​image will already have been installed within a configuration of showing, a configuration that serves to stabilize the image, and to open it beyond itself, to objectify it. The sense-​image is fleeting and delicate. It is the sheer upsurge of presence but is not yet even a presence of the thing. In its delicacy the image is duplicitous, adhering indifferently to the thing and to the sense of the one who would sense it, hence adhering decisively to neither. It is only through certain supplements [horizons] that the image is stabilized and objectified. In effect these supplements set in place a configuration for the self-​showing of the thing that is present, if meagerly and duplicitously, in the sense-​image. In the drawing out of this configuration, speech and imagination come to the aid of sense; in its draft they are decisively engaged, though they do not by any means simply produce the series of supplements. (li 129) Before one may speak of the look of things occurs the sense-​image. The sense-​ image is fleeting and delicate, an ephemeral tremor in the flesh of the world, held together by supplementary horizons. The sense-​image appears within a configuration of showing that will allow for the image to appear beyond itself as an object. The image is stabilized by a series of horizons, which make up a configuration for the appearing of the thing that is present. This last configuration is formed when “speech and imagination come to the aid of sense” (li 129). Here, the temporalizing movement (draft) is figured as the very force of imagination. Imagination figures as the playing out of a time-​space that comes to be situated by supplements or horizons such that the looks appear. This is the way to the looks of things, the dynamic that painting discloses. To add to the density of the appearing one must consider that, as Sallis explains, this operation occurs in between speech and imagination, and thus through a sensible-​intelligible thinking neither of things nor of ideas. It should also

108 Vallega be underscored that the movement of speech and imagination cannot be resolved into either one or the other (image or speech). Instead, the two occur as a tension and this tension is itself already at play in the sense-​image’s configuration or horizonal region for the appearing of things. As Sallis points out: “In the exchange between word and look, the terms do not coalesce into an indifferent union. Each remains distinct, irreducible to the other … to speak is not to look” (li 140). The sequence in the singular appearing is from sense-​image, to self-​showing, to looks. This is neither a logical sequence nor a dialectical one, but rather a question of light or the way shining occurs. Although in distinguishing elements one may seem to be talking about separate discrete moments, the temporality of appearing or presencing holds as a unity in distinctness. Perhaps one may think of the words Dante has in The Divine Comedy, when in Paradiso he speaks about how one comes to see truth, never directly and pure, but through the three rings Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, three cycles shot through with light at once. Sallis writes in Logic of Imagination: It is imagination and the opening to speech that conspire to transform the mere shining of the image into the self-​showing of the thing itself. It is then from this self-​showing that the look emerges, crystalizing what has become manifest, gathering it into this new guise, elevating it to the level of a more compact and determinate self-​showing. (li 131) The arising of presencing occurs through the conspiracy of imagination and speech, through their tension. Sense-​image alone must be contextualized by a horizon and the upsurge of sense data must be gathered into a unity, into the look of the thing. In this sense, painting makes visible the elements in the ­gathering of the visible, elements of concrete intelligibility in their making the  visible visible as image, thing, and look. One may once again think of Monet’s “Summer” wheatstack. The visible occurs through the trembling opening of light sustained by various tensions. This is clear in the the way sense-​image and look are related in the operation of imagination. On the one hand, as Sallis writes: In its relation to the look, imagination is neither productive nor reproductive but, rather tractive. It draws upon the manifestation that already, and in a more rudimentary way, has been accomplished; it gathers the dispersed moments into a concentrated, contracted, intense, self-​showing. Imagination brings its gathering force to bear in such way that, cancelling the diversity of appearances, it lets the thing reveal what it is.

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Through this gathering the thing comes to disclose itself in the unity of its whatness, comes to show itself in its being. (li 136) Here, imagination’s force gathers into a unity that discloses thing and look, a gathering that requires “cancelling the diversity of the appearances.” In this cancelling, it would seem that diversity—​the fragile upsurge to presencing—​ gives way to determination, to “the unity of its whatness.” On the other hand, as Sallis indicates above, already in the sense-​image, already the upsurge before thing, whatness, and look, speech and imagination are caught in that fathomless sea, in the movement that is neither mere sense-​image nor look, but the entanglement in the presencing as such. Moreover, the imagination does not create but gathers that which is already given. In this way, imagination “draws upon the manifestation that already, and in a more rudimentary way, has been accomplished; it gathers the dispersed moments into a concentrated, contracted, intense, self-​showing” (li 136). The gathering into a unity remains at the same time the gathering of the distinct, ephemeral, almost invisible. Indeed, as one may draw from Sallis’s discussion, the gathering into the visible is never only a perfect unity. Imagination and speech have a distinct logic held by their tension, which seems to play out at the limit of the looks of things, in the very appearing of the looks. Furthermore, from the sense-​image to the looks, the unity of perception is always composed by a doubling of sensible and intelligible. Thus, the appearing does not—​in fact, cannot—​correspond to the logic of the mere pragmatic presence of things. Nor can the appearing be held as a transcendental movement, since every appearing will be concrete in that in its givenness intelligible and sensible occur simultaneously. One finds another moment in the break with the logic of the identity of things and their representation when Sallis writes: as drawn from the antecedent manifestation [the sense-​image], the look is already there; on the other hand, as requiring the tractive force of imagination in order to be drawn together from disparate moments, the look is not already there in the antecedent manifestation. … Thus, it is necessary to say that the look both is and is not there antecedently. In this mixing of is and is not, in their conjunction, imagination commits—​as in many instances—​an infraction of the alleged principle of noncontradiction. (li 136–​7) In the first part of this chapter, I have aimed to introduce the sense of painting for Sallis; that is, how painting brings to light the very movement of the presencing of things, understood out of the originary movement found in

110 Vallega the shining that composes the envelope, sense-​image, thing, and its looks. A progress held in the tension between speech and image, and by the vibrant doubling of sense-​image and look. In underscoring these dynamic aspects of the presencing of things, one sees that the unity brought forth between imagination and speech is never complete, homogeneous, and self-​sustaining. The visible occurs through tensions, differences, and reverberations that hold presencing in place, but that cannot be reduced to the single fact and material presence of the thing or the visible. The horizons that hold the sense-​image in its play with the looks—​the word at the edge of the image and vice-​versa—​ and the dynamics of being between through which the visible comes to pass are always already beyond the visible presence. Moreover, the horizons and the play of imagination and speech not only gather the image into a unity of perception and intelligibility. Rather, as we will see in the rest of my remarks, the vibrancy in the gathering occurs at the same time with a disseminating movement, which, if engaged as such, may bring us to engage the visible in its originary cosmological arising movement.

Section ii

1

The Eye before the “I” Imagine an eye unruled by man-​made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye that does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. … How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of “Green”? How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye? Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of color. Imagine a world before the “beginning was the word.”12

In the first part of our discussion, we saw that Sallis makes evident that painting makes visible the movement of appearing through which things in themselves and their looks arise. We also saw that ultimately appearing is gathered into a unity by the conspiring of speech and imagination. However, this unity

12

Epigraph. Stan Brackage, Essential Brakhage: Selected Writings on Film by Stan Brakhage, ed. Bruce R. McPherson (New York: McPherson and Co., 2001), 12.

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is not a pure determination or a resolution of various elements into a stable principle or form. As Sallis notices, the unifying through the draft or gathering of imagination is not a creation of something, but a protractive movement. And this movement is a gathering of the ephemeral and delicate sense-​image, of the effusive envelope of light, and of the horizons that hold the shining configurations in their coming to pass. In other words, the unity is not a thing material or ideal, but rather a dynamic shining, which is fragile and always at the limit of visibility (rather than a given visible thing that happens to appear in one light or another). This much may be clearly seen in Camille Pissarro’s Washerwoman, Study (1880). The head and body of the woman appear through the evident sheer vibrancy of that which is not yet an image. Sense-​impression, fields of bordering color (green), sustain the image in the envelope of light that situates it. At issue in the painting is not the woman as a thing, but her coming to presence, her visible coming into visibility. In this sense, Sallis’ account is generative or originary; that is, it points to painting as a sight of originary disclosure of the visible in its becoming visible. But as Pissarro’s study makes evident, the gathering into unity is never completed; there is never a dialectical or synthetic resolution that will overcome the shining or dynamic movement. In what follows, I wish to stay with this shining; that is, with the dynamic movement, in particular with sense-​image, envelope of light, and horizons, as spacing-​temporalizing dimensions of the coming into being of the visible. In other words, I am interested in engaging not the visible, but the movement of visibility in its coming into being. So I am interested in the movement rather than in the unification of elements into a unity. This is because, as we will

­f igure 6.2 Camille Pissarro’s Washerwoman, Study (1880)

112 Vallega see, force of imagination does not hold true to unity, but performs distinct “unifying-​disseminating” movements. Visibility is not only a matter of unity. Seeing happens simultaneously with a unifying-​disseminating movement, as the vibrant flickering of living-​dying, through the delicate and fragile upsurge of presence. I use “living-​dying” here in the sense of the coming to presence in passing in which beings appear and are as such. It is the disseminating movement that I want to make evident and I will do this by examining several photographs and paintings. In the quote that opens this section, American experimental filmmaker, Stan Brackage, refers to this very aspect of the visible and visibility in its originary movement. As we will see, works of art, photography, and painting make explicit this disseminating-​unifying coming into visibility. The appearing in the draft of the imagination is also a disseminating movement and this is not the flying away of sense and meaning. On the contrary, as I will conclude, the disseminating movement I address in this section relates thing and I/​eye to the movement of living-​dying of worlds and cosmos. In its disseminating movement, painting makes evident this worldly and cosmological relations, which occurs before—​at the delimitating of I/​eyework, language, thing, looks, and their logic. This cosmological relation is attained through the freeing of the eye from the visible and, hence, from subjectivity and the world of things present and visible “out there.” But in order to understand this one must see it, one must learn to see again, beyond the visible. 2 Image Painting at the Limit of the Visible Let us consider for a moment a way into the becoming of the visible by way of the sense-​image. First of all, the sense image is not an image of a thing but occurs before the look emerges. Thus, it does not have a fixed visibility or invisibility. At the same time, the sense-​image is already within a configuration of showing that stabilizes the image by virtue of horizons, which seem to work as edges that hold the sense-​image in its tremulous movement. The elements of visibility and appearing—​envelope of light, sense-​images, and horizons—​are not resolved, but gathered by force of imagination. This is the articulation of a movement, the most difficult dimension of which seems to be that before the looks of things; i.e., the “sense-​image.” As we have already noted, Sallis characterizes it as: ”fleeting and delicate”; as “the sheer upsurge of presence” […] “but not yet even a presence of the thing.” Furthermore. He says that this sense-​image is “In its delicacy … duplicitous”; “adhering indifferently to the thing” as well as “to the sense of the one who would sense it.” A duplicitous character that is never resolved at this level “hence adhering decisively to neither.” This delicate upsurge of presence, neither visible nor

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­f igure 6.3  Alejandro Vallega, Untitled, San Torini (2019)

invisible, this vibrant shining before the thing’s visibility, I want to suggest, is already vision, understanding, and it is what shows in such works of art as photography and painting. This is evident if one turns to the photograph that opens this section. What interests the photographer is not an object. In this picture, the photographer displaces the primacy of objective presence and its logic for the eye by taking a picture that—​in not being focused by the centrality of a thing and its presence—​exposes one to a kind of aura of vision before the visible. Before, in the sense of that which comprises seeing and in which the visible, is never dismissed, but reintroduced as that which appears through the play of sense-​ images, or spectral determinations of visibility, the envelop of light in a kind of simultaneous unfolding. In short, this image deconstructs the idea of vision as the task of the unity of the visible and does so by bringing one into the dynamic of seeing and into the coming into visibility of the visible. This occurs as one is exposed with and in the movement and vibrancy of seeing, in its flesh, density, and unfathomable complexity in between appearing-​disappearing,

114 Vallega unifying-​disseminating, and living-​dying.13 The picture reveals the way that elusive forms and textures, the lines, and light hold the eye. In this case, the edges or horizon hold a center that is not yet a distinct object. What is seen at the center of the image articulates a movement held by the envelope of light, in this case interestingly unfolding through a play of chiaroscuro. The envelope becomes darkness as the density of the sense-​image trembles and vibrates in a spectral shining. The intimacy of the image is neither of an object nor the synthesis of phenomena of a subjective consciousness that accomplishes the ­visible as this or that subject. Visibility is neither in the thing nor in the viewer. Rather, the sense-​image holds to both, with both. To the point that the  senses and word have no place to turn to in order to make sense of the image, except for the sheer irredeemable ambiguity of the movement of appearing. The sense-​image displays the flesh of the world, a tremulous movement through which the eye appears to consciousness as does the world, before thing, representational image, and word. At the same time, the image under discussion would seem to refer to a thing—​a window, a shade. And yet, the sense-​image, envelope of light, and horizons are not held by the thing. At best, the window reveals an ephemeral, perhaps phantasmal character. The center is held by the most fragile, held together by the fading horizons or edges of shimmering light, by an envelope of light that seems to burn through the window and shade to the point of making them disappear as objects. Background and foreground give only further evidence of the unstable in the shining of things, which one may perhaps leap to soon to identify with a window and a shade. The image is concerned with the shining as such, with the light, the fading indeterminate edges of and in the visible, and with another sense-​image that holds us to the eye as tremulous flesh, as light that makes us witnesses and witnesses to a seeing that is already perhaps too late, the light already spent, the image burnt through, drowning in light. The point is to expose us to the visible in its becoming, without objective or subjective logical justification. In short, the image is not representational, but performative. Thus far I have focused on these images because they reveal the eye of a painter at work. In turning to the last sections of my remarks, I would like to focus on other painters whose work makes evident the dynamic disseminating-​ gathering of the visible in its becoming to which painting exposes us. 13

I should note that I compose these terms through an enjambment and in order to indicate and begin to think with the appearing’s logic; that is, to engage with the appearing’s occurring free of the logic of presencing and representation of things in terms of their identity, whether material or conceptual.

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­f igure 6.4 Vincent Van Gogh, Self-​Portrait with Straw Hat (1887)

3 Disseminations, Painting’s Cosmological Inceptive Character Van Gogh’s Self-​Portrait with Straw Hat (1887) puts one directly in front of the movement of visibility. The configuration of the image happens not as a representation of a static field of vision, but, as it does pointillism, it offers sense-​ images that remain to be gathered as hat, countenance, coat, and background. Following the strokes one sees the rhythmic play of gesture and dab of paint, of a brush beating and running over the surface. Moreover, what becomes explicit is the simultaneous movement forward of specks, points that radiate outwards, while the image recedes into a dense field of more dabs of color. The subject of the painting appears in the tension between two movements, in a dynamic of protraction that stays with the visible in its double appearing as unity and dissemination. At the same time, the image of the one portrayed (de)composes into the intensity of the vibrant play of dabs, lines, and color blots. In short, Van Gogh’s self-​portrait does not depict only the painter, but it is made up of sense-​images, gestures, light that although letting the visible arise are not a mere depiction of a subject. With an undoing of the primacy of the unity of perception in order to expose us to visibility’s concrete passing, painting exposes one to a disseminating movement in the configuration of the unity or subject, the self-​portrait. The disseminating movement that sustains the visible is also clear and perhaps intensified in the work of Sonia and Robert Delaunay. In Windows Open

116 Vallega Simultaneously (First Part, Third Motif) (1912), Delaunay opens visibility onto the way seeing happens in the coming to pass of visibility. This may seem non-​ sensical, the image may seem pure chaos if one begins by seeking windows, perspective, and space and things outside them. However, as we have seen, painting makes evident that the dynamic aspects of visibility, the envelope of light, sense-​images, and horizons are at play in seeing, in a seeing not organized by the unity of things and their look. Delaunay engages light, movement, and sense-​image in this painting. Objects, the compositional laws, and even the word as reference to seeing become suspended by the sense-​image. Moreover, light here no longer figures an envelope, but, rather, breaks into simultaneous resonances and movements “after” the delimitation of the visible (both in the sense of holding visibility open and in unsettling it as determined by what is visible). Such light no longer follows an inside and outside rule, space no longer takes place after the visibility and unity of things. At this point, painting makes visible the visible in its disseminating eruptive occurrence. At the same time, what is made visible is not something in the world, but the occurrence onto visibility of the world, a movement that is not only of the world as presence. Light and color move outwards, outwards as they situate one’s eye beyond the visible world of things. This explosion that at the same time holds in the unifying of the visible is not a negative movement away from presencing, but it relates presencing to that which is no-​thing. Painting in its eruptive movement refers one to the cosmological movement that situates world, thing, and I/​eye. One may speak here of the concrete sense of painting, in that literally, painting in its disseminating-​gathering movement inscribes one, self, things, world into the cosmological movement of existing. Those same windows that we are invited to imagine through the title, become a task for the imagination again, but now in terms of the sensible, in the gathering of light, sense-​image, and horizons, words become possible. By the sense-​image, light, and horizonal dynamics, one stands with the movement of becoming at the limit of image and word. It is not that in painting word remains secondary to things and materiality. Rather, sense happens in that holding in the gathering of unity and dissemination, in the “quickening” that painting attempts to articulate. I would like to end by suggesting that this freeing of the I/​eye onto the cosmological movement of concrete living-​dying is what Sallis engages in his thinking with painting as the making visible of that which remains invisible in our fixation with things and their space, in our being fixed in our egological consciousness, with its interiority as opposed to the exteriority of nature “out there.” Painting sinks and takes us into that fleeting movement, into the delicate upsurge of presencing, without thing-​in-​itself or its looks, in order to

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attempt the most unlikely leap to the concrete configuration of sense, that leap that painter and philosopher must always risk.

Bibliography

Berger, John. The Shape of a Pocket. New York: Pantheon Books, 2001. Brakhage, Stan. Essential Brakhage: Selected Writings on Film by Stan Brakhage. Edited by Bruce R. McPherson. New York: McPherson, 2001. Derrida, Jacques. “To Unsense the Subjectile.” In The Secret of Antonin Artaud, 51–​148. Cambridge: mit Press, 1998. Klee, Paul. Kunst-​Lehre. Leipzig: Reclam, 1987. McCance, Dawn and Sallis John. “Crossings: An Interview with John Sallis.” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Journal 40, no. 1 (March 2007): 1–​10. Merleau-​ Ponty, Maurice. “Eye and Mind.” In The Merleau-​Ponty Aesthetic Reader: Philosophy  and Painting, 121–​ 149. Edited by Galen A. Johnson. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993. Vallega, Alejandro. “Paul Klee’s Vision of an Originary Cosmological Painting.” In Paul Klee, Philosophical Vision: From Nature to Art, 25–​34. Boston: McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, 2012.

­c hapter 7

Interpreting the “Sense” of Art James Risser Let me begin with the obvious for anyone who has read John Sallis’ work on art: we misread this work if we expect to find in it a philosophy of art in its ordinary sense. Strictly speaking, John Sallis has no philosophy of art, because he is no ordinary philosopher writing about art. He refuses to subject art to a determination by philosophy, to a determination that privileges the concept when it comes to art. Put differently, Sallis does not provide us with a determination of art as aesthetics, namely, a theory of the sensible from the perspective of reason. For that matter, he gives no determination of art as truth from the perspective of the truth of being. And yet, Sallis’ work on art is all about the sensible and a relation to truth. The difference in this regard is quite simple: John Sallis, more than any other contemporary philosopher, will write about art as art. Sallis himself speaks of this displacing of philosophy when it comes to thinking about painting in a 2006 interview. When asked about the trajectory of his own work, Sallis makes the point that philosophical texts have a tendency to be too insular; they are often written in the margins of other philosophical texts, so to speak. So, for the sake of a more direct engagement with painting and not just an engagement with texts, he wants to write about painting in a different way. He wants to write about painting more directly and in a way that could be instructive for philosophy. Such a writing requires a different style, one that is not simply conceptual and does not subordinate the sensible to the conceptual. It is a matter of letting painting show itself as a sensible phenomenon. It is a matter of being able somehow to “say” the painting, while at the same time undermining the “saying” so that the painting can appear as painting. If indeed this approach to painting—​proceeding from the explicit recognition of the difference between discourse and sense—​displaces the typical operation of philosophy, it nevertheless remains in its approach a matter of interpretation. To write about art as art and to write about painting as painting, is already a matter of interpretation in a double sense: to say art as art (my words, not Sallis’) is to carry out an interpretation of art, and in this very saying we are able to see something of how art itself constitutes an interpretation. We are able to see how sense comes to interpretation in art or, what amounts to

© James Risser, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004507098_009

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the same thing, how, within its sensible condition, a painting comes to itself as painting. This matter of interpretation is the focus of my remarks, and it is important to state at the outset the concerns that are motivating my remarks. For one, in an attempt to speak to, if not further, the work of Sallis, I have been struck by how little attention has been given to the question of interpretation in art, at least in any overt way. It is a concern that is remarkable in view of what I take to be a close proximity between Sallis’ work and that of Gadamer, especially in regard to their shared emphasis on the self-​showing character of art. This lack of explicit attention may be accounted for by the scope of Sallis’ overall project of developing a more fundamental phenomenology of imagination through which it is possible to demonstrates how imagination is operative in the self-​ showing of things. In effect, Sallis places the emphasis on presentation and not interpretation. The implication here is that, in fact, Sallis does address the question of interpretation in art indirectly in his approach to painting and through his understanding of imagination. Still there is an additional concern that comes oddly enough not from the side of Sallis’ work on art, but from the side of hermeneutics. In my own efforts to follow Gadamer’s interpretation of art, I have been struck by how little attention he gives to art’s sensible condition and for that matter to explicitly consider, as Sallis does, the relation between art and imagination. For Gadamer, art is Aussage. It has something to say and thus it is to be approached primarily in relation to linguisticality. But one has to wonder if this is sufficient for the question of interpretation in art, especially in regard to painting. What follows addresses—​either directly or indirectly—​both of these concerns. 1

Sallis’ Approach to Art

To proceed, let me first indicate the general contours of Sallis’ approach to art and, more precisely, to the art of painting. For Sallis, the artwork is indeed composed, but this is not at all equivalent to it being a production. Painting, in particular, cannot be understood as a simple fabrication and certainly not as a fabrication of something already imagined, such that what is fabricated is simply a replication of visibility. If this were the case, then the character of art would amount to little more than imitation in the ordinary sense of copy. What is painted by the painter, Sallis insists, will seldom have been visible in advance. One can say, in fact, that the painter sees what is to be painted only as the painter paints. In this engagement with painting, it seems that the painter

120 Risser is ahead of himself in relation to what is being seen, not unlike the composer is in relation to a musical score or, for that matter, the performer is in relation to the musical piece. And the idea is much more than that. In the case of the painter, Sallis claims, the composing that is translating the space between the eye and the hand of the painter is engaging not the visibility of the mirror but a certain space of invisibility. In effect, the art of painting—​as an art of visibility—​has a double character, not unlike what philosophy puts in place with the differing relation between the sensible and intelligible. On the one hand, painting is a configuration of forms and colors, a visible image set before our vision. Yet, on the other, painting presents something beyond the merely visible through the depiction that it effects. It presents something intelligible, if only in the sense that is presents something irreducible to an object of sense. Painting can present something almost invisible—​if not entirely so—​within the very midst of the visible. A painted portrait, for example, can make visible the inward character of the person, which is not in itself a visible object. In Logic of Imagination, Sallis captures this doubling with respect to visibility through the notion of a look. Things have a look, which emerges from an antecedent self-​showing. In offering their look, things are able to disclose what and how they are. The look presents one with a distinctive visibility. It has a visibility that cannot be set apart from the thing itself—​as a formal independent moment—​ without violating its very sense. In this regard, the look of things is what philosophy in its historical development has tended to overlook. It approaches the look as if it were an intelligible look remote from the sensible; it sets the look within the classical distinction between sensible and intelligible. But in opposing the notion of the look of things in this way, it would also be inappropriate to regard the look of things as a sense-​image, as something that would be the sheer upsurge of presence that is not yet the presence of the thing. Sallis points out that the art of painting has this capacity to render the look of things visibly manifest in a way that surpasses mere perception. And this means that in being able to display the look of things, art is able to display what might otherwise remain virtually invisible, as in that portrait in which something of the person shines through the figure painted. In painting, the look of things is set entirely within the sensible. Even though the look is “irreducible to the merely sensible, it is, nonetheless, of the sensible” (li 136). And in being of the sensible, the look effectively captures what Paul Klee means when he says that “art does not reproduce the visible but makes visible.”1 What 1 Paul Klee, Kunst-​Lehre (Leipzig: Reclam, 1987), 60. Sallis quotes this line in Transfigurements (ta 19).

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he means, as Sallis notes, is that art is not simply a matter of depiction, but rather—​and more precisely—​a matter of making visible something that otherwise would go unseen. In painting, there is the look of things: “something would be made visible, something that, if not utterly invisible, nonetheless borders on invisibility” (ta 20). Klee will paint, for example, the invisible genesis that lies behind the surface appearance of things, just as Monet will paint the spread of light across the scene. In this way, Monet makes visible the light that remains virtually invisible in a simple perception of the landscape. But no account of Sallis’ approach to art would be complete without indicating the place of imagination in it. The discernment of the look of things, he tells us, is inseparable from imagination. As we know from his magisterial work Force of Imagination, imagination has little to do with fantasy, just as the look of things is not a merely imagined look. In fact, for Sallis, imagination is no longer equated with its classical determination as a faculty that is simply in service to vision. It is not a power for producing or reproducing in the manner of bringing something into visible presence, which depends in some way on something already being imagined or seen in advance. Rather, in relation to its force, imagination contains an availability that is already deployed, releasing things into their self-​showing. “It is by force of imagination,” Sallis tells us, “that the configuration of showing is drawn” (fi 126). Imagination in this sense is “poietic”: it comes to bring forth, it grants a bringing forth. In this way, imagination is neither productive nor reproductive, but tractive, not unlike a drawing of a line that begins as a sketch as the measure of the possible (fi 138). With respect to art, imagination brings forth the lines and figures that belong to the very constitution of a work. Sallis writes: As an operation into which imagination enters, as an operation that is primarily of imagination, [the composing of the artwork] can be nothing other than a drawing. In the composing of the artwork, the force of imagination comes to draw the lines and figures of the work, the lines and figure that belong to its very constitution as a work. It is especially in coming to draw the lines and figure of the work that imagination is poetic. (fi 223–​24) In this way, the artwork in its self-​showing brings forth the look of things. In the look of things, we can now say, there is a transfigurement of sense; that is to say, in bringing forth the look of things, imagination comes to transfigure sense. In art, everything depends on sense in its double sense and on its double transfigurement. The doubling of sense is sense as sensible and as intelligible sense (sense as meaning). The double transfigurement of sense occurs

122 Risser through sensible sense’s transfigurement into a shining of the beautiful while intelligible sense is transfigured so as to be brought before our senses (ta 7). 2

The Question of Interpretation

Certainly, this all to brief description of Sallis’ approach to art does not do justice to the richness of his analysis, but it does serve its purpose here of providing the appropriate context for addressing my initial stated concern. This concern can be put in the form of a question: given what has just been said about Sallis’ understanding of the project of examining art, what are we now to say about interpreting the sense of art? If we follow Sallis closely, we have to proceed here with a set of precautions. At the beginning Transfigurements, Sallis asks us to imagine ourselves on a Greek landscape, which engages one’s vision in a way that leads one to be enthralled by the beauty of the site. Such an immersion with vision is not unlike what occurs when one looks at a painting in a way that would let the painting open up to reveal its shining. In such an immersion, one is captivated by the life of the scene in such a way that imagining can trace and retrace the scene. This beautifully described gesture of imagining appears to be much like what Bachelard calls poetic reverie. Such reverie is not the loss of consciousness as in a dream, but an attentiveness that amplifies and heightens the sensual contact of the world in a moment of composing. Here too, for Bachelard, it is not a matter of imposing oneself on the scene, but of being attentive to the look of things—​as if there were an exchange of looks by virtue of the beautiful with its elevation in the dignity of seeing. But returning to my question, we should also say that this gesture of imagining at this beautiful site appears to be something like a movement of interpretation. If we can speak of interpretation here it is in its most basic sense—​ as a movement of crossing over in relating one thing to another and thus a movement of being in relation to another place (even if it were a place before place). Thought of in this way, it does indeed appear that the one immersed in vision—​the one in a posture of looking—​is caught up in interpretation. Sallis indirectly says as much in his text, when he states that: “Even as your vision enfolds the figure taken up in imagination, you will also no doubt be drawn to the scene in such a way that the distance across which you would have observed it gives way to an affective proximity.” And more directly, Sallis writes: “In such an affective imaginative vision something is given to understand, something is yielded to understanding” (ta 2). Or, as Sallis says it even more directly a few pages later, “the beautiful gives something to understand,

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its advent launches the transfiguring of sense into meaning, even though the meaning given to understand remains irreducible to signification” (ta 4). This opening gesture in Transfigurements in which Sallis broaches the issue of interpretation does not come without a precaution. Understanding, he insists, has little to do with knowing, that is to say, with the production of knowledge. It is a precaution that extends to another precaution that only serves to make more problematic the issue of interpretation. Sallis tells us that what indicates the remoteness from knowledge in this posture of looking is our experience of the inhibiting of speech. If anything, the painting as well as the natural scene demand silence; they both require that one forgo operations of signification that would set down concepts in place of what is understood. Instead, Sallis tells us that we are to linger, in a way that we are drawn along in playful, enlivening contemplation. One would hardly expect otherwise, but this disposition of lingering is also something that Gadamer highlights in the interpretive encounter with art. For Gadamer, lingering (Verweilen) is the presentness into which all mediatory discourse of interpretation must enter. It is a lingering “that waits and preserves in such a way that the work of art is allowed to come forth.”2 Such active waiting, he tells us, is like an intensive back-​and-​forth conversation insofar as what comes forth addresses the viewer. But here too there is a need for precaution within this outline in which speech enters the encounter with the artwork, an encounter that does not bind the artwork to sense in the way that we see this expressed by Sallis. Commenting on the expressionist paintings of Werner Scholz, Gadamer notes that they speak a silent language “that allows us to recognize things that belong together with no need for words.”3 In his essay “Words and Image,” Gadamer is even more explicit about this peculiar movement of interpretation through silent speech. He describes the moment of recognition in art that is the moment of understanding with the simple expression “it comes forth.” To say the least, this expression indicates just how the coming forth is to come from the side of art, it comes forth from itself as if the moment of understanding has been released from interpretation. With respect to this coming forth, he adds that “what came forth and how it came forth cannot be put into words.”4 And yet, he does not deny that speech enters into the encounter with the artwork, and neither does Sallis. 2 Hans-​Georg Gadamer, “The Artwork in Word and Image,” in The Gadamer Reader, trans./​ed. Richard E. Palmer (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 211. 3 Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, trans. Nicholas Walker, ed. Robert Bernasconi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 80. 4 Gadamer, “Artwork in Word and Image,” 216.

124 Risser When Sallis tells us that in lingering we are drawn into an enlivening contemplation, we understand this to involve language in some sense. Undoubtedly, when it comes to this enlivening contemplation there is only a silent language involved. Speech—​silent or otherwise—​has, as Sallis notes elsewhere, its own revealing capacity to supplement what vision offers, sealing the look of things with words. But this relation between word and image is complex, as we learn from Sallis’ engagement with the work of Paul Klee. In Klee’s work, there are words or elements of words that are inscribed on the work itself, blended with whatever look is composed in the painting. There is also—​as in Klee’s drawing Flight—​a sense of flight that emerges from the interplay between the title and drawing (km 104). The complexity is that the relation between speech and the look of things is twofold. Words do not only come to the aid of the look of things so as to seal the look, they can also, in advance, “project significations that serve to evoke the look and that, in turn, find their fulfillment in the look evoked” (li 140). In this exchange between the word and look there is for Sallis the capacity to bring forth the full expanse of sense, but this exchange does not mean that they are no longer distinct. To speak is not to look and to look is not to break the silence. 3

Interpreting the Sense of Art

And so, to take up our question directly, what now can we say about interpreting the sense of art? How does interpretation—​this effort of a crossing that is presumably inseparable from words—​occur within this expanse of sense? Following Sallis, we would have to say that it occurs in the discernment of the look of things. Sallis chooses his words carefully and his use of the word discernment is no exception. Discernment pertains to a perceiving with the eyes, but more exactly it means to recognize or understand what is distinct or different. What is decisive here is that for Sallis both the discernment and the look of things that is to be discerned are inseparable from imagination. Imagination not only draws forth the look, but also animates the discernment to which the look of things stands out. Can we not say, then, that interpretation, insofar as it is comparable to discernment, is inseparable from imagination? In hermeneutics, this proximity between interpretation and imagination is already signaled by the character of the interpreting word in its orientation, not to representation or to an extraction from sense, but to illumination. Interpretive understanding is not a mode of knowing in the traditional sense, but a bringing into view, a letting be seen in relation to a crossing over from one place to another, from one thing to another. Interpretation, in other words, is something like

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illustration, not unlike what we see in Plato’s Statesman: the art of the statesman is portrayed as the art of weaving. To illustrate is to move across sense, to move from sense to sense. And for the matter of interpretation that brings into view, everything will depend on the crossing over. Such a crossing, if it is to be a true crossing over, has to be something more than a projection that would simply reach across an expanse, imposing itself on the look. What is at stake in the crossing, at least at first, is not a circulation of a projection, but something like touch; a contact of sense in which the contact by itself stretches out, as if it were pulling something across the space of the crossing. Put differently, such contact generates intonation, as if it were the first moment of the expression of sense, indicating aspects. Such contact, in other words, opens up to view the painting’s tonality, the quality of its color. In the discernment of the look of a painting—​let us say, for example, one of Monet’s Wheatstacks—​there is not simply the appearance of light. With little regard for signification, the light appears at once as a soft light, just as another completely different painting by a different painter could show a harsh light. And, in relation to the expansive movement of the crossing, the appearing of the soft light can be at once the morning light, just as a harsh light can be ominous or foreboding. The painting is making these crossings from the simplest of marks. All depth, like an origami figure, is generated from the crossing in the fold of a flat plane. The discernment of the look of things captures these expressions of sense. Insofar as the discernment is drawn into an enlivening contemplation, the interpretive word, even if silent, will be caught up in a similar crossing. Certainly, when Gadamer describes interpretation in relation to an address and a speaking word, we can understand it in just this way. For Gadamer, all speaking is caught up in the movement within living language where a word enters contact with other words. But this speculative character of language has little to do with dialectical mediation. Rather, a word is drawn forth from an initial contact that remains an open space. To use Gadamer’s phrasing “every word breaks forth as if from a center, causing the whole of language to which it belongs to resonate.”5 This open space is not a simple reservoir of words, but a stretching movement not unlike the pause between words. There is no logic that can make this passage of interpretation—​there is no way for thought to produce this passage—​and yet there is contact and with it a passage of crossing. Gadamer describes this strange passage of interpretation in both word

5 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd revised ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1989), 458.

126 Risser and image with that simple phrase “it comes forth.” As if it were blind to what comes before it, this strange passage is, to say the least, a protrusion of sense, a sudden salience that is sense. In Sallis’ language, this passage is tractive by virtue of the force of imagination; something has been drawn forth and through its passage it has been brought to light. But in relation to sense and to painting in particular, interpreting the sense of art entails more than a crossing. The crossing of interpretation that is a bringing into view involves itself in formation. In Gadamer’s hermeneutics, we see that what is to be interpreted is the artwork’s formation. Playing off the cognates of the German “Bild,” Gadamer sees the artwork as a transformation into a formed shape, an actuality that has become figured, Gebilde, and interpretation is seeing what is appearing in what has been figured. But in placing the emphasis on the transformation of figure so that the artwork can be presented to interpretation, Gadamer overlooks the movement of formation as such. Certainly, Gadamer regards interpretation here as having the character of enactment, but this is not the issue in our consideration of the merits of Sallis’ approach to art. In the form of a question: what would it mean for interpretation to follow the path of the painter, to follow the movement of painting from the eye to the hand? What, in other words, is being formed in interpretation as it moves through sense, not unlike the painter whose vision remains within the tactile space traversed by the hand? Merleau-​Ponty is concerned with this question as well in his writings on Cézanne. He notes that Cézanne wanted to avoid separating sensation and judgment, seeing and thinking. He writes that Cézanne “wanted to depict matter as it takes on form.” He wanted to capture the physiognomy of objects “emerging from color.”6 Sallis also writes about color, noting Hegel’s insistence that what counts for painting is not form and drawing, but color and coloring. With color everything is there, including the forms and shapes of objects. What particularly interests Sallis about Hegel’s emphasis on color is his description of color as “the magical effort of coloring” that relates to a shining. In painting, presentation occurs as the shining of colors, which are eminently sensible. For Sallis, “Hegel foresees modes of painting in which what counts is no longer depiction but interpenetrations of colors and shinings of shinings” (ta 158). This shining of the sensible—​this recovery of the sensible in art—​is everything for Sallis.

6 Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, Sense and Non-​ Sense, trans. H. Dreyfus and P. Dreyfus. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 15.

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And what then of our question concerning interpretation? If indeed we can say that it follows the path of the painter, that is to say, places itself within the transfigurement of sense, that it sees meaning in relation to color’s magic, would it not be simply the movement of formation through sense? There is already a word for this movement of formation: rhythm. If we follow Benveniste here, the Greek rhuthmos means originally schema as form of figure and it was used in relation to the configuration of the signs of writing. But schema is only an approximation for rhuthmos. Schema indicates a fixed form—​a Gestalt—​ whereas rhuthmos is “the form at the moment it is taken by what is in movement.” Rhuthmos is a configuration of not escaping into infinity, but of a coming back in the manner of a curve that folds it without closing it.7 It is Henri Maldiney, though, who has made the case for the place of rhythm in painting.8 For Maldiney, a figurative form has two dimensions: one according to which it is an image and “a genetic rhythmic dimension which makes it precisely a form.” In this second sense, form in art functions immanently, coinciding with its own genesis, as an emergence in the sensible. For Maldiney, this rhythmic dimension takes the place of the concept. With rhythm you have complexes of space-​time, ways of being in space and time. He says that “A rhythm runs through a painting, just as it runs through a piece of music.”9 In painting, this movement sets in play the differentiations and folds that is the movement into appearance. And with respect to differentiations and folds, rhythm as form is formation, the coming together that is articulation. And what if this movement of formation were called by what is proper to it, namely, measure—​a measure that varied according to the elements in which it appears. If so, interpretation, without an appeal to signification, is quite simply taking hold of the measure of an artwork. This too has another name, one that Sallis uses to mark the transfigurement of sense; namely, the beautiful as the shining of the visible. Let us not forget that the beautiful is more than 7 See Jean-​Luc Nancy, The Pleasure of Drawing, trans. Philip Armstrong (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 80. 8 Here, one should not neglect to mention Kandinsky who drew parallels between painting and music. Kandinsky writes: “A painter, who finds no satisfaction in mere representation, however artistic, in his longing to express his inner life, cannot but envy the ease with which music, the most non-​material of the arts today, achieves this end. He naturally seeks to apply the methods of music to his own art. And from this results the modern desire for rhythm in painting, for mathematical abstract construction, for repeated notes of color, for setting color in motion.” Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, trans. M.T.H. Sadler (New York: Dover, 1977), 19. 9 See Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 37.

128 Risser the shining of the visible. As we learn from Plato, what is to be found in the beautiful is not simply an openness to view, but measuredness and commensuration. It would appear that this measure-​taking within the beautiful is just what Gadamer means when he says “it comes forth.” And for Sallis, perhaps this would also be so as the logic of imagination. What is certainly so is that in these instances the shining of the shining of the beautiful commences.

Bibliography

Deleuze, Gilles. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Translated by D. W. Smith. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Gadamer, Hans-​Georg. “The Artwork in Word and Image.” In The Gadamer Reader. Translated/​Edited by Richard E. Palmer, 197–​224. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007. Gadamer, Hans-​Georg. Truth and Method. 2nd revised ed. Translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1989. Gadamer, Hans-​Georg. The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays. Translated by Nicholas Walker. Edited by Robert Bernasconi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Kandinsky, Wassily. Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Translated by M.T.H. Sadler. New York: Dover, 1977. Merleau-​Ponty, Maurice. Sense and Non-​Sense. Translated by H. Dreyfus and P. Dreyfus. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964. Nancy, Jean-​Luc. The Pleasure of Drawing. Translated by Philip Armstrong. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013.

­c hapter 8

To Speak of Art … at the Limit Jeffrey Powell One finds in the work of John Sallis a continual desire for the limit, a desire that nearly escapes the efficiency of the word. This desire is often expressed in a very straightforward manner in the titles of books such as Delimitations: Phenomenology and the End of Metaphysics and Shades: Of Painting at the Limit, but it is also something to be inferred in other titles such as Echoes: After Heidegger and Light Traces. We could expand this series of inferences through interpreting his many other books and essays to the point where virtually all of his work would be included in the tracking down of this desire. In what follows, I would like to trace a certain trajectory of this desire for the limit in the work of Sallis, but especially with regard to art. It seems that this liminal move was discovered early on in the studies Sallis performed that might be more characterized as of an epistemological and metaphysical nature. But then, with the publication of his third book, The Gathering of Reason, the work seemed to approach a kind of crisis with regard to the seeking of the limit. That is, in a manner not so dissimilar from what prompted the writing of “The Oldest Program toward a System in German Idealism,” Sallis’s turn to art seems to be predicated on the very limits of philosophical discourse. This is not to say that the desire for the limit was absent prior to that moment, but that this particular encounter with Kant served to re-​ determine that relation in an essential way, in a way that seems to have set him on a path that would then result in a different kind of approach—​an approach decisively re-​directed towards more aesthetic concerns or, more properly and more simply said, towards art. Those prior, more philosophical concerns were not left behind, but from out of a certain occlusion of metaphysics arose art and the imagination. To see all of this in outline, I will direct our attention to the final chapter of The Gathering of Reason, which is entitled “Metaphysical Security and the Play of Imagination.” I will begin with the end, with the final section of this wonderful text from 1980, the section entitled “The Play of Imagination.” First I will cite its introductory paragraph, after which I will attempt to recount the steps leading up to the philosophically radical nature of what Sallis sets out in this early book and what seems to determine the path he has taken up to this point. Sallis writes:

© Jeffrey Powell, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004507098_010

130 Powell I want now to resume subversive interpretation at the more comprehensive level at which the play of critical metaphysics has moved, in order thus to install this play finally within the space of nihilism. Repeating the play within this space, I want especially to develop the outcome of the play, what becomes pre-​eminently manifest in it, what in a sense the entire archaic reflection has served to make manifest: the play of imagination. This is the undeveloped possibility that I want to retrieve from the Kantian beginning and bring to bear upon the issue of utter occlusion, the crisis of metaphysics. (gr 174) In this chapter, leading up to the passage I have just cited, Sallis marks out or sets forth a metaphysical crisis that occurs over the course of Kant’s career, from the 1770 Dissertation through at least the 1790 Critique of Judgment. For Sallis, what binds together all of this work in Kant is the various ways in which Kant accounts for the relation between the sensible and intelligible. Sallis will provide an analysis of these various ways in three stages or scenes, and these three—​all internal to the Kantian project—​will comprise an opportunity for a “subversive interpretation,” an interpretation, or more properly an entire array of interpretations, to which Sallis gives voice in all of his subsequent work. Sallis puts it this way: “My primary intention, however, is to stage this play of critical metaphysics as preparation for re-​entering, from within the critical project as a whole, that space of subversive interpretation which that perversion [the “blending of reason and imagination”] has already served to open up” (gr 167). The first stage or scene corresponds to Kant’s Inaugural Dissertation of 1770. As Sallis observes, this early view by Kant places him squarely within the metaphysical tradition, albeit with a slight alteration. That is, while Kant argues, much like in the Critique of Pure Reason, for two fundamental kinds of knowledge corresponding to sensible appearances and the conceptual knowledge of the intelligible, he does not view one as being derivable from the other, which is consistent with the Leibnizian-​Wolffian tradition before him. Rather, the world of things is presented in a two-​fold manner that corresponds to the two-​ fold manner in which they are given to the subject. On the side of sensibility, objects are given in their respective spatio-​temporal form, and on the side of intelligibility they are given to the intellect. The object as it is in its truth is intelligible and this is how the object is thought by the intellect. Thus, while the object is given in both its sensible and intelligible forms, it is only thought in its truth by the intellect. The second stage or scene gives attention to what is almost universally taken to be Kant’s critical turn or his turn to the critical period, and this is his

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famous 1772 letter to Markus Herz. In that letter, we are provided with a clear view of how Kant understood his earlier Dissertation, as well as his judgment about that earlier view. Referring explicitly to the Dissertation, he writes: “I had said: The sensuous representations present things as they appear, the intellectual representations present them as they are.”1 This explication is preceded by a question that rightly drives Sallis’ analysis of this particular stage. The question that Kant poses to himself in posing it to Herz is: “how a representation that refers to an object without being in any way affected by it can be possible.”2 The question concerns the ground that would account for a representation that could be said to correspond to an object, a ground that would account for the concepts through which the object is known in an experience. It is noted by Kant, and Sallis’ repetition of Kant, that the object cannot function as such a ground for such a knowing can in no way be attributed to the object; and it cannot be attributed to the experiencing subject, because the representation belongs to the subject and this would thus require the creation of the object by the subject. What was formerly in the Dissertation a conceptual knowledge of the truth of the object has now become a knowledge of sensible representations or experience, and any true knowledge of the object as it exists in itself has been denied to the subject. As such, all knowledge belongs to sensibility or, in the words of Sallis, “The purely intellectual is absorbed into sensible knowledge … In the transition from the Dissertation to the Critique of Pure Reason there takes place an absorption of the intelligible into the sensible and a consequent closing of the distinction itself” (gr 170). The third stage or scene, Sallis says, “begins amid ruins,” (gr 170), the ruins of metaphysical discourse, but this ruination could only take effect in the absence of any talk whatsoever. If thinking is to continue in the midst of such ruins, in the midst of what Sallis called “nihilism,” then the talk must continue. It is this continuation that is at stake and the conditions under which it might continue must be worked out such that the continuation is not simply a continuation of the same under a different guise. For Sallis, that continuation is introduced as follows: “A new edifice must be constructed alongside the ruins” (gr 170).3 What follows is an analysis that could take many forms, but in Sallis 1 Arnulf Zweig, ed. and trans. Kant: Philosophical Correspondence 1759–​99 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 71. 2 Ibid., 72. 3 For another approach to this continuation, one not so dissimilar from what Sallis calls for in this passage, albeit one that stages a different encounter from the one to which Sallis turns, see Georges Bataille, “Hegel, Death and Sacrifice,” trans. Jonathon Strauss, Yale French Studies 78 (1990): 9–​28.

132 Powell it is introduced as what one might view as the positive side of deconstruction, a positivity arising from out of the ruins. Sallis introduces it as follows: “This work of construction [the construction of the new edifice] constitutes the positive task of Kant’s three critiques” (gr 170). The construction under consideration consists of an analysis of what is common to and unifies Kant’s three critiques. In the Critique of Pure Reason, the overcoming of the metaphysical distinction between the sensible and the intelligible is achieved through the absorption of the intelligible into the sensible. In Sallis’ terms, this gives rise to another, different distinction: “In the new conception of the sensible, the constitutive opposition is not with the intelligible traditionally understood, but rather with the grounding subject” (gr 171). That is to say, the subject is ultimately responsible for the grounding synthesis of the manifold in intuition, and while the categories perform a synthetic function, all synthesis is ultimately due to the subject. Furthermore, the faculty charged with all synthesis is the imagination. Sallis thus cites Kant saying that “Synthesis … is the mere result of the power of the imagination” (gr 172). And yet, if the synthesis requires the imagination of the subject for its grounding, from where does the distinction arise in the first place? And, what is more, must there still yet be the distinction between the sensible and the intelligible if they are to be connected through synthesis? The answer to both of these questions is a simple one: the imagination. That is to say, by means of the imagination the distinction between the sensible and the intelligible is resolved, closed off, occluded; but it is reopened within the new sense of the sensible where the distinguished parts are both held open, held apart, and connected. Sallis thus asks and answers the question: “What repairs, within the new dimension, the occluded distinction? Kant’s answer: imagination” (gr 172). The grounding subject won in the Critique of Pure Reason paves the way to the intelligible freedom of moral conduct of the Critique of Practical Reason. Sallis views this as having been achieved in the transcendental deduction, in the grounding of all synthesis in transcendental apperception. What results from the one unchanging consciousness of transcendental apperception is the positing of a different kind of thing in itself, “the subject as self-​determining, as free, as intelligible” (gr 172). For Kant, this is a subject that, as pure practical reason, can give itself laws capable of forming intentions in the guidance of moral conduct. Thus, the subject is at once of the orders of nature and freedom, and this antinomy must be mediated, which will be the goal of the analysis of purposiveness in the Critique of Judgment. This mediation between nature and freedom is played out in three stages for Sallis. The first stage consists of the harmony that is established between the imagination and the understanding. This is not just any kind of harmony such

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as one might find in agreement, but rather it is a free harmony, a harmony that does not run the risk of a determination of one faculty by the other. For Sallis, the result of this first stage is a “freeing of imagination, a releasing of it into its free play” (gr 173). The second stage corresponds to Kant’s analysis of the sublime, the stage in which is signaled the failure of the imagination, a failure that will nevertheless produce a pleasure in the discovery of what goes “beyond understanding and its realm, nature, to reason and its realm, freedom” (gr 173). The third stage is the final link in the mediation between nature and freedom, and it consists in the move to beautiful art and the analysis of genius. At this third stage, the artist possessed with genius is charged with the production of aesthetic ideas, ideas of which the understanding is incapable, and instead the understanding finds itself governed by the imagination, by the imagination “provoking thought.” It is at this point—​the point at which “the mediation is genuinely accomplished” (gr 174)—​that the imagination realizes its freedom, a realization that at the same time fulfills or consummates the metaphysical order. Stated more succinctly, it is at this point that metaphysics reaches its limit, albeit a limit that functions differently from all thinking of the limit within the limits of metaphysics. According to Sallis, the limit that is reached by means of the imagination, rather than being a limit signaling the end of metaphysics, is the limiting of metaphysics. It should come as no surprise, then, that this limiting is first gleaned through Kant’s critical project, through a project that was itself explicitly concerned with the critical limits within which metaphysics was to operate. How, then, is the metaphysical limit discerned by Sallis different from that sketched by Kant? For Kant, we know that the drawing of the metaphysical limit, while allowing for a way in which the intelligible and the sensible are held apart and yet connected through the imagination, results in a new determination of the intelligible through the grounding subject. For Sallis, on the other hand, the broaching of the metaphysical limit in the freeing of the imagination is the very drawing of the metaphysical limit, a drawing that entirely abandons the grounding subject as thought by Kant. This freeing of the imagination is the freedom of imaging, the free play of imaging that Sallis realizes in the aesthetic ideas and thus “The play of imaging is nothing but the play of occlusion itself” (gr 176). Sallis initially understands this free play in a decisively Heideggerian manner: “Imagination is original ecstasy; it is a standing out into the play of imaging, a being set out beyond oneself into that play, a being outside oneself in such radical fashion that the self is first constituted in a recoil from this ecstasy of imagination” (gr 177). This crisis of the limit became the crisis of the imagination, and thus the imagination became the focus of a work that was anticipated by us all. That

134 Powell work, of course, resulted in Force of Imagination and Logic of Imagination. Prior to those more systematic works, we can discover what might well have been the original insight guiding the result of that analysis of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. By this original insight, I am not thinking here of the effacement of the imagination in Kant that is so well noted by Heidegger, but, rather, the effacement of imagination in Heidegger so well noted by Sallis. In the provocatively titled chapter four of Echoes: After Heidegger entitled “Imagination—​the Meaning of Being?,” we read the following: The question is whether imagination, which fundamental ontology has thought in its identity with temporality, to the point of effacement—​ whether imagination might not also be overturned onto this site. … But now the very question would be overturned into something other than the question of the meaning of Being, into a question which, even if bound to that question and accessible only through it, would nonetheless exceed it. Overturned imagination—​its identity with time now disrupted—​would be one way of thinking such excess. (eh 116–​17) In the very next chapter of Echoes, “Mortality and Imagination: The Proper Name of Man,” the imagination is invoked once again, although this time not in direct relation to the meaning of Being, but with regard to that relation for those for whom Being is an issue: “Imagination would be the power of hovering between death as ownmost and death as othermost. Imagination would sustain death in its more than absolute alterity” (eh 134). Imagination, then, it seems safe to say, is intimately bound with up with this encounter with the limit. And the imagination has everything to do with art and, insofar as it has to do with art, art, then, also has to do with the liminal. Sallis will simply assert this in Shades—​Of Painting at the Limit and he will do so not only in the title, but very early on when he writes: “Painting is always at the limit” (sp 10). Let me repeat, “always … at the limit.” And, if nothing else, this entire text will reveal how this is always so, although it will do so in an ever more penetrating way. I would like to now give more attention to this, Sallis’ first real book on art. As already indicated, the turn towards art is not an erasure of metaphysical inquiry, it is not as if the crisis of metaphysics is simply left behind. Sallis vigilantly holds to the dictum established by Nietzsche and those in his wake—​ especially Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida—​that the very desire to transcend metaphysics is the oldest desire that binds such a thinking to metaphysics. What is far more important is to descend into the distinctions that determine the history of metaphysics, a descensional reflection that is fraught with risk,

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the risk of metaphysics, that it might simply come to determine all thinking at the limit of metaphysics. The risk of thinking, a risk characteristic of all ­thinking, is most forcefully challenged by art, for as soon as one speaks, as soon as one writes—​especially in the philosophical mode—​all that speaks is metaphysics. How, then, can one speak or write about art without sacrificing the very thing about which one is speaking or writing? How can one thoughtfully engage with art without sacrificing art? This would seem to be the question and limit towards which all of Sallis’ writings concerning art are gathered and this is the limit from which he does not shy away or engage in some kind of chicanery in order to avoid. The task, then, and one for which the work of John Sallis is so very instructive, is a double one: on the one hand, it is a traditional one that is concerned with the manner in which metaphysics is determined within its critical limits, whether those be exposed by philosophical discourse or works of art; on the other hand, it would be the various manners in which the metaphysical limits are negotiated, especially insofar as the various acts of negotiation are performed such that they resist being enclosed within the metaphysical boundary. So, in the advent of the Kantian crisis and the turn to the imagination, Sallis writes a number of ground-​breaking texts that operate still within the orbit of metaphysics. What binds these texts to the metaphysical tradition is the circumspect attention to an undoing of the fundamental operations of metaphysics, especially the sensible-​intelligible couplet. Every one of these studies, virtually every essay and talk, makes reference to an essential operation, even when not directly pursued, that was always intimated even if left unexplained. A reading of Sallis’ work would confirm that this explanation was forthcoming in the project concerning the imagination, even if we were left only the tea leaves that were strewn along the way. Looking back, we can now read the leaves more clearly and what they exhibit is a multiplicity of discourses that are multiple, not simply because they are many, but out of a kind of necessity, multiple due to having at their origin a kind of singularity that resists unity and universalization. As such, it would be improper to identify a “philosophy” of Sallis, an “aesthetic theory” of Sallis, or even something like “the imagination” according to Sallis. Instead, what we discover are treatments and the like that, so to speak, stand on their own, largely due to being engaged with a kind of singularity that stands on its own. This, in turn, makes it impossible to provide a kind of “account” of the work of Sallis without repeating all of it. So, I would like to just repeat a little bit of the work of Sallis in the aftermath of the Kantian metaphysical crisis. Although there are three specific books that inform what is to follow, I will limit myself largely to what Sallis has written concerning art and the history

136 Powell of aesthetics in Shades—​of Painting at the Limit. From his introduction, Sallis writes that “The discourses that follow undertake, though in quite various ways, to retain and reconstitute the proximity of painting to the singular “(sp 19). The first type of singularity to which painting is enjoined is what is depicted in the painting; i.e., the sensible phenomenon that the singularity of the painting depicts. There is something about the sensibly singular that Sallis retains throughout his work in and beyond his treatment of painting that will go by the name of the elemental, and which in his text he explicitly ties to Monet’s Wheatstacks as “the elemental time of shining” (sp 56). But, in painting, the singularity of the sensible thing is unfolded through the operation of a doubling of singularity in what Sallis calls painting’s “poetic moment.” This poetic moment consists of the tensional presentation of depiction through shade, color, and light or shining (the latter of which he ties to the Platonic notion of beauty as τὸ ἐκφανέστατον (sp 9)). To say that painting is in representational art joined with the singularity of the sensible object is to say that depiction is no longer the function, so to speak, of painting. Rather, painting, while conjoined with the singular, sensible object, is engaged in the act—​the deed—​of painting, which is to say in shading, in color, in conferring light through that which is painted, is installed the difference “that separates what is painted from what is depicted or figured in the painting” (sp 10). What we read in Shades, then, is a kind of historical account of modern art as gleaned through the three singular painters whose work is treated by Sallis; thus, the three discourses following “Adumbrations” “are addressed, respectively, to three phases in what is called the development of modern painting” (sp 19). That is to say, beginning with his treatment of Monet’s Wheatstacks, we discover the disappearance of the object held so dear to representational art in favor of art concerned explicitly with shade, color, and light; that is, whereas in representational art, shade, color and light surreptitiously serve in the depiction of the singular, sensible object, with the disappearance of the sensible object in Modern art, the concern becomes precisely the poetic moment of painting in accord with various restrictions. While the poetic moment in painting brings together shade, color and light in a singular enigmatic way, in Monet this unity, as it were, derived its focus and intensity from light. This is most apparent in Monet’s Wheatstacks in the series of depictions of the fields at various times of the day that bring to appearance the depicted differences of the Wheatstacks through the light that unveils them. This will then provide Sallis with an insight regarding painting that he will defend at length in his chapter on Monet. Sallis writes that painting “will never have been simply, exhaustively representational” (sp 2). The heart of the matter is that painting has always been a matter of the rendering of

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light. Even in what is called representational art, painting has been oriented towards a rendering of light or shining that makes possible a depiction of singular, sensible objects. Nevertheless, such an orientation, insofar as it is also concerned with depiction, has not been concerned with the presentation of light or shining as light or shining. That is, while the revealing of the singular, sensible object has light or shining as its ground, that ground is not what is depicted in representational art, even though it is what is painted. As such, even “representational art” can be said to have been liminal, can be said to have hovered at the limit; in this case, as hovering or occupying or rendering the limit between light or shining and what it makes possible. This discussion of Monet is not divorced from Sallis’ commentary on Kant in The Gathering of Reason. We should recall that the earlier work culminated in a reconfiguring of the sensible, what Sallis might well call a transfigurement of the sensible.4 More specifically, as already noted, once the intelligible is absorbed into the sensible, setting up the new opposition between the grounding subject and the new sense of the sensible, there is discovered the imagination as the common root of the two. The imagination, then, especially as thought in Heidegger’s interpretation in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, becomes identified with time. But in his commentary on Monet, Sallis moves in a direction different from Heidegger, for he sees in Monet the painting of a different “sense” of time. What Monet paints is an elemental time, a time “distinguished from the abstract now-​time that science has inherited from the history of metaphysics,” as well as a time distinguished from what Heidegger called originary time, for, according to Sallis, “originary time, if there were such, would be a time not yet contaminated by the self-​showing of things, a time before any shining of the sensible, a time in which the sun would not yet have shone” (sp 55). While Monet complicates the move through which an external singularity is presented in the medium of painting, Kandinsky poses a version of the opposite. Sallis shows that for Kandinsky, once painting is no longer bound to the external, singular object, it can focus on the presentation of a kind of pure painting, a pure painting released from the necessity of depicting objects. Kandinsky is thus exemplary of l’art pour l’art, what Benjamin has called the “theology of art.” Rather than employing shading, color, and light for the 4 We should note that in Transfigurements: On the True Sense of Art Sallis will draw together Kant’s aesthetic ideas, descensional reflection, and the thinking of the limit in the transfiguring of sense. See, for example, his introduction to that work called “Prefigurements,” where he argues that “Kant’s elaboration of the role of aesthetic ideas in artistic presentation is—​at the limit—​precisely a discourse on descensional transfigurement” (ta 7).

138 Powell purpose of depicting objects, the very activity of painting is to be put on display—​painting is itself what is to be depicted. What is more, the focus on painting itself is viewed not simply as an advance beyond the naturalism achieved in impressionism, but painting the very act of painting holds in store a more generalized beyond; namely, a beyond the discourse that might account for painting. This is not to say that discourse, thinking, has no relation to art, that thinking no longer informs art, but that it is art that carries us beyond, it is art that makes any advance. According to Sallis, “Kandinsky secures certain possibilities for art, possibilities that extend—​even if never unambiguously—​ beyond the closure that the metaphysics of art would impose“ (sp 66). Kandinsky’s painting, and his theoretical discussion of painting, place him in an ambiguous relation to Hegel, a relation that preoccupies Sallis in his discussion of Kandinsky. Noting that Kandinsky directs his theoretical and painterly gaze toward the act of painting in painting, Sallis draws attention to the source of painting, which is spirit. The issue for painting, then, is no longer a doubling in which there is depicted the singularity of the object in the singularity of the painting, but rather the singularity of the source of painting—​ spirit—​which becomes expressed in the singularity of the painting. The goal of painting, then, would consist in the negotiation of the threshold between the inside and the outside, the manner and degree to which painting is successful in expressing or externalizing interiority in the objective domain of the concrete painting. So, on the one hand, Sallis’ analysis of Kandinsky reveals the Hegelian import of art, which is the revealing of the truth of spirit; on the other hand, there is a resistance to where this leads Hegel, which is the death of art once its spiritualization has been achieved. It would seem, then, that the metaphysical question for painting is how the threshold between interiority and exteriority, inside and outside, is negotiated. Is the passage from the interiority of spirit into painting a passage towards pure art or is it a passage towards pure spirit? Or might the question even open up another kind of limit, albeit a limit in which Sallis’ narrative concerning art has been situated from the very beginning: the limit between art and the discourse concerning art? I will return to this later. The analysis of Kandinsky does not rest with what appears to be a very traditional metaphysical conception through which is contrasted interiority and exteriority. The moment in Shades at which this restlessness begins to be revealed, albeit very patiently, is with the introduction of Nietzsche. What we read here is a reconceiving of spirit from its more Hegelian form to its more Nietzschean form, a reconceiving that is not absent the presence of Nietzsche in Kandinsky. Once the threshold is passed through from

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exteriority to interiority, the threshold that distinguishes representational from non-​representational art, the spirit that is discovered (or perhaps in the final analysis, created?) is not the one discovered by Hegel. This threshold in which painting hits upon its true source does not discover a spirit that is conceptually fulfilled, but a spirit that is determined in a very different manner, in a manner not so dissimilar from the Nietzsche of The Birth of Tragedy. Sallis cites Kandinsky saying the following: “I myself don’t believe that painting must necessarily be objective. Indeed, I firmly believe the contrary. Nevertheless, when imagination suggests objective things to us, then, well and good—​perhaps this is because our eyes perceive only objective things. The ear has an advantage in this regard! But when the artist reaches the point at which he desires only the expression of inner events and inner scenes in his rhythms and tones, then the ‘object of painting’ has ceased to belong to the reproducing eye” (sp 84).5 Now that the source of painting has been discovered as an interiority full of “rhythms and tones,” how is this so different from an interiority that must externalize itself in the world of objects only to return to itself in the form of knowledge and meaning? Although Sallis will view Kandinsky as consistently on the verge of falling prey to the Hegelian resolution of this problem, he also continues to identify this interiority with Nietzsche. More specifically, Sallis argues that the interior source of painting realigns viewing art not from the side of the art object, but from the side of the artist, just as Nietzsche had done and as was recognized by Heidegger. The source of art for the artist, says Nietzsche, is given in frenzy, intoxication, rapture, Rausch. Sallis provides a great deal of meditation on this notion throughout his career.6 This is a much different kind of source than one would typically discover in reflecting on the

5 I should note here that I am not entirely consistent with how Sallis develops this point, especially with regard to Hegel. In fact, Sallis remarks on a certain consistency between Kandinsky and Hegel with regard to the passage I have just cited. Sallis maintains that this consistency obtains by appealing to a development in Hegel’s aesthetics. He notes that while the function of art for Hegel is the presentation of spirit, that presentation in painting is achieved through color and that presentation is most fully realized in “the play of shining” (sp 85). However, at the very end of the paragraph where this is developed, Sallis appears to grant to Kandinsky a determination of the limits of metaphysics that is at least more profound than that of Hegel. Sallis writes: “Kandinsky expands and generalizes this moment of painting in such a way as to take to the limit the determination of painting as such, its most rigorous metaphysical determination” (sp 85). 6 In particular, see Crossings: Nietzsche and the Space of Tragedy and Transfigurements: On the True Sense of Art, especially the final chapter, “The Promise of Art” (ta 152–​187).

140 Powell interiority that gives rise to art. The nature of this source will also cause Sallis to put into question the idea that art is the presentation of sensibility, even if such presentation would seem to be the very manner in which art will have come into being. Once again, exercising his analysis to its metaphysical limit, Sallis writes that “one will perhaps have ventured a first step toward putting into question the determination of the artwork as presentation, specifically, as sensible presentation of a truth anterior to its presentation” (sp 89). That is to say, in this schema the identification of the interiority of the artist as the source of art or painting is not the discovery of the truth of the artist that is then splattered onto the canvas. Rather, the painting is itself the painting of the artist and thus a creating of a sensible scene, an imaginative happening through the painting wherein what is installed in the artwork is a world. In Sallis’ words: “what is painted is subjectivity as the very scene of appearing and of reception (feeling), as the place where things come to presence, as the stage where they get illuminated and, through their concealment, their shades are composed … What is painted borders on another truth, presentation of another truth. If indeed it remains presentation of this truth and not also its very opening” (sp 93). Remaining within the Nietzschean narrative, Sallis will draw attention to the consequences of this new presentation. If the source of painting is the subjectivity, interiority, rapture of the painter, that source is at once what is painted and what is an effect of the painting. The source and the effect are, so to speak, exhausted in the painting of the source. As such, the painting would resist being recovered in a narrative meaning, for the truth of the painting would be an event of the painting. Painting would be the painting of spirit and not the depiction of an already determined spirit. Sallis writes that for Kandinsky “the imaging of natural objects need to be handled in such a way as not to produce a narrative effect; for, once the spectator begins extracting a story from the painting, he will have grown insensitive to the pure effect of the painting’s form and color” (sp 100). Towards the conclusion of his treatment of Kandinsky, this consequence is reinforced in a very clear and declarative manner: “What is painted is in the painting itself, in its inner life and in its very deed” (sp 113). At this point, Sallis has revealed the very limit of speech about art, and he has done so through speaking about art. What he has exposed is the very troublesome nature of his own discourse and he has done so with his eyes wide open: “From that point on, discourse on painting cannot but become immeasurably more problematic” (sp 114). Not to shy away from such difficulties, Sallis meets the enigma of writing about art head on, and he will do so in Shades by turning to the work of Mimmo Paladino, and in an even more concentrated

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manner in his book on Paul Klee, Klee’s Mirror, two painters for whom language intrudes on painting. The more traditional relation between the word and painting is the naming of what is depicted in the painting. However, this is often complicated even with more representational works of art. For example, appealing once again to Monet’s Wheatstacks, we discover the titles do indeed name the wheatstacks that are depicted, but the subtitles name what makes the wheatstacks visible, which is the light that is present throughout the time of the day. One might well want to ask what constitutes a proper name in painting, asking what is named and who or what gives the name to painting?7 Things become even more complicated, as one might well imagine, when it concerns the work of a more contemporary painter such as Paladino, although the word seems to respect the insight of Kandinsky to which Sallis has drawn our attention. According to Sallis’ analysis and his communication with Paladino, a series or cycle of Paladino’s paintings were referred to as a whole by en do re and each of the paintings, with one exception, carried the title, Untitled.8 Sallis immediately draws attention to the fact that untitled is still yet a title, albeit an unusual one in that it functions as a disentitling, where “disentitling the works comes to border on titling them, on entitling them to the title untitled” (sp 125). The disentitling—​the withdrawal of any title through the entitling untitled—​serves to “declare the pure visibility of the work,” although it does so in such a way as to bind the language to the painting, but in a way that requires an entire re-​thinking of language (sp 125). More specifically, disentitling names in word that naming is improper to what is named; naming, in this case, functions as the withdrawing of the name for the sake of the thing named (the painting), so that the thing named can be revealed. Sallis says this in a slightly different way: “Withdrawing from language, the work remains silent, even as language impinges upon it, even when phonemes are inscribed in it, even when the artist himself writes about it” (sp 126). 7 This would give rise, of course, to an endless series of questions such as those posed by Derrida in “Sauf la nom” and elsewhere. See Jacques Derrida, On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit, trans. David Wood, John P. Leavey, Jr., and Ian Mcleod (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). 8 An earlier painting from the 1977 is named EN DE RE and is related to the later cycle of paintings, the cycle entitled EN DO RE that just happens to include another, much different painting from the 1977 painting, but carries the same title, EN DE RE. Unfortunately, I cannot do justice here to the analysis of language that Sallis has composed around this figure of speech, an analysis that again appeals to Nietzsche and to Paladino’s comments regarding Nietzsche and language. Suffice to say that it has to do with the very origin of language, which is founded on the re or king.

142 Powell But it is not as if this silence of the work has no bearing on language, even if its performative function is the silencing of language. Just as in Kandinsky, the disentitling—​or, even the entitling—​of Paladino’s paintings serve as a disruption and disintegrating of the order of meaning that language preserves. In this sense, entitling or disentitling is a disturbing of the meaning function one might want to attribute to painting, and as this disturbing of meaning it preserves or shelters what is not said in the visibility of painting, which is to say it draws attention to the invisibility sheltered in the pure shining of visibility. Language, then, may be said to serve a function, but that it still functions in the absence of meaning. “As to the title, it is meant,” says Sallis remarking again on Paladino, “to evoke that side of the work that disquiets or displaces interpretation” (sp 138). But we should not allow ourselves to be fooled into thinking that meaning and intelligibility have been spirited away, but rather that painting has drawn us into the transition from meaning to the pure shining of art; that is, we have been drawn towards a kind of limit between pure shining and meaning, a limit through which all distinctions might be made insofar as they would be made by retroactively, so to speak, by the intelligible. Towards the end of Shades, still yet in Sallis’ commentary on the work of Paladino, he will orient us towards another kind of limit, which is the limit shared by painting and sculpture, a limit that is the very passage of sculpture in its passage towards painting. Sallis now writes that “Paladino’s painting is at the limit. Most notably, indeed manifestly, it is at the limit where painting borders on sculpture” (sp 139). Sallis will here appeal to a particular painting by Paladino (entitled Souvenirs from 1990) in which what is on view is this very passage, this very limit. The painting to which he refers is not a painting of sculpture that would depict such a limit, “Rather, it is at this limit in the sense of presenting the limit, setting the passage across it into the work itself” (sp 140). What is accomplished in this passage is the setting into place of sculpture, a setting into place of sculpture into that very passage, and this setting into place places sculpture, so to speak, into a clearing that, in a sense, makes the very difference of the limit between painting and sculpture an indeterminate one, which is to say, as Sallis does, that sculpture becomes a “clearing [of] the space in which one could imagine a free mixing of painting and sculpture” (sp 140). One finds a similar analysis of the metaphysical import of titles in Klee’s Mirror. There Sallis will write of a particular drawing of Klee’s entitled Flight, a later drawing that depicts neither what is meant by flight as such nor a

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concrete image of that meaning. In this instance, the title serves a different function from that discerned in Paladino, for it is not simply the disturbance of the order of meaning, but a reconfiguring of that order. To be sure, insofar as meaning has historically functioned in a universally determined manner it has been disturbed, but in this case that disturbance serves different ends specific to Klee’s drawing. Sallis addresses those ends as follows: “What is evoked in the interplay [the interplay between the title and the drawing] is like a third kind, mediating between intelligible and visible, perhaps even anterior to the differentiation between intelligible and visible. If, as in every case, the juxtaposition of title and work reenacts the founding distinction of metaphysics, here their interplay signals also a certain confounding of that distinction, perhaps even a displacement toward something anterior to it” (km 105). But, still, I wonder whether viewing the work of art through the prism of language—​which is to say writing about art—​condemns all such writing to the metaphysical task. Is it enough to mark the metaphysical limits achieved by art? Isn’t such writing necessarily informed by the very thing that it limits, which is to say metaphysics? Sallis writes in Klee’s Mirror that “One could say, then, that Klee’s work carries through, precisely in the works themselves, a major task that also imposes itself on philosophy today, namely, to free itself from the hold of the classical opposition between intelligible and visible. Whether carried out in the artwork or in thinking, what counts most of all is that the classical opposition not be simply inverted, but that a return be made to the point at which, from which, it first arises, a return toward a place where visibility and inscription can be traced in a more originary and anterior way” (km 118). That this return carries with it the risk of simply repeating the same origin by speaking the language of metaphysics is perhaps known no better than by John Sallis. It would seem that his resistance to being overtaken by this language is arguably what makes all of his writing so compelling, so worthy of study, and also so difficult to situate, for his analyses are always moving targets, never reducible to the same. This is especially the case with his writings on art. What he has to say about Monet concerns the painting of Monet, what he says about Kandinsky is specific to Kandinsky, what he says about Paladino remains with Paladino, and what he says about Paul Klee is drawn from the work of Paul Klee. Thus, while his thinking is always keen to spot the classical opposition in whatever form, when it is exercised in the direction of art it is always determined by those works under discussion. It is a responsive discourse to the art itself rather than an attempt to determine the art from the order of thinking. Perhaps this is the best one can hope for.

144 Powell

Bibliography

Bataille, Georges. “Hegel, Death, Sacrifice.” Translated by Jonthan Strauss. Yale French Studies 78 (1990): 9–​28. Derrida, Jacques. On the Name. Edited by. T Dutoit. Translated by David Wood, John P. Leavey, Jr., and Ian Mcleod. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). Zweig, Arnulf, ed. & trans. Kant: Philosophical Correspondence 1759–​99 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967.

­c hapter 9

On Translating John Sallis Drew A. Hyland Translation goes astray. It happens almost inevitably. It happens both with the word, itself a translation, and with the operation (and product) named translation. Both go, almost inevitably, astray. (ot xi) So begins the Preface to John Sallis’ insightful, original, and, particularly in his analyses of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, often humorous book, On Translation. By quoting it exactly as it is printed in his text, with the exact line arrangement, the same words put in parentheses, and the same italicized words as in the original, it might be argued—​especially by one who had not yet read Sallis’ book—​that I am avoiding translation. On the contrary, having shifted the context of the quote from the beginning of a book on translation by Sallis to the beginning of a paper that considers some of the work of Sallis, one might wonder whether or not I have already begun—​perhaps in spite of my intentions—​to translate Sallis? Can the words possibly have the same meaning once placed in such a different context? Would it be right to say that a translation has already occurred in the change from Sallis’ written text to mine here, with the different project in each case and the different set of expectations that you the reader may have? Indeed, translation goes, almost inevitably, astray. But so too, it seems, does the attempt to avoid it. This is one of the many lessons of this remarkable book. Still early in his text, Sallis deepens this problematic even further. Dwelling on the kinship between the words translate, transfer, and the Greek μεταφέρω, from which we derive our metaphor, he says: But the Greek words also carry a second sense that carries these words—​ translates them—​in another direction, a sense that disturbs the otherwise smooth transition across an interval: to transfer something is also to change it, that is—​and here I am retracing a series of translations within translation—​to alter it, and hence—​this is the second sense—​to pervert it. To translate or metaphorize is to bear something across an interval at the risk—​perhaps even inevitably at the price—​of perverting it. (ot 24)

© Drew A. Hyland, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004507098_011

146 Hyland So in translating Sallis’ words here in the various senses of translation that he elicits, I not only risk going astray, one might say, mistranslating his words, I risk perverting them. And not only me! All of us involved, in one way or another, in translating Sallis risk such going astray. In an only slightly different register, it is precisely this danger that leads every one of us to preach to our students the importance of learning the original languages of the texts that we read. “Every translation is an interpretation,” we say echoing Gadamer,1 which means that every translation risks going astray, risks even perversion. From this standpoint, we might infer that it would be more accurate and more honest if we for the most part dropped the word “translation” from our vocabulary and referred to “translations” as mistranslations. So the covers of some of our books would read, “Plato’s Republic, mistranslated from the Greek by Alan Bloom,” or Benjamin Jowett, or Joe Sachs, or any of the other mistranslations of this or any other text. In these last words, I have alluded to perhaps the most common or standard meaning of translation: translation from one language to another. But the first thing Sallis does is to show that translation is hardly a stable word with a univocal meaning. Instead, he elicits a number of the different senses of the word, beginning with the very process of thinking itself, which make it hardly possible that translation is ever even avoidable. Indeed, the first chapter of the book is entitled “The Dream of Nontranslation.” Citing Kant, who, he observes, echoes the more famous instance of Socrates in Plato’s Theaetetus—​where Socrates characterizes thinking as “discourse that the soul goes through with itself about whatever it is examining”—​Sallis observes that if anything like this is so, then thinking, as “imaginally listening to oneself as one speaks to oneself,” is always already involved in translation. He says: To the extent that thinking is thus always already drawn into speech, that is, enacted as speech, thoughts will have already been voiced (even if in silence), significations will have already been translated into words. There will always have commenced a translation, not between words within  the same language or in different languages, but rather the t­ranslation, the  circulation, between thought and speech, between meaning and word, that constitutes the very operation of linguistic signification. [He concludes,] If thinking is speaking with oneself, then it will never have outstripped such translation. (ot 2)

1 Sallis cites this in On Translation (ot 72).

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It would seem, then, that not only with Gadamer is “every translation an interpretation,” but “every interpretation is a translation,” and so the vast and profound significance of the question of translation begins to come clear. Thinking itself “will never have outstripped” translation. And yet, as Sallis goes on to develop in great detail, it remains the case that translation is highly problematic; it always risks going astray, risks perversion. In Chapter 3 in the context of an interpretation of Critias’ “translation” of Solon’s words, themselves translations, as they are discussed in Plato’s Timaeus and Critias, Sallis says: Here one finds indicated for the first time what later—​and especially in modern times—​will be ever more insistently declared: that translation cannot occur without loss, that in a translation the force of names will always have been diminished, that in translation names undergo a loss of force. Again and again it will be said that a translation is always less forceful than its original. (ot 59) As Sallis goes on to show in detail with examples from both philosophy and literature (especially, as I shall discuss presently, Shakespeare), this loss almost inevitably suffered by translation is complex. It is much more than simply the occasional loss of meaning in the shift from a word in one language to another, as when, to use a now famous example, the translation is made in Plato’s Timaeus of the Greek χῶρα into “space” or “place.” Just as often what is lost is that set of contextual, emotional, or psychological significances that are often carried by a given word, in a given context, spoken by a given person. It is this multiplicity of significances that is rarely carried over completely in the move from one language to another. So Sallis says: If even the most masterful translations will always have been compelled by the force of linguistic difference to choose between significations that in the original are intact in their multiplicity, then translation will always involve loss. By highlighting certain significations, translation will necessarily—​with a necessity enforced by linguistic difference—​reduce or even obliterate others, reducing them to mere overtones or silencing them altogether. In translation, something of the original is lost. (ot 79)2

2 One example Sallis uses involves the various translations (in English and German) of προθυμήθητι in Plato’s Phaedo, almost all of which fail to capture the presence in the word of θυμός, conveying the sense of heart, soul, or spirit. See ot 78–​79.

148 Hyland As Sallis had emphasized earlier, it is this “loss of force” occurring in virtually every translation that gives people—​especially, he adds, we moderns—​ the conviction that translation is always inferior to the original. Hence, again, our regular injunction to our students about the imperative to learn the original languages of the authors we are studying. And as Sallis has documented so well, there is ample justification for this widely held conviction. He summarizes his position on this as follows: There are, then, various kinds of losses, losses that can be—​and often are—​undergone with respect to various moments of discourse. Several have been marked: loss of multiple meanings through resolution that retains only some while excluding others, loss through transposition of syntactic structures, which can obliterate, for instance, the significance that a certain word order has for the discourse; loss of metaphorical forcefulness as a result of the necessity of shifting from metaphorics valid in the original language to those valid in the other language; and loss of the tempo of the style of the original. (ot 87) So far, then, Sallis has articulated and documented a position that is widely held: the inferiority of translation to originals. However, what is perhaps most original about his book is what comes next: for he now complicates that affirmation with the observation that translation is not just loss of force, because, in the right hands, translation can also embody certain gains in meaning, in the force of words and of language itself. Still, in the context of acknowledging the inevitable loss involved in translation, Sallis introduces the possibility of a qualification on this loss as follows: The loss incurred by translation is not, however, pure expenditure but rather, at the very least, will be situated within an economy in which the loss is compensated for by certain gains in another dimension. In translating a text one may come to a more adequate and detailed understanding of it despite the necessary reduction, or rather, in many instances, because the necessity of reduction, the operation of linguistic difference, puts in relief features of the original that would otherwise go unnoticed. (ot 79) Sallis spends significant time developing this possibility, exemplifying it with instances from poetry, despite blanket claims from thinkers such as Roman Jakobson and Martin Heidegger that “poetry cannot be translated” (in Heidegger’s case, an impossibility that he says extends to thinking itself)

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(ot 83–​84). One of the most powerful and sustained examples is that of A.W. Schlegel’s German translation of Shakespeare, particularly that of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Sallis introduces this reflection in a summary passage that both sharpens the issue of the loss-​yet-​gain in translation and leads to the discussion of Schlegel’s translation. He says: Loss there is indeed, or rather, various kinds of loss, loss with respect to various moments of the original discourse. And yet, the question imposes itself, a question that, it seems, needs especially to be imposed today so as to mark the limit of—​if not to undo—​a certain pathos of the end of philosophy, the question whether in translation there is only loss, whether even in the translation of Greek philosophical language into Latin and hence into the modern European languages there was only loss. Or whether, at the very least, this translation served to open possibilities in the Latin language that would otherwise never have been offered, possibilities in turn passed on to some degree to the modern European languages. It is a question of whether, in Schlegel’s translation of Shakespeare, there is not something gained for the German language, possibilities of sense that the language would otherwise not offer, that hitherto it did not offer—​ indeed in a way parallel to that in which through the poetry of Holderlin and Goethe new possibilities of sense were opened up. (ot 88) This leads to a long and insightful discussion of some of the gains achieved in Schlegel’s translation (or should we call it a productive mistranslation?) of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I shall dwell on only one example here, that of Schlegel’s choice to translate the name of Nick Bottom the weaver as Klaus Zettel. Now, normally we would not even think it necessary to translate proper names. The name Heidegger in German remains Heidegger in the English translations. But such translations are rendered appropriate and even necessary in the case of A Midsummer Night’s Dream because, as Sallis points out, each of the mechanicals who will perform in the play within a play is given a name that carries some relation to the occupation by which he is identified; indeed as which each is identified (ot 38).3 In the case of Nick Bottom the weaver, his surname refers to an object on which yarn is wound. Moreover, his surname is put into play in the play in other ways as well, as when, after Bottom’s famous “translation” into the head

3 This identification with their occupations is particularly strong in the play and contributes to the comedy.

150 Hyland of a donkey (Peter Quince the carpenter says, “Bless thee, Bottom, bless thee! Thou art translated!”) referring to his vague recollection of the experience as but a dream, Bottom says, “it shall be called ‘Bottom’s dream,’ because it hath no bottom.”4 Clearly, since the German word Zettel has nothing to do with “bottom,” the force of those references are indeed lost in Schlegel’s translation. Yet, as Sallis demonstrates, the German word enables a gain in another direction; for example, in the translation of the very reference to “Bottom’s dream” above: “it shall be called ‘Bottom’s dream,’ because it hath no bottom,” is translated by Schlegel as “sie soll Zettels traum heissen, weil zie so seltsam angezettelt ist.” Sallis comments on this play of loss and gain as follows: Here one sees from a particular angle how Schlegel’s translation of the name Bottom as Zettel is both peculiarly appropriate and yet limited: for, while it is no doubt the case that such a dream is only seldom instigated (angezettelt), its having no bottom is something quite other than the infrequency of its instigation; and while no doubt it can be said in various regards that Bottom/​Zettel is an instigator, this quality is not among those alluded to in the name Bottom. (ot 30) So, as Sallis has reiterated, translations, at least the best of them, can bring about some gain along with the inevitable loss. Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is, of course, poetic theater and poetry is the very genre that the likes of Jakobson and Heidegger have claimed is untranslatable. In thus destabilizing that claim, Sallis is moved to a consideration of theater itself, where he discovers that the very genre is replete with various sorts of translation. He finds in theater no fewer than five modes of translation. He begins by identifying what he takes to be the core disclosure of theater as such. Theater, he says, is at its core “a production of presence.” “This is what is distinctive about presence in the theater: the work is present in and as a production of presence” (ot 34). This dramatic production of presence, he says, takes place as a variety of translations. Hence, “theater abounds in translation” (ot 34). First of all, there is translation within a given language; as when, in a striking case, we read Shakespeare and must translate Elizabethean English into modern English. This is true in reading Shakespeare’s text and all the more so, he adds, when listening to—​or acting in—​an actual performance of his works. 4 Sallis cites this in On Translation (ot 30).

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As soon as there is performance, there is a second moment of translation: a translation of the language of the text “into the scenes of the play and the action carried out on those scenes” (ot 35). As is obvious from the significant differences from one director’s version of a play to another, every actual performance is a translation of the original text into the specific scenes, words, and actions of that performance. It is thus a translation of words (the words of the text) into deeds—​the action of the play, a translation that is complicated by the fact that much of the “action” of the play is in fact the spoken words of the actors. Thus, Sallis indicates, a third translation emerges, the translation of the written words of the text into “the living, sounding speech” of the actual performance (ot 35). Fourth, Sallis says: Furthermore, the dramatic presentation as a whole, that is, as unity of speech, action, and scene, is carried out precisely as translation. The actors must translate themselves into the characters, without of course actually becoming those characters, producing a presence that belongs to the play but that is not their own, yet producing it precisely by means of their own presence. (ot 35) Each actor in a performance, then, is involved in several translations. When translating the written words into spoken speech, they simultaneously translate themselves into the characters they play, without of course actually becoming those characters. The failure to quite understand this complication—​that is, the failure to realize that the actor does not actually become the character (or in the case of this play, the thing) he or she is playing—​is what gives several of the mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream all sorts of trouble and hence constitutes some of the most hilarious comic moments of that play. When it is suggested early on that Snug the joiner will play a lion, several mechanicals express the fear that the ladies in the audience will be afraid at the sight of a lion, a problem that they resolve by insisting that Snug’s face be visible under the head of the lion, and that he name himself explicitly as Snug the joiner. The fifth moment of translation in a theatrical performance involves the spectators, who, Sallis says, “must translate themselves, or, more likely, let themselves be translated.” He explains: They must be moved from a state in which they merely perceive the stage and those appearing upon it to a disposition in which they behold those persons imaginatively as the characters enacted and regard what is seen on the stage as the scene of action of those characters. The spectators

152 Hyland must give themselves over, must let themselves be entranced, enraptured, enchanted by the presence produced before their very eyes. (ot 36) One might say that if this last translation does not happen, there is a failure, either of the written play, of the director and actors, or of the audience members. The theatrical performance, then, becomes a kind of paradigm for Sallis of the multiple modes of translation present in much of human interaction. Having brought forth with detail and power the many complications regarding both translation and nontranslation, and having taken us to the verge of comprehensibility regarding the limits of both, where we are brought to the abyssal boundary of translatability and nontranslatability, Sallis closes the book with a strikingly short chapter entitled, with a jolting terseness that matches the jolting terseness of the chapter, “Varieties of Untranslatability.” It is as if, confirming the problematic untranslatability into language of what he is about to discuss by the abrupt shortness of the chapter, he at the same time points to the limits of such untranslatability by nevertheless writing a chapter on untranslatability; one could even say, translating—​to be sure with a manifest reticence—​the very untranslatability of that which he addresses. After a brief discussion of the oft-​insisted upon untranslatability of poetry—​now complicated as he has already shown by the manifest fact that some poetry has been translated and translated very well—​, he turns to two other genres where the case for untranslatability is prima facie stronger. The two “varieties” of untranslatability he discusses are painting and music. Respecting—​and in a sense imitating as well as translating—​Sallis’ own reticence, I shall close with just a few reflections on this thought-​provoking chapter. Everyone is familiar with the most general sense in which painting and music are considered untranslatable into language. I once attended an art opening where, the gallery director having insisted that the artist make a “statement” for distribution at the opening, the artist simply wrote on a paper that was headed “Artist’s Verbal Statement” the sentence “I have no verbal statement to make.” And with regard to music there is the famous story of Igor Stravinsky, at a concert where he conducted his own Rite of Spring. An impertinent audience member asked at the end what the “meaning” of the piece was. Stravinsky, so goes the story, turned around toward the orchestra, lifted his baton, and played the piece again. A stronger claim to untranslatability could hardly be made! Sallis again wants to complicate and destabilize the border between the translatability and untranslatability of both painting and music. In the case of painting, he reflects on several works of the Italian artist Mimmo Paladino. Paladino mounted an exhibition in Bologna in 1990 and gave it the overall title EN DO RE. Now, “EN DO RE” carries no meaning on the face of it, either

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in Italian or Latin (nor in English). Neither does the cipher of which it is, in Paladino’s own words, a “mutation,” EN DE RE, which appears within one of the works in the exhibition.5 It is, then, a “title” that, if anything, closes off our expectation that a title will inform us of something about the paintings; that is, to translate the paintings into language. This closing off is exacerbated by the presence in one of the paintings of that of which it is a mutation, EN DE RE, a cipher that is equally meaningless in any language, though seemingly related somehow to the overall title. Still further, each of the individual paintings in the collection bears the title “Untitled,” (Senza titolo), a “title,” as Sallis observes, that serves to disentitle the paintings, a title “the very bestowal of which frees the painting from entitlement” (ot 116). The effect, then, of both the untranslatable overall title and the title “untitled” of each of the paintings is, Sallis says: With this designation, it is as though language only grazed the surface of the painting, being reflected back to itself rather than adhering to the painting, letting the painting thus go free. Here language outdistances itself … But rather than importing language, as it were, into the painting, the effect is to take up, in a painterly way, the question of language and painting, the question of the translatability and untranslatability of painting. (ot 116–​117) This insight makes me wonder about a further complication in the question of the relation of language and painting inspired by the famous painting of René Magritte entitled La trahison des images (The Treachery of Images). This painting is of an almost photo-​realistic pipe with the words “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (“this is not a pipe”) inscribed below the pipe. Here, language might be said not just to “graze” the painting, but to invade it, to make the painting, at least in part, about an instance of language. The title, “The Treachery of Images,” begins the mystery. Wherein lies the treachery, in the image of the pipe or in the words “this is not a pipe”? Yet as incorporated into the painting, the words “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” become themselves not just a particular sentence, but an “image” of a sentence. The painting contains an image of a pipe and an image of a sentence. Hence the title, in the plural, “The Treachery of Images.” The sentence itself—​to be sure, the very meaning of the sentence—​is in this case utterly integral to the work. A non-​French reading viewer, without

5 Sallis goes into greater detail regarding this exhibition in his Shades: Of Painting at the Limit, ­chapter 3 (sp 117–​143).

154 Hyland a translation, would have only the most limited access to the force of the painting. Likewise, imagine the painting just of the pipe without the words or, for that matter, a painting simply of the words “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” without the inclusion of an image of a pipe. The painting becomes the painting it is only with both and the treachery begins only with the inclusion of both: it is a painting of a pipe, yet it is not a pipe, it is a painting of a pipe. In its own way, then, Magritte’s painting, steeped as it were in language raises the question of language and painting, or, perhaps, problematizes the relation of language and painting. The case of music, as Sallis shows, is somewhat different. On the one hand, he observes that the untranslatability of music into language is so commonly asserted as to be proverbial (ot 120). That sense of untranslatability remains affirmed by Sallis. And yet, he goes on to point out that there is surely a profound affinity between music and language, which shows itself paradigmatically in song, the joining together of music and poetry. Music, Sallis concludes, can, in the best instances, “supplement the poetic work—​can, in another, more profound sense of this word, translate it.” (ot 122). I wonder if this might not be generalized to painting and perhaps all the arts. Perhaps we mistake the warrant of language in regard to the arts when we suppose that language should explain art, might somehow be a replacement for the work itself; in the strongest sense of the term, that language might translate art. Perhaps instead, language has a different, but equally profound, kinship and role in regard to the arts: perhaps language at its best can help open up art, open us to the question or questions raised by art. Perhaps language can help us, then, less to translate art than to open us up to it. By my count, Sallis’ books have been translated into seven languages. In another sense, I, along with others who comment on his work, have been translating Sallis, in many of the multiple senses of the term that Sallis elicits (though happily not all of them!). Whether I have done so faithfully is for him to decide. But I hope I have come close enough to be able to say, “Bless thee, Sallis, bless thee! Thou art translated.”

pa rt 3 Concerns of Philosophy

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­c hapter 10

On the Way to the Sensible: Disrupting Simple Directions Peg Birmingham A return to the sensible, a return that would not be merely a falling away from the originary, a return that would be originary in the very move of disrupting the simple directionality that would have defined the originary. john sallis, Echoes: After Heidegger

∵ I will begin with the first two sentences that open John Sallis’ Force of Imagination: “Imagine being there.” “Imagine sensing and sensed.” These two sentences provoke wonder: Why imagine being there? Why imagine sensing and sensed? Why imagine at all? Being there seems to involve a sensible perception in no need of imagining: I am here and the cup of tea on my desk is there, within reach of my hand. Picking up the cup, I am sensing its warmth even as I am sensing myself holding the cup. My hand is sensed in its active sensing. Certainly, this involves a bodily or sensible reflectiveness of the cup being held and my hand holding the cup. But why does this require imagination? Or more precisely, why does a return to the sensible—​that is, sensing and being sensed—​require imagination? In addressing these questions, there can be no question of considering here the entirety of Sallis’ immense work on imagination. Instead, the recent publication of Sallis’ 1970–​1971 lecture course, The Logos of the Sensible World, provides the occasion to return to Sallis’ beginnings and ask how these lectures illuminate his earliest work on the sensible and imagination in his critical engagement with Merleau-​Ponty’s phenomenology. Toward the conclusion of the lectures, Sallis explicitly takes up the problematic of the relation of the cogito to sensible being, arguing that this problem requires a move from phenomenology to fundamental ontology, which, in turn, requires a philosophy of imagination. I submit that at the center of this move are Sallis’ lectures on

© Peg Birmingham, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004507098_012

158 Birmingham bodily motility and spatial directionality, which show that a phenomenological account is not adequate for thinking the synthesis of sensible reflection and world. In the second part of the essay, I follow Sallis’ move to fundamental ontology in his critical engagement with Heidegger on the sense of being-​there. Significantly, Sallis shows that Heidegger’s fundamental ontology—​rooted, as it is, in ecstatic temporality—​does not give an account of the “origin” of transcendence that makes possible the very “ecstasis” that marks temporality (Temporalität). For this move from fundamental ontology to metaontology—​ Sallis’ significant departure from Heidegger—​and the uncovering of the power of imagination, the spacing of the sensible is required. Thus, his departure from both Heidegger and Merleau-​Ponty lies in his claim of the primacy of sensible spacings as the condition of perception (Merleau-​Ponty) and temporality (Heidegger). My claim throughout these remarks is that Sallis’ focus on the problem of embodied directionality in his early work on Merleau-​Ponty and Heidegger leads him to uncover the originary power of imagination as the power of spacings; that is, the power of being-​there. 1

Imagine Sensing and Sensed: Merleau-​Ponty and the Sensible

In his critical engagement with Merleau-​Ponty, Sallis’ primary concern is with a “new interpretation of the sensible” after Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God; that is, the death of a transcendental intelligible realm from which the sensible has been understood since the very beginning of Western Philosophy. The death of the transcendental calls for a new beginning, a new sense of the sensible. In other words, intelligibility must now be located in sensibility. As Sallis puts it, “The sensible and the intelligible, the visible and the invisible, belong to one and the same domain” (pr 49). Belonging to the same domain, however, does not conflate or reduce intelligibility to sensibility; instead, the task of thinking or intelligibility is to be reoriented to the sensible. Referring to Zarathustra, Sallis clams that the task of thinking “is to remain faithful to the earth” (pr 22). Thus, he asks, “How to secure the Logos of the sensible world?” (pr 45). Sallis addresses this question by taking as his starting point Merleau-​ Ponty’s claim in The Visible and Invisible that “Reflexivity must be understood by the body, by the relation of the body to itself.” However, he points out that the body’s relation to itself is always mediated through the other; as the site of radical openness and exposure, it senses itself only through the provocation of another. As Sallis puts it: “Things reflect back an image of ourselves inasmuch as they (as seen) designate, by their way of unfolding for that seeing, the

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place in the midst of the visible from which they are seen, the place of the seer himself within the visible” (pr 80). Always in the world and of the world and constituted by this open exposure, embodiment always escapes itself. In other words, embodiment never coincides with itself, there is no pure immanence. Instead, embodiment exists in an originary exteriority to itself such that it is always responding to itself from outside of itself. Indeed, the embodied “self” of exteriority is constituted by this reflective response. In this schema, then, consciousness is the other side of the body.1 While we might want to think of sensible embodiment as a modern notion of self-​consciousness, Sallis argues against this insofar as, unlike the modern notion of a constituting subjectivity, “the body is a sensible-​for-​itself” (pr 88). The body as a sensible-​for-​itself is always already immersed in the flesh of the world. For Sallis, the problem Merleau-​Ponty leaves unaddressed is how this sensible bodily reflection—​this sensible-​for-​itself—​can be the ground of experience if it is the case, as Merleau-​Ponty claims, that the body is always already part of an anonymous realm of flesh. As Sallis points out, flesh is the elemental “as it is used to speak of air, earth, fire, and water” (pr 82). Still further, flesh is a latency, a “doubling up into an inside and outside,” which points to a more fundamental chiasm that “joins seer and seen, body and thing, and which makes of them one and the same flesh” (pr 84). Sallis continues: “Because both the seer and the things seen are flesh, because each is the locus of a chiasm, there is possible that further chiasm in which the flesh of the body and the flesh of things encroach, transgress, upon one another” (pr 84). When speaking of the flesh of the visible, therefore, there is no question of an anthropological account. As Sallis points out, flesh is an ontological structure and as such it is a radical rejection of anthropology and its projections of human meanings upon the world and earth. Again, flesh is the anonymous and passive ontological structure of the sensible. Sallis’ recently published 1970–​1971 lecture course, The Logos of the Sensible World: Merleau-​Ponty’s Phenomenological Philosophy, illuminates his thinking on this anonymous realm of flesh or wild being. In the lecture course, Sallis suggests that already in the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-​Ponty is thinking the latency of flesh, pointing out that perception is never “something I do,” but instead, it is “anonymous, general, something one does” (lw 99). This 1 Throughout this essay, I will use interchangeably “embodiment” and “the body,” recognizing that the language of “the body” comes dangerously close to positing sensible embodiment as a thing that can be defined in terms of what it is, its essence. Whenever possible, I use “embodiment” to denote the ecstatic character of sensible embodiment as always already being in the world.

160 Birmingham anonymous and general realm points to an originary acquisition that is beyond personal experience and which prevents personal experience from ever being transparent to itself. As Sallis points out: “I am not like an absolute observer who, completely outside the world, could hold it all in view. Instead, I have no distance. I am immersed in the world and perceive it from this position within it. Hence I never perceive it exhaustively” (lw 99). The problem, then, is how to think of the relation of bodily sensible reflection to this anonymous and passive realm of flesh—​“wild being”—​to which bodily reflection always already belongs? As we have seen, sensible bodily reflection is always already in and of the visible such that it is able to unfold from it. As Sallis points out—​and this is his departure from Merleau-​Ponty’s claim of the primacy of perception—​this means that the synthesis between body and world “is already underway, the chiasm always already instituted” (pr 92). Here again, Sallis’ 1970–​1971 lecture course is helpful insofar as he is already problematizing this fundamental, originary synthesis, giving a more detailed analysis than in his monograph. In the lecture course, Sallis begins by asking of the synthesis of the five senses, a problem that led Augustine, for example, to posit an “inner sense” that unified the five senses, which by themselves seem to have nothing in common: the ear cannot see nor can the eye hear and neither can touch. Rather than posit an inner sense, Sallis argues that the five senses are unified in their opening on to the same thing even as the thing is manifested in differing ways to each of the senses. This raises in turn another question: how do we think the unity of the thing which at the same time allows for the synthesis of the sense-​experience? In other words, Sallis points to a double synthesis: at once the synthesis of the senses and the synthesis of the thing being perceived. In a very detailed analysis that I cannot do justice to here, Sallis shows that the double synthesis is bodily and takes place “within an already established system in which the body is already anchored in the world, geared into the world” (lw 102). Moreover, the synthesis of embodied subject and world is temporal, unfolding from rootedness in a perceptual history. Importantly, as Sallis continues to think the synthesis of subject and world especially in his reading of Heidegger, he will add to Merleau-​Ponty’s account by asking whether the synthesis of time requires another synthesis, one which neither Merleau-​Ponty nor Heidegger give an account. We need to linger just a bit longer with the 1970–​1971 lecture course insofar as Sallis follows his analysis of the temporality of sensible bodily synthesis with an extended discussion of its spatiality. In the lecture course, he gives a much fuller account of the directionality of the perceptual-​bodily synthesis, which he only touches upon in Phenomenology and the Return to Beginning. Moreover, in the lectures on directionality and bodily motility, he mounts an

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important critique of both the empirical and transcendental accounts, which taken together is the earliest indication in Sallis’ work that his thinking of imaginative synthesis charts a way between the Scylla of transcendentalism and the Charybdis of empiricism. More precisely. Sallis rejects both an account of directionality rooted in the transcendental ego (Kant, for example) or in empirical sensations and impressions (Hume). In my view, it is not too much to claim that this early account of spatial directionality and motility will prove to be more important than his analysis of temporality for uncovering the power of imaginative synthesis of anonymous bodily anchorage in the world. In the lectures, Sallis shows that both the transcendental and empirical accounts understand space as objective and distinct from the content of experience. Kant understands space as an a priori form of intuition that has its origin in consciousness. In an earlier discussion on bodily motility, he points outs that the transcendental account makes a strict distinction between projective consciousness and sensory content, and then makes the further claim of a projective consciousness that “unifies the contents around an intelligible core and gives us thereby a unified, meaningful, coherent world” (lw 83). However, this position, he points out, insofar as it posits a consciousness transparent to itself, cannot account for madness, sickness, or error. In other words, if consciousness is transparent to itself, then we must claim that even in madness, consciousness is aware of its madness; or that even in error, consciousness is aware of its error. However, this means that consciousness is never really mad or in error, which contradicts their very state of being. On the other hand, empiricists such as Hume understand space as objectively given in sense content. As Sallis puts it: “Empiricism tries to understand the emergence of directionality in terms of sense-​content. Content, however, as understood by empiricism has no direction, no orientation” (lw 106). This is consistent with Sallis’ earlier critique of empiricism in his discussion of bodily motility in which he points out that the empiricist claims that all sensory relations are external and that the body is a passive recipient of stimuli “cannot account for the ways in which bodies (and not merely the human body) organize and respond to the sensory world that demonstrate they are always already engaged, immersed, and oriented” (lw 76–​77). Both accounts understand things in terms of objective spatial relations, whether the external relations of sense-​data or those instituted by consciousness. The problem, Sallis shows, is that objective relations cannot provide any account of directionality; for example, spatial orientation such as “up” and “down,” which cannot be accounted for by either an empirical Humean subject totally and passively immersed in the world of sense-​content or by a Kantian constituting consciousness completely aloof from the world. Instead,

162 Birmingham as Sallis claims, our sense of directionality requires a system of coordinates and a bodily self already directed toward the world. With the body firmly anchored in the world, neither the transcendental nor the empirical account suffices. Indeed, in Phenomenology and the Return to Beginnings, Sallis points out that the distinction between facts and essences, the empirical and the transcendental, collapses into the very joints and crevices of embodiment: “It is not the case that essences are over and above the facts as though the essences belonged to another domain in which the facts point” (pb 71). Instead, citing Merleau-​ Ponty—​ who claims, “The alleged facts, the spatio-​temporal individuals, are from the first mounted on the … generality of my body, and the ideas are therefore already encrusted in its joints”—​ Sallis emphasizes the originary eccentricity and radical belongingness of the body with the world is such that the distinction between constituting and constituted, between intelligible and sensible, between transcendental and empirical, collapses.2 Instead, Sallis argues that we must think the invisible-​of-​the-​visible. The terms are equiprimordial, although not the same: “The invisible is the framework, the frame which lets the visible be seen but which is not itself seen” (pr 71). At the same time, we must be cautious insofar as the invisible frame is not added like a kind of superstructure onto the visible. Again, the terms are equiprimordial in what Sallis calls a “natal bond.” Significantly, in thinking this natal bond between the visible and the invisible, Sallis’ criticisms of the empirical and transcendental accounts extend to a critique of Merleau-​Ponty’s phenomenological account of the relation between the visible and the invisible, that is, between the sensible and the intelligible. This leads him to call into question Merleau-​Ponty’s fundamental principle; namely, his claim of the primacy of perception. Sallis points out that insofar as perception is of the visible that unfolds from this anonymous and passive realm of wild being, something more is required than a phenomenology of perception. Here, I can only summarize Sallis’ detailed and rich discussion—​both in the lecture course and in Phenomenology and the Return to Beginnings—​of Merleau-​Ponty’s three claims for the primacy of perception, namely, its being

2 See Maurice Merleau-​ Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Claude Lefort (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 114; see John Sallis, Phenomenology and the Return to Beginnings (pr 71).

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originary, autonomous, and the foundation of thought. For Sallis, the third claim is most problematic insofar as he points out that thought has its roots in perception and yet not entirely insofar as thought is also independent. As Sallis puts it, thought is a “dependent-​independence.” This raises the question of the cogito, which is Sallis’ concluding question in Phenomenology and the Return to Beginnings. However, in the 1970–​1971 lectures, Sallis not only raises the question of the cogito, but goes further, pointing out that the problem of the cogito—​or, more precisely, the problem of self-​consciousness—​requires a radicalization of this claim of the primary of perception, demanding a “phenomenology of phenomenology” or a move to fundamental ontology. Sallis states: “The discussion of the cogito raises explicitly the problems we have identified as the central ones occasioned by the retrieval of the perceptual subject: the problem of thought (“the origin of truth”) and the problem of reflection” (lw 153). Sallis takes up the problematic with Merleau-​Ponty’s claim of a “continuity, if not complete identity, between reflective experience and the thematization of that experience in reflection” (pr 89). While Merleau-​Ponty argues that the continuity is given in the very experience of perception, Sallis cautions against such identity and coincidence. He points out that insofar as bodily reflection is now in the position traditionally occupied by self-​consciousness, bodily reflection for Merleau-​Ponty is the ground of experience (pr 90). However, the hand example indicates that the relation between embodiment and world is one of difference and divergence. Sallis argues there is no coincidence. As he points out: “My left hand is always on the verge of touching my right hand touching the thing, but I never reach coincidence” (pr 92). Furthermore, he points out that bodily reflection fails: “To say that the reflection fails is to say that as soon as the hand is touched, the same hand withdraws, recedes into a depth beneath the touched surface” (pr 93). As we have seen, Merleau-​Ponty claims that reflective thinking must be understood in terms of our sensible embodiment that already possesses the world. Furthermore, he claims that perception has an original directionality, although Merleau-​Ponty argues that this cannot be grasped. Insofar as there is no non-​spatial subject and object, no originary constitution of space or directionality can come to light. Sallis, however, raises an important consideration: “But does the failure of a reflection with regard to a certain matter ­establish that that matter is intrinsically impenetrable to every attempt at reflection?” (pr 32). Moreover, Merleau-​Ponty claims there is no need to invoke a founding act of thought in order to give an account of perceptual experience. All the properties of the thing form a phenomenal field. Thus, perceptual

164 Birmingham experience is autonomous, Yet, Sallis points out, the object is always there “for me.” As he puts it: Merleau-​Ponty’s entire consideration of the issue of synthesis serves, therefore, to point back to primordial stratum that consists of the always already established anchorage of the bodily perceptual subject in the world … What is the character of this reflective ‘pointing back’ to a stratum which is radically antecedent to reflection itself? (pr 40) In other words, Merleau-​Ponty’s attempt to establish the independence of thinking is itself dependent on this antecedent stratum and as a result the entire project recoils upon itself. In an attempt to overcome this recoil, Sallis points out that Merleau-​Ponty tries again, articulating a new flesh, the flesh of language, “a less heavy, more transparent body.” Merleau-​Ponty makes an analogy between the reversibility of the body and what it senses, and the relationship between language and other dimensions of being. Just as there is a reflexivity of touching and seeing, so too is there a reflexivity of speaking and hearing. This new reflectivity—​and the emergence of flesh as expression—​are the points where language is inserted into a primordial silence, bringing that silence to expression. Sallis, however, questions this continuity between language and flesh, pointing to an inherent tension. On the one hand, being or flesh on Merleau-​Ponty’s account has always already been transposed into language; while, on the other, he still evokes a silent stratum of being present to itself and prior to the productivity of language. Sallis, however, asks how it is possible to philosophically vindicate an ontology that begins with a pre-​linguistic stratum of wild being that nevertheless seems able to be grasped through language? As he puts it, “Such a reflection must use language in order to express silence. It must use language in such a way as to let be seen a dimension of silence” (pr 63). He suggests that such a demand for a speech that is ultimately self-​effacing in the presence of the silence of wild logos is impossible. Thus, he asks: “Is it possible to take up the question of being in advance of the question of Logos in this full sense?” (pr 113). The “in advance” is important here, pointing to something prior to logos that allows logos in its full sense. In other words, this “being in advance,” more originary than logos, cannot itself be a form of logos. In his extraordinary essay on Sallis’ work, Derrida points to the importance of Sallis’ insight on that which is beyond, logos in advance as it were; namely, imagination. Derrida points out that Sallis’ thought is imaginative, not imaginary: “His thought is in the strongest and most enigmatic sense of the word imaginative … That would be his signature, and yet he finds what is already

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found in a language as a singular and latent possibility.”3 He goes on to say of Sallis’ writing: “The economy of language here keeps in reserve the very thing it gives us to think, the moment we turn our thoughts to heeding it. This does not mean that “this very thing” is “within” language or is reducible to a linguistic phenomenon.”4 In his 2002 Preface to the Second Edition of Phenomenology and the Return to Beginnings, Sallis clarifies the relation between sensible being and speech, using the example of painting, what he calls the “secret art.” Just as painters make visible the light which is otherwise invisible and they do so “without betraying it and turning it into just another thing” (pr 12), so too, Sallis claims, “in the configuration of the self-​showing in which a thing of sense can show itself as being itself, a certain opening of speech already comes into play” (pr 12). This opening of speech, however, must not reduce sensible being to signification. Instead, like painters engaged with the secret art, so too speech, held in the opening of logos of the sensible, makes visible by providing “access to being” (pr 12). Nevertheless, speech is not capable of capturing the silence and reserve of the sensible and, therefore, must resist the temptation to reduce it to conceptual meaning.5 At the same time, Sallis suggests that imagination is the power of synthesis between the flesh of embodiment and the flesh of things. As noted above, an originary synthesis connects body and world, between the visible and invisible. However, it is the synthesis of a fundamental chiasm. As mentioned above and which bears repeating, for Sallis, “the synthesis is already underway, the chiasm always already instituted” (pr 92). This is the power or force of imagination, a more originary opening, setting things in motion, yoking together, but keeping apart. Imagination, Sallis argues, is the invisible force of the sensible. In his earliest work, Sallis is already thinking the power of imagination as the power of spacings: “Imagine sensing and being sensed.”

3 Jacques Derrida, “Tense,” in The Path of Archaic Thinking: Unfolding the Work of John Sallis, ed. Kenneth Maly (Albany: suny Press, 1995), 55. 4 Ibid. See also, John Sallis’ memorial essay on the long conversation over many years with Jacques Derrida on silence, speech, and the power of imagination. Sallis, “Last Words: Generosity and Reserve,” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 39, no. 3 (2006): 15–​26. 5 For a longer discussion on silence and the logos of the sensible, see Sallis, “On Shining Forth: A Response to Gunter Figal and Dennis Schmidt, Research in Phenomenology 40, no. 1 (2010): 115–​119.

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Imagine Being-​there: “Being to an Extent Sensible”

Continuing to think of this power of imagination as the invisible force of the sensible, I want now to take up the first sentence of Force of Imagination, “Imagine being-​there,” focusing on Sallis’ critical engagement with Heidegger in the central three chapters of his 1990 monograph, Echoes: After Heidegger. Certainly, it is not too much to claim that Heidegger is the thinker of “being-​ there”—​of Dasein—​and Sallis’ engagement with him marks his continuing to think the fundamental issue of his seminal book and lectures on Merleau-​ Ponty: sensing and being sensed. As I claimed at the outset of these remarks, Sallis’ focus on sensible directionality in Heidegger’s Being and Time is central to his rethinking Heidegger’s account of being-​there. In Chapter Three of Echoes, Sallis takes up the question of sensing and being sensed by first asking of the “way in which Being shines forth in the midst of the sensible” (eh 77). This question depends upon a certain coupling of Being and sensible. Sallis uses “coupling” advisedly, a coupling rather than a Platonic subordination of the sensible to Being. To think of the coupling requires asking of the extent of Being’s sensibility. Immediately, then, at the outset of the essay, Sallis problematizes a certain directionality of sensibility and Being: “For the word extent would raise the problem of translating Erstreckung, the extending, the stretching that is broached in the return from temporality to the question of the self. This extending between birth and death consists in a certain twisting together of future, beenness, and present, in short, Dasein’s originary contortion” (eh 79). The twisting free of the Platonic subordination of sensibility to Being requires a twisting together of Dasein’s originary temporality. And yet, Sallis cautions against turning too quickly to Dasein’s temporality in order to grasp the extent of the coupling of the sensible and Being. In other words, Erstreckung, the extending and stretching that marks the coupling, may point to something more originary than temporality: It will be a matter of attempting to ask in an effective way whether an analysis of temporality could ever suffice for developing the question of the meaning of Being. Is time the meaning of Being? Is it the sense (Sinn) of Being? Is it the sense, specifically, of the Being of the things of sense? Is it the coupling that joins Being and sense? Does it suffice for rendering Being to an extent sensible? (eh 79) Noting that the entire project of Being and Time is a “twisting free of the understanding of being as presence,” Sallis turns to Heidegger’s notion of disclosedness (Erschlossenheit) asking: “What happens to the sensible in that twisting

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free into a disclosedness beyond Being as presence?” (eh 84). Extending the question slightly, What happens to being-​there in this twisting free? Strikingly, Sallis begins to address this question by turning to Heidegger’s discussion of Befindlichkeit or disposition. Disclosedness is always dispositional; that is, affective. As Sallis puts it: It is not as though Dasein is first affected by things through the senses and then comes to have a certain disposition toward those things. Rather, conversely. it is only because Dasein is always already disposed, already attuned mood-​wise to the world, that things from out of the world can affect the senses in some way or other, that things can show themselves so as somehow to matter to Dasein. (eh 84–​85) Disclosedness is always dispositional and, further, this dispositional disclosedness is the a priori of the senses. Sallis points out that at just this moment, the moment that Heidegger subordinates the senses to disclosedness, a Platonic shadow falls over his thinking. In an extraordinary reading, Sallis illuminates this subordination in Heidegger’s analysis of equipment (das Zeug). Noting that this subordination begins as a translation problem in the original German with Heidegger translating das Ding as das Zeug, indicating Heidegger’s decision to understand the thing as part of a complex system of references that make up an equipment structure and, further, his decision that things as equipment are “closest to us” (eh 87). In other words, Heidegger does not take up the thing as such, but only in its equipmentality (Zeughaftigkeit). Sallis considers Heidegger’s discussion of the infamous hammer which, he points out, is understood only in its work, in its ability to produce or fabricate. It is helpful to cite him at length: It is almost as though the hammer were only a point of intersection of a certain complex of references. It is almost as though in the translations of das Ding into das Zeug any surplus of the former over the latter had been made to vanish. It is almost as though the hammer had no shape, no color, no weight. It is almost as though all that would pertain to its sensible shining had been passed over or, if you will, concealed. It is almost as though the shining of the sensible had been extinguished. Almost—​but not quite. (eh 88) Sallis goes on to point out that Heidegger quite rightly wants to avoid understanding things in terms of presence-​at-​hand, which is why he translates das Ding as das Zeug. However, in his attempt to twist free from metaphysical

168 Birmingham presence, Heidegger ends up repeating another metaphysical gesture; namely, forgetting the sensible thing or at least leaving it behind in favor of its meaning in a complex of references, As Sallis states, “In short, the outcome is that Being—​the Being of things—​is to no extent whatsoever sensible” (eh 89, emphasis mine). At this point, Sallis takes up the problem of directionality in Heidegger’s analysis of das Zeug, pointing out that not only is the thing bound up with Dasein’s disclosedness, “there is a certain directionality, leading to a toward-​ which (Wozu) that is primary, that is not itself toward or for (zu) something else. Such a primary toward-​which he calls a for-​the-​sake-​of-​which (Worum-​ willen); it is something pertaining always to the Being of Dasein” (eh 89). This directionality is toward Dasein whose comportment allows for the self-​showing or unfolding of world. In other words, things show themselves only through their relation to Dasein and, moreover, “in the circuit of Dasein’s self-​showing” (eh 90). Here, the shadow of metaphysics casts itself over the analysis: not only are sensible things related to the Dasein’s disclosedness, at the same time, this disclosedness is thought as self-​presence. The directionality is simple; it runs in one direction; that is, to the more originary self-​disclosedness of Dasein. Here, we need to recall Sallis’ discussion in in his lectures on Merleau-​Ponty’s claim of a fundamental “narcissism” in the chiasm between touching and being touched. Despite his claim that sensible embodiment is always already anchored in the world, nevertheless, Merleau-​Ponty’s analysis of the chiasm of touching and being touched also moves in the simple direction toward a more originary longing for self-​presence. Sallis, by contrast, thinks a longing for a return to the sensible that no longer desires a simple return to origins. Returning to Sallis’ analysis of Heidegger, he shows that the simple directionality from the equipment structure to Dasein’s self-​presence is constantly frustrated by Dasein’s fallenness (Verfallen), thrownness, (Geworfenheit), and always finding itself (Befindlichkeit) dispositionally in the world. Sallis points out, however, that the greatest frustration to the simple directionality toward self-​presence seems to be Heidegger’s analysis of death; yet, even in Dasein’s being-​toward death, the simple directionality of an originary self-​showing holds in Heidegger’s thought, now in the direction of Dasein’s relation to an “outside-​itself [that] threatens to become an outside-​itself ” (eh 93). And it is at precisely this point that Sallis radically rethinks Heidegger’s being-​toward-​ death. I will turn to this momentarily. First, however, we need to follow Sallis as he returns to the sensible, pointing out that in Heidegger’s analysis the sensible “comes to be separated from itself, on the one side translated into das Zeug, on the other side reduced to a mere residue having no bearing on what such a thing—​hence, the thing as such—​is”

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(eh 93). In other words, in Heidegger’s schema, in the twisting free into disclosedness, the sensible is once again subordinated to meaning (Sinn). Sallis then raises a series of critical questions: “Must the move beyond presence be also a move that displaces the sensible, bringing it under the yoke of meaning. Must the move be one that withdraws the sensible from its element, that effectively cancels or abandons what would otherwise be taken as the specifically sensible character of things?” (eh 94). Sallis answers in the negative and goes on to claim that to avoid these moves there must be a return to the sensible “that would be originary in the very move of disrupting the simple directionality that would have defined the originary” (eh 95, emphasis mine). To disrupt this simple directionality, Sallis turns to a later essay of Heidegger’s, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” pointing that “mortal becomes, in this text and beyond, the name of man, displacing, if not entirely, replacing Dasein” (eh 121). While I cannot do justice to his rich analysis of mortality, I will briefly follow just two threads:1) non-​being and 2) ecstatic temporality. We saw above in Sallis’ analysis of Heidegger’s being-​toward-​death, nothing or non-​being threatens to become a kind of presence or for-​itself for Dasein. However, Sallis points out that the “nothing” or non-​being that marks what is Dasein’s ownmost is always “not-​yet” or “to come.” And yet unlike a ripening piece of fruit that becomes what it is only when it is fully ripe and falls from the tree, Dasein’s death is not the actualization of who it is, but the withdrawal of all possibilities. As Sallis states, it is “withdrawal and annihilation of possibilities.” At the same time, mortality or death belongs to existence. As Sallis so beautifully puts it: “The ripe fruit drops finally to the ground, but Dasein dies always in the midst of life” (eh 125). Mortality then is always double: being and non-​being coincide and, at the same time, Dasein, being towards its end, is always given back to itself from the end. There is, in other words, a double directionality: “The fruit merely progresses to its end, but Dasein, comporting itself to that end is cast back from it in such a way that a certain space is opened, a reserve of freedom” (eh 125). At the same time, death cannot be an “itself,” a self-​presence. Instead, Sallis argues that death is the state of radical exile through which Dasein is given back to itself from this abyssal exile. Death, in other words, “is the very annulment of origin” (eh 130). Death, in other words, disrupts the simple directionality to origin, opening instead “a space of abyssal play … a space spaced in the play of imagination” (eh 137). Here, Sallis thinks further the problem of synthesis, first raised in his analysis of bodily motility and directionality in his lectures on Merleau-​Ponty. Now abandoning the language of “synthesis”—​which I suspect for him has too much residue from both the transcendental and empirical traditions—​Sallis instead

170 Birmingham uses the language of spacings that holds together ownmost and otherwise, being and nonbeing in this space or medium of abyssal play: “Imagination: the coincidence of ownness and otherness that is mortality” (eh 138). Unlike “synthesis” that carries with it too much of a unity of opposition, Sallis’ use of “spacings” denotes the opening up of the field or medium in which there is an ­indecidability between being and nonbeing, presence and absence, ownness and otherness. The power of spacing hovers between, disrupting and displacing any move in the direction of a grounding unity or origin. At the same time—​and this is the second thread mentioned above—​the problem of directionality appears in Heidegger’s account of ecstatic temporality (Temporalität). Here, the issue is directionality in the sense of the ecstatic extending (Erstreckung), a “whither” toward which one is being carried away (Entrückungen). Sallis cites Sein und Zeit: “Rather, there belongs to each ecstasis a ‘whither’ toward which one is carried away … This whither of the ­ecstasis we call the horizonal schema” (eh 109). Going further, he points out that for Heidegger, most markedly in Sein und Zeit, the “wither” is toward a unified horizonal schema which corresponds to the ecstatic unity of temporality (Temporalitat). However, Sallis radicalizes Heidegger, showing that “temporality, the outside-​itself, displacement itself—​[is] now itself displaced” (eh 113). Still further, Sallis shows that this ecstatic being outside itself is for Heiegger what makes possible Dasein’s transcendence and thus also being in a world. This last point needs emphasis: Heidegger identifies transcendence and world. Sallis, however, calls this into question. In an analysis that bears striking comparison to his analysis of Merleau-​Ponty, Sallis asks whether there is not an irreducible difference between temporality and transcendence, that is, “between temporality as an outside-​itself and transcendence as Dasein’s being outside-​itself in a world” (eh 114). At this point, Sallis returns to the distinctive spatiality that belongs to world and transcendence, a spatiality that “is irreducible to temporality … that indeed would mark, not to say constitute, the very excess of transcendence over temporality” (eh 115). Following Heidegger, but only up to a point before radicalizing him, Sallis shows that this requires a move from fundamental ontology to metaontology that radicalizes spatiality. Sallis makes the further suggestion that this means we would have to go back and radicalize Geworfenheit, our thrownness into the world, asking again of this thrownness in light of a metaontology that asks of this excess, this overwhelming transcendence over temporality. An originary transcendence that does not ground temporality, but instead disrupts origin and ground; that is, radically disrupts and displaces the simple directionality toward origin. And, further, it would mean displacing temporality as the meaning of Being or, more precisely, of asking of this excess

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and overwhelming that exceeds the meaning of Being. This is to ask of the power of abyssal imagination, the power of spacings, that excessive and overwhelming power that opens up a field or space of being: Imagine being-​there. At this point, we are able to return to the question of the sensible. As I have tried to show in this essay, Sallis’ extraordinary achievement since his seminal lectures and monograph on Merleau-​Ponty has been and continues to be a return to the sensible through a radical rethinking of space and directionality, one that resists any temptation for simple directions. His radical rethinking of the sensible follows Zarathustra’s demand that we remain faithful to the earth, which for him requires that we think the spacing of the field of the sensible, allowing the sensible to shine through this spacing and not reducing it to something more originary. This shining is that of the beautiful (kalon). Things show themselves from the kalon, their shining forth from the beautiful. Here, finally, the sensible twists free from the yoke of meaning. As Sallis states: Is it not imagination that in its flight opens to the shining of the beautiful? Is it not imagination that in its hovering spans the gigantic space of sense, thus gathering now what would previously have been called the horizon, the meaning of Being? Is imagination not precisely this gathering? Is imagination not the meaning of Being? (eh 97) Imagine being there. Imagine sensing and sensed. In summary, I have tried to show that from his earliest and seminal lectures on Merleau-​Ponty, Sallis’ thought has been on the way to the sensible, a thought that thinks in the draft of the power of imagination. Beginning with sensible, worldly embodiment in Merleau-​Ponty and extending his analysis to Heidegger’s account of how sensible things such as hammers appear in the world, Sallis’ extraordinary achievement is to uncover the power of imagination, the power of spacings, the abyssal “origin” that opens a field or space of the sensible, allowing it to shine through as itself without subordinating it to meaning and the intelligible. He shows that embodied sensible being in the world—​whether that be hammers, humans, or stones—​is possible through the spacing power of imagination—​the power of “wild being”—​that is ineluctable and held in reserve, and yet opens the space of shining beauty of sensible being in the world. Beauty, not utility or even meaning, is the mark of the sensible in all its many shapes, colors, sounds, and ways of being. In a world that has nearly destroyed itself by reducing the sensible to its utility or whether it has meaning, turning to Sallis’ work on the logos of the sensible—​that is, turning to his return to the sensible—​has never been so urgent.

172 Birmingham

Bibliography

Derrida, Jacques. “Tense.” In The Path of Archaic Thinking: Unfolding the Work of John Sallis. Edited by Ken Maly. New York: suny Press, 1995. Merleau-​Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Edited by Claude Lefort. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968. Sallis, John. “Last Words: Generosity and Reserve.” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 39, no. 3 (2006): 15–​26. Sallis, John. “On Shining Forth: A Response to Gunter Figal and Dennis Schmidt.” Research in Phenomenology 40, no. 1 (2010): 115–​119.

­c hapter 11

John Sallis’ Liminal Phenomenology Daniela Vallega-​Neu 1

Introduction

Following Husserl’s motto, “Back to things themselves!,” phenomenology engages the self-​showing of things. However, since Husserl, phenomenology  has undergone shifts, reorientations, and expansions, especially in the wake of Heidegger. When in Being and Time, Heidegger addresses being as a phenomenon, phenomenological analysis sets out to explore what is not a thing at all, but rather the temporal-​spatial event preceding the self-​showing of things and indeed withdrawing, so to speak, behind the presence of things in their self-​showing. Consequently, there are many who would debate whether Heidegger’s thinking—​especially after the 1930s—​can properly be called phenomenology. As concerns Johns Sallis, it is insofar as he sets out with the self-​showing of the thing, that he continues the legacy of phenomenology, although his notion of the force of imagination operates without constituting consciousness and, indeed, beyond subjectivity. Sallis continues the phenomenological legacy in his own transformative way. He offers a phenomenology at the limit by engaging, like Heidegger and Merleau-​Ponty, with dimensions of being that do not show themselves. Indeed, he makes manifest that the self-​ showing of things is always already exceeded by what both constitutes and withdraws from the site of presence of the self-​showing thing. In the wake of Nietzsche’s overturning of Platonism and Heidegger’s announcement of the completion of metaphysics in the thinking of Hegel and Nietzsche, Sallis ventures a phenomenology at the limit that he also calls monstrology; a tracing of the force of imagination that hovers in between presence and absence, bringing forth the self-​showing of things, elementals, proprieties, and their configurations in speech. This chapter will explore three thematic clusters of Sallis’ liminal thought: (1) its relation to what he calls “philosophy at the limit”; i.e., its relation to a certain lineage in Western philosophy; (2) the working of imagination in relation to things and what exceeds things in their very manifestation; and (3) proper elementals. As I address these topics in Sallis’ work, I will bring to bear especially Heidegger’s thinking, marking similarities and differences that help me see

© Daniela Vallega-Neu, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004507098_013

174 Vallega-Neu not only Heidegger’s influence on Sallis, but above all the distinctness of Sallis’ work. A question I bring to bear in my readings is a certain gathering force in Heidegger’s thinking that is bound to the primacy of the question of being and that is often forcefully held apart from thinking things in their self-​showing. Sallis, on the other hand, remains true to the self-​showing things, even if things will show themselves to be always already exceeded by horizons constitutive of their self-​showing. And yet, for Sallis, imagination operates as a gathering force, not as a disseminating or interrupting force. Thus, one of the guiding thoughts of this chapter is the question of the one and the many, the singular and the plural. 2

Phenomenology at the Limit of Philosophy

The history of philosophy at the limit of which Sallis situates his thought, is the history of philosophy as we find it recounted by Heidegger. It situates Plato at the beginning of metaphysics and Nietzsche and Hegel as its completion. However, not only is the question of beginning and ending continuously and performatively put into question by Sallis; in The Logic of Imagination, he also admonishes: “the entire itinerary of metaphysics and the correspondingly alleged homogeneity of the legacy remain suspect to the highest degree. Accordingly, the designation metaphysics is to remain (as indeed it is) suspended between singular and plural” (li 17).1 The play between a singular and plural sense of metaphysics emerges, for instance, in the second chapter of Delimitations, in which Sallis proceeds to distinguish “four primary senses in which metaphysics has been proclaimed to be at its end”; four senses that “slide, as it were, into the sense of end as closure” (dp 17). The figures he invokes are Nietzsche, Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger. In each case, metaphysics receives a different determination in relation to its proclaimed end. However, all these senses of an end of metaphysics “slide,” writes Sallis, into the sense of end as closure as we find it in Heidegger. With the designation of metaphysics as closure occurs a transgression beyond this closure. When Heidegger thinks the closure of metaphysics as it occurs in 1 Sallis has problematized again and again the complexity of the very notions of beginning and ending. “One will have never simply begun,” he writes, for instance, in Force of Imagination (fi 26). The very question of beginning reinscribes the sense of beginning into a new narrative, turning back upon the beginning and thereby multiplying the very sense of beginning. As to the question of ending—​specifically in reference to the end of metaphysics—​this, too, dissipates into a multiplicity of senses.

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Nietzsche and Hegel, he does so from a site of thought he understands to be in transition to what he calls “the other beginning” of history and as being already determined by that other history.2 In Delimitations, Sallis mentions two more strategies of transgressing metaphysics. One is Derrida’s strategy that consists in showing how every alleged enclosure is always already invaded by its exteriority. The third strategy is Sallis’ own, which brings into play imagination as a force that mixes presence and absence, thus going beyond the determination of being as presence (see dp 27f). In the following, I will trace—​in very broad and, hence, necessarily somewhat inadequate strokes—​similarities and differences of Sallis’ approach with respect to Derrida’s and Heidegger’s. Sallis’ relation to metaphysics is closer to Derrida’s than to Heidegger’s, if we consider that Heidegger understood his thinking to have twisted free of metaphysics in thinking the truth of being as an event more originary than metaphysics. Derrida’s deconstruction, on the other hand, never claims that thinking could be situated in a “beyond” with respect to metaphysics or come from somewhere “other,” but he still transgresses metaphysics by showing how metaphysical texts are constituted by what they exclude. Thus, Derrida always remains at the limit of metaphysics. Similarly, Sallis does not claim to be moving “beyond” metaphysics or to be developing an originary ground of metaphysics. Rather, he situates his thinking at the limit, playing out, by force of imagination, an extreme possibility of metaphysics, right at the verge where it “twists free” from the metaphysical opposition between the sensible and the intelligible.3 All hinges on that last line in Nietzsche’s story in Twilight of the Idols of “How the True World Became a Fable”: “We got rid of the true world: which world remained? The illusory one, perhaps? … But no! along with the true world we got rid as well of the illusory one!”4

2 See the first section of Martin Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), edited by Friedrich von Herrmann, Gesamtausgabe vol. 65. (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1989). 3 It may be worth noting that Heidegger never delimited metaphysics primarily as being constituted by the opposition between the intelligible and the sensible. This was Nietzsche’s reading of metaphysics as the history of Platonism. Rather, for Heidegger, what delimits and determines metaphysics is the self-​secluding of the event that grants presence to beings and the consequently—​primary representational—​orientation of thinking toward beings in the oblivion of being in its happening. What remains forgotten in metaphysics, for Heidegger, is the dimension of concealment belonging to the truth of being. In the way he situates his thinking at the limit of philosophy, Sallis stays together with Derrida closer to a Nietzschean determination of metaphysics. 4 Friedrich Nietzsche, Götzendämmerung, in Sämtliche Werke; Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. 6, edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzion Montinari (Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1980), 81.

176 Vallega-Neu And what now? Now, Sallis suggests, comes the tracing of the force of imagination. This tracing follows again an appeal by Nietzsche; namely, the appeal to stay true to the earth, which, for Sallis, means to stay true to the sensible, thus marking a beginning with sense, a beginning one will never have simply begun.5 Sallis will indeed remain true to the earth in staying with sense, which also means, with sensible things in what I am calling his liminal phenomenology, a liminal phenomenology in which he does not remain merely a deconstructive thinker, but thinks the very surging of what comes to presence. There are ways, then, in which Sallis’ transgression of metaphysics comes closer to Heidegger than to Derrida. One such way can be seen in the way Sallis characterizes Heidegger’s transgression of metaphysics in Delimitations, referring to Heidegger’s lecture “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking” of 1964. Sallis tells us how Heidegger questions what remains unthought in the turn to things themselves, which is the Lichtung, the clearing, or the “open space in which brightness and hence showing can occur” (dp 27).6 As I see it, there are similarities between Heidegger’s notion of clearing and Sallis’ descriptions of the force of imagination as a spacing that holds together presence and absence. In operating as a spacing, the force of imagination operates prior to the self-​showing of the thing and thus precedes (like the clearing in Heidegger) the presence of the thing. Furthermore, as I will show below, especially in his thinking of proper elementals, at times Sallis seems intimately close to Heidegger’s thinking of beyng as self-​seclusion. And yet, Sallis will never emphasize withdrawal, concealment, and seclusion to the same degree as Heidegger does. He remains more wedded to the phainesthai—​the self-​ showing of things—​and is less concerned than Heidegger with the withdrawal of being and the self-​secluding of truth. He is, then, more drawn to trace the coming to appear of things by remaining attentive to the lateral and peripheral horizons that in their peculiar non-​presence co-​determine the appearing of 5 See chapter one of fi. 6 What Sallis does not mention is that toward the end of his lecture, Heidegger hints at the thought that the clearing is not a clearing of presence, but rather “clearing of the self-​concealing presence, clearing of the sheltering that conceals itself [Lichtung der sich verbergenden Anwesenheit, Lichtung des sich verbergenden Bergens].” (Martin Heidegger, Zur Sache des Denkens, [Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1969], 79). As was often the case in Heidegger’s public lectures, he speaks more in relation to metaphysics and emphasizes that which grants presence. But, as his non-​public writings have revealed, after the mid-​1930s, the emphasis for Heidegger is the clearing of concealment and not the shining presencing of things. (Hints at this emphasis are revealed to the attentive reader in briefer remarks in his public lectures.) As I see it, since abandoning the trajectory of Being and Time, Heidegger can no longer be properly called a phenomenologist and certainly less a phenomenologist than Sallis.

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things. Another way of explicating this matter would be to say that his thinking is guided more by wonder than by a sense of withdrawal or abandonment.7 In the following sections, I hope to support and refine some of the claims I have made so far. 3

Imagination at Work in the Tracing of Things

Even more than Force of Imagination, Logic of Imagination gives insight into the systematic character of Sallis’ work, which becomes evident especially in Chapter Five that is titled “Schematism.” In this chapter, Sallis differentiates a variety of schemata demarcating the logic of imagination as one not of axioms and propositions, but of figures that he describes as being “like a figure in dancing”; figures that both prescribe spatial movements and originally enact the spatial movement (li 165). In this way, schemata articulate dynamic spacings with different interwoven levels of complexity. Sallis distinguishes three kinds of schemata that should not be taken to form a closed system. It is the first schema that brings into play the historical legacy operative in Sallis thinking.8 The first kind of schema “outlines the spacing that is most comprehensive, all-​encompassing.” Sallis writes that “it is especially to this kind of schema [schema is written in singular] and to the spacing it governs that philosophy as a whole has been geared; even though they must be thoroughly reconstrued, it is to such schemata [schemata now in plural] and their spacings that the philosophy to come [philosophy in singular] must orient itself primarily” (li 166). The plural singular of the first kind of schema is initially marked by one word that indicates the dyadic limit of this most comprehensive schema: “sense.” The word “sense” indicates the two lines of the dyadic schema that characterizes the first kind of schema. These two lines mark sensibleness and significancy. With this schema, Sallis reorients the Platonic logos as an opening from the sensible to the intelligible. What is required now, at the limit of philosophy, he tells us, is a reorientation to the sensible. The spacing opened from the sensible must remain “of the sensible”: “That to which the space that is opened is

7 One could certainly argue that the later Heidegger, in thinking things in relation to the fourfold, re-​engages in phenomenological thinking, but here, too, one could argue that Sallis stays truer to the phainesthai of things, since there remains, in Heidegger, an emphasis on the question of being as such. 8 I will not enter into a detailed discussion of Sallis’ relation to Kant in his thinking of schemata, but one point of difference is that Sallis does not think of the schemata as constituting a closed system in the way that Kant does.

178 Vallega-Neu to extend is nothing other than sense in the sense of meaning or signification.” But now, at the limit of twisting free of Platonism, we cannot presuppose “a prior intelligibility anterior to speech,” because “significations are never totally detached from the sensible” (li 174). Indeed, they are involved in the very self-​ showing of things. This takes me to the second kind of schemata (now in plural) in which is operative “not only the comprehensive schema, but also schemata that govern the various moments belonging to the self-​showing” (li 178). There are four moments of this second kind of schemata: 1) the sheer sense-​image, 2) the sense-​image with its horizons, 3) the elementals that encompass the things that show themselves, as well as those to whom things show themselves, and 4) the look of things (eidos). The tracing of these schemata gives a kind of generative account of how we arrive from the sheer, barely articulated, sense-​ image to the showing of the thing itself as itself. Sallis shows this already in Chapter Four of Force of Imagination. We begin, following Sallis’ tracings, with a moment in which there is not yet a thing showing itself as itself. This moment is not self-​seclusion or withdrawal, as we would find it in Heidegger’s thinking. Neither is it raw sensible matter, a multiplicity of sense data, or any other multiplicity. Rather, Sallis sets out with light and the shining of the sheer sense-​image, a sense-​image that is duplicitous in that it is both, on the one hand, of what will come to be perceived as the thing and, on the other, a sensible intuition. The spacing of this schema is a “hovering between perceiver and perceived” (li 179). It thus is not the result of a subjective consciousness. It is only with the second moment that the thing begins to emerge. There occurs what Sallis addresses in Force of Imagination as “the spacing of the image.” This comes about with a move beyond the image that “comes into play from the moment one speaks, indeed from the moment one assumes the very opening to speech” (fi 102). We see, then, how the encompassing schema is operative in the spacing of the image, since speech or signification is operative in the very spacing of the sensible image that comes to show itself. Thus, things never come to appear without meaning. Indeed, even the initial sense-​image carries incipient sense in the double sense of the word. The second moment of the second kind of schemata is the sense-​image that comes to be enclosed by lateral and peripheral horizons. Both horizons are marked by absence. The lateral horizon “links the presented aspect of the thing to the entire series of aspects that are withheld, absent from view, not presented as such” (fi 110). Peripheral horizons can assume various guises. They are, for instance, the background against which a thing appears, but they also indicate the instrumentality of a thing—​what the thing is for—​or

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the network of utility within which it appears (fi 114). It is by virtue of the lateral and peripheral horizons—​that is, by virtue of an absence belonging to the present aspect of the thing—​that a thing acquires density and depth. Without going into details, let me note that the schema of this second moment of the self-​showing of the thing is again dyadic; the one side marked by presence and actuality, and the other side by a schema marking the “infinite multiplicity” that constitutes the lateral horizons and the peripheral horizons (li 180). Lateral and peripheral horizons are drawn to the site of the presence of the sense-​image by force of imagination, doubled in Sallis’ monstrological speech. In Force of Imagination, he writes: “In being drawn around the there, the horizons must also be withdrawn from it.” “They must be protracted so as to bound the present aspect of the thing, and yet,—​they must be retracted from the occurrence of presence and its locus” (fi 125). Thus, the tractive force of imagination brings forth the self-​showing of the thing by mixing presence and absence. The third moment in the second kind of schemata addressing the self-​ showing of the thing is constituted by the elementals that come to enclose the objectified image. The elementals range from the primary elementals earth and sky, to clouds, air, and the sea. Sallis even explores time itself as an elemental. Furthermore, in Logic of Imagination, he distinguishes four different proper elementals: the natural elements, the sheltering retreat, birth and death, that all delimit (in ways I will sketch later) the space of propriety or what one comes to find to be “one’s own.” Thus, elementals not only encompass the self-​showing of things, but also those to whom the thing is shown. Its schema is not dyadic, but—​since elementals are encompassing—​circular or elliptical.9 4

Unity and Multiplicity in Liminal Phenomenology

I traced in broad strokes the schemata especially relating to the self-​showing of the thing in order to make present Sallis’ liminal phenomenology. Certainly, the tracing of the spacing of the self-​showing of things he performs is not 9 I am not expanding on the fourth moment in the second kind of schemata, “the look of things,” a schema that does not contribute to the self-​showing of things, but addresses the Greek eidos that surpasses the self-​showing of the thing. I also am not expanding on the third kind of schemata that addresses an open manifold related to ways in which, for instance, memory or phantasy contribute to determining, in various complex ways, the space within which a specific self-​showing occurs.

180 Vallega-Neu phenomenological in the traditional sense, because what he sets out with are not things themselves as they show themselves. Rather, what he traces is precisely how things first come to show themselves as themselves. In Force of Imagination, he explains how there occurs a passage from phenomenology to monstrology, the latter occurring by virtue of a tracing he also calls “remonstration.” He writes that “in remonstration one traces something that … only becomes manifest through the tracing” (fi 104). Thus, remonstration is originary, but it is also memorial in that what is traced originarily appears “as anterior to the tracing.” Hence, when Sallis traces the self-​showing of the thing from the sheer sense-​image through the horizons and to the elementals, the horizons of the thing come forth as always already belonging to the thing and the elementals come forth as always already encompassing the self-​showing of things.10 One could see an analogy between remonstrative thinking and what Heidegger calls Erdenken or “inventive thinking” in Contributions to Philosophy. In the case of Erdenken as well, there is nothing there before it is thought, but what is thought is first opened up in the very act of thought. However, Heidegger experiences Erdenken to be responsive to a call he comes to conceive as a historical necessity to think being in its withdrawal. What I find to initiate Heidegger’s thinking, is a sense of lack and urgency, hence an attunement or disposition—​and with it a spacing—​that is, if at all, only dimly lit. Heidegger’s thinking begins far removed from things. Sallis, on the other hand, sets out with the sense-​image. If there is a call in Sallis’ thinking, then it would have to lie in the shining of the sense-​image, in this ephemeral duplicitous image that acquires density and depth only by force of imagination. It is because he sets out with the sense-​image (although this image is not yet the thing that will come to show itself as itself) and thus with a certain presence that is as well an opening to speech or logos, that Sallis’ thinking can be called phenomenological. Beginning with an all-​encompassing first kind of schema and then with the sense-​image might seem to suggest a tendency to privileging unity and the singular in Sallis’ discourse, even though I have been drawing attention to a certain mixing of the singular and the plural in his thinking. Unity is evoked especially by situating the phenomenological or monstrological approach in the lineage of metaphysics, which is expressed especially in the first kind of schema marked by the all-​encompassing spacing of sense into sensibleness and significancy. Furthermore, Sallis’ discourse does not set out with a multiplicity 10

See Sallis, li 176, for a summary of this tracing.

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of sense-​images; rather, the initial sense-​image is presented in the singular. Certainly, with the sense-​image one cannot strictly speak either of singular or plural, since counting presupposes some thing showing itself as itself that can be counted. However, for Sallis, the sense-​image will reveal itself as the frontal aspect of a thing that comes to be objectified with its horizons being drawn toward the locus of presence. The singularity of the thing correlates with a certain comportment of who will emerge as the perceiver of the thing. As Sallis notes, as a thing comes to show itself, “one is oneself gathered to the self-​showing of the thing” (fi 198). Furthermore, the apprehension of the thing requires a certain detachment: “the thing must be released to its self-​showing” (fi 198). However, he also notes that in releasing a thing to its self-​showing, one’s belonging to the elemental configuration of that thing must be relinquished (fi 198). Thus, whoever comes to be determined as the perceiver of the thing, prior to this perception, somehow belongs to the elemental configuration of what comes to be determined as a thing. The elemental configuration addressed here includes natural elementals like earth, sky, and other elementals at play in specific places and moments, which will each come to situate the thing against a certain background. If we pay attention to the withdrawing aspects of the thing that comes to show itself, we can notice that the thing is exceeded from within, so to speak, by a multiplicity that cannot be clearly demarcated. For instance, the absent aspects of the thing, brought into play through the lateral horizons, bind a limitless possibility of aspects to the self-​showing thing. This is even truer of the peripheral horizons and the elementals, even if we take earth and sky as the most encompassing elementals.11 Thus, multiplicity lies in hiding, in the 11

Sallis’ insight into a multiplicity of temporalities is that it is tied to the multiplicity brought in through the horizons of a thing as well as through the elements encompassing the thing. This is a place where he clearly differentiates himself from Heidegger’s thinking of time in Being and Time, in that Heidegger limits time to psychic time, whereas in Sallis’ account, psychic time is only one of many forms of temporalities. This is linked to the fact that the discourse of imagination does not privilege the human being, but sets out from things such that time proves to be constituted “in the very midst of the self-​showing, a time so interlaced with manifestation that it is as if woven from the very depth of sensible things” (fi 189). Sallis distinguishes various temporalities at work in the self-​showing of things. The lateral horizons indicate aspects of a thing that it could have shown or might show, implying a proximal past and future. As to the peripheral horizons, he elaborates especially on instrumental horizons that indicate past and future. The drafting of imagination—​by virtue of which a thing comes to show itself as itself—​is also temporal, coinciding with the time of the self-​showing of things. As mentioned previously, the engagement of imagination is both originary and memorial: it gathers the horizons and brings them into being as if they had already been there. It is temporal in that is protracts

182 Vallega-Neu possible aspects of the thing or in those aspects of the thing that constitute its depth. Although these are “of” the frontal aspect of the thing, they can be said to precede the present aspect. The horizons of the thing are protracted, drawn toward the locus of presence by being withdrawn, retracted from the occurrence of presence (fi 25). This withdrawal operative in the coming to presence of the thing thus has a different character than the withdrawal of being in Heidegger that recedes in the presencing of the thing. Heidegger—​from at least the 1930s onwards—​ thinks of things or beings as emerging from out of the withdrawal of being, so much that he thinks of things as being abandoned by being, lacking even presence. When he thinks either back or ahead into the possibility of beings being “seiender”—​“more being” or fuller in being, such as in “The Origin of the Work of Art” or later essays like “The Thing” and “Building, Dwelling, Thinking”—​ Heidegger never focuses on the present aspect of the thing, but, rather, on the world it gathers; i.e., on its relationality. Sallis thinks of things neither from a movement of withdrawal or seclusion, nor from being as presencing. He thinks of things from the surface of their concrete appearing, a surface that has a depth that emerges in the spacing of the image. There is a place in Sallis’ thinking where he addresses a withdrawal and seclusion akin to Heidegger’s notion of being as withdrawal. He addresses it not in relation to things, but in relation to the proper elementals that relate to human propriety. 5

Proper Elementals

The notion of the “proper” addresses “what is one’s own.” In fact, it addresses “one’s ownmost” (li 203). What is one’s own is not rooted in some subjectivity, but, rather, in dynamic relationality. In Force of Imagination, Sallis sketches how proprietary manifestation—​i.e., how we are revealed to ourselves—​“takes the horizons to the locus of presence by retracting them and thus setting them apart from the site of presence. Sallis distinguishes not only various temporalities related to the self-​ showing of things, but also—​when viewing time as an elemental—​various places of time. This leads him to the notion of polytopical time, whereby “Time is borne and offered not only by things but also, above all, by the elementals, by some singularly, by others in their concurrence” (fi 192). Although Sallis grants a precedence to the temporality of the sun, he notes that the sun is not an originary time and thus does not efface the polytopical character of time. He names, for instance, the seasons, the time of days, and the time of the snowfall, noting as well that the temporalities of these elements have a certain texture (fi 194).

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place by way of a certain reflection of oneself back from something else” (fi 211). A certain reflection back on oneself may occur from things, as when Merleau-​ Ponty writes that a painter feels himself looked at by things. The reflection may occur in an instrumental context—​e.g., relating to the peripheral horizon of an instrument like a wrench—​that belongs to a given instrumental horizon—​e.g., of plumbing such that one becomes manifest to oneself as a plumber. Proprietary manifestation may happen in even more complex ways in the relation a violinist has to her violin. However, the primary proprietary manifestation happens either from the elementals or from others (fi 212). Proper elementals, then, address dimensions of human propriety in which the proper is both exceeded and given to itself. This means that the relation between the human and the elementals is bidirectional: “… in one direction, each elemental indefinitely exceeds the properly human” (li 204). In the opposite direction, there occurs “a recoil back upon the human; thereby one is disclosed to oneself as enfolded, encompassed, by the elemental” (li 204). Thus, when one is drawn out beyond oneself—​for instance, in contemplating the sea—​one is at the same time restored to oneself.12 The natural elementals Sallis has in mind are in the first place earth and sky, and then, for instance, a storm. Walking the earth under the sky is proper to humans. However, the natural elements as well indefinitely exceed the proper of humans, installing impropriety within the proper. Sallis writes: “Because it is in relation to the natural elemental that the proper is thus shaped […], this elemental can also be appropriately termed a proper elemental” (li 204). The spacing of the proper elemental “consists in the circulation between finite and infinite by way of excess or expansiveness, on the one side, and self-​disclosive encompassment, on the other” (li 205). Its schema is an ellipse without a precisely determinable border that, by virtue of repetition, may mutate into a spiral. In the chapter on proper elementals in Logic of Imagination, Sallis will come to distinguish four proper elementals: the natural elements, the sheltering retreat, birth, and death. All of them “delimit, in their transgressive bearing on the proper, the space of propriety” (fi 215). Birth and death determine the proper through what Sallis calls a “texturing.” This texturing addresses what I would call a bodily dimension that precedes and permeates the arising of the sense-​image as well as the coming to show itself of things. All proper elementals mark, in different ways, human finitude.13 The relation to natural elements is only one way in which human finitude is revealed. 12 13

Sallis speaks of ecstasy in abiding with elementals (li 204). Sallis introduces proper elementals with the question of human finitude, which takes him to a discussion of the relation between the finite and the infinite that (with respect to traditional accounts) appears in a transformed way in the relation of the human to the indefinite elementals.

184 Vallega-Neu Birth and death also reveal human finitude and mark human propriety. Birth can never be reached by memory and yet textures the properly human through a place to which we belong and above all through speech (li 232–​234). Death is both ownmost and othermost (li 241). It is one’s ownmost possibility that “suspends all other possibilities in the most radical way” (li 238). (This is reminiscent, of course, of Heidegger’s analysis of death in Being and Time.) The proper elemental I would like to look at a little more closely is the one called “sheltering retreat.” Sallis addresses it as well as “seclusion or secludedness.” He first introduces it in relation to the gaze of the other in which “there is discernible in reflection from the other human a trace of an infinite other than that of nature” (li 210) a trace that indicates “a depth that as such is secured against presence” (li 211). But he develops seclusion especially in relation to the surging of images and memories, and, indeed, as a seclusion preceding the emerging of the sense-​image. He writes that the particular finitude marked by seclusion “lies in being exposed to the upsurge of images—​and indeed not only of images—​stemming from one knows not where, images sheltered from the probings of proper apprehension” (li 212). It is in his discussion of seclusion that I find Sallis’ thinking closest to Heidegger’s account of the event as addressed in his non-​public writings, even if Sallis does not refer explicitly to Heidegger’s thinking of the event.14 Heidegger’s turn toward withdrawal and concealment seeks out a spacing that would allow precisely the free arising of a thinking and saying of the event. For Heidegger, the event would occur out of the abyss of the truth of being first of all as the surging of the word, but also as the rising of things into being such that beings are “more being” (seiender). This requires that the poet or thinker be attuned or disposed out of the abyssal clearing of truth. Similarly, Sallis addresses disposition or attunement as occurring out of seclusion, and understands this disposition or attunement as being prior to and determining our relation to things. I here quote a pertinent paragraph in almost its total length: Yet seclusion engenders not only fitting words, prompted memories, phantasies, and dreams; from behind the invisible veil, releasing what it will, it disposes humans in one way or another, gives them a certain bearing, a certain inclination, toward things and toward other elementals. … It attunes each in a certain register, and it is precisely in this state 14

There is an unspecified reference to past accounts of seclusion when Sallis writes: “It has been called darkness” and “it has also been called unruly” (li 216). Finally, he tells us, it has also been called ground, a ground that has “become abyss” (li 217).

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of attunement, from out of it, that humans then—​and only then—​come to apprehend things. It is from out of—​within the spacing of—​this disposition that even the most direct and primary relation to presence, that of the sense-​image, takes place. In its antecedence, disposition forms the proper by deforming it; and as such it constitutes the distinctive texture that belongs to seclusion. (li 218) Toward the end of the section on seclusion, Sallis relates disposition to the body and calls for a redetermination from disposition of the body—​or rather of “corporeity”—​that bears similarities to Heidegger’s thematization of the lived body in the Zollikon Seminars. Corporeity is not “simply present,” Sallis writes. Indeed its resources “are deployed from out of concealment” (li 230). Corporeity is disposed—​or, to say it the other way around, disposition takes place in corporeity—​such that when we look at things, our eyes are disposed to see in a certain perspective. It is, then, Sallis writes (hinting at Merleau-​ Ponty), “that things, as it were, look back at us” (li 230). Thus, in his account, Sallis returns to sense, but now in direction of the perceiver; he returns to the “not simply present” corporeity such that out of concealment attunements dispose the very ways in which we will relate to the sense-​image prior to any relation to things. 6

Conclusion

I noted earlier how the relation humans have to non-​presence or withdrawal has a distinctly different character than the specific absence at play in the sense-​image as Sallis traces it in his monstrological approach. The seclusion determining human propriety has more the character of an originary and engendering seclusion that predetermines and predisposes the relation to things. The non-​present, receding, or possible aspects of the thing showing itself, as well as the natural elementals and sometimes instrumental relations forming the peripherals horizons of the thing, all remain of the present thing in a way that does not allow us to see them as originary or engendering presence “from one knows not where.” And yet, human disposition out of seclusion predisposes our relation to the sense-​image even before a thing shows itself as itself. I wonder, then, if and how disposition is at work in what Sallis calls the most comprehensive, all-​ encompassing schema marked by the word sense: the schema that indicates both sensibleness and significancy. To what extent is the significancy of—​or the meaning operative in—​the sense-​image related to the seclusion exceeding

186 Vallega-Neu and determining the proper of humans? Furthermore, what happens when, as Sallis writes, the thing is “released into its self-​showing” while one is at the same time “gathered to the self-​showing of the thing” (fi 198)? To what extent does the relation to seclusion preceding and dispositionally determining the relation to the sense-​image determine the sense of the thing that is coming to show itself as itself? This leads me to another set of questions: Could there be, in relation to things, plants, animals, instruments, institutions, buildings, colors, sounds, etc., other ways in which human propriety is exceeded and given to itself? That is, could human propriety be exceeded and given to itself not only in relation to proper elementals, but also in relation to various things and events in their dispersed concurrences? Could the human be given to itself as fragmented, incomplete, and dispersed in relation to a multiplicity of things and events as well as to what Sallis calls elementals? Furthermore, could not only other humans manifest a trace of seclusion withdrawn from presence but also animals and generally living and non-​living things? Perhaps their specific “textures” might inadvertently and silently “seep” into the finite textures marking our corporeity and dispositions. And this may occur prior to our being gathered toward the thing coming to show itself as itself, prior also to a sense of propriety. These questions highlight multiplicity rather than unity, dispersion rather than gathering, as well as the absences and silences constituting the web of cacophonies and symphonies amongst which I find lives, things, and events to happen. I would count Sallis’ thinking amongst the symphonies. It is an open-​ended symphony, rich and inspiring, full of surprises, both delicate and forceful.

Bibliography

Heidegger, Martin. Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis). Edited by Friedrich-​ Wilhelm von Herrmann. Gesamtausgabe vol. 65. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1985. In English: Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event). Translation by Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-​Neu. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012. Heidegger, Martin. Zur Sache des Denkens. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1969. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Götzendämmerung, in Sämtliche Werke; Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. 6. Edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1980.

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Elemental Ecology: Reading John Sallis in an Age of Earth Crisis Jason M. Wirth The newest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (ipcc) gives us a little over a decade to change radically how we live and consume or risk a “catastrophic” 2-​degree centigrade average rise in global temperatures. Although this would be bad for most everybody, it would continue to impact the poor disproportionately. In a sense, our relationship to the earth has come to a fork: either the powerful relinquish dramatically how they dwell upon the earth or human dwelling becomes increasingly precarious, starting with the least powerful. “Attention to power asymmetries and unequal opportunities for development, among and within countries is key to adopting 1.5°C-​compatible development pathways that benefit all populations (high confidence).”1 This is one of the many documents that point, each in its own way, to the need for a fundamental reorientation. This ecological conversion guides my appreciative reading of John Sallis’ own call for what amounts to an elemental earth revolution. 1

On Not Being at Home in the Interpreted World

In the final chapter of Logic of Imagination, Sallis reviews the “cosmological turn.” It commenced, according to Sallis, with Galileo’s interruption of the ancient view of the starry heavens above as ethereal, orderly, and immutable. He writes: “The decisiveness and indeed abruptness with which Galileo gave

1 J. Roy, P. Tschakert, H. Waisman, S. Abdul Halim, P. Antwi-​Agyei, P. Dasgupta, B. Hayward, M. Kanninen, D. Liverman, C. Okereke, P.F. Pinho, K. Riahi, and A.G. Suarez Rodriguez, “Sustainable Development, Poverty Eradication and Reducing Inequalities,” Global Warming of 1.5°C. An IPCC Special Report on the Impacts of Global Warming of 1.5°C above Pre-​industrial Levels and Related Global Greenhouse Gas Emission Pathways, in the Context of Strengthening the Global Response to the Threat of Climate Change, Sustainable Development, and Efforts to Eradicate Poverty, ipcc Report, 2018, 449.

© Jason M. Wirth, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004507098_014

188 Wirth voice to the new vision of the cosmos stemmed from the fact that his discoveries and thus the conclusions he drew from them were directly linked to his constructing a telescope and turning it to the heaven” (li 248). His discovery of the moons of Jupiter, for instance, demonstrated that “not all heavenly bodies revolve around the earth” (li 250) and hence broke decisively with the optimism of Ptolemaic geocentrism. Along with Copernicus and Kepler, Galileo sundered our reliance on the Ptolemaic “natural vision” and replaced it with a new view that “constituted a passing of sky over into cosmos in the sense of a dissolution of sky into cosmos” (li 251). Hubble and others would later discover the utter sublimity of the vastness of space—​“so enormous as to resist comprehension” (li 255). Galileo could not have imagined that the Milky Way was just one galaxy among “at least ten billion others” (li 255). The Milky Way itself is comprised of at least a hundred billion stars. The sun, once thought to revolve around a proud earth in the center of the universe, is but a speck in a galaxy that itself is only a slightly bigger speck. Monstrosity does not only concern the sublimity of scale, but also formations like dark matter, dark or vacuum energy, and black holes that as such resist perception and “natural vision.”2 Elemental sky did not, therefore, altogether disappear into the cosmos, but rather a “supplement” was revealed; namely, “human comportment to the sky comes to include two opposed moments: on the one side, it is granted its place as sensibly framing the self-​showing of things, while, on the other side, it is released so as to pass into cosmos and thus be dissolved as sky” (li 252). Most germane to my concerns, the earth is also one of the “natural elementals” that is supplemented. Although it remains “manifestly the abode of humans,” Galilean cosmology “robs the earth of its stability and sets it in motion. It becomes a planet rotating on its axis as it swings through its orbit around the sun” (li 252). The vast scale of the cosmos expands this to monstrous dimensions. As the scale and monstrosity of the cosmos present themselves, it no longer makes sense philosophically to speak of subject and object. In the self-​showing of the scale of the cosmos, the imagination also inherits a monstrous supplement. As Sallis writes: “With the passing of sky over the cosmos, it comes to 2 Monstrology is a discourse concerned with “showing [monstrare], while also alluding to the monstrosities to which such discourse will inevitably be exposed: that in which nonsense becomes interior to, rather than the opposite of, sense.” And this is “A discourse that would inscribe the showing of things themselves cannot but transgress the limits of mere explication and violate what was to have been the principle of all principles. The inception of such a discourse marks the passage of phenomenology over into monstrology” (fi 42, 104).

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yoke together in their difference the persistent human vision of the sky with the vision that passes over the cosmos, leaving the sky to its dissolution” (li 274). The point is not to further humiliate thinking by demonstrating that it is an infinitesimal speck in an incomprehensible vastness. Rather than “self-​deprecation and nostalgia,” it deconstructs the duality of intelligibility and sensibility, and further enhances elemental sense, evoking wonder and prompting questioning (li 277–​278). It does not diminish the human, but rather liberates it. Thus, the cosmological turn does not disinherit us from the earth, which is “manifestly the abode of humans,” but rather confirms its elementality beyond any and all anthropocentricism and geocentrism. The reign of the Anthropocene and our boundless transformation of the earth into human wealth—​our appropriation and subjugation of the earth as property—​also confirms this, albeit not by inspiring wonder and thought, but rather with ecological disaster. The earth is practicing a kind of elemental eminent domain, a self-​showing in which it is reclaiming what we have claimed as property, clarifying that the earth does not belong to us, but that we belong to the earth. Bruno Latour in his remarkable 2013 Gifford lectures, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, concurs that Galileo made it possible to move from a “closed world to an infinite universe.”3 The earth was not the center of the universe, just a planet among planets. The ecological crisis, however, also drew Latour to see that the opposite is also true, albeit in a new way. He frames this reversal of a reversal by turning to Lovelock and his Gaia thesis (a contemporary version of the ancient anima mundi). This time, we humans are not shocked to learn that the Earth is no longer at the center and that it, in fact, whirls aimlessly around the Sun; no, if we are so deeply shocked it is because the Earth should indeed be at the center of the universe and because we are imprisoned in its tiny local atmosphere. Suddenly, as if a brake had been applied to all forward movements, Galileo’s expanding universe is interrupted and Koyré’s motto should now be read in reverse: ‘from the infinite universe back to the limited closed cosmos.’ Recall all the fictional characters you have sent away! Tell spaceship Enterprise to come back home.4

3 Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Polity, 2017), 77. 4 Ibid, 80.

190 Wirth Although it is true that the earth is a planet among seemingly countless planets in an infinite universe, it is the only planet to which we have evolved to credibly call home. But even though it is our home in that it is our abode, it does not follow that it is our home in the sense that we own it. Moreover, it is not our home as a thing. It is our elemental home and, as such, it is it does not reduce to our representations, blueprints, property maps, states, empires, plans, or hopes. It is our elemental abode, but we abide courtesy of its elementally mysterious largesse. How then can we think elemental earth ecology? Ecology is a discourse on the οἶκος—​a discourse on our home. It is not a home that belongs to us—​to think that it does is to repress the elemental and monstrous Unheimlichkeit of the earth beyond our world. The earth does not belong to us even though we make our worldly home upon it. We belong to it and live within its elemental hospitality. The sheltering of the earth—​just like the cosmological turn—​ reveals a sovereign elemental indifference to the prolongation of our dwelling. That we are no longer the center of a desperately optimistic Ptolemaic universe conceals the even more difficult realization that the earth and the cosmos that grants human dwelling is not in any way invested in it. Background monstrosity is increasingly coming to the fore as climatic conditions can no longer be dismissed as the neutral scenery against which the drama of human history unfolds. Our thoughtless reliance on “normal vision” is at the heart of our many stupidities about—​and de facto tolerance of—​climate change. Earth monstrosity is unsettling our self-​absorbed economics and politics, and we can no longer—​if we ever honestly could—​take the earth for granted. Despite the occasional natural disasters, for a long time we generally assumed that the earth was on balance hospitable to human habitation. Now, the limits of its habitability intimate themselves. Climate change is not simply the calculations and observations about a rise in the global average temperature, but rather a monstrous revelation, a revelation of monstrosity: we, the strangest of all creatures, enjoy a monstrous hospitality and the monstrosity of that hospitality can no longer be banished to the background—​or, if it is, it is no longer just the death of wonder and thought, but also a species wide suicide. 2

Stone Scape

In his beautiful book Stone, Sallis reflects on the presence of stone in a Greek temple, a work whose world has withdrawn:

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Like the earth to which it belongs, stone shows itself only when it is brought into the open as self-​secluding, as closed off, as self-​closed. That is what the artwork and only the artwork can do; this is precisely what the temple does precisely by its way of being made of stone. (st 114) The obdurate opacity of stone when deployed in this way shines forth in its opacity, allowing one to sense the “peculiar depth” of the earth (fi 180). As Sallis notes, “stone—​to a degree perhaps unequaled by any other kind of thing—​is of earth” (fi 179). The revelation of its vital thickness perhaps once spoke to the remote presence of the gods. Alternatively, if one thinks of the placement of stone and gravel in the Japanese karesansui (枯山水)—​“dry landscape” or, more literally, as I shall discuss further in the final section, dry mountains and waters—​one can see the density and silence of stones drawing us into an awareness of our own density and silence. Humanus, after all, has its etymological and ontological roots in humus—​in the ground and soil of the earth—​ rather than in the heavens among the gods.5 As François Berthier hearkens to the famous Kyoto dry landscape garden in Ryōanji, inquiring into its “silent words,” it responds without surrendering its silence: I am nothing but blocks of stone on pieces of gravel. I am nothing but weight and silence, inertia and density. Nothing will ever learn my secret, or even whether I contain one. The only thing that can penetrate me is the silent cry of the cicada that pierces the heart of summer. Be content to taste the raw beauty of my opaque flesh; look at me without saying a word and ask me nothing; be silent and try, through my hermetic body, to find yourself.6 The silent cry of the cicada alludes to one of Bashō’s best-​known haiku (“Prevailing silence—​/​And penetrating the stone /​The cicada’s cry”). The silence of the stone is not that stones are quiet while cicadas buzz and hum in the summer heat, but rather that the silence of the stone invites one into the  monstrous silence of the earth itself. This too “is what the artwork and only the artwork can do.” However paradoxically, does not the climate emergency allow us to sense that we have been deaf to the speaking of stones, despite their artful arrangement 5 This echoes all the way down to its hypothetical archaic Proto-​ Indo-​ European root, dhghem, earth. 6 François Berthier, Reading Zen in the Rocks: The Japanese Dry Landscape Garden, trans. Graham Parkes. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 41.

192 Wirth so that their silent voice could come forth as the elemental silence of the earth itself? Even in organizing a garden, which begins first with the selection and arrangement of stone, we are counseled in the Sakuteiki (The Garden Making Record)—​the anonymous Heian period classic and perhaps the oldest extant book on gardening in the world—​to learn to listen to the stones and follow their “desires.” In a section called the “Secret Teachings on Setting Stones,” we are instructed to “choose a particularly splendid stone and set it as the Main Stone. Then, following the request of the first stone, set others accordingly.”7 Hearkening to stone allows the garden to come forth as an attunement to earth. There is, of course, nothing to hear. One of the many gifts of Sallis’ writing and thinking is his insistence that there is no such thing as the earth. It is not something to see or identify. In this vein, he reflects: To turn back to the earth is to rediscover this archaic earth that will always have given nourishment and support. If philosophy at the limit would carry out this turn so as now to remain true to the earth, then it must recover the earth as elemental, undoing all that would serve—​and has served—​to reduce the elementals to things. All would hinge on declaring: though all things are earth, earth is not a thing. (fi 174) The earth is not the mother of things as if it were a master technician. It is not a big thing that makes all other things. It is rather the “from which of manifestation” itself (fi 177). The stone in the archaic temple or the stone and gravel of the karesansui are a “visage” of that which “displays its secret strength but in such a way as to keep it secret in the very display” (fi 177). The “physiognomy” of the stone defies “every effort to lay it out in utter transparency before one or the other of the senses” (fi 177). If stone, like all manifestations of the earth, is both vulnerable, subject not only to coming to be but coming to pass, the “resistance” of earth itself is “radical,” supporting and withdrawing all that it manifests while itself remaining closed off and withdrawn (fi 178). Unlike the sea—​and certainly utterly unlike anywhere else in the cosmos—​ the earth nonetheless is the humus of humanity. Its support is our support, and its silence is our silence. The earth is our unheimlich home. Nonetheless, its self-​ seclusion can itself recede when we become absorbed with the things of our lives and earth. When we are lost in quotidian affairs, the “earth remains unobtrusive and inconspicuous” (fi 180). Despite the oblivion of our absorption,

7 Sakuteiki: Visions of the Japanese Garden, trans. Jirō Takei and Marc P. Keane (Boston: Tuttle Publishing, 2001), 184.

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the earth, without surrendering its self-​seclusion, “can obtrude in such a way as to show itself as prodigious” (fi 180). Just as the sea brings the land into relief or lightning illuminates the night sky, the ecological emergency exposes the Unheimlichkeit of our humus. This is not our earth, yet it is also the only earth that we have. It is time to hearken to the stones and to place new stones as sentinels for a too long postponed earth conversion and earth awakening. If the earth is archaic, it is not because it has an identifiable ἀρχή. Its support is also its simultaneous self-​seclusion. In this sense, it is anarchic. As we huddle into our cities, states, provinces, and nations, the stones proclaim no political affiliations. The ecological crisis knows no political or economic boundaries. Our insistence on national and economic boundaries and wall building—​ the silence of the stone in response to insipid calls like “Make America Great Again” is deafening—​we now know will be the end of us. Our ideological fixations have made it all but impossible to hear the silent call of the anarchic. We habitually dismiss it as degeneration into chaos, destruction, and a dark night when all stones are black. Yet, we can clearly see that the official alternatives are not only ineffective, but also so deeply ingrained that we can more easily imagine the end of any humus that supports humanity than we can imagine viable alternatives to global capitalism and its state supports. Philosophical anarchism of the kind advocated by thinkers like Kropotkin eschews centralization and domination while distributing authority broadly, complexly, and cooperatively. In his unfortunately little known, but quite spirited, 1974 work, Communalism: From Its Origins to the Twentieth Century, the West Coast poet and philosophical anarchist Kenneth Rexroth acknowledges the visionary importance of anarchists like Kropotkin: It is right that ecology should have become so enormously popular at this juncture. It is not just that man is destroying the planet on which he lives, and driving himself toward extinction by mining his environment and reducing all business enterprise to the form of an extractive industry. The human race is a certain kind of species, developed in a specific environment, with specific relations internally, man to man, and externally to other species. Had this situation not existed, the human race had not evolved, and had not continued within a narrow range of modification, man would have become extinct. The present relation of man to his environment and man to man has become so unlike the optimum necessary for the evolution of the species that humanity as we know it cannot endure … This is what all the schools and tendencies of the libertarian and communal tradition have in common, a primary emphasis on man as a member of an organic community, a biota, in creative, non-​exploitative

194 Wirth relationship with his fellows and his environment. The communist-​anarchists Élisée Reclus8 and Peter Kropotkin were both geographers and, if anyone was, they were also the founders of the science of ecology.9 Rexroth, whose dedication to ecological issues goes all the way back to some of his earliest published poetry, wrote these words in 1974 when few people could appreciate the gravity of climate change. However, Exxon and its scientists knew how catastrophic it would be already in the decade that Rexroth published these words. Recently, leaked documents from 1988 demonstrate that Shell also knew that its business model would have devastating consequences.10 Since both corporations knew how bad it would be, did they spread the word? Of course not! They spent an estimated two billion dollars in an orchestrated campaign of misdirection and lies.11 Still his words sound prophetic: “It is either utopia or catastrophe.”12 Ecologists are geographers, those who study and transcribe the earth itself. It is to write—​γρᾰφειν—​of and from γαῖα itself. In so doing, it is to advocate for a new earth and a new people. Ecology is not just being at home in our world because the global world—​Arendt’s ever shrinking desert that erases the space between peoples and the earth itself, the great monocultural desert—​ has clearly unmoored itself from the earth and done so ruinously. 3

Landscape

In conclusion, I return to the problem of landscape. In a sense, this is to somehow imagine the monstrous ground upon which we walk and dwell. Sallis notes that: The sense of landscape is intimately connected to the manner in which the earth shows itself. To this self-​showing there belongs not only the 8

Jacques Élisée Reclus (1830–​1905), like Kropotkin, was primarily a geographer and like the latter was also banished for anarchist activism. Reclus is the author of a nineteen volume work, La Nouvelle géographie universelle: la terre et les homes. 9 Kenneth Rexroth, Communalism: From its Origins to the Twentieth Century (New York: Seabury Press, 1974), xiii. 10 Benjamin Franta, “Shell and Exxon’s Secret 1980s Climate Change Warnings,” The Guardian, September 19, 2018. 11 Robert J. Brule, “The Climate Lobby: A Sectoral Analysis of Lobbying Spending on Climate Change in the USA, 2000 to 2016,” Climatic Change (2018) 149: 289–​303. 12 Rexroth, Communalism, xv.

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indication of a sealed-​off depth that does not come to light but also a distinctive boundedness. (sl 4–​5) Sallis writes of different ways of imagining landscape, different manners  of sensing the earth. In his turn to Schelling, for example, Sallis takes heed of Schelling’s undoing in the Freedom essay of the traditional understanding of ground as a discrete and discernible cause: “Ground is conceived, then, as utterly different from the classical conception of ground—​as becomes evident in Schelling’s descriptions of it as longing, as the unruly, as the darkness of the depth” (rn 42). How, then, do we dwell upon such self-​enclosed yet—​at least for now—​supportive ground? How to think the humus of humanity? Of the various senses of landscape, I would like to return to the sense at which I hinted at earlier; namely, karesansui or dry landscape The kanji for sansui (landscape) are made up of the kanji for mountain (山) and water (水). The karesansui—​which literally involves no actual water whatsoever—​ evokes the movement and vitality of water solely through the use of stone. It does this by allowing the stone’s own vitality to evoke the energy of water. The kanji for rock is 岩 while the kanji for stone is 石. In the upper part of the kanji for rock you can see the kanji for mountain (山), indicating that stones remaining in their original mountain location are rocks. The dry landscape removes rocks from the mountains and places them as stones to call forth the presentation of the dynamic interplay of the elements of mountain and water; e.g., between form and emptiness. The obdurate density of stone makes it a good example of what Mahāyāna Buddha Dharma simply calls “form.” Stones change so slowly that they are ready figures of the almost imperceptibly slow pace of change on a geological scale. They appear within the limited lifespans of their human viewers as if they will also remain true to form. Yet stones—​masters of holding to their form—​are also “empty” or kū (空), a kanji that also means the infinitely recessive spatiality of the sky. When the Heart Sutra, the pith of Mahāyāna Buddhist practice, claims that “form is emptiness and emptiness is form,” it is counseling us to become aware of their mutual reliance. Yes, a stone is a stone, but it is not just a stone. Emptiness is often associated with water, which has no form of its own, but which can take the shape of any form. Listening to stone is the capacity to detect, even in its obduracy, the dynamic and mutual interdependence of its form and emptiness. As Dōgen reminds us, “the mountains are always walking.” Dōgen—​who made the prior statement in a fascicle dramatically entitled the Sansuikyō, the Mountains and Waters Sutra (or, Mountains and Waters themselves as sutra)—​often speaks of the interplay of mountains and waters, form and emptiness, as the Great Earth. For

196 Wirth example: “Here, everywhere, right now is mountains, river, and earth.”13 Or: “The mountains, rivers, and the great earth are all the ocean of buddha nature.”14 Sansui is also the Japanese pronunciation of the same characters that comprise the Chinese word for landscape in the sense of landscape painting. Sallis’ consideration of Guo Xi’s masterpiece of shan-​shui painting, Early Spring (1072) is instructive. In this context, he writes: A large-​scale dynamic tension or opposition that also plays a major role in laying out the space of the picture is that between the mountain and the waters. The mountain soars upward to the heights, whereas water flows downward and spreads out horizontally. Though displaying virtual movement, the mountain is massively solid and unmoving, whereas water is transparent, fluid, perpetually in motion. (sl 131) Yet, the mountain is always walking and water too always has its physiognomy, even though it is always that of what gives it shape. One might be tempted, however, to look longingly to China from the chains of our long obsession with the eidetic abstracted from the sensible, but that would be a mistake. On the one hand, Sallis unearthed or exhumed the problem of sense within Western lineages of thought, beginning with his radical exhumation of the Greeks. On the other hand, Chinese painting in its own way was trying to crack its growing oblivion to the self-​seclusion of the earth. Mark Elvin reports that elephants once roamed through much of China, largely to perish due to habitat degradation and loss. Chinese spiritual, aesthetic, and philosophical values did not prevail: There seems to be no case for thinking that, some details apart, the Chinese anthropogenic environment was developed and maintained in the way it was over the long run for more than three millennia because of particularly characteristic Chinese beliefs or perceptions. Or, at least, not in comparison with the massive effects of the pursuit of power and profit.15

13 14 15

Dōgen, “Baika [Plum Blossoms],” Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō: Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, ed. Kazuaki Tanahashi (Boston and London: Shambhala, 2010), 585. Dōgen, “Busshō [Buddha Nature],” Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō: Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, 238. Mark Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 471.

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The Chinese statesmen dreamed of retiring to the countryside, tending garden, and writing poetry. Many were enraptured by the legend of the Seven Worthies of the Bamboo Grove, the Third Century Daoists who fled the corruption of the Wei State and lived among the bamboo and drank wine, composed poetry and music, and debated philosophy with a lively wit—​what the Daoists of the time called qingtan (清談) or “pure conversation.” The grounds of Chan temples, Gary Snyder tells us, “became the last refuges of huge old trees; in fact the present-​day reconstruction of original forest cover in north China is done to a great extent by plotting the distribution of relict stands on temple grounds.”16 Shan-​shui painting was in part an exercise in trying to remember what we have been calling the humus of humanity; humus that includes all the beings—​sentient and insentient—​with whom we share our humus. François Jullien’s wonderful book on shan-​shui painting, Living Off Landscape, speaks not of scientific knowledge of the land, but rather of connivance, the kind of singular knowing tied, monstrously we could say, to the singularity of humus: Indeed, we end up suspecting that knowledge developed through science is but the visible side of a coin that exists only because of the ever-​present but separate conniving flipside. It is a shadowy knowledge that remains integrated in a milieu, that will not be drawn out of its condition, that separates no “me” from the “world,” and that remains beneath all exposition—​all explanation. It will not be abstracted from a “landscape.”17 Jullien is alert to the awakening force of shan-​shui painting, its self-​showing of a more primordial, non-​abstract, singular humus before our separation from it as dweller and dwelled upon. He claims that it is “through landscape and the connivance on my part that I discover in it I am reacquainted with the world at a more primordial level.”18 In a time when a large variety of creatures are vulnerable the world over, and life as we know it is increasingly coming under the threat of humanity alienated from its humus, Arendt’s world desert looms, threatening the singular milieus of the earth with global ubiquity and uniformity. In painting mountains and waters, Kuo Si in his Eleventh Century Advice on Landscape Painting gives an account of what, in these times of unfolding 16

Gary Snyder, The Great Clod: Notes and Memoirs on Nature and History in East Asia (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2016), 64. 17 François Jullien, Living Off Landscape: Or the Unthought-​of in Reason, trans. Pedro Rodriguez (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2018), 106. 18 Jullien, Living Off Landscape, 108.

198 Wirth ecological crisis, lies at the heart of not only shan-​shui painting, but also of connivance itself: If you wish to grasp their creation, there is no way more spiritual than love, no way finer than diligence, no way greater than wandering to your satiety or gazing to your fill. If all is ordered in detail in your bosom, your eye will not see the silk and your hand will be unaware of brush and ink, and through the immensity and vastness [of your mind] everything will become your own painting.19



Bibliography

Berthier, François. Reading Zen in the Rocks: The Japanese Dry Landscape Garden. Translated by Graham Parkes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Brule, Robert J. “The Climate Lobby: A Sectoral Analysis of Lobbying Spending on Climate Change in the USA, 2000 to 2016.” Climatic Change (2018) 149: 289–​303. Bush, Susan, and Hsio-​ yen Shih, editors. Early Chinese Texts on Painting. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985. Dōgen. Shōbōgenzō: Treasury of the True Dharma Eye. Edited by Kazuaki Tanahashi. Boston and London: Shambhala, 2010. Elvin, Mark. The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. Franta, Benjamin. “Shell and Exxon’s Secret 1980s Climate Change Warnings.” The Guardian, September 19, 2018. Jullien, François. Living Off Landscape: Or the Unthought-​of in Reason. Translated by Pedro Rodriguez. London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2018. Latour, Bruno. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Polity, 2017. Rexroth, Kenneth. Communalism: From its Origins to the Twentieth Century. New York: Seabury Press, 1974. Roy, J., P. Tschakert, H. Waisman, S. Abdul Halim, P. Antwi-​Agyei, P. Dasgupta, B. Hayward, M. Kanninen, D. Liverman, C. Okereke , P.F. Pinho, K. Riahi, and A.G. Suarez Rodriguez. “Sustainable Development, Poverty Eradication and Reducing Inequalities,” Global Warming of 1.5°C. An IPCC Special Report on the Impacts of

19

Susan Bush and Hsio-​yen Shih, eds., Early Chinese Texts on Painting (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 166.

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Global Warming of 1.5°C above Pre-​industrial Levels and Related Global Greenhouse Gas Emission Pathways, in the Context of Strengthening the Global Response to the Threat of Climate Change, Sustainable Development, and Efforts to Eradicate Poverty, ipcc Report, 2018. Snyder, Gary. The Great Clod: Notes and Memoirs on Nature and History in East Asia. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2016. Takei, Jirō, and Marc P. Keane, translators. Sakuteiki: Visions of the Japanese Garden. Boston: Tuttle Publishing, 2001.

­c hapter 13

Force of Imagination as Critical Turning Point: Sallis and the Future of Philosophy Bernard Freydberg What constitutes a turning point in the history of philosophy? I think of turning points as changes in the logos; the language with which philosophy is ­practiced. Beginning from the modern period, Descartes certainly effected a turning point with the installation of the language of reason alone; i.e., the language in which pure intelligibility provided both the measure for thought and, for its empiricist opponents, the focus toward which to aim their critiques. For Hegel in his mammoth history of philosophy, Descartes’ thought signals “land” for us, after millennia of swimming and sailing about more or less randomly. This turning point gave rise to two centuries of great philosophy, perhaps the most influential of all. Even in the most radical reaches of contemporary thought, strong traces of this era remain. The still provocative name of this battleground is metaphysics. Kant provides another turning point, insofar as he transforms the language of philosophy in terms of its long uncontested logical parameters. He characterized the prior two centuries as a conflict between dogmatism (in its ultimate form, Leibniz) and empiricism (in its ultimate form, Hume). In his language, dogmatism consisted entirely of judgments that were analytic (or virtually analytic). Empiricism consisted entirely of judgments that were synthetic. The former were regarded as a priori. The latter were regarded as a posteriori. There was no court before which the competing claims could be evaluated. In other words, metaphysics was fated to remain a battleground upon which no victory was possible. His solution(s) to this conundrum were manifold, but for purposes of the issue of transformative language, it suffices to note that synthetic a priori judgments served to provide what rescue could be offered to metaphysics. This rescue, as you well know, limits ontology to objects of sensible experience and declares God, the soul, and the world to be objects beyond any possible experience. This mutation, of course, was not and is not universally cheered, but even those radical 20th century logical empiricists argued in these Kantian terms, if only to rail against them.

© Bernard Freydberg, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004507098_015

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While there have surely been dramatic developments in philosophy since, there has been nothing like a refashioning of language since Kant’s. Neither Nietzsche’s emphatically hurled thunderbolts nor the proudly pedestrian pragmatism of James have resulted in a new model. Husserl and Heidegger on the Continental side have surely given rise to new ways of philosophizing, just as Quine and Kripke have done on the Analytic side, but we find ourselves in a situation not altogether unlike Kant’s in this way: there appears to be no way philosophical logos can bridge the chasm between the two approaches. No doubt, Sallis’ language in Force of Imagination: The Sense of the Elemental (2000) may not seem well suited to serve as a turning point in the history of philosophy. It arises from an unmistakably Continental perspective, with no bouquets thrown to the majority Anglo-​Analytic side. It merges pre-​Socratic Greek strains, 20th and 21st century phenomenological strains, and poetic strains, the latter drawn primarily from English literature. However, I divine that it is this militantly English discourse that provides the kernel from which a major turning of thought can occur. At a crucial point in Force of Imagination: The Sense of the Elemental, Sallis discusses three prospective ways of addressing the task of philosophy at the limit; i.e., of philosophy that can no longer sustain the traditional sensible/​ intelligible distinction. In this regard, philosophy must release its tie to the intelligible. In so doing, its language must reflect this releasement and establish its bond to sense—​sense both in its classic meaning with its root in the Greek aisthêsis through its iteration in Sinnlichkeit and the sensation associated with British empiricism and in the doubled meaning that Sallis will propose. It is helpful to consider Sallis’ three ways of examining the task of philosophy at the limit in turn. The first is a remembrance of an old word: chora. As it occurs in Plato’s Timaeus, this “third thing” withdraws in order to allow anything at all to come forth. This word—​if it is a word—​points to a region anterior to the sensible/​intelligible distinction. In the dialogue, it is said to be graspable as if in a dream and therein only obscurely and with great difficulty. In Force of Imagination, Sallis speaks of it as “putting into play not only remembrance, but also—​in a perhaps unheard of sense—​imagination” (fi 37). The “perhaps” here can be read as a qualification of imagination as free of likeness, free of image, free of synthesis, free of (Schellingian) creation, folding back into darkness upon itself. One of the very last observations in the book echoes this way when Sallis speaks of a “nature before nature.” The second is phenomenology, which requires a more extensive treatment. More particularly, Sallis notes the approach to “the things themselves” proposed and enacted by Husserl, but tied to the move to to pragma auto in Plato’s

202 Freydberg Seventh Letter and in the Phaedrus. As a result, phenomenology becomes conceived of as pragmatology; i.e., as a return to the things we encounter. Sallis even locates this return in Descartes, who renounces his considerable book learning in order to study the nature to which he is already given over. Unlike the implicit endorsement of the unheard of sense of imagination in the remembrance of the chora, Sallis notes what he calls Derrida’s “accomplishment” of pointing out that the rigor of phenomenology rests upon “a massive metaphysical presupposition” of an assumed presence (fi 40). For the record, I do not credit this accomplishment at all. It would relieve us all of a great deal of labor if the proclamation of “massive metaphysical presuppositions” could render Husserl’s phenomenology somehow passé. And what a major burden would be lifted from our shoulders if this concern could be extended to the entire history of Western philosophy! Sallis endeavors to “save” phenomenology with two related moves. First, he speaks to a radicalization of phenomenology as pragmatology; i.e., as an apprehension of the things themselves. Then, he moves on to consider what he calls its mutation, in terms of which something irrefutably non-​present comes to show itself. This mutation, however, can find resonance in a radicalized notion of the Husserlian noema that reinterprets its role in perception by relocating it in the  realm of irreality. In this notion, the irreality of the noema—​as making possible the apprehension of anything at all—​is the counterpart of the remembered chora. It also preserves phenomenology’s descriptive function, insofar as directs itself to the very nature and possibility of appearance. Still further, it can be said of this notion too that it is a product of—​in a perhaps unheard of sense—​imagination. Crucially, Force of Imagination is a work of phenomenology in the most genuine and powerful sense. Sallis writes in one of the most resonant passages in recent thought that philosophy must “move from composition to manifestation” (fi 154). Search the index, and you will find that the word “cause” does not appear at all. It may be broadly correct to say that phenomenology is descriptive rather than causal, but description is far from being passionless. Sallis’ philosophical vocabulary prominently includes “excess,” “exorbitance,” “monstrosity,” and even “delicacy.” Now to the third way examining the task of philosophy at the limit. He says that this way “consists in grafting the discourse onto a poetic text in such a way as to draw from that text something of its power to engender sense in unheard-​ of phrases … [so as] to lend it a special force of imagination—​interweaving it with certain of those flowery bands that poets wreath so as, in Keats’ words, to bind us to the earth” (fi 42). Thus, this way not only reflects back upon Force of Imagination, but also is that very discourse grafted onto poetic texts as it

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speaks in a language not yet fully heard. Its three superscripts belong to two poets (Blake and Emerson) and to a philosopher who extolled poetry as the exoteric expression of the absolute (Schelling). Its first chapter is given over largely to the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Force of Imagination traverses all three ways, with the first—​chora—​and the second—​phenomenology—​gathered into the third. The language of the book directly images its philosophical character; i.e., its orientation in terms of sense purified from any tie to the intelligible. Although this is a demanding text, I am convinced not only of its consequence, but also of its teachability. In a truly extraordinary set of passages, Sallis recalls a letter Hegel wrote to the classicist Voss, translator of Homer into German. In this letter, Hegel praises Voss for providing his fellow Germans with the means of access to Homer’s epics, just as Luther did with the Bible. Such access to great works in one’s own language is necessary to lift a people out of barbarism. Then, Hegel indicates a hope of his own, with an introductory observation from Sallis: “Then, with the requisite moderation, Hegel writes of his own intent: “If you will kindly forget these two examples, I may say of my endeavor that I wish to try to teach philosophy to speak German” (fi 34–​35). This declaration startled me as well. Until I saw those words, I labored under the misapprehension that Kant did at least a good enough job of presenting his thought in his native language, that Fichte, Schelling, Schiller, and others were not halting beginners, and  that furthermore, Hegel’s philosophical vocabulary rested primarily—​if not entirely—​upon Kant’s. What on earth could this mean? And with this missive introduced, Sallis provides us with another at least as astonishing when he writes: “Though moderation might prescribe virtual silence in this regard and in any case interminable hesitation, it would not be entirely inappropriate to wish today to teach philosophy to speak English” (fi 35). So much for “virtual silence” and “interminable hesitation.” And how would this teaching of philosophy to speak English occur? By spinning off from its German/​ Latinate axis and emigrating. But where? In the “land of the future,” as Hegel called ours. Again, I thought that Locke’s, Berkeley’s, and especially Hume’s English was already pretty good. And Dewey’s was at least passable—​certainly more advanced than that of a school student’s primer. After commenting upon Hegel’s and Sallis’ outrageous play, I shall proceed to the heart of this paper, which will also present some key entries in the English Philosophical Lexicon as fashioned by Sallis. The teaching that is uniquely Hegel’s concerns the nature of propositions (Sätze). Unlike Kant’s principles (Grundsätze), which serve as conditions for the possibility of experience for a finite subject, and unlike the interplay of

204 Freydberg Fichte’s Ich and nicht-​Ich in their ever-​circling interdetermination, Hegel’s propositions find themselves always in motion. The subject disappears into the predicate, only to re-​emerge in a new form. As distinct from the formal proposition—​or, rather, the proposition as formally presented—​for Hegel, the ultimate proposition is speculative and in dialectical movement through its various shapes. In these terms, “philosophy speaking German” means that the proposition that was earlier considered simple and fixed is presented in its true, speculative dialectical form. Sallis’ philosophical English reckons with our language’s polyglot nature and strives to bring its various strains together into a systematic whole that reconfigures thought so that it can be practiced as philosophy at the limit. The most suggestive analogue to Hegelian self-​reflexive pedagogy consists in Sallis’ doubling. The release from the intelligible in language makes itself manifest not only in the retention of the word “sense” without a complementary other, but in the formulation “sense of sense.” “Sense of sense” gathers both apprehension of things and their “meaning” into a single formulation. Just as Satz is hardly an altogether new word in German, sense is also hardly altogether new. Let “sense” and “sense of sense” be considered here as key entries in Sallis’ English Philosophical Lexicon. At the limit, force of imagination is neither a subjective faculty (as some say it is in Kant) nor the condition for the possibility of subjectivity (as in Fichte). Rather, force of imagination allows both things and thoughts to occur at all. As we apprehend the things of sense, we do so in terms of horizons and perspectives. Spacing draws up the limits of what can be apprehended. In this sense, horizon hearkens back to the ancient Greek horismos—​to set a limit or a boundary—​, but does so in accord with a renewed sense of perspective, which has a Latin and an old French root. The perspectives that determine our horizons are twofold: frontal and lateral. Frontal horizons allow us to locate and to apprehend things as they appear directly before us. Lateral horizons, by contrast, deselect the surrounding appearances sufficiently for us to focus on what comes before us. Horizons are ever-​shifting and ever-​withdrawing, as noted when, for example, the light of the sun traverses its daily path over the haystacks painted by Monet. We never actually see the perspectives as they form the horizons that make possible all human apprehension. Both horizons make it possible for “time to be given there.” By force of imagination—​translating Einbildungs-​kraft—​time gathers itself into every occasion of apprehension. Now to the Bild of Einbildungs-​kraft. The image presents itself as doubled; i.e., it both shows itself to apprehension and does so as pointing beyond itself: it is sense of sense. One would do well to think of the divided line not

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as an ontological doctrine, but as a collection of ways of seeing, also recalling it minus the intelligible region. On the lower level are images; e.g., shadows, objects seen in water, etc. On the higher—​highest—​level are the pragmata of which the images are images. However, the pragmata are themselves images—​ one might say, images for which no original of any kind can be and so within which no image can inhere in any sense. The quality in terms of which they make themselves manifest is called delicacy by Sallis. Once the image is fixed by the spacing of its frontal and peripheral horizons, it is the self-​showing of “the thing itself.” There is no other “thing” anywhere or at any time. So let “thing” be the next entry in Sallis’ English Philosophical Lexicon. Force of imagination—​force, that is, of imagination and of nothing else—​is provoked to gather the undifferentiated chaos before it when and only when the shining of sense calls it forth. Let force as Kraft be the next term to be added to this English Philosophical Lexicon. What might be called the ultimate provocation for this gathering is the provocation of speech. Sallis calls it “the provocation of provocations” (fi 103). Speech—​what is it? Of course, speech is already deployed in raising this question. The self-​referentiality of this question, however, does not render its answer to be moot. In the Platonic dialogues, we can say that speech—​logos—​ takes place as a certain interplay of argument and mythologizing. In Kant, logos receives a decisive and unambiguous characterization: logos as concept is a rule for the synthesis of representations. Concepts are the contents of judgments and judgments can be empirical or pure. In both cases, language at least gestures toward closing certain issues and/​or rendering them indeterminate in principle; e.g., virtue either cannot be taught and lightning either does or does not cause thunder. For Sallis, speech serves to hold open possibilities, never to close them. We see how this is in keeping with the reiterated twofold belonging to the sense of sense, in keeping with shifting horizontal perspectives and with force that is so powerful that it can both set aside the laws of discourse and so powerless that it cannot effect anything whatsoever. He borrows a word from Fichte, here heard at the limit: hovering. Logos hovers within the self-​showing of things, makes them manifest as things of sense. And the things of sense appear, as has been shown, in terms of horizonal perspectives. But what of these horizons and perspectives themselves? The space and time—​or spacetime, of physics—​can indeed demonstrate the construction of things in accord with its nomenclature; i.e., decompose things into their scientific elements; e.g., atoms, subatomic particles, etc. This “physics,” however, sets itself apart from its origin as phuo, coming to light. Only the most thoughtful of 20th century physicists—​such as Heisenberg

206 Freydberg and Weyl—​have so much as gestured in this archaic dimension. The “physics” of contemporary science cannot account for the very appearance of those “things” with which it deals. Referencing this kind of idea, Sallis says: “What is required of philosophy at the limit is that it turn back to the elements as constituting the from which, not of composition, but of manifestation [the latter passage, my emphasis], that it return to the elements as they bound and articulate the expanse of the self-​showing of things themselves” (fi 154–​5). For the ancient Greek thinkers and for Plato in the Timaeus, sky, fire, water, and earth serve to provide the boundaries within which horizons can let things manifest themselves. These elementals—​which intersect, overlap, or envelop one another—​differ from things in the following way: whereas things appear as determinate by virtue of the (withdrawing) horizons, there can be no “enveloping” of the elementals since the elementals are indeterminate by their very nature. There is no bounding of sky, water, or air. Just as in the Timaeus, earth occurs in another register; namely, indeterminate depth. No matter how deep one digs, one arrives only at yet another surface upon which things can rest. Of these elementals, no lexical definition can be provided, because it belongs to the very nature of definition to entail limiting, de-​finition. One must rather say that the elementals provide the sense of sense beyond which nothing can properly be said. There can be no starting point that could govern them nor any fixed point from which they might flow. However, just as reason, logic, experience (in the empiricists sense), Geist, will to power, transcendental consciousness, the Being of beings, and other kinds of “groundings” have quite fruitfully served the task of the love of wisdom, so too do the elementals serve the same task. The elementals provide a lens for us in our historical moment—​ or perhaps better, a prism—​through which it not just becomes possible for us to become more mindful of our fragile yet tenacious dwelling. Earth is characterized by Sallis as the “universal negative,” meaning that by its means as oceans, mountains, and deserts, earth interrupts continuity between and among what might otherwise be grouped homogeneously as genus and species into which all things of nature can be divided and placed on a descending, but intelligible, scale. Recalling both the Timaeus and the discourse of Heidegger in The Origin of the Artwork, Sallis provides an account of earth as self-​secluding. It is a countenance never apart from the face beyond which it appears and is inconceivable beyond this. It is not itself a thing, but all things are of earth and/​or from earth. This twofold aspect finds special resonance in the treatment of tragedy offered in Force of Imagination. In Sallis’ previous works, comedy occupied much more of his attention. Indeed, in his magisterial Plato book, the word tragedy does not even appear. In the analysis of King Lear, the rage of the

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elementals is imaged in the rage of the tragic hero, who suffers not because of his misreckoning of two of his daughters’ characters. Sallis holds that the radical absence of causality between the events of the play and the elements that swirl chaotically around them constitute both the abysmality that “ungrounds” the tragedy just as it also provides the atmosphere that makes ennoblement out of the ruins possible. Add “tragedy” to the English Philosophical Lexicon as the incongruity between the human actions and the elementals within which these actions occur. I hasten to add that far from being a new contrivance of some kind, the elementals are old, ancient. Our scientific sophistication may be said to have replaced them with the Periodic Table of the Elements that we were taught in high school, but fire, air, sky, and earth have remained what they are nevertheless. The elements of chemistry are capable of many wonders, such as creating a bomb that can diminish or wipe out civilized life all the way to fashioning the “three-​different-​taste” phenomenon in Mountain Dew soda pop of which its creators in the food laboratory are exceedingly proud. But the one most dazzling of wonders—​the wonder that things are manifest at all—​is inaccessible to them. The contrast between self-​secluding earth and the pure radiance of sky strikingly brings about the field within which manifestation occurs. Note how different is this field from Kant’s and also how oddly akin they are. For Kant’s critical philosophy, the conditions for the possibility of experience consist of transcendental apperception, the principles of the pure understanding (which include the schemata), and pure intuition. That is to say, in order for anything at all to appear, a gathering of (a unity of) intelligible principles is required, but one that is decisively limited by its bond to sense. This is the deepest sense of the proud name of an ontology humbled to a mere analytic of the understanding—​an analytic the validity of which is limited to appearances. There is no such analytic belonging to Sallis’ elementals, which together serve as the ultimate sense of sense. However, like their great metaphysical antecedent, they delineate the determining factors for appearance as such. Finally, the most profound kinship obtains with respect to Einbildungskraft, to imagination, and to Sallis’ word “force of imagination,” its literal rendering. 20th century Kant interpretation cannot receive enough credit for its many analyses that established the centrality of imagination in the Critique of Pure Reason. Simple textual reading justifies the following claims: imagination is the source of all synthesis, synthesis is required for all thought including what may at first appear to be merely analytic thought, and synthesis runs through the entire critical philosophy. In its most exorbitant interpretation, one that can be fully justified by §24 of the B Deduction, imagination serves as the anterior basis for apperception itself.

208 Freydberg In Sallis’ account, the elementals allow things to disclose themselves from themselves, with a due amount of determinacy and indeterminacy. No concepts of objects serve as rules for them. Rather, their own way of disclosure in sense itself—​in terms of the qualities and limits of sense itself—​holds sway over our possible apprehension of them. One of the more remarkable surprises in Force of Imagination is Sallis’ appreciation of Berkeley’s contribution on imagination to this notion (fi 87–​ 88). I have no quarrel at all with his celebration of this underrated thinker and no real objection to his more or less standard critique according to which the entry of the divine being reduces ideas apprehended by imagination to secondary status. But I would like to conclude with another look at Berkeley’s thought. Berkeley is much more interesting to me as a Continental philosophy ancestor than as an empiricist or epistemologist. Normally, his “proof for the existence of God” gets little or no respect—​perhaps deservedly so—​, but #66 of the Principles is noteworthy, because I think it exposes the concealed depth of what is all too quickly called British Empiricism. Berkeley says: 66. Hence, it is evident that those things which, under the notion of a cause co-​operating or concurring to the production of effects, are altogether inexplicable, and run us into great absurdities, may be very naturally explained, and have a proper and obvious use assigned to them, when they are considered only as marks or signs for our information. And it is the searching after and endeavoring to understand those signs instituted by the Author of Nature, that ought to be the employment of the natural philosopher; and not the pretending to explain things by corporeal causes, which doctrine seems to have too much estranged the minds of men from that active principle, that supreme and wise Spirit ‘in whom we live, move, and have our being.’1 Berkeley’s metaphorics are eminently worthy of our attention. God is neither creator, nor first cause, nor the only being for whom essence and existence are one, nor the ens realissimum, nor omnipotence/​omniscience/​or some combination, nor any of the other Western (or Eastern) conceptions. Rather, God is Author of Nature. God is conceived, at least metaphorically, as a writer, as an author, a poet—​and Nature is the language in which God writes. Nature then,

1 George Berkeley, Principles, Dialogues, and Philosophical Correspondence (Indianapolis: Bobbs-​ Merrill, 1965), 54.

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is the divine logos. When we behold nature without the implicit contradiction of unperceived matter, we never perceive anything like a cause. So how do we account for what seems so clearly to be causal events? How, for example, do we account for something so obvious as a flame bringing heat and pain to the touch, and thunder always preceding lightning? Each of the temporal antecedents are signs, and the subsequent regularly proceeding events are what these signs signify. Nature is not a chain of causes, but resembles much more a marvelous poem that ever unfolds before us. This poem can never be envisaged statically, but is always moving, ever-​shifting. When we behold it is this way, this divine epic is always fresh and we experience it for the first time every time if we are so disposed. In this way, Berkeley is a deserving ancestor of Sallis, just as are Timaeus’ account from necessity, phenomenology in its most genuine sense, and the poetry upon which Sallis’ text is grafted. It took Sallis to recover the language that would bring this poetic thought to fulfillment.

Bibliography

Berkeley, George. Principles, Dialogues, and Philosophical Correspondence. Indianapolis: Bobbs-​Merrill, 1965.

Response John Sallis Beginnings are difficult. They are next to impossible, especially if one expects a beginning—​expects to achieve a beginning—​that is entirely unconditioned, a beginning that is preceded by no beginning before the beginning. Yet, in the present case there can be no question where to begin, no doubt but that this beginning is so imperative that even these few words that I have offered before announcing it will have been entirely drawn into it; they will have constituted no beginning before the beginning. And yet, in another respect this beginning is anything but unconditioned, for it is preceded by a set of essays, and what is now about to begin is precisely a reply to them, or, more precisely, a series of sketches that attempt to begin responding to the essays in the manner and to the extent they call for. I cannot begin otherwise than with words of gratitude, with words that, here and now in the time-​space of this discourse, I am expressing as I say: I am grateful to all of you for the thoughtful reflections you have addressed to my work. We are aware that when we speak, we hear ourselves speaking. Yet, what we hear—​both the speaking and what is said—​is never quite the same as what is heard by another, by someone who is listening. There is a displacement also in cases where the other is a technical device that records and can play back our speech; this is why we can sometimes barely identify a recording of our voice as being our own. A similar displacement occurs if, high in the mountains, I shout across the valley below to another range of mountains that reach up to approximately the  same height. With only the slightest interval intervening, my voice will return to me in the form of an echo. It will be as if the mountains in the distance spoke in my voice, as if they were capable of ventriloquy. I will hear coming from afar what, just moments ago, I would have shouted across the valley—​ that is, I will hear myself speaking, though with a separation between speaking and hearing that otherwise would not occur. This separation will constitute a space of difference: the sound returned will be displaced from the sounding of my own voice. While indeed recognizing it as echoing my voice, I will also be aware of—​that is, will hear—​the difference. It would perhaps not be too hyperbolic to compare this set of essays to a series of echoes. In addressing my work each essay returns to me my inscripted voice, but with a difference. Within the space of this difference, there are

© John Sallis, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004507098_016

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perspectival shifts, new directionalities, and prodigious intensifications, which serve to illuminate, amplify, and interrogate my work. In and through these enactments, the authors of these essays have bestowed their gifts on me, bountiful gifts, disclosive gifts. My gratitude is unbounded, and the mere supplements I will offer here are no match whatsoever for the richness of these incomparable gifts. For the honor that Dennis Schmidt has accorded me in his Foreword, let me convey my most heartfelt gratitude. My hope is that my work will have been worthy of his generous words, that it may on a few occasions evoke the wonder with which philosophy begins, and that now and then it might offer a few surprises. The exquisite Introduction that James Risser and Walter Brogan offer is a verginal gift. Their description of my work portrays it, in effect, as a palimpsest in which the scripted project of phenomenology is overwritten, yet in such a guise that it can itself overwrite a panoply of other engagements. It is this round of overwritings that Risser and Brogan have described in its various dimensions as exemplified in this volume. For their insightfulness I am grateful beyond all bounds.

∵

Michael Naas traces with remarkable clarity and subtlety the twistings back and forth that connect The Figure of Nature and The Return of Nature. His surmise regarding their composition is correct: they were written simultaneously, each with constant—​though usually unmarked—​reference to the other. In fact, they were originally conceived as a single book, but eventually it became evident that they had to be divided precisely because of the complex relation between the two discourses. Their focus on the problematic of nature extends back across much of my work, and one could, without too much exaggeration, say that, like the early Greek thinkers, the comprehensive title might well be Peri Phuseōs. It goes without saying that there is here no claim that every human abode is reducible to nature or that everything is by nature (phusei). Naas fully recognizes the decisive role that discussion of the chōra plays in my reflections on nature. Note that I say the chōra and not simply chōra. The question whether the definite article is required or at least advantageous is one about which Derrida and I debated, he maintaining that the article should be omitted, since the chōra is not a being of any sort, I insisting that the article is needed in order to mark the difference between the chōra and the word (which is also not a word) chōra.1 1 See “Of the Χώρα” Epoché 2, no. 1 (1994): 1–​12. This paper was presented in French, with Jacques Derrida present, at the colloquium Le passage des frontiers: autour de travail de

212 Sallis Naas mentions another discussion that I had with Derrida. In this case we were both concerned with the question: Why did Plato not extend to the chōra the description epekeina tēs ousias (beyond being) that he applied to the good? In the course of our discussion, I pointed out the connection—​not unproblematic—​established in the allegory of the cave, namely, by the pronouncement that at the apex of his ascent the escaped prisoner turns his gaze toward the sun (the counterpart of the good) “in its chōra.” I also referred briefly to a passage in the Sophist (254a–​b) where the Stranger attests that the philosopher, who is devoted to the look (idea), is difficult to see “because of the brilliance of the chōra (dia to lampron au tēs chōras).” Among the most difficult questions that arise in this connection concerns the way in which what Plato thought as the chōra is to be thought today. Is it to be determined in relation to the elementals, specifically as the space delimited by earth and sky? Or must even these determinations be eliminated and the chōra thought as space in a still more indeterminate sense? In connection with the latter alternative, Naas’ question—​perhaps understandable—​regarding the unlimited is quite pertinent. If the unlimited (to apeiron) is, as my discussion in The Figure of Nature implies (fn 22), identified as the infinite, then the question emerges as to how the unlimited, infinity, is to be thought today. In this connection my strategy in Logic of Imagination is the same as in the case of astrophysics, namely, to bring modern developments to bear on traditional concepts. In this case the relevant development occurs in modern mathematics, namely, in Cantor’s proofs that there are different orders of infinity. Not all infinities are the same, and thus, whatever the context, one can no longer speak simply of infinity. Yet, the concept of infinity is deeply embedded in the language and the conceptuality of philosophy. The injection of the differentiation between orders of infinity cannot but have unheard-​of consequences for the philosophy to come.2

∵

Jacques Derrida held at Cerisy in 1992.The proceedings were published under the same title by Éditions Galilée in 1994. The question regarding the article cannot be decided by appeal to the Greek text of the Timaeus, since the word chōra occurs there both with the article (52b) and without it (53a). 2 “Mathematically there are, as Cantor demonstrated, multiple infinities, different orders of infinity, as in the differentiation, in terms of denumerability, between the transfinite number of the natural numbers and that of real numbers. The question is whether and how this pluralizing of mathematical infinity has a bearing on the philosophical protoconcept” (li 206).

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The resonance of Sara Brill’s reflections on and by way of mythic discourse and the way in which she lets muthos enter into and exceed the logos both mirror Platonic writing and enact the very monstrosity that is her theme—​assuming, as in the end one cannot, that monstrosity can be submitted to a thematic account. Let me add, merely as a supplement to her discourse, some reflections on a passage from Aeschylus’ The Suppliant Maidens. The drama begins: “Zeus Protector, protect us with care. From the subtle sand of the Nile delta, our ship set sail” (lines 1–​3). The chorus is speaking for—​in the voice of—​the suppliant maidens, who have fled Egypt to escape the Egyptian men, their cousins, who wish to marry them against their will. Theirs is a “self-​ imposed banishment, since they abhor impious marriage with Egyptus’ sons” (lines 9–​10). Pursued by their would-​be husbands, they take refuge in Argos, just as Metis was said to have fled from her vengeful husband in search of a safe haven. Almost at the beginning of the play, the chorus, speaking as one of the suppliant maidens, lets the suppliant maiden be imaginatively transformed into Metis: “Now if haply there chances to be nearby one who knows bird cries, then, hearing our bitter passion, he will fancy that he hears the voice of Metis, Tereus’ sad wife, the hawk-​chased nightingale. For she, constrained to leave her green leaves, laments and longs for her abode; and with her lament she blends the tale of her child’s doom, of how he was killed by her through her perverse wrath” (lines 58–​67). The story told of Metis was one of mutual revenge. She sought revenge on her evil husband by killing, dismembering, cooking, and serving to Tereus their young son. Fleeing, she was pursued by Tereus, yet, just as he prepared to kill her, the gods rescued her by turning her into a nightingale. Even before her fabulous metamorphosis and especially afterwards when she could sing as a nightingale sings, her song is a lament for her abode. Yet ethos means not only abode but also character, and her lament is also for the character that she possessed in her abode among the green leaves before her heinous act of revenge. The thought of her abode evokes mourning for what is now irretrievably lost and memory  of her abode  as a place of shelter. An abode can shelter as a child is sheltered in the home, protected from perilous exposure. And yet, just as it shelters, an abode can be violated and can become the scene of the most terrible deeds, murdering one’s child and desecating his remains. In sheltering there is always the threat of impending violence. This story poses generativity along several axes, the generativity of all that comes and goes, of all that, like—​indeed as—​phusis itself, comes to pass, comes to be and passes away, that is born into life and threatened by death. There is the coupling of nurture and violation, as with the child borne by Metis only to be murdered and defiled by her. There is new life in the shadow of death, as when Metis, exposed to her husband’s deadly assault, escapes in

214 Sallis a new life, that of a nightingale. There is both the abundance and shelter of her abode of green leaves and the fearful flight into which she is driven as the result of her depraved character. There is the horror of the deed committed in her abode and the wistful comfort in her memory of the shelter it provided. There is monstrosity at every turn, deeds contrary to nature, deeds that within the sway of nature exceed nature. In the drama—​as the drama—​monstrosity is enacted.

∵

When Claudia Baracchi first sets about determining the senses of technē and poiēsis, she draws a strict distinction between them, construing technē as the mimetic production characteristically performed by the artisan, while, on the other hand, affiliating poiēsis with procreation, birth, eros, and more generally with phusis. Fathering or bearing a child or engaging a lover bears no resemblance to the kind of production that would be carried out by looking to a paradigm and making something, an artefact, in such a way that it looks like the paradigm, that is, is an image of what has been seen in advance. What is perhaps most insightful in this connection is the way in which, having drawn this apparently clear distinction, Baracchi proceeds to complicate matters—​ or to show who complicated they are—​by showing how these senses prove to mutate when exposed to the light of a more careful reading of the Republic and the Timaeus. Perhaps most noticeable is the way in which the sense of technē is altered once account is taken of the governing role played in it by the user of the product made by the artisan. In the course of her reflections, Baracchi marks various points at which there occurs a kind of crossing of the respective senses of technē and poiēsis; the result is that a complex figure is drawn, effacing the simple distinction between mimetic production and erotic production. Baracchi suggests that even before the chorology there may be in play a disruption of the authority of technē as mimetic production. Indeed one can mark particular places in Timaeus’ first discourse (hence prior to the chorology) where the exclusive role seemingly assigned to technē in the production of the cosmos is mitigated. Two such loci can readily be identified. The first occurs at the point where Timaeus declares that the god is difficult to discover and that it is impossible to speak to all men about him. Timaeus calls him by two different names (28c). On the one hand, he calls him poiētēs; though this name clearly corresponds to much of the activity described in the first discourse and so can be translated as maker (or fabricator), it also—​for just that reason—​introduces a complication with respect to the distinction between

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poiēsis and technē. In addition, he refers to him as the dēmiourgos, which is the term commonly designating an artisan. On the other hand, Timaeus calls the god patēr (father), thus attesting to his connection also to procreation, to erotic production. Then, at another place, where the first discourse is getting under way, Timaeus declares that the cosmos is a living being (zōon) (30b). Yet, living beings do not come about as the mimetic image of a paradigm, but rather they are born; they come about through natural procreation, that is, not in the manner of technē but rather of phusis and eros. Passage through the chorology is decisive, for it destabilizes the distinction between intelligible and sensible. On the far side of the chorology, the discourse on images—​eikōs logos—​must take on a different guise and a new idiom. As Baracchi says: “The task then is that … of thinking images, sensing images, outside their dependence on the eidetic.” The question is whether, once they are freed of the eidetic, images will not mutate beyond themselves. Will what has been called by the name image not betray its name and call for a name yet to come? If, in Baracchi’s words, “images are thick, vibrant, boundless in their shivering movement away from the forced, petrified contours of the concept,” then how are they to be summoned? What voice, what tone, will be needed in order to entice them back into philosophical discourse?

∵

Shane Ewegen takes up the question of the relation between the Apollonian, the Dionysian, and Socrates. He brings to bear on this question various writings by Nietzsche and in this way is able to treat the relation between these three figures at several levels of complexity. The manner in which he displays these figures and the affinities and oppositions between them is highly illuminating. The suggestions I am offering are intended merely to indicate some directions in which Ewegen’s analysis might be further elaborated. The analysis would, I believe, be enhanced by differentiating between the various writings on the basis of which it is developed. One distinction that is pertinent is that between The Birth of Tragedy, on the one hand, and the notes and lectures that are only preparatory for this work. In a note dated “end of 1870 to April 1871,” Nietzsche in fact refers to Socrates as “The Apollonian individual”3; and in the 1870 Basel lecture “Socrates and Tragedy” he writes: “Socrates

3 Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente. Herbst 1869 bis Herbst 1872, vol. iii/​3 of Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1978), 165.

216 Sallis embodied one side of the Hellenic, Apollonian clarity.”4 On the other hand, in a note dated “end of 1870,” he writes, referring no doubt to Socrates or at least Socratism: “The theoretical genius as the destroyer of Hellenic Apollonian art.”5 What is written in the notes and lectures from this period needs, then to be kept at a distance from what is written in the published book The Birth of Tragedy. While some may be helpful in interpreting the book, they cannot serve as the final court of appeal. It is virtually imperative to distinguish and hold apart what is written about the triad (Apollo, Dionysus, Socrates) in Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy, and books from his very last year such as The Twilight of the Idols, most notably in passages such as the one in which, having just referred to The Birth of Tragedy, he writes: “I, the last disciple of the philosopher Dionysus—​I, the teacher of the eternal recurrence.”6 Unless one sets out merely to differentiate between and contrast the two portrayals of Socrates, it is requisite that one keep apart Nietzsche’s view of Socrates and the view of Socrates that can emerge from a careful reading of such Platonic texts as the Symposium. Still further distinctions need to be taken into account, since the character of Nietzsche’s portrayal of Socrates depends on which texts one consults and, on the other side, there is enormous variation in the results stemming from engagement with the Platonic dialogues.7 There are three points that could, I believe, serve for the further development of the account that Ewegen gives of the complex relations between the Apollonian, the Dionysian, and Socrates (or Socratism). First of all, account needs to be taken of Nietzsche’s description of the relation between the Apollonian and the Dionysian as a “monstrous opposition,” which is exemplified in the difference “between the art of sculpture, the Apollonian, and the nonimagistic art of music as that of Dionysus.”8 Here it is a matter of excess, of opposition that exceeds itself. It is precisely because their opposition is monstrous that when yoked together, they can give birth to tragedy. The second point concerns the character of Apollo and hence the Apollonian. While Nietzsche does refer to Apollo as the deity of light, he emphasizes the character of the god as “the shining one [Scheinende],” as the god who also 4 Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Schriften 1870–​1873, vol. iii/​2 of Werke (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1973), 36. 5 Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente Herbst 1869 bis Herbst 1872, vol. iii/​3 of Werke, 139. 6 Nietzsche, Götzen-​Dämmerung, in vol. vi/​3 of Werke (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1969), 154. 7 See “Nietzsche’s Platonism,” chap. 1 of pl. 8 Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie, in vol. iii/​1 of Werke (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1972), 21.

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“rules over the beautiful shining [den schönen Schein] of the inner world of phantasy.”9 There is, then—​as the third point—​a strong contrast drawn in The Birth of Tragedy between the Apollonian, described in terms of engagement with beautiful images as in dreams, and the characterization of the Socratic as embodying the demand for unlimited uncovering. It is this demand that brings about the death of tragedy, and it is only when it has run its course that there can be a rebirth of tragedy, though in a new guise, which Nietzsche portrays in the figure of a music-​practicing Socrates. It is in this figure that Nietzsche brings together Apollo, Dionysus, and Socrates.

∵

The Phaedo is about sailing. Walter Brogan touches on this figure in several illuminating ways in his discussion of the interpretation of the Phaedo developed in The Figure of Nature. He writes, for example, that “the dialogue is about movement and circulation and transport and not about fixed regions above or below.” He writes also that “the very desire, the eros, that impels the striving of the philosopher to reach beyond the body belongs to the body.” Sailing on, the ship relies on its motive force, on its sails or its oars, or its engine; by its own power it is impelled toward a beyond, perhaps toward distant seas. It may eventually return to port or the pilot might fancy that it need not return, that it can sail on indefinitely. Brogan reminds us that it is a sailing that determines on what day the events reported in the Phaedo take place. The ship returns to Athens, the very ship, so it is said, in which Theseus had once sailed to Crete to kill the Minotaur and thereby free the Athenians from the order given by Minos that every nine years they were to send fourteen human sacrifices to Crete where they were devoured by the monster. When Theseus set sail on his mission to Crete, the Athenians vowed to Apollo that if Theseus’ mission proved successful, they would send the ship to Delos each year in gratitude for being delivered from Minos’ order. While the ship is sailing to and from Delos, the city is kept pure, and so no execution can take place until the ship has returned. Its return from its voyage is what determines the day when Socrates must die. Once the conversation in Socrates’ cell commences, the question debated is whether after death the soul is transported to Hades—​in a vessel that remains unidentified in the conversation—​and whether at birth a soul is transported 9 Ibid., 23.

218 Sallis back from the dead to the living. Death would consist in transportation in one direction and birth in transportation in the opposite direction. At the heart of the Phaedo there is a sailing that is identical with philosophy itself. Failing to move at all—​from things to their cause—​in his previous efforts, Socrates takes to the oars, just as sailors do when there is no wind. His second sailing, as he calls it, he casts his vision afar for causes for fear of being blinded by the sun; likewise he avoids advancing toward things by means of his senses. Instead, he sets sail for logoi and resolves on this voyage to look for the truth of things. While he absconds from nature and from hypernature, there is hope that as he sails on, he will eventually return to them and discover their truth. As Brogan writes at the very end of his essay: “In the second sailing the soul does indeed draw itself away from nature, but only in order that there might be a return to nature in the manifestness of its being.”

∵

The words come from Paul Klee. They are the very first words of an essay entitled “Schöpferische Konfession.” They constitute a declaration of what art aims to accomplish, and thereby determine precisely what art is, what intention lies at its very core. These words are not based merely on theoretical reflections but stem largely from Klee’s own artistic practice. Yet, since they were inscribed in Klee’s 1920 essay, they have spoken again and again to those who would engage philosophical reflection on art. Their resonance, their echo back from the artworks to which they are addressed, is clearly audible. Klee’s words: “Kunst gibt nicht das Sichtbare wieder, sondern macht sichtbar.”10 Transposed they read: “Art does not reproduce the visible but makes visible.” Alejandro Vallega’s reflections will, no doubt, also have drawn resources from his own artistic practice. In his reflections he takes up my elaboration of Klee’s dictum and extends it in several directions. He establishes the basis for his reflections by affirming my supplement to the dictum, which remains within the orbit of Klee’s thought: that the invisible that art would make visible is, for the most part, something that otherwise—​were it not taken up into art—​would simply go unseen. Art can—​as Klee’s sometimes does—​make visible something like the growth of a plant, which, stretched across a temporal interval and taking place, in part, beneath the surface of the earth, would otherwise not be seen in its full course. 10

Paul Klee, Kunst-​Lehre (Leipzig: Reclam Verlag, 1987), 60.

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Vallega extends this supplemental form of Klee’s dictum by relating it to—​and interpreting it in terms of—​Nietzsche’s inversion of the opposition between the sensible and the intelligible. As long as this opposition remained in place, the artwork would be understood as exemplifying something beyond the sensible, something intelligible or in some other way unpresentable to sense experience; lying beyond the sensible, it could only be exemplified, not made visible as such. Vallega analyzes the way in which the Nietzschean inversion displaces this opposition; and he brings to light the manner in which, as philosophy turns to the sensible, so art will aim at making visible an invisible that belongs to the sensible, something that, so to speak, is coiled within the core of the sensible rather than posited beyond the sensible. For art it will become a matter of releasing the shining within the visible. Vallega refers to Monet’s Wheatstacks. The painting of these objects does not represent anything beyond them but rather captures—​makes visible—​the spread of light at a particular time of day. Vallega mentions also the case of paintings that capture the fleeing moment, that render the fleeting moment as a stable presence, making visible a happening that almost certainly would go unseen or of which, at most, one would get only a fleeting glimpse. There are few paintings that directly display such a capturing of the moment so effectively as Monet’s The Red Kerchief (Figure 14.1) in which Camille Monet is pictured from inside as she passes by a window, her passage as momentary as the configurations of snowflakes around her. Vallega goes still further and refers to paintings that make visible the very movement of the visible as it comes into being; here again one thinks of Klee’s paintings and drawings of the genesis of plants. Such rendering can be carried out so as to make manifest the dynamic aspects of the visible, as in the confluence of elements that make up a storm. I recall a project on which Vallega and I collaborated. The result was the book Light Traces, the very title of which posed the exigency of making visible or of displaying in some other manner the epiphenomena to which the book was addressed. I ventured to produce one kind of display by writing the text. The question then was whether paintings (or drawings) could be created that could be appropriately set alongside the text so as to add to the linguistic presentation an artistic presentation capable of making visible the light traces invoked in the text. Vallega sent me twenty-​four works exquisitely rendering the light traces yet in no way imitating the picture of them that might have been foreseen on the basis of the text. Clearly they were not images and could not be designated as images; after struggling to find an appropriate designation, we decided just to designate them as “paintings and drawings.” The very impossibility of finding an appropriate designation for them was precisely an

220 Sallis

­f igure 14.1 Claude Monet, The Red Kerchief, c. 1868–​73

index of their force and their capacity to present, yet not as images, the light traces that were our concern.

∵

Risser’s most apt phrase perhaps is: art as art. This phrase does not at all have the same sense as: art for its own sake, art for the sake of art. It is not a prescription for ripping art out of all its context. Art always happens within a complex context, and to pretend that it does not is both to falsify it and, moreover, to invite contextual features to reenter the discussion surreptitiously. What the phrase “art as art” bespeaks, above all, is the imperative that one set aside all determinations that do not cohere with the sensible character of art. To regard art as art is to prohibit submitting it to conceptual determination and the rule of abstract intelligibility. Lingering before a painting, giving one’s vision to it entirely and exclusively, letting even a certain synaesthetic sense be absorbed by the painting—​such comportment, which is neither simply activity nor pure passivity, can be

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regarded as incorporating a moment of interpretation only in a particular, somewhat attenuated form. To be sure, in the experience of art, one will eventually speak, yet speaking in the initial engagement with an artwork runs the risk of covering over the sensible self-​showing of the artwork. The shortfall of speech is still more apparent in the case of music, which is proverbially resistant to speech. On the other hand, Risser’s point can be granted if interpretation remains, as it were, this side of speech, if it does not require speech but can be integrated with perceptual opening to the sensible manifestation radiated by the artwork. In that case, interpretation would, like vision, be linked to an inhibiting of speech. Whether silent speech—​whatever its character may be—​might continue in such perception/​interpretation is difficult to decide, since silent speech is still speech, and to this extent it seems that it would not readily integrate with silent lingering before the work, with visual absorption that defers speech. Referring to the Greek landscape that the reader is asked to imagine at the beginning of Transfigurements, Risser offers a beautiful description of the  visual lingering that could be evoked by this scene. He writes: “Imagine engaging your vision in a way that would be enthralled by the beauty of this site. Such an immersion with vision is not unlike what occurs when one looks at a painting in a way that would let the painting open up to reveal its shining. In such an immersion one is captivated by the life of the scene in such a way that imagining can trace and retrace the scene.” Yet, captivation is not conversation, even if, within sense, it engages in a certain back-​and-​forth. It is in terms of this perceptual back-​and-​forth, not in an exchange even of incipient words, that what might be called sensible interpretation could be determined. Interpretation, determined in this manner, would be, in Risser’s words “comparable to discernment” and, as goes without saying, would be “inseparable from imagination.” Risser’s description of interpretation as moving “from sense to sense” has multiple senses. It may designate the movement of vision across a painting following the directionalities built into the painting. It may refer to the movement from the sensible work to the intelligibility that supervenes when language comes into play. But it may also portend a movement within the sensible work that lets become manifest a sense irreducible to an intelligibility apart from the work. All these senses are in play in the experience of art, but it is the last of these that best describes a form of interpretation that is ever in play in silent lingering with the artwork.

∵

222 Sallis Jeffrey Powell takes up and elaborates the distinction between what is painted in a painting and what is depicted or figured. He refers to the analysis of Monet’s Wheatstacks developed in Shades. In these paintings what is depicted is a wheatstack (or in some cases two wheatstacks) standing in a field, which extends to a village in the distance; yet, the wheatstack is not at all the subject of the paintings; in terms of the analysis, it is not what is painted in the painting. Rather, what is painted is the spread of light through the atmosphere at different times of day and in different seasons. What is painted, what in a certain respect is painted in all painting, is light. Shades offers this description: “In painting … the light that brings visibility to things would itself become visible” (sp 2). It is said that the last words uttered by Turner were: “The sun is god.” The question is whether this distinction between light and object or a distinction analogous to it can be extended back across the history of Western art. This question is, in turn, bound up with the question of marking—​if it is possible—​the point of separation between what can be roughly designated as traditional art and distinctively modern art. Then, still further, there is the question as to whether there is such a point, such a separation. According to Kandinsky there is no absolute point of separation; though there is a transition that occurs with the inception of abstract art, this does not constitute a radical break, since—​Kandinsky insists—​painting has never been purely representational but has always abstracted from the scene it depicts, even if in a kind of abstracting unique to art. Even if one maintains that, on the contrary, there is a radical break, it is perhaps undecidable when the break occurred. From the side of philosophy, one might be tempted to locate the break at the point where Hegel declares the pastness of art, where he announces that art is a thing of the past that no longer is capable of satisfying our highest needs. This does not, however, amount to declaring the end of art, since Hegel allows that even after art has become something past, artists will continue to produce fine works. These works might, then, be designated as modern art; yet, the lower rank that Hegel assigns them would be balanced to some extent by the fact that in his analysis, he anticipates forms that would not be seen until more than half a century after Hegel gave his lectures on philosophy of art (see ta chap 5). From the side of art history, however, one might take the innovations that appeared in Impressionism as constituting the break between the traditional and the modern. Yet, the development of Impressionism stretched across more than half a century, and it would be difficult to mark a point in this development where the difference became decisive. On the other hand, abstract art might be taken as marking the break with traditional art. Yet, in this case,

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Kandinsky’s objection that all art is abstract to some degree as well as the extensive development of abstract art in the twentieth century would seem to preclude marking a point where a definitive split occurred. Powell discusses at length the question of the bearing of language on painting. He lays out a broader context within which to understand Kandinsky’s insistence that a narrative effect should be excluded from painting, since associating a story with a painting draws attention away from the form and color of the work. To Powell’s account one might add the observation that Kandinsky’s imperative could have only a limited range of application, assuming that one would not want, on this basis, to denigrate either the great historical paintings of the nineteenth century such as David’s The Coronation of the Emperor Napoleon (1806–​7) or the charming mythological paintings of the eighteenth century such as Boucher’s Vulcan Presenting Venus with Arms for Aeneas (1757). Powell brings into the discussion the silence that belongs to painting and, more generally, the bearing of language on painting. The silence of painting points to its capacity to evoke the highest degree of visual engagement with the work. A linguistic element comes into play with the entitling of the painting; yet knowledge of the title cannot replace or even dominate the perceptual absorption in the work but may, at most, provide some guidance to the visual exploration of the silent work. Another linguistic element can enter in the form of inscriptions on the work itself, as in some of Klee’s works and in a majority of Chinese paintings. Still another linguistic element is the expressible sense that emerges from—​as a result of—​visual engagement with the silent work; it is imperative, however, that the sense remain bound to the work, that the sense remain bound to sense. The philosophical task is, then, to think these three linguistic elements in their interconnection and in their manner of supplementing the silent work.

∵

Like Bottom, I am translated! Into Japanese. My book about translation—​translated into a book in which I can read not a single letter, or rather, not a single character. In being translated the original book is completely lost to me, turned into a book that to me says nothing whatsoever. Moreover, I have no means by which to measure whether and to what degree the translation goes astray. Were it not for the copyright page, where, in very small print, my name appears, I would not even be able to recognize or claim the book as mine, or rather, that in its previous materialization it was mine. In releasing On Translation to be translated into Japanese, I have released an expenditure without return. And though, in

224 Sallis a broader perspective, there is indeed return in various registers and gratitude for those returns, there is no return that is of the same kind as the original gift. I am again translated. Both in the title and in the final words of Drew Hyland’s translation. And now the translation moves within my own language and thus is as accessible to me as the Japanese translation is inaccessible. The translation that Hyland offers runs quite counter to the usual rule that translation involves loss; in a different way but just as decisively as Schlegel’s translation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hyland’s translation provides significant gains—​for example, in the way in which he brings his discussion of translation together with his insights into the issues raised by Magritte’s painting The Treachery of Images. Hyland’s statement regarding the relation of language to painting (and, he suggests, perhaps to all the arts) is incisive. He maintains that we should forego supposing that language should provide the means for explaining art or that language could be a surrogate for art, that it could be a replacement for the artwork itself. He says: “Perhaps instead, language has a different but equally profound kinship and role in regard to the arts: perhaps language at its best can help open up art, open us to the question or questions raised by art, help us, then, less to translate art than to open us up to it.” To the two examples that Hyland discusses, Paladino’s en do re and Magritte’s The Treachery of Images, I would like to add another. It is also a painting by Magritte, and it has to do with Hegel. It is entitled Hegel on Holiday (Figure 14.2). The picture itself consists of a black umbrella with a glass of water sitting on top of it. On the one hand, it is impossible for a glass of water to sit atop an umbrella; but, on the other hand, if it could, this would demonstrate that the water nature sends down in the form of rain can be controlled and contained, that, more generally, nature can be taken up into what, in his systematic language, Hegel calls “the concept.” Thus, the picture is opposed to itself: it shows a dialectically prescribed containment, which, however, cannot happen. The opposition in the picture is duplicated in the title: Hegel does not go on holiday, because the concept is always at work. Magritte’s own words say much the same: “I … thought that Hegel … would have been very sensitive to this object, which has two opposing functions: at the same time not to admit any water (repelling it) and to admit it (containing it). He would have been delighted, I think, or amused (as on a vacation), and I called the painting ‘Hegel on Holiday’ [‘Les Vacances de Hegel’].”

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­f igure 14.2 René Magritte, Hegel on Holiday, 1958

Drawing on the analysis in Phenomenology and the Return to Beginnings, Peg Birmingham observes that when things are perceived, they reflect back to us an image of ourselves by which is revealed the place amidst the sensible from which they are seen. To this observation it might be added that we are also reflected back to ourselves—​to various moments of our being—​by other elements, and, first of all, by those that are elements in the literal sense, such as earth, sky, wind, rain. Earth and sky bound and thus open the space in which we earthbound beings lead our lives. Wind and rain sweep across this space, revealing to us our exposure and fragility. From the communities and cities in which we carry on our lives we are reflected back to ourselves as members of communities and as citizens or foreigners. To cite Force of Imagination: “it is from the elementals and from others that one learns what and who one is” (fi 212). As Birmingham observes, in our comportment to death we are given back to ourselves in our mortality. Birmingham offers a precise and extended discussion of bodily reflection as this theme is developed by Merleau-​Ponty. Conceived in general as the ground condition of the possibility of experience, it represents an inversion of the conception of this ground as intelligible or as transcendental. Merleau-​Ponty explicates bodily reflection through an analysis of the example of touching oneself touching. His conclusion—​further elaborated in Phenomenology and

226 Sallis the Return to Beginnings—​is that when my left hand is on the verge of touching my right hand as it, in turn, is touching some thing, the circuit is never completed, the gap never closed, and the bodily reflection fails. To Birmingham’s description of the happening of bodily reflection and its failure, I would add two points. The first is already indicated to some degree by a passage that she cites from Phenomenology and the Return to Beginnings, in which there is reference to a withdrawal of the hand touched. Now I would formulate this reference in somewhat stronger terms: when I attempt with my left hand to touch my right hand touching, my right hand is touched touching and in the very same moment the occurrence of touching by my right hand withdraws; when the hand is touched touching, the touching does not simply cease but rather remains as withdrawing. One could say that in the moment when the hand is actually touched touching, it withdraws, leaving behind a trace of itself. The second point concerns the motive force that drives bodily reflection. The description of the touching hand conveys the impression that it is a particular, occasional occurrence motivated by a singular intention, perhaps even just by curiosity. However, as the ground of experience, bodily reflection must continually be in play. If account is taken of the aim guiding bodily reflection, that it involves the attempt to close the circuit of touching and touched thereby achieving the ideal of wholeness, that is, uninterrupted self-​presence, then the force that drives this progression may be identified as eros. In this case, the task would then be to demonstrate how eros is intrinsic to bodily reflection and how, thus propelled, bodily reflection is not just a matter of a touching hand, but, as the ground of experience, is an ever-​operative happening at the core of human existence.

∵

Daniela Vallega-​Neu’s designation of my work as liminal phenomenology is entirely appropriate. On the basis of the descriptions she offers, it could also be called light phenomenology—​light in several senses. She comments that I “set out with light and the shining of the sheer sense-​image”; she contrasts this orientation with Heidegger’s emphasis on self-​seclusion and withdrawal. She remarks also that my “thinking is guided more by wonder than by a sense of withdrawal or abandonment.” Vallega-​Neu draws other distinctions between my work and Heidegger’s. She remarks that “Heidegger’s thinking begins far removed from things,” contrasting this beginning with my setting out with the sense-​image and thus in a way that is more phenomenological. Mention of such removal points to some

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of my most serious reservations about Heidegger’s thought. Some discussion of these will, I believe, supplement Vallega-​Neu’s keen discernment. Despite the phenomenological orientation of Heidegger’s thought, especially in Being and Time, there is, in his thought, a certain abstractness. In Being and Time the abstractness is found in his understanding of world as a framework of references determined primarily by utility and other instrumental functions. What Heidegger’s phenomenology displays in the analysis of world are the utilitarian relations between things, that is, the way in which they fit together within a referential framework. In orienting his descriptions in this way, he abstracts from the sensible character of experience, that is, from the purely sensible aspect that is shown by things as they appear. In place of the sensible thing, there is the thing solely as it belongs within a referential framework. Vallega-​Neu comments on Heidegger’s appeal to what he terms Lichtung, clearing, which he regards as what first makes possible any disclosedness. This appeal is perhaps most explicit in the essay “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking.” At a crucial juncture in this essay, Heidegger translates eidos and idea as Aussehen, as “the outward appearance in which beings as such show themselves.” Then—​decisively—​he writes: “No outward appearance without light—​Plato already knew this. But there is no light and no brightness without the clearing.”11 What is most remarkable about the clearing is that, on the one hand, it remains highly abstract in the way it is used in Heidegger’s writings; it seems to lack—​or at least leave unexpressed—​any articulation and any content that would bring it closer to the various modes of illumination and to things as they are illuminated in the outward appearance in which they show themselves. On the other hand, despite the objections that Heidegger would likely raise, the word clearing is a metaphor taken from the concrete, sensible scene of an open space in a forest; in this respect it might be taken as marking a kind of oblique return to the things in their sensible character. Among Vallega-​Neu’s most incisive suggestions is that there is some similarity between the clearing and what I call spacing. While there are perhaps certain formal correspondences, I would stress the need for differentiation. In contrast to the clearing, spacings are figured in such a way as to resist both drifting away into abstractness and, in their designations, being taken as metaphors. Spacings are always spacings of something: spacings of elements, of

11

Martin Heidegger, “Das Ende der Philosophie und die Aufgabe des Denkens,” in Zur Sache des Denkens, vol. 14 of Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 2007), 82.

228 Sallis horizons, of the sublime, of imagination. There is no such thing as spacing merely as such. In a somewhat different direction, Vallega-​Neu suggests that my discussion of seclusion displays a certain proximity to Heidegger’s thinking of the event. While this may be the case, there are significant points of difference that would need to be marked. The most significant difference is constituted by the character of seclusion as a proper elemental, that is, as infinitely exceeding the proper, that is, one’s sphere of ownness, while, in the opposite direction, reflecting back disclosively upon oneself, granting a certain self-​understanding. To a limited extent, my discourse on seclusion draws on a certain source. But the source is not Heidegger’s thinking. A conception of seclusion is anticipated as a result of the critique of Freud carried out in the section of Logic of Imagination entitled “Kettle Logic.” But the primary source is clearly identifiable by the series of synonyms that Vallega-​Neu lists in a note: darkness, the unruly, abyssal ground—​all of which come directly from Schelling’s Freiheitsschrift. The description of the upsurge of images from the depth of seclusion also draws on Hegel’s description of a “nocturnal pit in which is stored a world of infinitely many images and representations without their being in consciousness.”12 Let me, finally, thank Vallega-​Neu for her gracious description of my thinking as a symphony. There is nothing to which I aspire more than to think musically!

∵

In the course of discussing the need to determine the elements as the “from which, not of composition, but of manifestation,” Bernard Freydberg refers to modern physics as bound for the most part to the practice of decomposition. Yet, he notes that there are exceptions such as Heisenberg and Weyl; Heisenberg, in particular, has engaged in extended philosophical inquiries that take into account, for instance, ancient Greek thought, the “archaic dimension,” as Freydberg terms it. Yet, it should be added that if there is need to bring science under philosophical scrutiny, there is also need today to let the findings of modern science, especially those of recent astrophysics, reflect back upon philosophy and be given serious philosophical consideration. It is imperative that our thinking not remain earth-​bound, oblivious to such (non-​)phenomena as dark matter and black holes.

12 G. W. F. Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften III (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1970), §453 (p. 260).

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Freydberg does not conceal his advocacy of Husserl’s phenomenology over against Derrida’s deconstruction. While I quite agree that, as Freydberg insists, Husserl’s thought has not been rendered passé by the declaration that it contains metaphysical presuppositions, it would perhaps be more instructive if, rather than simply setting Derrida’s work aside, one would let a kind of dialogue between Husserl and Derrida take place. Derrida’s role might be played by the voice of his text Voice and Phenomenon, which would take further the discourse that commenced in the Logical Investigations. This voice would declare: “We see unmistakably that in the end the need for indication simply means the need for signs. For it is more and more clear that, despite the initial distinction [made by Husserl] between an indicative sign and an expressive sign, only an indication is truly a sign for Husserl.”13 An interpretive voice might add: “The attempt to reduce language so as to assimilate it to self-​present consciousness simply ends up setting speech completely outside. Consciousness loses its voice, falls silent, and it is only elsewhere, out there beyond, that the sound of voices can be heard” (ed 12). Suppose then that Husserl were to counter the entire reduction that would have led to the conclusion just enunciated. Listening to the voice of Derrida’s text and its interpreter, perhaps interrupting now and then, Husserl, with his voice sounding from out of the Logical Investigations, would insist that Derrida is failing to take full account of the intentional character of consciousness. Emphasizing the radicality of this conception of consciousness, he would declare “that intentionality is not merely a characteristic belonging to consciousness, that it is not a matter simply of a relation between consciousness and its object, but rather that consciousness is, as such, an opening onto exteriority (thereby cancelled as exteriority), that it is therefore not a sealed-​off interiority, that it is not defined by its solitary mental life but rather, precisely as consciousness, exceeds this would-​be limit” (ed 12). Finally, there is Freydberg’s recounting of the positive contribution that Berkeley makes through his insight into the role played by imagination in experience as such. Especially striking are Freydberg’s comments on Berkeley’s conception of God as “Author of Nature.” This conception, Freydberg observes, entails, at least metaphorically, that God is an author, a writer, perhaps even a poet, and that nature is a text written by God. It goes almost without saying that this is not the only instance in which nature has been conceived as something written: as a text that, according to Galileo, is written in the language of mathematics; or as a writing that, according to Schelling, has the form of 13

Jacques Derrida, La Voix et le Phénomène (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967), 46.

230 Sallis visible spirit; or perhaps as an inscription by arche-​writing, either as practiced by the ancients or as set forth in the endeavor to counter phonocentrism.

∵

Jason Wirth’s essay “Elemental Ecology” is a eulogy to the earth. It laments the earth’s exposure to appropriation, exploitation, and destruction. Marx’s description of the earth as completely subordinated to the satisfaction of human needs is paradigmatic, and it was not to remain only a description but also a formula for action. In his account of labor and surplus-​ value in the first volume of Capital, he writes of the earth and nature as instruments for use in human labor: “Thus nature becomes one of the organs of his [the laborer’s] activity, one that he annexes to his own bodily organs, adding stature to himself in spite of the Bible. As the earth is his original larder, so too it is his original tool house. It supplies him, for instance, with stones for throwing, grinding, pressing, cutting, etc. The earth itself is an instrument of labor.”14 It is little wonder that Eastern Europe became the site of a monstrous degradation of the environment. For Hannah Arendt it is not a matter of exploitation of the earth but of escape from it. The Human Condition begins with a reference to the first launching of a satellite: “In 1957, an earth-​born object made by man was launched into the universe, where for some weeks it circled the earth. …” Marking this event as “second in importance to no other,” she continues: “The immediate reaction, expressed on the spur of the moment, was relief about the first ‘step toward escape from men’s imprisonment to the earth.’ ” She refers, finally, to “the extraordinary line which, more than twenty years ago, had been carved on  the  funeral obelisk for one of Russia’s great scientists: ‘Mankind will not remain bound to the earth forever.’ ”15 Arendt’s aim is not to praise this event but rather to explore its consequences, largely its political consequences. Nonetheless, in describing this event in the way she does, she emphasizes the significance that attaches to escape from the earth, to the new-​found ability to overcome our bond to the earth—​that is, to nullify our belonging to the earth. And yet, today one cannot but be aware that it is not possible to exploit nature endlessly with impunity. Now we cannot but recognize the consequences of the destitution to which we have reduced nature and the earth by 14 15

Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, The Process of Capitalist Production, ed. Frederick Engels, trans. S. Moore and E. Aveling (New York: International Publishers, 1967), 179. Originally published 1867. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 1.

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which it is sustained. We have forced nature to recede behind the fabricated world that we have built from it, and we have grown oblivious to the fact that, as Husserl said, the earth is the primal ark (Urarche) that supports all things, that it is our primal home (Urheimat). Now nature and the earth will return, have already returned, indeed in guises that are hardly recognizable as their own, as ghosts of themselves, yet endowed with monstrous force. There will be no controlling this return. Confronted with more frequent and more powerful storms, with earthquakes of unheard-​of magnitude, with wildfires raging out of control, technology stands impotent and hopeless. And yet—​indeed, in face of the devastation—​Wirth’s essay celebrates the earth. It sounds a call—​and invites us to call—​for a return to nature and to the earth. Its aim is to evoke a renewed recognition that the earth is “our elemental abode,” that “we belong to it and live within its elemental hospitality.” Its aim is to let us hear anew the imperative sounded by Nietzsche, that we “Remain true to the earth.”16

Bibliography

Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958. Derrida, Jacques. La Voix et le Phénomène. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967. Hegel, G. W. F. Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften III. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1970). Heidegger, Martin. “Das Ende der Philosophie und die Aufgabe des Denkens.” In Zur Sache des Denkens, vol. 14 of Gesamtausgabe. Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 2007. Klee, Paul. Kunst-​Lehre. Leipzig: Reclam Verlag, 1987. Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, The Process of Capitalist Production. Edited by Frederick Engels. Translated by S. Moore and E. Aveling. New York: International Publishers, 1967. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Also Sprach Zarathustra, vol. vi/​1 of Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe. Edited by G. Colli and M. Montinari. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1968. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Die Geburt der Tragödie, vol. iii/​1 of Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe. Edited by G. Colli and M. Montinari. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1972. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Götzen-​Dämmerung, vol. vi/​3 of Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe. Edited by G. Colli and M. Montinari. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter Werke. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1969.

16 Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra, vol. vi/​1 of Werke (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1968), 9.

232 Sallis Nietzsche, Friedrich. Nachgelassene Fragmente. Herbst 1869 bis Herbst 1872, vol. iii/​3 of Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe. Edited by G. Colli and M. Montinari. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1978. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Nachgelassene Schriften 1870–​1873, vol. iii/​2 of Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe. Edited by G. Colli and M. Montinari. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1973. Sallis, John. “Of the Χώρα.” Epoché 2, no. 1 (1994): 1–​12.

Index Acropolis 68–​69 Acteon 38 Aeschylus 32, 213 Agamemnon 37 air 29–​30, 87–​88 Alcibiades 75, 77–​79, 83 allegory of the cave 212 anamnesis 87, 93 Anaxagoras 25–​27, 30 Anaximander 16, 26, 29 Anaximenes 16, 26, 29, 30, 87–​88 Aphrodite 32 Apollo/​Apollonian 41, 58, 71, 74–​84, 91, 215–​217 Apology (Plato) 25, 76, 83–​84 archaic 48–​49, 58, 192–​193, 206, 228 archē 29, 49, 66, 86, 88, 102 Arendt, Hannah 57, 194, 197, 230 Aristotle 32, 36, 48–​50 art 9–​10, 100–​103, 118–​121, 122–​123, 126, 129, 134–​140, 143, 154, 218–​222, 224 modern 136, 222 artworks 105, 119, 121, 123, 126, 140, 191, 218, 221, 224 Artemis 32, 37, 87 Athens 68–​69, 76, 83, 91, 217 atopos 48 attunement 50, 64, 180, 184–​185, 192 Augustine 160 Bachelard, Gaston 122 Bashō 191 beauty/​beautiful 51, 72, 122, 127–​128, 136, 171, 191, 217 Being and Time (Heidegger) 166, 173, 184, 227 Benjamin, Walter 137 Benveniste, Émile 127 Berkeley, George 203, 208–​209, 229 Berthier, François 191 bios 36 Birth of Tragedy (Nietzsche) 55, 75, 81, 139, 215–​217 black holes 20–​21, 24, 31, 188, 228

body 27, 46, 78, 90–​96, 158–​162, 164, 185, 217 lived 185 Buddha 65, 195–​196 Cantor, Georg 212 Cebes 26, 91, 93 Charmides 78 China 196 chōra 20–​22, 28–​29, 50–​53, 57, 201–​203, 211–​212 chorology 52–​53, 57, 214–​215 cicadas 191 cry of the cicada 191 clearing (Lichtung) 29, 58, 176, 227 Clytemnestra 37 comedy 91, 206 concealment 85, 140, 176, 184–​185 copy 53, 55, 56, 119 cosmos 18, 24, 30, 31, 46, 48, 52, 57, 87, 112, 188–​190, 214, 215 cosmological turn 24, 25, 187, 189, 190 Crete 60, 61, 62, 217 Critias (Plato) 147 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant) 130–​132, 134, 207 Dante, Alighieri 108 Darwin, Charles 31 Dasein 166–​170 décadence 72–​73, 75, 80, 81 Delaunay, Robert 116 de Anima (Aristotle) 48, 50 deconstruction 3, 11, 132, 175, 229 Demiurge 18 Derrida, Jacques 22, 28, 164, 175, 176, 211–​ 212, 229 dialectic 39, 40, 42 diamonia 4 Dionysus/​Dionysian 59, 60, 73–​76, 77–​82, 83–​84, 216–​217 Divine Comedy (Dante) 108 Dōgen 195 doubling 4–​6, 10, 11, 90, 93–​94, 101, 105, 109–​ 110, 120–​121, 136, 138, 159, 204

234 Index earth 18, 21–​22, 23, 24–​27, 31, 49–​50, 59–​60, 62, 67, 87, 89–​90, 92–​93, 95, 158–​159, 176, 187–​195, 206–​207, 230–​231 earthbound 17, 21–​22, 225 ecology 190, 193, 194 Egypt 213 eidos/​eidē 20, 52, 56–​57, 87, 88, 89, 178, 227 elements 5, 18, 20, 22–​24, 29, 47, 51, 62, 67, 88, 108, 111–​112, 179, 183, 195, 206–​207, 219, 225, 227–​228 natural 20, 179, 183 elemental 4–​5, 23–​24, 29, 58, 64, 99, 136, 159, 181, 183, 184, 188, 189–​190, 192, 228, 231 elementals 5, 23–​24, 99, 173, 176, 178–​184, 186, 188, 206–​208, 212, 225 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 15, 18, 22, 203 Empedocles 16, 18, 26, 87, 89 empiricism 161, 200 British 201, 208 environment 104, 193–​194, 230 epiphany 60, 61, 62 Erdenken 180 eros 38–​39, 54, 78, 93, 214, 215, 217, 226 experience 22, 28, 58, 61, 62, 64–​67, 104, 106, 131, 159–​160, 161, 163, 206, 226–​227 archaic 48 Fichte, Johann 22, 203, 204, 205 finitude 183–​184 fire 23, 29, 87, 89, 159, 206 flesh 78, 107, 113, 114, 159, 164, 165 and wild being 159–​160, 162, 164 Foucault, Michel 134 Freud, Sigmund 31, 228 Gadamer, Hans-​Georg 119, 123, 125–​126, 146 Galileo, Galilei 187–​189, 229 garden 195, 196 Generation of Animals (Aristotle) 36 Glaucon 41 gods 32, 46–​50, 59–​60, 64, 67, 78, 92, 96, 191, 213 Hades 39, 90, 217 Hegel, G.W.F. 18, 126, 138, 139, 173, 203, 222, 224 Heidegger, Martin 16, 18, 64, 65, 134, 137, 158, 166–​168, 173–​176, 180, 182, 184, 227 Heraclitus 26, 28, 87–​89

hermeneutics 119, 124 Gadamer’s 126 Herz, Markus 131 Hippolytus 32, 38 History of Animals (Aristotle) 36 horizon/​horizons 6, 22, 28, 52, 107–​108, 110–​116, 170, 171, 174, 176, 178–​183, 185, 204–​206, 228 hovering 134, 137, 171, 178, 205 Hume, David 161 humus (of humanity) 191–​193, 195, 197 Husserl, Edmund 22, 173, 201–​202, 229, 231 image 52, 57, 58, 101–​102, 107–​110, 111–​116, 120, 127, 143, 153, 178, 201, 204, 205, 214–​215, 225 sense-​image 107–​116, 120, 178–​183, 183–​ 186, 226 imagination 3–​7, 18, 66, 107–​112, 119, 121, 124, 132–​137, 157–​158, 165, 170–​171, 174, 188, 201, 207–​208, 229 force of 3, 5, 107, 109, 112, 121, 126, 165, 173, 175, 176, 179, 202, 204, 205, 207 logic of 28, 177 power of 158, 165, 166, 171 tractive 5–​6, 108, 109, 121, 179 Inaugural Dissertation of 1770 (Kant) 130–​131 intuition 7, 51, 66, 132, 161, 178, 207 Ion (Plato) 54 Jakobson, Roman 148, 150 Jullien, François 197 Jun, Cao 10, 62 Kandinsky, Wassily 137–​143, 222–​223 Kant, Immanuel 129–​134, 137, 161, 200–​205, 207 King Lear (Shakespeare) 206 Klee, Paul 10, 101, 103–​105, 120–​124, 142–​143, 218–​219 Knossos 61 Latour, Bruno 189 Laws (Plato) 46, 48 landscape 67, 106, 121, 191, 194–​197, 221 liminal 134, 173 phenomenology as 176, 179, 226 living-​dying 112, 114, 116 logic 58, 73, 75–​76, 81–​82, 90, 109, 125, 206 of opposition 73, 75–​76, 81–​82 of imagination 128, 177

Index logos/​logos 17, 26–​27, 36, 39–​42, 52, 87–​88, 92, 93, 95, 164, 177, 205 eikos logos 53, 215 Magritte, René 153–​154, 224, 225 Maldiney, Henri 127 Medea 37 Merleau-​Ponty 11, 100, 126, 157–​164, 168, 170, 171, 173, 183, 185, 225 metaphysics 2, 3, 10, 20–​23, 35, 53, 58, 74–​75, 82, 85, 105, 129–​130, 133–​135, 137, 138, 143, 168, 173, 174–​176, 200 Metaphysics (Aristotle) 49 Metis 213 Mikonos 67 Minotaur 33, 35, 91, 96, 217 misology 40, 42 Monet, Claude 10, 101, 103, 104, 121, 136, 137, 143, 219 monstrosity 4–​6, 32–​33, 36, 40, 43, 188, 190, 202, 213–​214 monstrology 4, 173, 180 mortality 32, 37, 40, 90, 169–​170, 225 music 87, 91, 127, 152–​154, 216, 221 nature 6, 15–​31, 32, 36, 48–​49, 80, 86–​87, 94, 96, 132–​133, 184, 201, 208, 209, 211, 214, 218, 229, 230–​231 figure of 16 return of/​to 17–​19, 96, 218, 231 natality 37 Nietzsche, Friedrich 71–​75, 81, 134, 138–​139, 174, 175, 176, 215–​217, 231 nightingale 213–​214 Nightingale, Andrea 33 nihilism 130, 131 nous 26, 27, 48 Odyssey (Homer) 59 Okeanos 49 opacity 191 painting 9–​10, 100–​106, 110–​112, 115–​116, 118–​ 120, 122–​24, 125–​127, 136–​142, 152–​154, 219–​224 shan-​shui (landscape) 196–​198 Paladino, Mimmo 101, 140–​142, 152–​153 Parmenides 64 Parthenon 69

235 Phaedo (Plato) 16, 17, 25–​26, 33, 35, 37, 39, 40, 42, 86–​91, 95–​96, 217–​218 Phaedrus (Plato) 33, 36, 40, 54 phenomenology 3, 7, 119, 157, 163, 173, 201–​ 203, 211, 226, 229 liminal 176, 179, 226 philia 38, 39 phusis/​physis 15–​17, 22–​23, 26–​27, 29, 31, 32, 36–​37, 54, 86–​90, 213 place 50–​52, 58, 61, 65–​67, 147 setting into 142 Plato 2, 8–​9, 20, 28–​29, 33–​36, 38–​39, 41–​43, 48, 50, 56, 87–​90, 174, 212, 227 Platonism 8, 23, 32, 91, 173, 178 polis 38, 56 poiesis 52, 53–​55, 214 pragmata 205 pragmatology 4, 202 Presocratics 16, 19, 22, 23, 28 Prometheus 59 psuche/​soul 5, 30, 36, 37, 38, 40, 46–​48, 66, 90–​96, 217–​218 Pythagorean 91–​92 rapture 139 remembrance 87, 93–​95, 201 Republic (Plato) 33, 36–​38, 40, 42, 54–​57, 146, 214 Rexroth, Kenneth 193–​194 rhuthmos (rhythm) 127 ruins 131–​132 Sanskrit 65 Schlegel, A.W. 149–​150 Schelling, F.W.J. 18, 23, 195, 203, 229 Scholz, Werner 123 Schultz, Anne-​Marie 83 sculpture 142, 216 Scylla and Charybdis 37, 161 shelter/​sheltering 24, 52, 142, 179, 183, 190, 213–​214 silence 29, 51, 52, 58, 65, 67, 92, 123–​124, 142, 164–​165, 191–​193, 203, 223 of stone 191 Silenus 75, 76, 78, 80, 83 Simplicius 48 singularity 58, 135–​136, 138, 181, 197 Sirens 37 second sailing 26–​27, 95, 96, 218

236 Index sense 4, 51, 58, 65, 94, 101–​102, 107, 118, 120, 121–​122, 124–​127, 158, 166, 171, 176, 177–​ 180, 201, 204–​208, 221, 223 See also sense-​image sensible 3–​5, 27, 96, 100, 105–​106, 118, 126, 131, 136, 157–​159, 165, 166–​169, 172, 196, 219, 220, 221, 227 and intelligible 10, 20, 21, 51, 57, 92, 101–​ 103, 107, 120, 130, 132, 135, 158, 162, 175, 177, 201, 215 Shakespeare, William 147, 149, 150 shining 51, 58, 59, 60, 104, 105–​106, 108, 114, 126–​128, 136–​137, 142, 167, 171, 180, 205, 216, 219, 221 of the beautiful 122, 128, 171 Simmias 91, 93 sky 18, 24, 46, 47, 59, 62, 67, 181, 183, 188, 189, 193, 195, 206, 207, 212 Snyder, Gary 197 Socrates 25–​27, 35, 38, 40, 55, 71–​79, 81–​85, 90–​96, 215–​217 ugliness of 71–​79, 82 song 40, 91–​92, 156, 213 Sophist (Plato) 51, 54, 212 space 6, 18, 58, 68, 88, 96, 116, 120, 125, 147, 161, 169, 171, 179, 188, 212 enchorial 24 lived 24 space-​time 64, 127 spacing/​spacings 6, 86, 88, 93, 106, 158, 165, 170, 171, 177–​178, 180, 182–​185, 204, 205, 227–​228 speech 88, 95, 123–​124, 146, 151, 165, 173, 178–​ 180, 184, 205, 221 and imagination 107–​110 speechlessness 67 speculative 125, 204 Stateman (Plato) 125 Stravinsky, Igor 152 Styx 49 Symposium (Plato) 51, 54, 71, 75–​79, 81–​ 82, 216

techne 52, 54–​56, 214–​215 Tethys 49 temporality 108, 134, 158, 160–​161, 166, 169, 170 ecstatic 158, 169, 170 Timaeus (Plato) 18, 20, 24, 36, 50–​53, 57, 147, 201, 206, 209, 214–​215 Thales 28, 46–​50, 66 The Stranger (Sophist) 51, 212 Theaetetus (Plato) 9, 29, 33, 86, 88–​90, 146 Theseus 91, 96, 217 Thrasymachus 56 time 6, 134, 136, 137, 166, 179, 204 elemental 4, 136 originary 6, 137 touch 52, 94, 125, 163, 168, 225–​226 tragedy 58, 74, 91, 206–​207, 211, 216–​217 death of 74, 82, 127 translation 17, 55, 61, 145–​152, 223–​224 trust (pistis) 65 Twilight of the Idols (Nietzsche) 71, 72, 73, 79, 175, 216 Typhon 33, 35 unheimlichkeit 190, 193 unifying-​disseminating 112, 114 unlimited 27–​31, 62, 212 untranslatable/​untranslatability 52, 150, 152–​154 van Gogh, Vincent 115 visibility 10, 20, 52, 58, 59, 61, 67, 103, 111–​116, 119–​120, 141, 142, 222 and invisibility 103, 107, 112, 120, 142 water 23, 28, 49, 66, 159, 195–​196, 205, 206, 224 wonder 5, 189, 190, 211, 226 Xi, Guo 196 Zeno 26 Zōē 36, 37 Zollikon Seminars (Heidegger) 185