There are articulations that are older than any of those by which things as a whole are divided. They are older than the articulations by which the various regions of things and the various kinds of things are distinguished, living things, for instance, from those that are inanimate, sublunary or terrestrial things from those in the heaven. They are also older than those articulations by which origins are differentiated from what issues from them, from what originates from them. They are older than the difference between what is fundamental and what is based on it, what rests on the fundament. These older, more anterior articulations cannot therefore even be called fundamental; or, if they were so called, then it would be necessary to say also that they are more fundamental than the fundament itself, that they antedate the very differentiation that sets the fundament apart from the founded and determines thereby the very sense of fundamental.
More fundamental than the most fundamental of things, more originary than every origin, these anterior articulations form the joints that belong to the spacing of the elements, of elemental nature. Their anteriority lies in the precedence that this spacing has over the manifestation and differentiations of things. It is only within the enchorial spaces of the elementals, preeminently within that delimited by earth and sky, that things can come to show themselves. Nearly all things that become manifest do so as they come to pass upon the earth and beneath the heaven. Even for the Greeks, as the example of Socrates demonstrates most profoundly, one who exceeds these limits, who asks about things in the heaven and beneath the earth, risks incurring suspicion and even punishment by the majority who would confine life within these limits. Yet, in becoming manifest, things also show themselves from within the compass of other elementals. Fog, rain, the light of day, the sea—such elementals can frame the manifestation of things, thus determining how things show themselves. For instance, through thick fog or heavy rain, only the vague, almost colorless forms of things are visible. It is quite different in the silvery light of a clear winter day, in which the surfaces of things, now sharply defined, shine radiantly and gleam with color. Motion in relation to an elemental broaches still another configuration, as when, borne away across an expanse of sea, things become ever more indistinct and finally fade into the distance, as if engulfed by the sea. When things come to show themselves such that they can be differentiated into kinds and the fundamental or originary set apart in its originary, founding capacity, the spacings of the elementals will always already have taken place. In and through these spacings, various elementals come together, and it is precisely their concurrences that define the anterior articulations. Wherever and whenever various elementals meet, there are joints, seams, articulations. Preeminent among these is the horizon, the articulation that separates and yet joins earth and sky. Prominent, too, is the shoreline defined by the concurrence of land and water, of earth and sea. In the sky, where spacing is inseparably linked to time, there is the border where day passes over into night, the expansive border that is called twilight or dusk.
In The Tempest the elements are continually evoked, first of all, in the title itself, which names, not just a single element, but one in which several concur; for a tempest is nothing but the concurrence of wind, rain, thunder, and lightning. The very first sound heard in the play is elemental: “a tempestuous noise of thunder and lightning.” Elemental nature announces itself forcefully in the storm scene with which the play begins and in which the narrow human world of the courtiers is displaced by the threat of natural catastrophe. The threat of the elements continues to sound when, as “a noise of thunder [is] heard,” Caliban and Trinculo encounter one another for the first time. In the moment before he spies Caliban, Trinculo is entirely preoccupied with the threat of another storm:
Here’s neither bush nor shrub to bear off any weather at all, and another storm brewing; I hear it sing i’ th’ wind. Yond same black cloud, yond huge one, looks like a foul bombard that would shed his liquor. If it should thunder as it did before, I know not where to hide my head. Yond same cloud cannot choose but fall by pailfuls.
(II.ii.18–24)
Not even the sight—or the smell—of Caliban distracts Trinculo from his preoccupation with the elements; and, as he exclaims
Alas, the storm is come again,
(II.ii.36)
he creeps under the gabardine with his monstrous bedfellow.
In facilitating the prospects envisaged by Prospero, Ariel has a unique relation to the elements. At the end of the play, when Prospero has given him his final charge, his erstwhile master adds:
Then to the elements
Be free, and fare thou well!
(V.i.317–18)
Yet already in serving for the realization of Prospero’s designs, Ariel traverses the various elements. Indeed when, summoned by Prospero, he appears for the first time in the play, he comes to speak precisely of traversing the regions of the various elements:
All hail, great master; grave sir, hail! I come
To answer thy best pleasure, be’t to fly,
To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride
On the curled clouds. To thy strong bidding, task
Ariel and all his quality.
(I.ii.189–93)
Advancing through air, water, fire, and clouds, Ariel is capable also even of carrying out Prospero’s
. . . business in the veins o’ th’ earth[.]
(I.ii.255)
Swift as the wind, the airy spirit is ever ready to hasten off to aid in the realization of Prospero’s designs; he is ever ready to facilitate gathering all that belongs to each of the scenes the master has composed, and to this end he is prepared to traverse and to evoke any and all elements that pertain to these designs and to these scenes.
The scene of the masque is manifestly envisaged by Prospero for the entertainment of the young couple, Miranda and Ferdinand. As Prospero says to Ariel:
. . . I must
Bestow upon the eyes of this young couple
Some vanity of mine art.
(IV.i.39–41)
In this instance it is not Ariel alone but spirits subordinate to him, his quality, as they were called earlier,1 who come to perform the masque, thus bringing to realization this vanity of Prospero’s art. The scene of the masque is one of the most openly fantastical as three goddesses come forth with ceremonial words to bless the couple and promise them prosperity in their issue. Most remarkably, the goddesses who appear, Ceres, Juno, and Iris, are elemental in the most comprehensive sense. Ceres presides over the bounty of the earth and extends to the young couple the promise this holds, of full barns, fruitful vines, and rich harvests. Juno, “queen o’ th’ sky,” descends from the heights to offer the blessings of marriage to the young couple. Iris, “many-coloured messenger,” personifies mythically the rainbow, which arches between earth and sky. This most majestic vision, as Ferdinand calls it, is a vision of the elemental in its most comprehensive, mythological guise. Yet the vision is also, as Prospero declares, an enactment of his fancies, that is, an enactment of a vision that is brought forth through imagination. However, it is not as though there is an imaginative vision, which then comes to be realized in an enactment that falls entirely outside imagination; rather, as the fantastical scene itself demonstrates, the enactment carried out by the spirits belongs no less to the sphere of imagination than does the vision, the fancy, called up by Prospero.
The question that is in effect posed by the scene of the masque concerns the relation of imagination to the elemental. How does the majestic scene of these goddesses belong to imagination? How does this mythological presentation of the enchorial space of earth and sky, of the region that is the proper abode of humans, belong to imagination? Is it only the purely fanciful, mythological aspect of the scene that is borne by imagination? Is it only because it is performed by airy spirits and not by actual characters that the enactment of the scene belongs to imagination? Or is it the case that, independently of all these aspects, imagination has a certain bond with the elemental? On the one hand, it would seem that the very sense of the elemental, its very sense of being, precludes its being fashioned or brought forth by imagination. In its anteriority, it would seem to be what least of all is subject to being brought forth, what most of all is always already there. Yet, on the other hand, precisely as always already there, elementals such as earth and sky provide the setting within which things can come to show themselves, even though, as elementals, they may be only minimally manifest or not manifest at all, hence in need of being somehow brought forth, made present in their very refusal of manifest presence.
But what is an elemental? What does it mean to be elemental? Is an elemental even such that these questions—questions about the what, the meaning, the is—are appropriate to it? Need it be said that not every kind of question can appropriately be asked of every kind of thing—especially if what would be interrogated is not properly a thing at all? In such cases what is to be interrogated may deflect the question so that it recoils upon itself. Then it becomes imperative to put the question itself into question, circling—or rather, spiraling—between the form of the question and what comes to light regarding that to which the question would be addressed. In this recurrent movement between question and questioned, the utmost caution—and a writing coupled with its own effacement—is required in order to avoid asserting in the question precisely that which would be put in question.
What, then, about the what?. What about the pertinence of the question “What is an elemental?” The question is utterly impertinent, as long as the sense of the what has not been radically redetermined, built up through a discourse on the elementals themselves. Short of such a redetermination, what is asked about in the question of the what is the εἶδος as set forth in distinction from singular things. In the history or histories of metaphysics, εἶδος is—in ever varying ways—thought as that in which a manifold of singular things is gathered. But what if the elementals are not things at all? What if an elemental has no εἶδος in this sense? Is there any assurance that there is an εἶδος of the earth or of the sky?2 What if, consequently, the elementals could not be accommodated by the frame defined by the opposition between intelligible and sensible? What if they could not be assimilated to this paradigm of paradigm? What if the elemental were of an entirely different kind (without, in the most rigorous terms, being a kind at all)? Then it would submit neither to the question of the what nor to the logic geared to the field of things. The only way in which another discourse could be broached in this direction would require redetermining the sense of εἶδος as the look of things.
To ask about the meaning of elemental would be no more appropriate than asking about the what. For even if signification were taken as the starting point and meaning thus determined as the signified over against the signifier, the affinity of the signified with the εἶδος would readily come to light. As to the is, it could hardly be presumed that the sense of being that is appropriate to things—the sense that being as such is, for the most part, taken to have—coincides with that appropriate to the elementals. Is there any assurance that the elementals are in the same sense that things are?
The pertinent differentiation is linked to the imperative to which, in its end-phase, philosophy—the thinking to come—must submit. That imperative prescribes that philosophy bind itself to the sensible and forgo positing any “beyond” that is not a “beyond” of the sensible. Whatever might now be set beyond the sensible must also be such that it belongs to the sensible, even if it is not simply reducible to sensible things. This requirement is instrumental in prompting a turn to the elements.
The turn to the elements takes up—ventures to recover—latent possibilities in the early history, the Presocratic history, of Western philosophy, possibilities that to a significant extent remained undeveloped in the course of Greek philosophy. What came to be called the elements were called στoιχεῖα by the Greeks, or, in the case of Empedocles, ῥιζώματα. They were designated individually by the words πῦρ, αἰθήρ and ἀήρ, ὕδoρ, and γαῖα. We translate these words as fire, air (upper and lower), water, and earth and yet lose almost everything in translation. What the Greek words designate does not correspond, either in sense or in extent, to what is conveyed by the conventional translations; ὕδoρ, for example, can designate, not only water, but also metals. Furthermore, in early Greek thought the στoιχεῖα were not regarded as chemical elements, as the constituents of which things are composed.3 It would come closer to their sense if they were to be thought of as natural regions: the fiery region of the heaven, source of light and heat; the expanse of the air extending up to the silvery light of the heaven; the expanse and depth of the sea; the spread of the dense, supportive earth on which humans build their dwellings and in which they bury their dead. Even with Aristotle, who in many ways is quite remote from the early philosophers, each of the στoιχεῖα is still thought as intrinsically related to a certain region (τóπoς).
Granted the provocation of early Greek thought, how are the elements to be thought today in a consequential way? How must they be conceived so as to constitute a kind of “beyond” of the sensible that nonetheless belongs to the sensible without being reducible to sensible things? Here everything depends on the reference to the self-showing that belongs intrinsically to the sensible: just as sensible things are to be regarded, not in terms of their composition, but in reference to their self-showing, so, likewise, the elements are to be considered, not as the make-up—ultimately as the matter (ὕλη)—of things, but rather in reference to the way in which they show themselves in connection with—yet as distinct from—the self-showing of things. Conceived as they belong to the configuration of self-showing, they assume the character of elementals. The most comprehensive of these elementals are earth and sky. These delimit the space in which sensible things come to pass and become manifest; and while earth and sky do not show themselves as sensible things, they also do not belong to a domain other than and apart from the sensible. They show themselves as being of the sensible without being themselves sensible things. They belong to nature, grant natural things an expanse in which to appear, yet they show themselves to be such that they are irreducible to mere natural things.
Yet how is it that elementals, in their way of becoming manifest, are differentiated from things? How is it that earth and sky, wind and rain, sea and forest, thunder and lightning are elementals and not merely things, not merely congeries of things?4
While things can indeed surround us, elementals are encompassing, each in its own distinctive manner. This character is perhaps most evident in the case of the multiple encompassings that belong to a storm. As a storm approaches, for instance, up a narrow valley, the low, black clouds move in and form a canopy covering the landscape so that the entire valley comes to be encompassed by the storm. Though some living things may find shelter from the onslaught of the elements, the very sense of taking shelter attests to the encompassing character of the storm, that it cannot be escaped but must—in the best way available—be endured. The wind will sweep through the entire valley, encompassing it, though in a way different from the clouds and the rain. The lightning also has its own way of encompassing, namely, by the manner in which its flash momentarily illuminates the entire valley. The rolling thunder echoes from the hills in such a way that its sounding and resounding outline the contours of the valley, tracing the way in which the earth is shaped into this particular site. The storm brings these various elements together, and, while each of them encompasses the site in its own special way, they also intersect, overlap, and envelop one another. Indeed the storm occurs precisely in and through the coincidence of these elements and their characteristic encompassings. The storm is nothing but the running-together, the concurrence, of these elements.
Another distinctive character of elementals consists in their not being determinately bounded in the way that things are. Even though the storm is not completely unlimited in its extent, it has a certain indefiniteness. One cannot readily say just how far the storm reaches, unless, bringing meteorological measures to bear, one begins to level out the very difference at stake. Not only are the elementals indefinite in extent, but also they display a certain gigantic, almost monstrous, character, for they exceed, virtually without measure, the proportions of natural things and of those beings who bring measure to bear on nature. The gigantic earth, only remotely imaged in the giants who once (so the stories say) strode upon it, exceeds in its unmeasurable measure all the measured things that come to pass upon it; and yet, it is the abode of these things, not something alien to their nature. Also gigantic is the lightning flash, which exceeds in unmeasurable measure all the fires that humans kindle and all the lanterns that they light.
Still another distinctive character of elementals is their peculiar onesidedness. To be sure, as phenomenological analyses have pointed out, an object of perception shows at any moment only a single aspect or profile (Abschattung); from the front, one profile of the object is seen, whereas, from the side, another, different profile comes into view. In every case, however, the profile is seen as a profile of the thing, as one profile among the indefinite multiplicity of other profiles that could be seen if the object were to be apprehended from other standpoints or if it were itself turned about so as to show these other profiles. Thus, a thing shows itself to be such that, while offering at any moment only a single profile, it harbors a wealth of other profiles. By contrast, the side offered by an elemental—the edge of the wind, for instance—is not an aspect or profile behind which a wealth of other profiles that could be seen would be harbored. Neither the surface of the earth nor the vault of the sky presents itself as a profile, as one profile among indefinitely many. In the case of such elementals, what is presented is the only side and is indeed presented as the only side—hence not as a side at all in the usual sense. What sense could it have to speak of seeing the sky from another perspective? One can of course see it with different kinds and degrees of cloud cover, and one can see it with the various configurations of light and of color that it has at different times of day and of the year. But the sky itself one sees only from one perspective, only in one profile, which is to that extent no profile at all but just the sky itself. The one-sidedness of the earth is scarcely less insistent. One can of course resort to excavation in search of another profile of the earth, and yet in doing so one would only replicate what is already to be seen on and as the surface. If it is the uniformity and recessiveness of the sky that gives it its peculiar one-sidedness, it is the homogeneity and density of the earth that forestalls its dispersion into multiple profiles.
Elementals are thus distinguished in these various ways from the sensible things to which our perceptual apprehension is largely directed. Because they are not things, elementals do not at all accord with the ontological paradigm of thinghood; they are not things having properties. To be sure, it is possible, with certain elementals, to gain a vantage point—either in deed or merely in theory—from which the elemental can be deployed in a manner approximating that of a thing. Yet one does so only at the cost of effacing all that pertains to its elemental character. On the other hand, some elementals—especially the sky—utterly resist deployment as things. Amidst all that is visible, nothing is less a thing than the sky.
For the most part, elementals are apprehended only marginally, at least as long as a concurrence of them does not obtrude, as in the case of a storm. Yet, though their apprehension remains largely marginal, it is essential to the self-showing of things; certain elementals must, in some measure and in some mode, be made manifest so as to be effective in their relation to things, even if remotely. It is most conspicuous in a natural setting that earth and sky delimit the space in which things come to pass and come to appear as they are. Supported by the earth’s firmness and nurtured by its bounty, natural things come forth into the light and find their way within the enchorial space that opens toward the sky. The lives of animate things and the stability and visibility of all things are regulated by what comes to pass in and from the sky: the alternation of day and night, the course of the seasons, the promise of light and the threat of the storm. These, too, though announced in their concurrence with the sky, are elemental: day and night as they give and withdraw the light of heaven; the seasons as they give and withdraw the warmth of the sun and the bounty of the earth; the promises and threats that elementals send toward us from out of the future. These cases show decisively that elementals take place, not only as spatial, but also as temporal—that these are temporal elementals.
Because they are neither things nor thinglike in character, the elementals, like the dream-work, are not bound by the principles and laws of traditional logic, since such logic, even in its modern extensions as, for instance, a logic of relations or modal logic (already broached by the ancients), remains determined by the Aristotelian categories and ultimately by the ancient ontological paradigm. In particular, because their character is not that of things having properties, they are not subject to the law of noncontradiction, which prescribes precisely that a property cannot both belong and not belong to a thing (granted all the necessary qualifications: at the same time, in the same mode, etc.). In the domain of the elemental, in elemental nature, there are neither things nor properties, and hence the law that would govern the belonging of properties to things has no bearing, no relevance. When opposed elementals concur or endure side by side, the logic of such conjunction is entirely different from that which governs the belonging and nonbelonging of a property to a thing—that is, which excludes, prohibits, the belonging of both a property and its opposite, its negation, its privation, to one and the same thing. While, in their elemental character, earth (as dry land) and sea are opposed, land offering the very support that the sea utterly lacks, they nonetheless endure side by side and thereby form the articulation designated by such terms as shoreline and coastline. They also concur in a certain regard and to a certain extent: in its very opposition to the earth, the sea also belongs to the earth, extending it beyond the dry land. In both regards there are elemental opposites that nonetheless belong together.
While they are not things having properties, elementals are not simply uniform and without determinate character. To be sure, the diurnal sky itself is nothing but light and color. Though it will be said of course that the sky itself is blue, it is not blue in the manner of a thing having the property blue; for it is not a thing at all but rather only sheer recession that is nothing other than the illuminated and illuminating blueness.5
And yet, the sky can have texture. Clouds can interrupt the pure blue of the diurnal sky, not only providing contrast but also shining with a light that is different from that of the sky as such. If there is complete cloud cover, they will eclipse the color of the sky entirely and admit only diminished light. Cumulus clouds add voluminosity to the uranic scene. Furthermore, at dawn and dusk the sky can—especially through the diffusion effected by scattered clouds—take on very different colors. In such instances the blue sky could be said (improperly of course) to contradict itself, if indeed it had an itself and were not merely the spread of color. If the clouds are striated so as to form narrow bands of white against the blue sky, they give patterning and directionality to the sky; the directionality is even more prominent if the striations appear slanted. Such texture is enhanced artistically in paintings such as van Gogh’s Along the Seine (Plate 5). In this work the slanted striations of the clouds are given such prominence, such intense visibility, that they largely determine the painting as a whole. The effect is heightened by the way in which the ground, covered perhaps by grasses, mirrors in reverse the striated sky, its off-white color also showing striations as well as streaks of blue.
The nocturnal sky displays less texture. Yet the innumerable points of light spread across it and their cyclic movement have never ceased to evoke admiration and wonder and to entice humans both to imagine countless animate forms outlined by groups of stars and to invent countless tales about these mythical beings. Even in the wake of modern astronomy and the distinction that it enforces between sky and cosmos, the starry heaven above continues to inspire. It continues also, even in a strictly scientific context, to provide reference points by which directions can be indicated. The ancient names of the constellations, which are evocative patterns of stars that are relatively nearby and hence appear bright, are still commonly used by astronomers to identify the part of the sky in which particular cosmic phenomena are located. Thus the galaxy nearest to the Milky Way, designated as M31, is usually referred to as the Andromeda Galaxy, even though it is approximately two million light-years farther away than the stars in the constellation Andromeda and has nothing to do with these stars.
Other elementals, too, have their texture. The earth, for instance, is not just a uniform surface. It displays various colors and is differentiated as in the contrast between the fertile soil of farmland and the sand of the desert. There are also protrusions that, in the form of stone, give texture to the earth. These become most conspicuous in the form of hills and mountains, which jut upward toward the sky in such a way as to appear almost contrary to their character as earth.
Grasses and stands of wheat give patterning and articulation to the otherwise plain surface of a field. These textures are accentuated when the painter renders more prominent the array of colors to be seen in what otherwise—and certainly at first glance—would seem to be the uniform yellow of the grasses and the wheat. Such complex textures are presented in exemplary fashion in a work entitled The Wheatfield that van Gogh painted in June 1888; amidst the yellow of the wheat, red, green, blue, and even black are to be seen (Plate 6). A similar texture is made visible artistically in some of Monet’s Wheatstack paintings; in one of these works, subtitled Sunset, the wheatstack itself is brown and dark red with noticeable traces of blue and black, while the surrounding field appears brown, blue, pink, orange, green, and yellow, as the setting sun also renders the sky yellow with only a trace of blue.6
The surface of water can take on a broad range of textures. It can assume almost any color, depending on what is reflected in it. Not only colors but also the swirls, waves, and other motions belonging to it serve to give it texture. Artistic presentations of water as a pure medium of color abound, and some, such as van Gogh’s Seascape near Les Saintes-Mariesde-la-Mer (Plate 7), show, not just colors that reflect something, but water that displays colors without obviously reflecting anything. Van Gogh alluded to such free colors in a letter to his brother Theo written at the time when, in the work just mentioned, he first painted the Mediterranean. The letter begins: “I am writing to you from Stes. Maries on the shore of the Mediterranean at last. The Mediterranean has the coloring of mackerel, changeable I mean. You don’t always know if it is green or violet, you can’t even say it’s blue, because the next moment the changing reflection has taken on a tinge of rose or grey.”7 Preoccupation with both reflected and free color on the surface of water as well as on other surfaces is one of the strongest links between van Gogh and the Impressionists.
Elementals can also be textured through their proximity to or concurrence with other elementals. The direction of rain, whether its fall is vertical or slanted in a certain direction, can be determined—in a storm, for instance—by the strength and direction of the wind. Also, day and night, announced in and from the sky, thereby give texture to the sky, rendering it diurnal or nocturnal. In this way and others, the primarily temporal elementals can impinge on the more or less spatial elementals so as to contribute to their texture.
Imagine a crystal clear mountain lake glistening in the bright sunshine of a fall day. Suppose that the lake is fairly narrow and its sides are lined with trees that blend into the forest spreading up the mountainside, but that it is quite elongated, so much so that, to someone standing at one end and looking out across the lake, the surface of the water appears to fade into the distance. In imagination transport yourself to this scene and picture yourself there by the lake at a time when there is almost no wind and the surface of the water is perfectly smooth. As you cast your gaze out upon the lake, its surface will be conspicuous as the bright rays of sunlight strike it and spread their glistening across it, thus marking the level of the surface while also, to some extent, preventing that surface from actually being seen as such. Yet as you observe the surface, you will also see through the surface into the depth of the water; indeed you must, in some measure, see through into the depth in order to see the surface as a surface, since it belongs to the very sense of surface that it covers a certain depth. Thus, as you gaze out over the lake, apprehending this scene in its expanse and its concreteness, there will be a doubling of your vision, as it is directed both to the surface of the water and into the depth.
If it should happen that the scene is pictured as being in New England at the time when the fall foliage has just reached its peak so that the trees are ablaze with their fall colors, then the doubling of vision will be all the more conspicuous. For as you gaze upon the smooth surface of the water, you will also observe that it is a mirror in which you see reflected, as if into depth, the colorful spectacle of the surrounding woods. In this case the doubling of vision is quite manifest: in order to apprehend the full scene, vision must be directed both at the surface and at the image reflected by it, the image that, in turn, is an inverted double of the scene of the woods itself, to which vision may also be diverted.
In the vision of such scenes, it is not simply a matter of simultaneously having two images present to one’s view; first of all, because, in strict terms, what one sees are not mere images but things. What one has before one’s vision is the look of things, and even in the case of a reflection from the smooth surface of the water, what one sees are not merely images but rather reflections of things, reflections in which the look of the things reflected, the look of trees ablaze with their fall colors, is manifest. Yet even with such insistence on the intentionality of vision, there is still more required for the accomplishment of such vision: it is not even just a matter of having the looks both of surface and of depth present to one’s vision. Rather, in order to see such scenes in their full expanse and concreteness, it is necessary that the looks of the things seen be held together in their very difference. It is necessary that the look of the lake’s surface, glistening under the intense sunlight, be apprehended in its connection with the look of the recession into depth; and as these looks, both conveyed by the water of the lake, are yoked together, they must also be apprehended in their difference. It is necessary that the smooth, mirror-like surface be apprehended in a way that binds it together with the woods as this panorama of color is reflected in the lake; and yet the apprehension must be such that the difference between surface and reflection is retained and recognized. What occurs as one apprehends such scenes is not a mere perceptual reception of the look of things, much less of mere images; rather, there must occur also a holding together of these looks, a gathering of them in which nonetheless their difference remains intact. What occurs is a doubling, the posing of a dyad of looks that, in their affinity, in their bearing on one and the same thing, remain still distinct. This doubling, this holding or drawing together, is irreducible to mere receptivity. It is, rather, the accomplishment of what, taking up and extending a long tradition, may properly be called imagination.8 It is imagination that holds together in their difference the looks of surface and depth and of surface and reflection. In order to draw them together while respecting their difference, imagination must hover between them, circulating from one to the other.
This example, understood along the lines suggested by this analysis, has broad and significant implications. Most notably, it shows that imagination does not operate only in isolation from other capacities but that its operation can be central to others such as perceptual apprehension. Nothing could have been more distortive and reductive than the rigid separation that much of modern philosophy imposed between imagination and perception. For this separation had the effect of reducing perception to the mere reception of images and of distorting the common conception of imagination to the point that its only remaining function was to call up images in the manner of phantasy. Yet today rigorous phenomenological analysis has demonstrated that, as in the example just discussed, both imagination and perceptual apprehension extend beyond these narrow limits and involve structures and operations that are much more complex and far-reaching than those attributed to them by the modern reductive theories.
Even in the allegedly simple case of phantasy, the operation of imagination is more complex than was previously supposed. Consider a situation in which one imagines a unicorn, that is, imagines seeing such a mythical creature. In such a case the look of this creature must come before one’s inner vision, must be present to—as we say—the mind’s eye. Yet something merely imagined in this way is distinguished by the fact that it is not perceptually given but rather must be brought forth by the activity of imagining or, more specifically, of phantasizing. Thus, while it is intuitively given, while it is present to the inner vision or intuition, the givenness of something merely imagined is produced precisely in and through the imagining; in such an instance the imagination gives to itself that which is imagined, brings it forth in such a way that it, in turn, is given to the inner vision that belongs to imagining. Once the imagined scene has been brought forth, it must be sustained if it is to remain intuitively present to one’s inner vision; and yet, there is little or nothing to sustain it other than the self-giving. It must, then, be continually brought forth in extended repetitions of the autodonation. This character of being unsustained by anything perceptual, by any outer receptivity, this character of needing to be continually brought forth, belongs to the very constitution of the scene as one of phantasy. The unicorn must be held in phantasy, must be continually brought forth and intuited; and this character of being held in phantasy belongs to it as phantasized. In this complex operation a doubling is evident: for, in and through the imagining, the phantasy scene is both brought forth and intuited. In such cases the operation of imagination must be such as to hold together the two moments involved, the productive and the intuitive, even though otherwise they are quite opposite, at least in their basic directionalities. Imagination must hover between these two opposed operations so as, in and through this hovering, to draw them together.
Such structures and operations are implicit in the definition of imagination that Kant gives in the Critique of Pure Reason. According to Kant, “Imagination is the power of representing in intuition an object that is not itself present.”9 In drawing out the full sense of this definition, it is imperative to observe that in order to represent an object in intuition, in order to be positioned to intuit it, the object must in some manner be present; for, as a purely receptive power, intuition is open only to what is present before it. Thus in an operation of intuiting an object that is not itself present, that is not present in and through itself, the object to be intuited must be brought to presence, made in some sense present. It must be brought forth by imagination in conjunction with the operation in which, thus brought forth, it is intuited. Thus, in the Kantian conception there is already implicit the requirement that imagination hold these two moments together.
Comparable operations prove to be involved if we turn back to the ancient Greek conception of what subsequently came to be called imagination. Consider, specifically, the capacity that the Greeks called εἰκασία. This word is derived from the word εἰκών. Though εἰκών is usually translated as image (in order to retain the connection with the Latin imaginatio, hence with imagination), it does not signify image in the modern, psychological or epistemological sense, but rather in the sense of a copy or semblance, as, for instance, a picture of a person is a semblance of that person. Correspondingly, εἰκασία is the name given to the capacity to recognize in an image the original of which it is a copy or semblance, as when, for instance, in a portrait of Simmias one recognizes the look of Simmias himself.
This capacity is the primary theme of the Platonic discourse developed around the figure of the divided line.10 According to the account in the Republic, this line represents primarily the course of the movement by which, beginning with the most remote images, the would-be philosopher proceeds toward ever more original things. The movement consists precisely in reiterated passage of vision through an image to the original of which it is a copy or semblance. The capacity required for this movement is that of catching a glimpse of the original in the image and then extending one’s vision to an apprehension of the original. Thus, one’s vision would move repeatedly through image to original, each original being recognized as itself an image of a still more original original. Yet, in seeing through the image to the original, one recognizes, at the same time, that the image is an image, not an original. Thus, just as one’s vision presses ahead from image to original, it also circles back to the image in the recognition of its character as an image. Here, then, there is a double operation, that is, two operations with opposite directionalities that must, in and through the operation of εἰκασία, of imagination in this ancient sense, be held together.
Thus, in each case, regardless of the extent and manner of its involvement with perception, imagination is operative in holding together moments that in one way or another are opposed. Such a dyadic gathering occurs regardless of whether these moments are different looks of things (for instance, of surface and depth, surface and reflection), or different modes in which the looks come forth (as produced or as intuited), or the oppositely directed movements across the difference between image and original. In each case imagination poses a dyad in which the opposed moments are yoked together. In setting out this dyad, in holding the moments together in their apartness, imagination opens the space of its own operation, the space in which surface and depth, surface and reflection, can be apprehended together, the space in which a phantasy scene can appear, the space across which εἰκασία can move between image and original. Opening the space of its own operation, imagination also, in each case, configures this space in the way appropriate to the particular kind of operation in which imagination is engaged. It is, for instance, from the space configured for εἰκασία that the Platonic discussion condenses the figure of the divided line. But in every case, no matter how the operation takes shape, what is decisive is the spacing of imagination.
There are spacings also that belong intrinsically to all apprehension of things as they show themselves. One such case is the spacing of horizonality, most notably, that of the aspects or profiles that enter into the selfshowing of things. Whenever—as always—something is sensed from a particular perspective, in a certain profile, there is an unlimited number of other profiles that could be—but at the moment are not—given to sense. These other, non-sensed profiles are gathered into what is called a lateral horizon. For each sensed profile, the horizon assumes a somewhat different form, and, most significantly, it enters into the self-showing of the thing; that is, every thing, sensed in a single profile, shows itself as possessing an unlimited store of other profiles that could be sensed from other perspectives that the observer could assume over a certain course of time.11 Yet the profiles that, in each case, make up the horizon are not simply there with the profile that is sensed; they do not have a common locus with it or with one another. Rather, in and as the horizon, they are spaced in such a way that they are spread out, dispersed, in a manner that is irreducible to mere distribution in homogeneous space. In the horizon set forth through this spacing, the non-sensed profiles are at the same time drawn together and drawn toward the sensed profile, which appears consequently from within the horizon. This spacing, too, drawing the profiles together in their difference, is a complex, double operation that requires for its accomplishment that imagination hover between the various profiles involved.
There are also spacings of the elementals by which they remain in a certain way manifest and effective as bounding the sphere of all self-showing. In addition, there is a spacing of the cosmos, which, prior to the development of the instrumentation of modern astronomy (especially the telescope), was hardly differentiated from the sky.12
Deferring the cosmological question in order at this point to focus on the elemental as it frames the enchorial space of nature, the pertinent question concerns their manner of persistence in situations where even the most minimal apprehension of them—most notably, of earth and sky—is excluded. How can what goes unapprehended be nonetheless somehow manifest? Comparison with phantasy—as in the phantasizing of a unicorn—is helpful in showing how such elemental awareness is possible: for what is required in order that the scene of the unicorn, though not present to intuition, nonetheless appear is the operation of imagination, which brings the scene forth in and to the inner vision. The parallel is even closer in the case of perception: apprehension of the elementals, regardless of whether or to what extent they are given to sense, is comparable to that of the non-sensed profiles held in store by every thing. In the case of perception, the imaginative operation has a constancy that is lacking in the case of phantasy; whereas phantasy occurs sporadically, imagination is always operative in drawing forth the unseen profiles of things. In the case of the elementals, especially earth and sky, there is not only constancy in the imaginative operation but also antecedence: imagination will always already have brought these elementals forth as bounding the space of the self-showing of things. Imagination will always already have brought them forth, specifically in a manner analogous to that in which the non-sensed profiles that make up the lateral horizon are drawn toward and yet also, within the same complex move, withdrawn from the presently sensed profile. The difference is that an elemental is drawn to and withdrawn from, not merely a single sensed profile, but rather the thing itself as it shows itself in and through the interplay of sense and horizon. As always already brought forth in this manner, earth and sky—even if not presently given to one’s direct sense apprehension—delimit—always already will have delimited—the space of self-showing things without themselves being self-showing things. In this way imagination opens—and holds open—this space, circling or hovering between its limits, between earth and sky.
The spacing of imagination is operative, not only in opening the enchorial space bounded by earth and sky, but also in granting to each elemental its own defining limits, its space. Though the sky, for instance, is usually only marginally present to sense, almost as if it were merely an extension of the background (the peripheral horizon, as it is called) against which the thing shows itself, one may of course train one’s gaze directly at it. If it is a cloudless, diurnal sky (but also under other more complex conditions), it is present to one’s vision with constancy and with the intensity of its color. And yet, it is also sheer recession. Its depth is so peculiar that it almost seems to have no depth, at least not of the sort that things have. Yet it is not simply surface, but rather recession, unlimited, absolute recession. What is thus required for its direct apprehension as an elemental is that imagination conjoin these opposed features while leaving their opposition intact.
Imagination hovers. As it comes—and in coming, it comes as if from nowhere—it hovers, always. Yet to say that imagination hovers is like saying that lightning flashes: for just as there is no lightning apart from the flashing, just as the lightning is nothing but the flashing, so imagination is nothing other than the coming to hover. It is neither an agent that carries out the activity of hovering nor a power or faculty of a subject through which, by means of which, the subject carries out this activity. On the contrary, subjectivity and its activities (to the extent that the sense of these concepts remains intact) presuppose that imagination has already come; they take place only by force of imagination, only through its hovering.
Imagination hovers between different, distinct, often even opposed, moments. In and through this hovering between moments, imagination holds them together. This conjoining does not reduce the difference between the moments. It does not blend the moments, does not eliminate their distinctness; it does not, in the case of opposites, cancel their opposition. It does not issue in what might be called a synthesis. On the contrary, in holding the moments together, imagination also sustains their difference; in drawing opposites together, it maintains them in their opposition. In every instance the operation is like that which animates imagining or phantasizing: imagining a scene, a phantasy scene, requires, not only intuiting it, but also, since it is given, not through sense, but only through autodonation, continually producing it, bringing it forth. Thus in the act of imagining, imagination comes to hold together the moments of intuition and production; it draws them together in their difference, in their opposed directionalities. Yet, in turn, this operation must also open a space within which directionalities can be laid out, a space across which the pertinent moments can be drawn together. Apart from such a space, imagining cannot take place.
The difference between the moments on which imagination brings its operation to bear can take various forms. One such form is that in which opposition between moments intensifies into contradiction. In this case the hovering of imagination issues in a holding together of the contradictory moments in their very contradictoriness. It is to this operation that Schelling refers in saying that it is only through imagination that we are capable of thinking, and of holding together, what is contradictory. It is also by virtue of this operation that imagination can conjoin contradictory moments rather than putting into effect their mutual exclusion; for in conjoining them it also keeps them apart, opens a space between them. Thus it is that imagination, in its hovering between contradictory moments, is not bound by the law of noncontradiction. In the logic of imagination, contradiction can be sustained, and in this sense it is an exorbitant logic.
The theatre provides a quite transparent example of the hovering of imagination. As a spectator in the theatre, one apprehends the actor as a character in a drama, apprehends both his or her look as well as the sound of the voice and the words uttered. In this sense one sees and hears the original (actor) through the image (the character impersonated). Yet one does not simply forget that one is in the theatre; one does not take the actions on stage, an act of violence, for instance, as genuine actions, as actions actually taking place. To this extent there remains an awareness that the character on stage is not an actually existing character but only the actor playing the part of this character. Maintaining this awareness requires holding these moments together in their difference. It requires of the spectator a hovering of imagination, a hovering between image and original, a hovering by which, through the image, one apprehends the original (recognizes that the character is an actor) and, at the same time, sees and hears the original as the image (regards the actor as the character). The theatre itself, its very sense, is the space of this hovering. Or, more precisely, its very constitution as a theatre requires the opening of this space.
Thus, as it comes to hover, imagination opens a space across which it can draw together different moments in their difference. There are various moments—a broad range of types or kinds—that can be submitted to this operation. For each type, imagination opens a distinctive space within which, across which, the opposed moments can be drawn together. In this connection the opening of a space must be construed in an originary way. It is not that a certain space is already somehow there, though closed off, sealed in an enclosure, so that imagination would then dissolve the closure, opening up and freeing the space, letting it perhaps expand into—or at least relate to—a broader space. Rather, it is only in and through imagination’s coming to hover that there is a space, that a space is there. Yet to express the opening in this way is to venture an abysmal formulation: for the there where a space would be opened presupposes—as does ultimately the there is—this very space; or rather, the there is nothing other than this space. It would be more appropriate, then, to speak of a spacing that opens the very space in which it occurs. Such a space does not precede the spacing in which it comes about; and it comes about—that is, spacing occurs, takes place-precisely as imagination comes to hover. And yet—decisively—imagination is not an agent, not a power of a subject, not even an existential structure of a displaced subject, that would carry out the spacing. For to hover requires a certain space, even if in an extended sense. In other words, in its hovering, imagination opens the very space in which the hovering takes place. To this extent—though only to this extent—imagination is nothing other than spacing itself. As also—within a certain limit—it is nothing other than the drawing that takes place across the space opened up.
In turn, this discourse of spacing requires its own spacing, that is, specifically, an operation of typography that inserts spaces, that introduces separation, between expressions so that differences in diction, even contradictions, can (as in the abysmal formulation above) be sustained side by side. Needless to say, such a separative discourse is, most properly, a discourse of imagination.
The hovering of imagination can be thematized as separation, that is, as a spacing in which two moments are kept separate, each in its difference from the other. Yet to keep the moments separate is at the same time to hold them together. For separation is also relatedness; that is, one moment can be kept separate from the other only insofar as, in connection with the one moment, account is taken of the other—hence only insofar as a relatedness is maintained. In different terms, two moments can be kept apart only insofar as each is positioned with respect to that (other moment) from which it is to be kept apart; otherwise it would not be separated from the other but simply independent of it.
Such separation, in dramatic form, takes place in The Tempest. On the one side, there is the storm and the shipwreck; on the other side, there are those who were aboard the ship but who, wondrously, are done not the slightest harm, not even in the drenching in the water that would have soiled their garments. Thus, in the play there is enacted a separation that sets the storm apart from those aboard the ship but that also, since they were engulfed by the storm, still holds together the natural disaster and those threatened by it.
As imagination comes to hover, a schema becomes operative. It is the schema that determines the character of the space opened through imagination; and it is the schema that imagination, in opening a space, must trace. The word reproduces, as a cognate, the word σχῆμα, which has a broad range of meanings. One meaning of the word is shape or form, which indicates its affiliation with space and hence with the opening of space. In the Republic Plato uses the word in this sense to describe those who engage in imitation, specifically the painters, who, like those to whom they appeal, judge only by shapes and colors (περὶ τὰ σχήματα τε καὶ χρώματα).13 In relation to language, the word can designate grammatical form as well as rhythmical form, that is, the spacing of words such that they constitute a meaningful or rhythmically coherent expression.
Several other meanings of σχῆμα are expressed by the word figure, which perhaps comes closest to being a translation. Thus σχῆμα can be used to designate a geometrical figure such as a triangle, hence again referring to a determination of space. It can also be used in another sense that pertains to language, namely, as figure of speech. The word is used in this sense in Plato’s Ion, where Socrates gives Ion an account—not without irony—of the rhapsode’s proficiency in reciting Homer, comparing him to the Corybants, who have many figures of speech and phrases (σχήματα καὶ ῥήματα) appropriate for singing of their god.14 The way in which this passage is animated by the separation between mortals and gods and between Homer and his rhapsodes carries with it an oblique reference to the kind of intervals at issue here. In terms more directly pertinent, it can be said that the sense of figure of speech exemplifies precisely what it says (that is, is itself a figure of speech) and that a figure of speech opens an interval between what, in a particular instance, is actually said and what is meant by the figure. As observed in the earlier account (see Precursions IV), the relation to space is especially evident when the word is used to designate a figure in dancing, the figure that the dancer’s movement forms so as to trace out a certain space.
The most prominent sense of the word in logic, if not in philosophy at large, pertains to syllogisms. As mentioned earlier (see Precursions IV), the appropriation of the word σχῆμα for syllogistics occurs in the writings of Aristotle that were subsequently brought under the rubric of logic. In the Prior Analytics Aristotle adopts the word so as to designate and distinguish between the types of syllogisms. Thus he refers, for example, to the σχῆμα that is πρῶτov (the figure—as we say—that is first).15 He describes also various arrangements that can occur ἐv. . . τω τῷ δευτέρῳ σχήματι (in the second figure).16 In very general terms, the primary operation of imagination can be regarded as radicalizing or transposing the traditional logic of the syllogism. As the classical syllogism brings two propositions together so as to infer a third, so imagination draws different moments together so as to produce a certain configuration within the space outlined by a distinctive schema. As the inferred proposition is already tacitly contained in the two from which it is inferred, so, analogously, what is configured by imagination is precisely the two moments, which, though they do not contain the configuration, do serve to prompt it. In this respect there is a certain parallel between the logic of imagination and traditional syllogistic logic, though there is also a decisive shift, transposition, radicalizing, as is inevitable in moving from a logic of concepts, propositions, and syllogisms to a logic of oppositions, spacings, and schemata.17
Schemata are, then, intimately linked to space, or, more precisely, to the originary opening of space, that is, to spacing. Yet, as the analysis of horizonality demonstrates, the domain opened by spacing is not only spatial but also temporal: to move around—or to turn—a thing so as to apprehend it in another profile (and thus to reconfigure its horizon) is not only a spatial shift but also a movement that takes time, that can occur only across a certain temporal interval. Even if a system of mirrors is set up so that from the same position several different profiles can be seen, temporal intervals would still be required in the shift of vision from one mirror to another. Furthermore, spacing does not necessarily open a space that is isotropic or even homogeneous; in the spacing, for instance, of a lateral horizon, the various profiles are not laid out in a homogeneous space but rather in such a way that every shift of focus thoroughly reconfigures the horizon.
Though there is an intimate link, schemata are not identical either with space or with spacing. Rather, a schema is like a geometrical figure in that it encloses or otherwise determines a certain space. It is even more like a figure in dancing, which can either precede the actual dance so as to prescribe the spatial (and temporal) movements of the dancer or first be realized only in the dance itself. So it is with a schema, which is both a figure reenacted, recalled, hence memorial, and a figure put in operation as if on no basis, that is, originarily In this sense there are contrary moments in the very constitution of schemata.
It is no different, though perhaps more transparent, with schemata that are linked to the spacing within language, whether in the guise of grammatical and rhythmical form, of figures of speech, or of the more radical mode of separation that keeps expressions apart in their opposition. The double character of the schemata, as both memorial and originary—which can itself be expressed only through radical separation, even if implicit—is in certain respects parallel to Saussure’s distinction between language (langue) and speech (parole). In the development of this distinction, speech proves, on the one hand, to be prescribed by language (by the semantic and syntactic conventions that comprise it) and yet, on the other hand, to be the very actualization of language.18
A distinction is, then, to be marked between schemata and spacings as they take place in imagination’s coming to hover. Though it can—even must—be said that imagination traces the schemata and thereby outlines the shape of the space being opened, this very discourse involves a typographical spacing, which introduces separation where there is none.
Although the schemata do not form a closed, exhaustive system and hence are not, in the most rigorous sense, subject to a deduction, there is a certain systematicity that belongs to the manifold of schemata. This systematicity does not exclude the possibility that additional schemata may come to light, especially at a level other than that of the primary self-showing of things. In its broadest articulation this systematicity is based on the differentiation between three kinds of schemata. The first kind outlines the spacing that is most comprehensive, all-encompassing. It is especially to this kind of schema and to the spacing it governs that philosophy as a whole has been geared; even though they must be thoroughly reconstrued, it is also to such schemata and their spacings that the philosophy to come must orient itself primarily. The second kind of schemata are those that pertain to the spacing of the various moments belonging to the self-showing of things. The third kind are those that outline the spacings operative in imagining; these are the schemata that do not operate at the originary level of manifestation. It is especially with regard to this third kind that the manifold of schemata remains open; yet even with the other kinds there is an openness to further elaboration.
In figurative terms, the manifold of schemata takes the form neither of a line with its determinate end-points (not even if conceived as bidirectional) nor of a circle that closes on itself (not even if compounded into a circle of circles) but rather of a spiral. In a certain respect the spiral compounds the line and the circle. A circle is generated by an end-point of a straight line that, fixed at its other extremity, revolves around the fixed point. In the generation of the spiral there is likewise a straight line that, with one extremity fixed, revolves around the fixed extremity; but in this case, as the line moves uniformly around its fixed extremity, a point starts from the fixed extremity and moves uniformly along the revolving straight line. The curve described by this point is a spiral.19 What is distinctive about the spiral with regard to the schemata and the spacings outlined by them is both its openness, that is, its not being closed on itself and its capacity for unlimited extension, and its peculiar bidirectionality, that it both turns inward and turns outward.
Though it is possible to mark several foreshadowings in the history of metaphysics, it was in fact Kant who first introduced the schemata. While indeed the Kantian account provides a significant clue concerning the moments of self-showing, following up this clue will require an interrogation through which virtually the entire Kantian schematism will, in the end, be put aside. Not only will a thorough realignment and reconfiguration prove necessary, but also a regeneration of the very sense of schematism will be required at the most originary level.
Kant’s development of the problem of the schemata is set against the background—left largely implicit by Kant20—of the classical distinction between intelligible and sensible, which reappears in several guises in the critical philosophy. In its most general historical formulation, the question, pursued in ever varying ways from Plato on, is that of the bearing of each on the other, the question of how the intelligible determines the sensible and of how the sensible images, participates in, or in some other way instantiates the intelligible. Insofar as the question was addressed as one of spanning an interval, of reaching across a separation (χωρισμóς), there was broached throughout this history an extension of the sense of space (and of the space of sense) beyond the merely natural or empirical space in which things are positioned.
Instances abound in which such an extension of the sense of space is, with various orientations, carried out. One of the most notable instances is found in Plato’s Sophist. At the most originary level of the dialogue, consideration is given not merely to the space between sensible and intelligible but rather to that within the intelligible itself. In the discussion the Eleatic Stranger sets about considering how five of the most important kinds (γέvη),21 namely, being, same, other, motion, and rest, are capable of having community (κoιvωvία) with one another. In effect this discussion extends to multiple kinds the sort of connection that every kind has to the one by virtue of being itself one, that is, absolutely the same as itself. What the Stranger elaborates in the discussion of the five kinds is the way in which they belong together while also, as with all kinds, remaining apart in their inalienable self-identity. It is in this spread in which each remains itself while reaching out to the others that they form a community. That this spread in which community occurs is to be thought as spatial in an extended sense is emphasized by a contrast that the Stranger draws just as he is about to launch the discussion of the five kinds. The contrast is between the sophist and the philosopher: whereas the sophist is difficult to discern because he runs away into the darkness of nonbeing, the philosopher, pursuing the idea of being, is difficult to see because of the brilliance of the χώρα.22 If this passage is read in conjunction with the chorology broached in the Timaeus,23 then the reference is assured, the reference not only to space in an extended sense but, as χώρα, to what can be called the space before space, or even the spacing through which every space is opened. It is, then, within such space or spacing that the communal spread of the five kinds takes place.
In other instances the extension of the sense of space is determined by other philosophical or theological concerns. Thus in the case of Malebranche, the doubling of the sense of space serves neither to address the question of the χωρισμóς between intelligible and sensible nor to provide the means for articulating the intelligible. Rather, in this case the doubling amounts simply to a specific duplication of the distinction between intelligible and sensible; it serves therefore to reinforce this distinction and to render it more rigid rather than to mediate or suspend it. Since Malebranche’s concern is to be able to affirm certain attributes of God such as his immensity without introducing materiality into the divine being, he differentiates between two kinds of spaces; or in the Cartesian idiom of the era, he doubles—that is, extends—the sense of extension. In his words: “But you have to distinguish two kinds of extension, the one intelligible, and the other material.” He explains: “Intellectual extension appears to you eternal, necessary, infinite; believe what you see; but do not believe that the world is eternal, or that the matter that composes it is immense, necessary, eternal.”24 What is lacking in such instances is a sense or a remembrance of the heterogeneity that sets space apart from the twofold of intelligible and sensible; for the more originarily—which is not to say intelligibly—it is determined, the more insistently space proves to be a third kind.
Within the Kantian context, it can be said that a certain space—in a properly extended sense—is involved in ordinary sense-knowledge, in which a sensible intuition is subsumed under a concept (belonging to the understanding). It is in this form, as referred back to the subject, that Kant takes over the classical distinction and addresses the question as to how the space between these moments is to be spanned. It is, then, precisely in this connection that he introduces the schema as a third thing or third kind (ein Drittes),25 which, while it lies between sense intuition and concept, being homogeneous with both, nonetheless makes the application of concept to intuition possible, that is, makes it possible to span the space separating the two opposed representations in such a way that they are held together in their opposition. For Kant the schemata are differentiated into the empirical and transcendental schemata. Because the critical philosophy aims at interrogating the fundamental, comprehensive conditions of all knowledge, Kant’s primary concern is with the transcendental schemata, which hold together pure intuition (time) and the pure concepts, that is, the categories. Though Kant goes on to determine the specific schema that corresponds to each of the twelve categories, he also acknowledges the profound difficulty to which the attempt to uncover the transcendental schemata is exposed; for, in his words, “this schematism . . . is an art concealed in the depths of the human soul.”26
Kant is explicit in maintaining that the schemata are, at both levels, products of the imagination, which, in turn, is the power situated between intuition and understanding.27 He also characterizes the pure schema as “a transcendental determination of time.”28 Yet it is possible for Kant to limit the schema to determining time only on the basis of the absolute priority accorded to time over space. This priority is based on the way in which time and space are taken to be related to sense. Time, according to Kant, is the pure form of inner sense, whereas space is the pure form of outer sense. Kant concludes, then, that since all representations belong to our inner state and since time is the form or condition of inner intuition, “time is an a priori condition of all appearance whatsoever.” It is, he continues, “the immediate condition of inner appearances (of our souls) and thereby the mediate condition of outer appearances.”29 It is this all-inclusiveness that gives time its priority over space.
Regardless of whether this way of relating time and space to sense can, in some respect, be retained, there is one supposition that has now been thoroughly undermined. The development of the concept of intentionality has shown that representations do not belong to an inner state; in the perception of an object, the intentional act is directed, not at some image in consciousness that would resemble the object outside consciousness, but rather at the object itself. In the perception of a tree, what one sees is not some mental image of a tree but the tree itself. Even if, in the initial elaboration of the concept of intentionality, a remnant of the representational theory is retained in the supposition of hyletic data, more recent analysis has led to the dissolution of such inner quasi-representations in favor of a conception of the sense-image as duplicitous, as both one’s own and of the object.30
But then, if there are no inner representations of things, then there is no basis for maintaining that time, as the form of inner sense, is the condition of outer appearances. The priority of time over space is thus undermined. This is not of course to deny that time somehow enters into so-called outer appearances, that is, into the way in which things show themselves. But it is to cancel the priority in such a way that the connection between space and time, as they belong to self-showing, can assume a more complex configuration than simply that of mediate and immediate conditions. It is also to retract the characterization of the schema as “a transcendental determination of time.” Now the schema must be regarded as a determination of the intertwining or configuration of space and time; and the transcendental character expressed in Kant’s definition, its character as based on the a priori operation of subjective powers, must be transformed and realized in the direction of the self-showing through which things come to pass. Thus, the transcendental schema is to become a manifestive schema.
Hegel’s philosophy of nature broaches—in rigorous, though dialectical, terms that are not readily appropriable—an intrinsic connection between space and time. According to Hegel’s account, the point in space is negativity (each point is not every other point), and yet it is a negativity that does not actually negate its other. Thus: “Space is this contradiction, to have negation in it [an ihm], but in such a way that this negation falls apart into indifferent subsistence Negation in space is negation attached to an other.” The negation of this negation is a self-relating negation, a perpetual self-sublation (Sichaufhebung). This is time. The text concludes: “The truth of space is time, and thus space becomes time; the transition to time is not made subjectively by us but is made by space itself [der Raum selbst geht über]. In mere representation [Vorstellung], space and time are taken to be quite separate; we have space and also time. Philosophy fights against this ‘also.’”31
What is especially consequential in this account is not only the bond that it establishes between space and time but also the self-unfolding that it demonstrates. In the relation between space and time, it is a matter of transition, and it is space itself that makes the transition, namely, through its own unfolding or self-development—or, as may be said, through spacing. Yet the transition and the spacing in and as which it is made cannot be simply temporal, for it is the very coming to be of time. Thus, in Hegel’s account there is both an extension of the senses of space and time and an activation of space (with time) into spacing.
The extension of the sense of space is still more evident in Hegel’s delimitation of the concept of nature. Nature, says Hegel, is the idea as “external to itself [sich äusserlich].” Thus, “externality [Äusserlichkeit] constitutes the very determination in which it is as nature.” The text adds: “The divine idea is just this: to disclose itself, to posit this other outside itself, and to take it back again into itself.”32 Since, then, natural space and time presuppose nature itself, the externality, the positing outside itself, and the taking back into itself cannot refer to an inner and outer of natural space but only to an extended sense of space. In this extended sense, the inner and the outer serve to delimit the very genesis of nature.
What, then, are the schemata? What, most decisively, are the manifestive schemata, those that bound the spaces in which the self-showing of things takes place? Or rather, since a schema is not a what, how are they to be reconstrued once the classical distinctions become inoperative as such? What guise do the schematic outlines assume once the distinction between intelligible and sensible, its modern reformulation as the distinction between understanding and sensibility (concept and intuition), and the externality, the recuperable alterity, of nature have all been allowed to collapse into a rigorous orientation to the sensible? Within the most extensive purview, the schemata must now be construed as outlining—as the limit, bound (πέρας) of—various openings within and from the sensible. It goes virtually without saying that the sensible is to be taken here, not as determined by opposition to the supersensible or intelligible, but as the domain in which things come to show themselves through sense.
How, then, is the first kind of schema to be construed? What guise is assumed by the schema that bounds the most comprehensive, all-encompassing spacing? The determination of this schema can be brought to light most directly by beginning with a generalized form of the classical distinction and observing how this is transformed in and through the rigorous reorientation to the sensible.
This generalized form of the classical distinction is indicated in the very word sense. This word can designate both the sensible (the things apprehended through the senses) and sense in the sense of meaning or signification; the word can also designate the correlates on the side of apprehension, as when one senses with the senses or has a sense for what is meant by a certain expression. Thus it can be said, almost without qualification, that the word sense serves to designate everything that is, as well as all apprehension. Its extension is no less than that of being, regardless of whether being is articulated through the classical distinction or by way of an orientation to the sensible.
The opening that is indicated by sense and that brings to being its initial articulation or supplement has an abysmal structure. While it differentiates between two senses of sense (as the sensible and as meaning), this very differentiation into different senses presupposes that the second of these senses (that by which a word can be designated as having two senses) has already been distinguished. In other words, it is possible to speak of the two meanings of sense only if meaning as such has already been differentiated from the other sense (meaning) of sense. In short, the differentiation between two senses of sense presupposes itself. There is no point to be reached from which the differentiation could simply be effected from the beginning.
The way in which this differentiation, this primal articulation, is set out in its classical form is both described and enacted in the central books of Plato’s Republic. This text can be shown to identify λóγος as what is primarily instrumental in effecting the transition, the opening, from the sensible to the intelligible.33 It is, then, precisely the inception of λóγος that drives this transition and so carries out in deed the differentiation between the two senses of sense. Needless to say, there is no simple inception of λóγος, no recoverable point where it is first effected. If λóγος is—temporarily, at least—restricted to its sense as discourse or speech, then it must be regarded as always already in force.34 When philosophy comes upon the scene, it intensifies and thematizes the opening effected through λóγος.
With the reorientation to the sensible, the space opened primarily by the inception of λóγος can no longer be construed as that between intelligible and sensible. Rather, the spacing must be an opening from the sensible to something that remains nonetheless of the sensible. Here the double sense of sense provides a decisive clue. That to which the space that is opened is to extend is nothing other than sense in the sense of meaning or signification. Without diminishing the difference, a parallel can be drawn with the opening broached in the Platonic dialogues, that in which the ones, as what is said in speech, are posited over against the indeterminate sensible. The critical difference is that what is said in speech can no longer be taken to coincide with (or approximate to) an intelligibility anterior to speech, an intelligibility that, in the end, speech would merely convey or translate; for such an intelligibility is precisely the intelligible that has now been effaced. If speech does not, then, anticipate such anterior signification, then it becomes decisive that meaning as set out through speech is set out from the sensible. One speaks always about something, even if it is only remembered or imagined and not actually perceived; except perhaps in the most extreme cases (for instance, in certain areas of modern mathematics such as abstract group theory), significations are never totally detached from the sensible. Thus, as set out from the sensible, meaning remains of the sensible. What is effected is not a transition that, in the end, would leave the sensible behind for the sake of anterior intelligibility but rather a spacing that opens from the sensible in the direction of a domai of signification that remains nonetheless attached to the sensible, indeed so much so that, in the final analysis, it is involved in the very self-showing of things. For—and here the Platonic parallel is again indicative—it is only when—always already—speech sets forth significations that the mere indeterminate sense-image becomes disclosive of a determinate thing.35
The manifestive schema delimits the space that opens from the sensible. Thus there is an inversion of the Kantian determination: the schema itself is no longer conceived as a third kind but rather as bounding the space between sensible things and their meaning. It is the space, not the schema, that functions, then, as an in-between, as a kind of third kind.
But how is the comprehensive manifestive schema to be construed? This schema, which bounds and to that extent determines the comprehensive spacing, is a dyadic limit. The dyad consists of two lines. One line extends across the sensible as such; it marks sensibleness, independent of the way in which sensible things show themselves, that is, without specific regard for the various moments that belong to self-showing. The second line extends across signification as such; it marks significancy, independent of the way in which significations are set forth, that is, without specific regard for their relation to the sensible.
These lines, as schematic, set the rigorously defined limits between which the spacing of manifestation takes place. Before sensibleness and the sensible manifestness that issues from it, there is no self-showing; and beyond significancy and the significations informed by it, there is no pure intelligibility set apart from speech.
These lines are not simply geometrical. And yet, abstraction is possible, and then, subject to this condition, they can be regarded geometrically. Within this purview they prove to be lines that do not extend infinitely; thus the parallel postulate has no pertinence, and there is no question as to whether these are lines belonging to Euclidean, Riemannian, or Lobachevskian geometry. While not simply extending or extendable to infinity, they are also not of determinate, finite length but rather are more of the order of nonrectifiable curves in fractal geometry. The quadrilateral of which the two lines would form two opposite sides is completely open on the other sides. These features represent, in this abstract mode, the character of self-showing as limited yet open and displaceable. Yet this is only an abstract representation, not the dyadic schema itself, which is presupposed by all self-showing, even by that which occurs in geometrical representation. But neither are these lines simply concrete: they are not lines in nature (if indeed, as painters dispute, there are lines in nature), for they mark the limits—and hence pertain to the very possibility—of nature as it most comprehensively manifests itself.
Between these lines, which constitute the dyadic, manifestive schema, there is spacing, the opening of the comprehensive space of the self-showing of things. Across this space, between the limits that define it, speech intervenes, first as the sheer opening to or advent of speech as such and then as setting forth determinate significations, that is, as what the Platonic text designates by the words ὑπoτίθημι and ὑπóθεσις.36 Figuratively drawn—in distinction from abstract representation and recalling the near-identity of schema and figure—the line of this dictic or hypothetical (in the Greek sense) proposing extends in the direction of, but stops short of, significancy The proposed significations, in turn, come to bear on sensibleness so as to draw forth—short of sensibleness—the determinate thing as such. Continuing to draw the figure imaginatively, letting the lines between the lines curve around within the delimited open space, the figure that begins to take shape would, then, call for still another line extending to the horizons that enclose the thing, this line curving around within the space delimited by those already drawn. It would curve around still farther within this space as the thing (with its horizonality) came, in turn, to be encompassed by various elementals. It would then curve around still farther inward as, from the configuration of self-showing, the look of the thing came into view. Thus, tracing imaginatively the course of the successive moments of manifestation would produce the figure of a spiral. Most remarkably, the figure of this succession of moments could take shape not only through spiraling inward but also—with as much justification—through spiraling outward, as the peripheral horizons and the elementals extend beyond the thing. Correspondingly, in purely geometrical representation, a spiral can be generated, not only by the motion of a point that starts from the fixed extremity, but also by a point that moves in the opposite direction, starting at the other extremity of the revolving line and moving toward the fixed extremity.
And yet, can such drawing contribute to a rigorous discourse, especially to a discourse in which logic would be envisaged? Indeed it can. Indeed there is even a certain need for such imaginative figures to come to supplement the discourse. For imagination itself—if there is imagination itself, if imagination has an itself— has the character of drawing in the most comprehensive, yet also fundamental, sense.37 Thus, imaginatively drawing a figure (such as the spiral) under the guidance of the discourse on imagination adds to that discourse a corresponding enactment. It carries out in deed (ἔργον) what is envisaged in λóγος.
There is also another spacing governed by this linear, yet dyadic, schema. It is a different kind of spacing, a spacing that presupposes the operation of the comprehensive schema, specifically both the advent of speech as it comes to set forth significations and the manifestness of sensible things, preeminently of visible things and their horizonally composed characteristics. This spacing occurs as an exceeding, indeed as a double exceeding in which each, the seen and the said, exceeds the other.
On the one side, the said exceeds the seen, that is, signification (as what is meant in speech) exceeds the sensible spectacle, even when its reference is precisely that sensible spectacle. In saying something, one intends what cannot be seen, that is, one intends a what that as such cannot present itself to vision. To say mountain is not to intend any particular mountain available to vision, nor even all mountains taken together. To say this word is to intend something that exceeds anything that can be seen. The excess is only enhanced if one says the mountain is green, for not only does the signification of green exceed what is seen (just as that of mountain) but also, to a still higher degree, the signification of is, what the word is says, exceeds anything that can be seen. While one may see that something is (just as one sees the mountain and sees that it is green), one never sees that which the is as such signifies. There is also another, more continuous way in which signification exceeds the sensible. This occurs inasmuch as saying relates back to the seen so as to make explicit articulations and connections that, at the merely sensible level (that of what is often termed perception), are only implicit. Beyond merely seeing the green mountain, one says the mountain is green, articulating the holistically presented sensible thing, differentiating between the thing and its color.
In these ways, then, the said exceeds the seen.
On the other side, the seen exceeds the said, for what is merely said does not show itself as does the visible spectacle. To adopt an expression from phenomenology, mere signification, that is, what is intended merely in speech, does not present itself in the flesh. The blue of the sky cannot be captured in the word blue—and even in saying this, as just now, the excess is displayed. The excess is more powerfully displayed in the reflection or recoil of the seen back upon the said, that is, when, beholding the blue of the sky, one senses how it surpasses what is said in the word. Then it is as though blue were split, divided from itself, as though there were two blues, one actually seen, directly presented to vision, the other merely said and as such capable only of anticipating what the seen blue alone (in fulfilling the intention) can provide. Indeed in the most intense concentration on what cannot but be called the seen blue—though in this very designation it is displaced from seen to said-silence may supervene—perhaps inevitably—in order to keep what is seen apart from the blue that can be said.
In these ways, then, the seen exceeds the said. Thus each exceeds the other in the spacing governed by the linear, dyadic schema, the schema that is comprehensive and, above all, manifestive.
In the self-showing of things there is operative, not only the comprehensive schema, but also schemata that govern the various moments belonging to the self-showing. These schemata constitute the second kind.
The simplest, though indispensable, moment is that of the sheer sense-image. By sense-image is meant the occurrence, means, and locus in which the sensible becomes—and so is—present to sense intuition, or, more neutrally, to sense prehension. Phenomenological analysis—above all, that of the concept of intentionality—has shown that the image in this sense does not belong to some subjective interiority such that it would provide the subject with an interior copy of the thing existing outside subjectivity. Neither, on the other hand, can the image simply be jettisoned and subjectivity turned, as it were, inside out so as to be, with apparent simplicity, there alongside the object; for such a move would virtually efface the difference between perceiver and perceived (to use the terms of classical phenomenology). Rather, the sense-image is to be regarded as duplicitous in the sense that it is both one’s own and of the object, indeed indifferently so.38 Thus the spacing of the sense-image is its hovering between perceiver and perceived, or, more precisely, between the sphere of one’s own (that which constitutes one’s very ownness, one’s propriety) and the thing that in the image comes to be present. In this spacing it is as if imagination came to inhabit the image, to take it up into the hovering as which imagination comes, to haunt it so as to impart to it this very suspension between two points. The schema that marks the bounds of this spacing is again dyadic. Geometrically regarded, it consists of two points—though there, as throughout, the schema is neither abstract, mathematical, nor concrete, natural, but rather, as a moment of self-showing, is antecedent to both. It consists, then, in two antecedent points that mark ownness, in the one case, and sensible presence, in the other.
The second moment of self-showing occurs as the sense-image comes to be enclosed in its horizons. Through this occurrence, the duplicity of the image is resolved and the image with its horizons is objectified. It acquires density, depth, and other features that belong to objects as such. Yet with this moment, too, the spacing is a hovering, yet a hovering in the sense of a double drawing, of tractions in opposite directions. It belongs to the very characteristic of horizons that they are neither simply present nor simply absent. The case of lateral horizons is exemplary in this regard. In the sense-image there is presented only a single profile (Abschattung, in classical phenomenological terms) of the object. Yet in apprehending the profile as a profile of the object, there is also an awareness that the object can present itself in other profiles, that it would indeed present other profiles if it were turned or if the spectator were to take up a different position. The totality of these other profiles constitutes the lateral horizon within which the actually presented profile, the sense-image as it comes to be objectified, is enclosed. The spacing occurs, then, in the drawing of the horizon toward the actually presented profile and the simultaneous withdrawing of the horizon from the profile.
With this moment, too, the schema marks the bounds of the spacing. Also, as in other cases, it is dyadic. Its two sides can, as before, be regarded geometrically, though the way in which they take shape begins to mutate into a figurative regard. On the one side, the schema consists of two points. These points mark the two aspects of the sense-image as it comes to be objectified, that is, as it is transformed into an actual profile.
These aspects are (1) its character as presence to sense, as presenting the object, and (2) its character as actual (including, as one sense of the word: occurring now, in the present moment). On the other side, over against the two points, the schema is an extensive curve, which marks the indefinite multiplicity of other profiles from which the object could be apprehended, that is, the multiplicity of profiles that constitutes the lateral horizon. With other types of horizons, those loosely grouped together as peripheral horizons, the precise form of the curve would vary, but the schema would remain the same: two points over against a curve that would come almost— but not quite—to enclose the points.
The elementals also have a bearing on the self-showing of things. They constitute the third moment of manifestation. Like horizons, the elementals come to enclose the objectified image, and thereby they bring the self-showing of the thing to a certain completion; for there is nothing farther, nothing beyond the elementals that encloses—and so in some measure determines—the self-showing thing.
Yet elementals enclose differently from horizons, and thus their spacing is different. The spacing of the elementals is an encompassing; they encompass both the things that show themselves and those to whom these things show themselves. A heavy rain encompasses an entire expanse of things. Everything is drenched, even, if they lack protection, those to whom the rain and the things drenched by it are manifest; precisely because the rain is encompassing, because the spacing of this elemental takes the form of an encompassing, the attempt to escape is in vain, and the only choice is to seek shelter. In most cases the concurrence of elementals is also encompassing, as in a storm, or, most comprehensively, in the enchorial space formed by the concurrence of earth and sky. Even in those cases where the concurrence produces a linear moment, as with the horizon where earth and sky meet, that moment is in some respect encompassing and also belongs to a spacing that is more openly encompassing, in this case that of the enchorial space. Even those linear concurrences that are least obviously encompassing, such as a coastline, can always be traced farther to such an extent that they encircle and in that sense encompass.
Considered geometrically—but with the same displacement toward anteriority as with the other moments—the schema of the elementals is a circle. As such it encircles the self-showing thing and bounds the spacing that encompasses the thing. More precisely, this circle is one that expands into an ellipse, since the elemental encompasses, not only the self-showing thing, but also the one to whom it is shown. It would not, then, be inappropriate—granted the displacement from mere geometry—to regard these two poles as the foci of the ellipse.
Like the spacing that it marks, the schema, though not unlimited in extent, has a certain indefiniteness. The ellipse has no precisely determinable border. The same is the case when, through the concurrence of elementals, two or more ellipses intersect. The expanse of sky and earth, the extent of a storm, the length of the horizon—all of these resist precise determination. Rather, it is as fractal geometry has shown to be the case with coastlines. In attempting to measure the length of a highly irregular coastline, the result varies with the length of the yardstick used. If the yardstick is relatively long, then the total length will prove to be less than if one measures with a shorter yardstick that takes into account more of the irregular twists and turns of the coastline. For a still shorter yardstick the measurement will be affected even by the irregularity of the stones (measuring up around the slightly protruding stone rather than simply across it); hence the total length will turn out to be still greater. The point is, then, that the precise length of the coastline is undecidable, that it does not admit of precise determination. If ε denotes the yardstick length, then it can be said that “as ε is made smaller and smaller, every approximate length tends to increase steadily without bound.”39 In the terminology of fractal geometry, the length of the coastline is a nonrectifiable curve.
Such indefiniteness applies also to the manifestness of the elementals and of their concurrences. Their manifestness—for example, that of the absolutely recessive, nonperspectival sky—is of course quite different from the manifestness that issues from the self-showing of things. Yet what is schematically most significant is that the manifestness of an elemental can vary from its maximal extent down to the point where, even while remaining operative, continuing to encircle the self-showing thing, it is not manifest at all. From a mountaintop one can gaze upon the sky in its full extent; yet within an enclosure, within a cave, for instance, the sky may not be manifest at all, even though the cave and everything in it belong to—show themselves within—the enchorial space framed by earth and sky.
The schema incorporates this variation in the manifestness of elementals. The ellipse is set in motion; or rather, it is set on a course along which it can move from maximal manifestness to complete nonmanifestness. The schema of the elementals is an ellipse set upon such a measured course.
The fourth moment is quite different from the others. This moment, the look of things, is not a constitutive moment within selfshowing; unlike the sense-image, the horizons, and the elementals, it does not contribute to enabling the self-showing of things to take place. Rather, the look of things presupposes the self-showing of these things; and, while also appropriating this self-showing, cancelling the difference, the emergence of the look of things goes beyond their mere self-showing, beyond the dispersed manifestness that it produces. This emergence occurs through a gathering of what has become manifest into a new guise, elevating it to the level of a more compact and determinate manifestness. In the look of things their manifestness is crystallized and intensified. In the look of things their self-showing undergoes a certain fulfillment or completion as, at that very instant, it is surpassed. The emergence of the look, its surpassing of the self-showing of the thing, constitutes its spacing. More precisely, its spacing occurs as an opening through which it comes forth, comes forward, toward the one capable of apprehending the look.
Since the look emerges from the self-showing of the thing, its schema must include the two lines that comprise the comprehensive schema of self-showing, the lines that bound the space within which the spiral of manifestation takes shape. What transforms this schema into that of the look is a vector that cuts across the two lines and extends beyond the upper line (construing the comprehensive schema as two horizontal lines, the upper line being that which marks significancy). The direction of the vector is toward the whatness or being of the thing, since, as the ancients recognized, the look can disclose what something is, can reveal its being. Yet the vector does not reach the further line that would define the whatness or being of the thing, for what something is may prove to exceed what is disclosed in the look, as when, in the look of someone who looks back at the one apprehending this look, there are traces of a depth that the look cannot convey. In addition, the vector cuts obliquely across the two lines of the comprehensive schema, for the look does not in every case emerge straightforwardly from the full manifestness of the thing. As painters and photographers are well aware, there are cases where the look of a person can be conveyed—perhaps best of all—by the slightest gesture.
Such is, then, the schema of the look of things: a vector cutting obliquely across the two lines of the comprehensive schema, cutting across them in the direction of the line marking the whatness or being of the thing.
The third kind of schema pertains to an open manifold. These are the schemata that operate, not at the level of the originary self-showing of things (and of its extension in the look), but rather in more restricted spheres. In many cases the spacings they govern belong to deliberate acts of the operations by which things first become manifest.
Many types of presentation are bound to this third kind of schema. The question remains undecided whether even a remotely exhaustive enumeration and analysis of all these types is feasible or whether their extent is best left open for the specification and elaboration of additional types beyond those that are most evident. If, for instance, remembrance is counted among these types, remembrance in the general sense of presenting, in the present, a past presentation in its character as past, then it will be necessary, not only to analyze this type of presentation, but also to exhibit the way in which its spacing is governed by the third kind of schema.
Thus, no attempt at systematic completeness in this regard is to be ventured. Let it suffice, then, instead, merely to refer to the three instances of imaginative vision analyzed above. The first instance is that in which one sees the surface of a lake as a surface, that is, in which one sees simultaneously both the surface of the water and its depth. The second instance is that of phantasy. In this instance, too, there is a doubling, but here the two moments consist of the bringing forth of the phantasy scene and the intuition of that scene. The third instance involves a double movement between image and original: through the image, one sees the original, and yet, from the original, one recognizes the image as an image.
In all three instances the spacing is such that the two moments involved are held together in their difference. The space that is opened is one in which both moments can operate simultaneously: vision both of surface and of depth, both production and intuition of the phantasy scene, and both directions of movement between image and original. Yet the space is also such that the moments do not merge, are not simply unified through a synthesis, but rather retain their distinctness.
The corresponding schema bounds this spacing. Here, too, a geometrical regard is appropriate, provided that, as with other kinds, it is displaced in an anterior direction. Yet with this third kind of schema the relevant anteriority is not that of self-showing as such; rather, it involves a more moderate shift, the measure of which could to some extent be determined by showing how operations such as that of phantasy are presupposed by geometrical representation.40 The schema operative in these three instances consists, then, in two points connected (but also separated) by a line. The two points mark the distinct moments; the line yokes the two points together while also keeping them apart, so that in their conjunction they remain nonetheless distinct, separate.
Therefore, each of the three kinds of manifestive schemata delineates, each in a distinctive way, the opening of a space within which a self-showing can, at some level, occur. The schemata mark the bound, the limit, indeed the very shape—in a displaced geometrical sense—of the space that comes to be there (defining the there) through the hovering of imagination. Yet imagination is not an agent that draws the schemata and opens the corresponding spaces. Rather, imagination comes to hover, and as it hovers—always already—the schemata come to be drawn and the opening of spaces takes place. As there is hovering, the two lines of the comprehensive schema are drawn, as well as the spiral between them; also these lines exhibit a dynamism by which each transgresses the other in the mutual exceeding of the seen and the said. It is likewise with the schematism of each of the moments of self-showing, with the two points that schematize the sense-image, with the two points opposite a curve that together schematize the horizons, and similarly with the other, more complex schemata. As imagination comes to hover, whether simply oscillating between two points or sustaining a more complex figure such as that of an ellipse set upon a measured course, the schemata come to be drawn and the spaces of self-showing as such, of its various moments, and of its founded modes are opened.
But what about imagination itself? There are precedents that prompt a reversal: rather than regarding imagination as belonging to the subject, as a power of the subject, the subject would now be taken to belong to imagination. Thus imagination would be construed as primary, and the subject as secondary. And yet, such a reversal would have the effect of destabilizing the sense of both terms, as well as their relation. On the one hand, the very sense of subject (subiectum,ὑπoκείμεvov) precludes its belonging to something else. On the other hand, imagination has always—or almost always—been determined as a mere power, and it is inconceivable how, short of cancelling this determination entirely, it could be primary. Furthermore, once the reversal is carried out, the relation between the terms cannot be coherently reconstituted. A subject that is not primary can be no subject at all, and imagination, if it is to be primary, cannot continue to be determined as a power of the subject. What is required, then, is to free imagination, to twist it free of the subject, and to venture a radical redetermination. Yet in this venture it would not be a matter simply of taking up the question “What is imagination?” but, first of all, of interrogating the very pertinence of the question. At once, then, it will become evident that imagination is wholly anterior to the what and the is (so that in this very declaration the writing must also be crossed out). For the what and the is, the whatness and being, which come into play in relation to manifestation, emerge only through the spacing of the look. More generally, when manifestation occurs, imagination will always already have come.
More pertinent is the question of the bond, of the intimacy (Innigkeit), between imagination and the human. Even though imagination comes as if from nowhere, it cannot be—or happen as—something utterly beyond the human. The human capacity for speech (especially for setting it forth) and for art provides the most striking testimony to this bond. Coming as if from nowhere, imagination has the character of a pure gift, of something given without any giver being manifest, of a bestowal without origin. Like every gift, there comes with it an imperative or at least an entreaty that we open our heart to it, that we extend our hand, that we receive it with gratitude, though a gratitude directed at no one.
Thus imagination comes to the human, promising intimacy and entreating reception. Accepting the gift cannot be any kind of deliberate act, for in any such act the manifold of spacings is already presupposed. In receiving the gift, we must also honor it by immediately giving it up, by relinquishing any claim to possess it, for, should it become a possession, then it would settle into being an a priori; thereby reversion to a well-known course would, even if not without some divergence, have been effected. On the contrary, what is required is that the always already be thought otherwise than as an a priori. In the reception/relinquishment of the pure gift (of) imagination, the human is thought otherwise, indeed in its utmost possibility. The last word on imagination and the human comes from the poet William Blake:
The Imagination is not a State: it is the Human Existence itself.41
The title of Caspar David Friedrich’s painting The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (Plate 8) appears to describe quite accurately what the painting depicts. The wanderer is standing on rocks that rise well above the surrounding fog. Since he is facing directly away from the viewer, his face is not visible at all. In his right hand he holds his walking stick, which helps secure his stand on the rough, rocky protrusion while also serving as a kind of attribute like Jupiter’s eagle or Heracles’ club. His wind-blown hair calls attention, by contrast, to his stance: he stands firmly, motionless on the mountaintop, looking out across the fog. His gaze appears to be fixed on the distant landscape and the dome-shaped mountain that dominates it. It would be easy to suppose that he remains completely silent, his silence simulating the dampening effect of the fog. Perched motionless on the rocks, seemingly absorbed in his vision of this elemental scene, he is for the moment no wanderer at all. He simply beholds the spectacle of the gigantic, yet encompassing elements. He simply stands before the elemental.
When, with our senses attuned, we humans engage the elemental, it in turn engages us. We may indeed lose ourselves in it, let ourselves be completely drawn out into the elemental opening. What the artist presents only intensifies and brings more forcefully to our attention our virtually common capacity to be entranced by elemental nature. When we stand motionless and silent before the elements, our steady gaze fixed upon a vast sea of fog or a towering mountain peak, what motivates us is not the desire to see what the sea or a mountain looks like or to know what the sea or a mountain really is. It is not at all a matter of perception or of knowledge. When we attune our senses to the elemental, we are not in search of its essence or its distinctive look.
On the other hand, such direct attunement is necessary in order to come before the elemental. It does not suffice merely to think of it, to frame a concept of some elemental. Neither does it suffice merely to speak of it so as, through speech, to signify it; especially in this regard, it is imperative to guard against taking the elemental merely as a symbol or metaphor of something else, of something that does not itself belong to the sensible. It does not even suffice to imagine the encompassing fog and the distant fog-enshrouded mountainous landscape. Rather, we must stand in the presence of the elemental, not just apprehending it as an ordinary thing is apprehended, but abiding with it, letting our senses be absorbed by it. By attuning our senses to the elemental in its sheer presence, we enhance our sense of belonging to the elemental.
One could venture—with a tentativeness born of cultural distance, within limits that are themselves difficult to determine—to mark a certain affinity between attunement to the elemental and the Japanese concept—if it be a concept42—of iki. Any such venture must be accompanied by serious reservations and kept within appropriate bounds; for, according to Kuki, “iki will not be found” in Western culture, as testified by the fact that “the West has no word corresponding to iki.”43
Kuki distinguishes three features of iki. The first of these is coquetry, initially taken in the sexual sense, as directed at a person of the opposite sex, but then displaced into what is called the essence of coquetry, namely, “to come as near as possible, and at the same time making certain that nearness stops short of actual touch.”44 This displacement is secured by the second distinguishing feature of iki, the pride and honor that constitute the moral ideal of Edo culture. This feature serves to spiritualize coquetry, to transform it by a certain idealism. In terms that could seem more akin to Western metaphysics than to Japanese thought, Kuki calls the first feature the material cause of iki, while designating the second feature as the formal cause. The third feature is described in terms of various components that, even at the limit of Western philosophy, are extremely difficult to think together as a single feature. For marking an affinity with attunement to the elemental, there is one type of comportment that is most notably pertinent, namely, detachment from worldly concerns. How such comportment can be thought together with the imperative that “one must be sophisticated, possessed of a frame of mind that is light, fresh, and stylish”45 is, to say the least, difficult for us to fathom, however resolutely Western concepts are bracketed and sensibilities are oriented to Japanese culture.46
The affinity—limited, problematic, as in any effort to let the borders of very different cultures come in contact—lies primarily in the balance of nearness and its limit (“nearness stops short of actual touch”). Such comportment—thought in the Japanese mode as spiritualized coquetry—has an affinity with the comportment of the wanderer, who stands in the direct presence of the elemental, in a certain nearness to it, and yet remains aloof from it, taking his stance on the rocks above the raging sea. Furthermore, his utter engagement with nature, its presentation in the painting enhanced by his facing squarely away from the viewer (the “world” of art), amounts to a certain mode of detachment from worldly concerns—that is, from social-political, all too human, concerns in contrast to engagement with nature and with the elemental as it exceeds the human.
Aside from this very tentative attempt to mark an affinity across cultures, it can be said with some confidence—though also in a certain resistance to Western metaphysics—that we truly engage the elemental only when we do not think, only when we cease conceptualizing and insisting on connections between the spectacle of nature and something allegedly beyond the sensible. 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 elemental that belong to our very propriety—proper, in distinction from natural, elemental.
1.1.ii.193. See the editors’ remark in the Arden edition of The Tempest, 162n.
2. The limitation of the eidetic that Socrates grants to Parmenides in the Par-menides bears directly on this question. Asked by Parmenides whether there are εἴδη of fire and of water—that is, of these elements—Socrates replies that he has often found himself in difficulty (ἐv ἀπoρία) regarding this question. Parmenides then asks him whether he also has difficulty deciding whether there are εἴδη of such vile and worthless things as hair, mud, and dirt. Socrates replies: By no means (oὐδαμῶς). It would be strange (ἄτoπoς), he says, to think that there is an εἶδος of such things, though, as he admits, he is disturbed by the possibility that what holds for some things may hold for all (Parmenides 130c-d).
3. In a very different, modern context, though one in which there is explicit reference to early Greek thought, Hegel refers to “the equally trivial and external relation of composition [Zusammensetzung]” (Wissenschaft der Logik I [1832], vol. 21 of Gesammelte Werke, 154).
4. On this distinction see also Force of Imagination, 156–62.
5. Hence, “there is no such thing as sky.” See the further elaboration in Force of Imagination, 181–83; and below in chap. 7.
6. See Shades—Of Painting at the Limit (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), Plate 4 and chap. 1 (esp. 46f.).
7. The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, ed. Mark Roskill (London: Flamingo, 1983), 267.
8. This long and very complex history is treated in detail in Force of Imagination, chap. 2.
9. Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, B 151.
10. This interpretation of the Republic and specifically of the discourse on the figure of the divided line is developed in detail in Being and Logos, 413–43.
11. This formulation is meant to indicate that horizonality is not only spatial in character but also temporal. In this case the specific temporality involved is that of the temporal interval that would be required in order either to move to another perspective or to turn the thing so that another profile would be sensed in place of the one presently sensed. That such an interval would be required belongs to the very structure of horizonality.
12. This virtual identification is indicated in Plato’s Timaeus by the affinity between the words oὐραvóς and κóσμoς as they function in this discourse.
13. Plato, Republic 373b. See also 601a.
14. Plato, Ion 536c.
15. Aristotle, Prior Analytics 26b33.
16. Ibid., 36b27. See also 34b3 and 39a4.
17. Across the inestimable distance that separates dialectical logic from the logic of imagination, there is an analogy between this transposition of the syllogism and that which is carried out in Hegel’s Logic and which was cited above (see Precursions III). In Hegel’s discussion he dismisses the classical, formal syllogism as having nothing to do with the rational. But then, referring to his thoroughly transposed determination of the syllogism, he says, with emphasis, that “everything rational is a syllogism” {Wissenschaft der Logik II, 90). See also Enzyklopädie,§181.
18. See Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale (Paris: Payot, 1980), esp. chap. 3–4. In particular, Saussure says: “There is, then, interdependence between language and speech; the former is, at once, the instrument and the product of the latter” (ibid., 37).
19. This is the spiral of Archimedes, which can have any number of turns, the straight line making the same number of revolutions. See Euclid, The Elements, translation and commentary by Sir Thomas L. Heath (New York: Dover Publications, 1956), l:164f. Proclus, on the other hand, has a narrower concept, the so-called single turn spiral, which stops after one complete revolution of the line. Beginning with the same general definition, Proclus continues: “for when the end of the line which describes a circle has reached its starting-point at the same time as the point completes its movement along the line, they coincide and make me such a spiral [i.e., a single turn spiral]” (Proclus, A Commentary on the First Book of Euclid’s “Elements,“ trans. Glenn R. Morrow [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970], 141). In this work all references to the spiral are to the spiral of Archimedes.
20. In the Prize Essay, “What Real Progress Has Metaphysics Made in Germany since the Time of Leibniz and Wolff?,” Kant explicitly defines metaphysics in terms of this distinction: “This ultimate end toward which all of metaphysics aims is easy to discover and can in this regard provide the basis for its definition: Metaphysics is the science of advancing by reason from knowledge of the sensible to knowledge of the supersensible.” He is also explicit about the relation between metaphysics, so defined, and ontology, which he identifies with critical or transcendental philosophy. To metaphysics, which has as its end the supersensible, ontology belongs “only as a propaedeutic, as the porch or entryway of metaphysics proper. It will be called transcendental philosophy because it contains the conditions and first elements of all our a priori knowledge” (“Welches sind die wirklichen Fortschritte, die die Metaphysik seit Leibnitzens und Wolff’s Zeiten in Deutschland gemacht hat?,” in vol. 20 of Kants gesammelte Schriften, 260). In this regard it is significant to note also that Kant’s Inaugural Dissertation, the last of his precriticai writings, is entitled On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and Intelligible “World.
21. In introducing this discussion the Stranger also uses the word εἶδος synonymously with γέvoς. See Sophist 254c-d. See also the discussion of the passage on the five kinds in Being and Logos, 510–22.
22. Sopitisi 254a.
23. Timaeus 48b-52d, together with Chorology, chap. 3. It is significant that when the Stranger speaks of the place to which the sophist runs away, he uses the word τóπoς, whereas the philosopher’s place of brilliance is designated by χώρα. For, extending only slightly the account in the chorology, it could be said that the philosopher is precisely the one who would be capable of distinguishing between τóπoς and χώρα and of identifying the latter as primary or archaic.
24. Nicolas Malebranche, Méditations chrétiennes, méd. ix, §§9–10. See Alexandre Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957), 156f.
25. While recognizing Kant as the one who first introduced the schema, it must be acknowledged that he was not without precursors. Most significant in this regard is Plato, who in the Timaeus also lets a third kind (τρίτov γέvoς) be introduced, though into the distinction in its classical form (intelligible/sensible) rather than its Kantian form (concept/intuition). Like the Kantian schema, this third kind, the χώρα, is what makes possible the bearing of the other two kinds on each other. Significantly, the χώρα, while not identical with space, is closely affiliated with it. It would not be entirely inappropriate to say that it is the spacing in and through which space is first opened up as such. See the discussion in Chorology, 113–24 and, as regards Kant, 154f.
26. Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, A 141/B 180f.
27. In the Critique of Judgment there are various inversions of the relation between concept and schema or, more properly, between understanding and imagination. The simplest such inversion is that of the judgment of taste, in which imagination, apprehending the form of the object, is no longer, as in empirical knowing, subject to understanding but rather enters into a harmonious interplay with the power of concepts. Another instance, more closely linked to artistic creation, is that in which imagination presents an aesthetic idea, which is conjoined with a concept so as to expand the concept beyond what conceptual thought can grasp. Thus, aesthetic ideas prompt more thought than can be comprehended in a determinate concept. See Kritik der Urteilskraft, in vol. 5 of Kants Werke,§49, together with my discussion in Transfigurements: On the True Sense of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), chap. 4.
28. Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, A 138/B 177.
29. Ibid., A 34/B 50.
30. See Force of Imagination, 90–97.
31. Hegel, Enzyklopädie,§257. The citations given here are from the more accessible Zusatz rather than from Hegel’s own more rigorous, but also more condensed account.
32. Ibid., §247. The final citation (beginning “The divine idea . . .”) is from the Zusatz.
33. This transition occurs as the initiation of διάvoια. From the stage where there is a mixing-up of opposites (where things look, for example, both beautiful and ugly), there emerges another where sensible things present themselves as indeterminate (neither beautiful nor ugly nor both nor neither). The transition between these stages occurs when the beautiful and the ugly are posed as distinct and opposed ones over against the mixture. This posing, this dianoetic leap, is the initiation of διάvoια; that is, it marks the transition across the major division-point on the divided line, that is, the opening of the distinction between sensible and intelligible. Yet this posing is inextricably connected to names, to posing distinctly what is named in names. Thus, the differentiation, the opening of the distinction, is made possible primarily by λóγος (see Being and Logos, 424–39). This transition corresponds, across the differences in context, to the δεύτερoς πλoῦς that, in the Phaedo, Socrates describes himself as undertaking by having recourse to λóγoι (see Phaedo 99d-e).
34. It is in this respect—though only within the appropriate limits—that the classical definition of the human (?νθρωποζ) as the animal having speech (ζῷov λóγov ἔχov) can be affirmed.
35. In an analysis proceeding from the sense-image, it is shown that the initial exceeding of what is present to sense occurs in the opening to speech. Precisely thereby things themselves are set out as exceeding mere sense, as beyond the mere image. They are set out as such, though not yet as showing themselves in their particular actuality. More precisely, the provocation of speech calls them forth as things that are determinate; it posits them as things that in their determinateness are the same as themselves, in contrast to the vacillating sense-images. If, beyond this positing and in view of the things themselves as posited, one were to attribute opposite determinations to something, then one would have spoken against precisely what speech would have established; one would be speaking against speech, that is, producing a contradiction (see Force of Imagination, 102f.). That the possibility of contradiction arises precisely at the point where things themselves (with their determinations, that is, their properties) are posited serves to provide further confirmation—in a context quite remote from Aristotle—that the law of contradiction is geared to the field of things.
36. See Plato, Phaedo 100a-b, together with my paper “Speaking of the Earth: Figures of Transport in the Phaedo,” Epoche 13 (2009): 365–76.
37. See Force of Imagination, chap. 5.
38. See ibid., 90–97.
39. Benoit B. Mandelbrot, The Fractal Geometry of Nature (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1983), 26f.
40. Determining the precise character of presupposition in this sense and in this domain would require extensive analysis. Yet, as a point of departure, one could consider the way in which a geometrical figure may be envisaged in order for a proof regarding it then to be constructed. Another case would be that in which a geometrical figure is actually drawn in order that, through the drawing (as image), one could apprehend the figure itself (as original), which by definition cannot itself be seen; for, having no width, being one-dimensional even if on a two-dimensional plane, lines are, in the most rigorous terms, invisible.
41. William Blake, Milton, in vol. 5 of Blake’s Illuminated Books, ed. Robert N. Essick and Joseph Viscomi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), Plate 32*(e). Text given on p. 188. In a letter to Dr. Trusler dated August 23, 1799, Blake writes: “And I know that This World Isa World of Imagination & Vision. I see Every thing I paint In This World, but Every body does not see alike. . . . The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the Eyes of others only a Green thing that stands in the way. Some See Nature all Ridicule & Deformity & by these I shall not regulate my proportions, & Some Scarce see Nature at all[.] But to the Eyes of the Man of Imagination Nature is Imagination itself. As a man is So he Sees. . . . To Me This World is all One continued Vision of Fancy or Imagination” The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V Erdman [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982], 702).
42. In Heidegger’s text “From a Conversation about Language,” in which he dialogues with a Japanese philosopher, the latter remarks: Aesthetics “furnishes us with the concepts needed to grasp what is of concern to us as art and poetry.” Heidegger (termed the inquirer) replies: “Do you need concepts?” The Japanese answers: “Presumably yes, because since the encounter with European thinking, there has come to light a certain incapacity in our language.” Heidegger goes on to report that he often spoke with Count Kuki about “the question whether it is necessary and rightful for East Asians to chase after the European conceptual systems” (Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache, vol. 12 of Gesamtausgabe, 82f.). Heidegger notes that the conversation on which this text is based was occasioned by a visit by Professor Tezuka of the Imperial University of Tokyo (ibid., 261).
43. Hiroshi Nara, The Structure of Detachment: The Aesthetic Vision of Kuki shũzō, with a translation of Iki no kõzõ (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004), 58f The citation is from the translation of Kuki’s text.
44. Ibid., 19.
45. Ibid., 21.
46. Kuki stresses the connection between understanding iki and ethnic being. At the very end of his text he writes: “We comprehend and understand completely the core meaning of iki only when we grasp its structure as a self-revelation of the being of our people” (ibid., 60).