It is perhaps not totally precise—although the observation wears well and should give us pause—to say after Jaspers that a new kind (do I say a new “race”?) of thinker was formed in the nineteenth century, that of the poet-thinker, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. It is not totally precise because Pascal, Lucretius, perhaps Dante—to set aside names even more ancient—are equally poet-thinkers. And it is also not totally precise anymore to say that the philosophy of existence was born in the nineteenth century. Pascal is the ever-living refutation of such a judgment. And is not the philosophy of Plato directly tied to the meditation of an existing being named Plato on two existing beings named Plato and Socrates? Plato’s philosophy is a reflection on the life, condemnation, and death of Socrates.
The fact no less remains that the borders of philosophy dissolved in this milieu at the end of the nineteenth century, as have also in a lesser way borders of every kind. There are no longer many pure painters (if there ever have been any). Courbet or Manet were perhaps the last great painters. Van Gogh and Cézanne are something else entirely. What thinker before Kierkegaard had taken as the center of his meditation his own most personal experience and his own history? To find some analogues, we would have to turn to poets like Nerval or Rimbaud.
But it is not only the fact that Nietzsche and Kierkegaard are poet-thinkers,1 nor even that they have common adversaries (the historian and the professor of philosophy), nor even that before the unity of monism they raise up the unicity of both the Unique and of the Overman;2 and it is not only because they oppose philosophical reflection, one, with belief, the other, with the will to power3—it is not simply these reasons that explain the profound kinship, the coincidence of opposites, that unite Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Beginning with the observation, God is dead—which they take in opposite senses (for one, the death of God is the death of a God who is revealed to be God by his death, and which is our salvation; for the other, our salvation is the death of God, of a God who by his death ceases to be God)—they pursue their meditation, hunting for eternity in the instant: for Kierkegaard in the instant of repetition and resurrection, lived by the Unique, for Nietzsche in the instant of the eternal return, lived by the Overman. The Nietzschean instant as much as the Kierkegaardian instant is the fusion of what Heidegger will call the three ecstasies of time, within what he will call (and on this point his meditation only continues that of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard) the resoluteness of decision.
One proposes an immanence capable of overwhelming us as much as transcendence does, if we allow ourselves to be overwhelmed; the other proposes a transcendence that terrifies and consoles us. Both place man before an abyss; and it is within a hairsbreadth of his downfall, in anguish and heartbreak, that he is revived and starts anew.
Through the paradoxes before which they find themselves (the birth and death of God, the eternal return), through the paradoxes that they feel in themselves and that they are in themselves, through living their discordances, the Kierkegaardian Unique and the Nietzschean Overman intensify their individuality.
Starting from this point Nietzsche and Kierkegaard construct their existential dialectic, starting from here they forge their personalities as a union of opposites and—to recall the ancient phrase of Heraclitus—a harmony of strife. They are a living, felt dialectic, not a dialectic that goes from thesis to antithesis and then to synthesis, but a dialectic that from a thesis goes to a thesis and an antithesis, in order then to go toward a thesis that is not posed, that cannot be posed, and which is like the disappearance of consciousness in the ecstasy at Sils Maria4 or in religious meditation.5
By contrast to the Hegelian dialectic (thesis-antithesis-synthesis), and even to the Platonic dialectic (ascending dialectic, contemplation, descending dialectic), we could imagine an existential dialectic that would go from presence to dialectic, and from dialectic to ecstasy through the play of antitheses that destroy each other in order to cede their place to this ecstasy. From the ecstasy of perception (positive ontology) to the ecstasy of mystery (negative ontology), from the plenitude of the real to the apparent vacuity of surreal being, one passes through this dialectic, this coming and going of thought and ripping apart of antitheses.
Short dialectical chains between two moments where the dialogue ceases—at least the apparent dialogue—in order to leave the word, if I can put it this way, to silence. A silence of perception through which the spirit is nourished by things, a silence of ecstasy where it merges with the highest point of itself and the world.
Between the two, this tension, this intensity that defines existence placed between the transcendent immanence of perception and the immanent transcendence of ecstasy.
These last words show us that even in these moments where the dialogue ceases, it continues, that as soon as reflection is attached to them, there is a dialectic both of perception and ecstasy.6
We find this tension between antitheses at every moment—when we take the idea of being that divides into its objective and subjective aspects, into resistance and completion, into independence and communion, or when we take the idea of the absolute that divides into a transcendent absolute and an immanent absolute, into the absolute of Damascius and the absolute of Bradley, into discord and immersion, division and union. If there is a truth that seems to emerge from these studies, it is the truth of the unsayable, out of which discourse begins, to which it returns, without this being the same unsayable from which it escapes and to which it goes.
The Hegelian dialectic leads to the vision of a totality. The same goes for the Platonic dialectic. The dialectic that we foresee remains partial and comes from a logic of quality where the most is not more than the least, and which, occasionally, may orient us, not toward a richer view of the universe, but toward a more naked contact with certain parts of the universe, with those tiny particulars of which Blake spoke and about which Nietzsche thought.
The ineffable that we will reach could be expressed in the plural; there will be ineffables, multiple ones, each infinite, limited-unlimited realities. The absolute is not the totality (in any case, not the totality that would be an all-encompassing aggregation). It is intensity or density. For me it is a matter of a felt absolute [un absolu senti], and which can be felt in every little thing.
Rarely can one so strongly see the immanent dialectic at work in systems than in contemporary thought as it unfolds: the idealism of Royce somehow summons forth the neo-Realism of Perry, and neo-Realism summons forth a realism of a totally different, and opposed, sort, that of Strong and Santayana. Husserl: who prefigures in his philosophy the being-in-the-world of Heidegger, who shows us present objects so well, out there, in their corporeity, who so strongly characterizes the natural point of view, who insists on the necessity of perception as the starting point and end point for science, who, in my opinion, shatters the nonintentionality of perception (perception is not a sign; it is; this is the Husserlian equivalent of the Bergsonian theory of the image), who emphasizes the role of the body, without, for all that (unfortunately it seems to me), abandoning idealist presuppositions, and who makes us see not only a world of essences but a world of values—yet Husserl wants to bracket the sensible world, to separate essence and existence, to define essence. A vain task. The thinking he provoked has developed far beyond his own thought. Heidegger shows that the world cannot be bracketed, that existence has no essence, that the idea of essence is artificial, in the most proper sense of the term, modeled on human artifice, modeled on the model seen by the craftsman.7
Thus by a more objective observation we find again the path of the dialectic that we had glimpsed. But the path does not explain itself; it demands that it be placed between its starting point and end point.
Before putting the path back in its place in this way, it is appropriate to note that if with Nietzsche and Heidegger human thought has come to pose subjectivity in its most intense state, although both pose at the same time an object that by contact with which subjectivity is sharpened (an object-subject in Kierkegaard, since it is God incarnate; an object without reason, which is the eternal return, in Nietzsche), then, on the other hand, in Whitehead and Heidegger the object, the thing, is perceived in its most profound being, though one is guided by his insistence on being-in-the-world, the other by his insistence on the world of causal efficacy. Man, says Heidegger, is naturally outside of himself. Man is always with other men and near things; this near and with are intimately tied together. And it is this fact that man is outside of himself that constitutes transcendence such as Heidegger conceives it in his world where the transcendence of the traditional God no longer subsists.8
This is not to say, however, that Whitehead and Heidegger turn their noses up at this subjective thought, the force of which we have seen in Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. In order to sense their affinities with the poetic vision of things it is sufficient to reflect on the way that Whitehead likes to cite Wordsworth and Shelley and that Heidegger likes to cite Hölderlin and Rilke.
Heidegger and Whitehead place us in the presence of the world of objects. At the same time Whitehead liberates us from classical conceptions of time and space; no one, not even Eddington or de Broglie, whose reflections go so far, not even Bergson, has better shown the necessity of breaking with the spatio-temporal schemes of classical thought, of conceiving the jumble and effulgence of phenomena in such a way that here and now no longer have any meaning. Here Hegel’s critique, perhaps merely verbal at root, is extended; for it is no longer the terms here and now that are critiqued, but the very idea of a here and now.
The universe that modern science presents us with is made of relations at once more massive and subtler, more shapeless, vaster, and more nuanced than those that classical science used. When we have to connect the phenomena, the idea of causality, too crude and simplistic, cannot satisfy us.9
Nothing is more characteristic of contemporary philosophy than this emphasis on the most subjective of the subjective and the most objective of the objective (with this reservation that this word “objective” expresses very poorly this perceived density behind concepts, this opacity, this entanglement without name and without corresponding idea, something like a primordial slime which refuses every idea, and about which perhaps Parmenides was thinking when he interrogated the young Socrates in Plato’s dialogue).
In other activities we equally discover these loaded antitheses that appear at the apex of modern thought, this grand objectivism and grand subjectivism (to employ Sheldon’s terms, who, it is true, applies them to other doctrines). We discover them among the highest activities of man, in other visions, like those of Van Gogh and Cézanne. Van Gogh, along with El Greco, represents subjectivity at its highest power, and Cézanne represents at its greatest intensity the need, the hunger and thirst, for objectivity, and the need to “create the image” [faire l’image].10
Yet here we cannot separate grand objectivism and grand subjectivism. For destiny, a rational destiny like any destiny, says Hegel, demands that what we find in Cézanne is yet more than mere objectivity: a need for objectivity is something very subjective, appearing all the more subjective as we conceive it as attempted rather than as accomplished. And on the other side, Van Gogh knows—knows without knowing it—how to be engrossed in yellow and scarlet, and how to become every object.
Thus the subjective returns to the objective, just as the objective returned us to the subjective.
Perhaps this is an indication that, although it is important to push both sides as far as possible, they cannot be thought apart and even ought to be annihilated in the movement of thought as it attempts to attain to things.
We therefore find here dialectic and realism. We can observe the profound links that unite them. There is a dialectic of realism, extremely visible as we have seen in the history of its latest forms passing from the neo-Realism of Perry, a realist monism that allows for the identity of the object and its representation, to the critical realism of Strong, Santayana, and Sellars, who keep them separate. For the mind nothing is more difficult in fact (though this is no argument against this position) than to limit itself to a realist monism analogous to the theses of Bergson on the first page of Matter and Memory or to those of James in his famous article “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?” They want to stop short of this dialectic. Without doubt they are right. But the reason of the intellect does not know this reason of reason or experience the need ceaselessly to traverse anew the circle of oppositions and fusions of image and object.
If there is a dialectic of realism, this is because dialectic is not the explanatory term, or is such only because it is itself explained by the reality. Where does this play of antitheses come from, this mental play of conceits that makes contraries shine forth in the face of contraries, if not from this need it has to approach the real, a real that refuses all purely intellectual contact, which does not allow itself to be closed off and on which we could never have anything but successive, contradictory, and alternative perspectives, as Montherlant said?
We have already seen that dialectic will only be truly dialectical if it itself becomes dialecticized, by which we mean that the dialectic that makes each thing take place, should itself take place, and take place, in fact, between two nondialectical terms.11
This can become an opportunity for us to take a look at the point of departure of dialectic, then at its point of arrival, at the reality of perception, and at the moment of ecstasy and mystery, the moment of transcendence.
The weakness of empiricism and realism is demonstrated in the fact that they have handed over to idealism the great admiration that comes along with lofty thought and demanding reflection.12 From the starting point of the Kantian affirmation that being is position, we could pass to a positive philosophy analogous to Schelling and to the highest empiricism. In this way we could have a transcendental empiricism, as Schelling demonstrated, seeking the conditions by which experience is not merely possible but real, and this realism would be founded on the critique of the idea of the possible and on the reality of contingency (which goes hand in hand with the contingency of the necessary).13 We could also have a radical empiricism, as James demonstrated, hospitable to both relations and terms, or an empiricism hospitable to essences, such as is found in G. E. Moore, Russell, and Husserl, or, finally, an affective empiricism, of which Bergsonian philosophy is the living proof.14 Transcendental, radical, nonintellectual (these three empiricisms are inseparable): this empiricism is very far removed from what is offered in the classroom. It would allow us to bring together Pascal, Schelling and Hume, Russell, Boutroux and Scheler, Bergson, Nietzsche and Rauh.
Such an empiricism allows us to bring together a theory of contingency and a theory of reality.
This empiricism naturally leads to realism. Reflection only exists as reflection on that which is nonthought; consciousness only exists if there is nonconsciousness. Before my thought emerges, there is always something there. I think, therefore something is thought, which my thought is not. This apothegm is as true as the “I think therefore I am.”15
Even more, systems of meaning are created, and not only by the mind. If, as Plato said, the eye is of the same kind as the sun, then for this empiricism as for Plato the light has formed it. Matter gives form to the form before the form informs matter, and a similar idea is found at the root of the conception of emergence in Alexander.
Novalis spoke of a magical idealism. Continuing a tradition that comes from Albert the Great and some Arab philosophers more than Aristotle and Plato, he profoundly tied together idealism and magic. But it is no less legitimate to attempt to construct a magical realism. Reid approached this when he spoke of a magic of perception.
Idealism-realism: it is true that these terms are hardly satisfying. And doubtlessly we should observe that absolute realism and absolute idealism come to be confused, to coincide; or, more precisely, it is beyond realism and idealism, or even more precisely, below them, that we should place ourselves, and even live out, the negation of all these -isms, which are only various points of view on that which cannot be perceived by vision.
In this way we approach a mysticism, but a mysticism of the thing and of the object before it is a mysticism of the person.
The realism of which we have spoken will not be a flat realism. Remaining at the level of our perception, not pulling apart this perception in accordance with something other than it, it will present us with artificially nonconcrete concrete realities, albeit born from a natural concrescence of things.
The thing! Rilke created a poetry of things, and Husserl made all the aspects of these things shine forth that are never given except in perspective and in adumbration. He makes present to us the luminosity of things that are given and which are not given. Never better than in modern thought has the thing been known in its multicolored perspectives as also in its opacity and invisibility. To take back up an idea that could characterize certain of Whitehead’s conceptions, immanent and transcendent (or more accurately even equally eluding these two qualifications) are organizational ends.
Once we have felt the presence of perception, the point of departure for the dialectic, we can envisage its point of arrival situated beyond consciousness, as perception was situated below it. In fact the dialectic of which we spoke implies distance, rupture,16 estrangement, consciousness. Consciousness is always distance. As soon as there is consciousness there is a gulf to cross between it and reality that will never be crossed.
This shows thereby that even if the truth lies in judgment, reality lies in the realm of nonconsciousness. Here we are studying some ideas: the idea of being, of the absolute, of transcendence, of space. We see that they carry us each time to something that is beyond ideas, or rather, below them.
This also shows that every relation ought to be broken, founded on this transrelational experience, which is the true experience, non-experienced experience. This equally shows that it is in feeling [le sentiment] more than in reason that we find the most precise approximation of the absolute.
This finally shows that if we want to get back to paradise lost, we must lose ourselves in paradise regained; this is a condition for finding it. Consciousness occurs between this loss and rediscovery: consciousness is necessarily unhappy.
From its starting point to its end point, it passes through negativity, which leads the play of antitheses. But beyond this negativity there dwells an even more essential negativity, all-denying, destructive, and no longer merely negative, a need to annihilate its own thought in an attitude of submission to this domination by transcendence felt by the being.17
And if I can reach it, it is a living wall.
In this movement of transcendence there is an accomplishment of the self that is at the same time a self-destruction, a failure that is also a triumph. Phaëthon and Empedocles are fulfilled through destroying themselves.1
Doubtlessly, what we can call the charm of these ideas of transcendence and the absolute derives from their ambiguity, from the sudden flash of their meaning. Transcendence is both a movement toward and a stable end; the absolute is the separating and the uniting. No one has better highlighted this ambiguity than Plato in the Parmenides. The first hypothesis is the separated absolute; the second is the uniting absolute; and without a doubt, the uniting absolute ought to encompass the separated absolute—or at least ought to if the separated absolute allows it. Plato escapes these difficulties by erecting a theory of the limit and the unlimited—or at least gives the appearance of escaping them in this way. But the last line of the Parmenides shows us that they remain by putting us in the presence of the unsayable.2
Thus, despite these ambiguities, the absolute and the transcendent preserve their value for thinking. They mark the extreme point of thinking’s effort, where thinking reaches its limit. And by this limit, at this frontier, a light begins to shimmer about which we cannot say whether it comes from thought, from the Other or from the nameless Thing.
The same can be said for the concept of the instant. Since Plato it has haunted the minds of philosophers and writers. From the instant of the third hypothesis to the instantaneous pleasure of Aristippus, taken back up by Walter Pater and André Gide, to the theological instant (the instant of Incarnation, of resurrection, of last judgment in ictu oculi) to Kierkegaard’s iteration of it, and then Dostoyevsky’s, to the Nietzschean eternal return that sanctifies the instant, to Rimbaud’s eternity, we would have to follow these meditations as they unfold from the [primal] search for lost eternity, rediscovered in the instant, and to ask if the instant is not for the modern thinker a consoling myth more than a reality, a cheap imitation of eternity, and yet at the same time a reality, an existential reality ceaselessly offered, ceaselessly lost.
By returning to immanence, could we have lost transcendence? Can we preserve in myth that which thought destroys, that is, its essence, which gives it value? Could there be a return of dialectic, an eternal return by which the first term reappears enriched and impoverished? The following studies endeavor to give a response to this question. However, they themselves rather possess more of the character of questions than answers. At the least they place us in the presence of a movement that is glimpsed rather than seen and which strikes off from reality through a dialectic of antitheses and nonbeings in its struggle toward a mystery.
1. I note also that both Nietzsche and Kierkegaard doubt at the same time that they affirm, and know at the same time that they doubt. For them it is less a matter of dogmatic affirmations than of passion and will (see on this point what Jaspers writes about Nietzsche).
Both have made problems of themselves. And in such a way that one would have to study the relation between the poet-thinkers and “problematic” men, between poetry and doubt.
2. It is in this sense that Löwith said that Hegel is the last great philosopher.
3. It would be interesting to follow the struggle of philosophers at the end of the nineteenth century and of those of the twentieth century against the philosophia perennis, who perhaps now know that it is mortal (like the civilizations of which Valéry spoke): the struggle against Plato, against a certain conception of Plato, in my opinion false, carried out by Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Bergson, James, Heidegger; the struggle against Descartes, waged above all by Heidegger and Jaspers; against Spinoza (James); and against Leibniz (Russell).
4. [A town in Switzerland where Nietzsche spent the summers of 1881 and 1883–88.]
5. The contradictions of Nietzsche, Jaspers tells us, ought to orient us each time to an unsayable center by means of their relation to what gives them their depth of meaning.
The thought of the eternal return is destructive and constructive: destructive inasmuch as it affirms the absurd, and constructive inasmuch as it reaffirms being, establishing the infinite value of the instant. Nietzsche’s art consists of making the greatest dissatisfaction into the greatest satisfaction, of the becoming absurd into an accomplished being made up of divine instants, of decadence into the gate that leads to the richest and most self-assured of cultures.
6. Plato, Damascius, Hegel, and Kierkegaard have been able to make us feel this quasi-ineffable junction of relation and nonrelation, of immanence and transcendence. The absolute is given in its relation with the subjective and yet can never be given in this relation. This situation is also that of the person and even of the thing.
7. I emphasize that one will find in Arbalète, vols. 3–4, a clear and faithful translation (as clear as possible) of some passages from Heidegger. I cannot recommend with the same enthusiasm the translation of Corbin, which was published by Gallimard in the collection Les essais. Despite all the very great qualities of this translator (in different realms of thought he has given us works of value), and despite his often deep enthusiasm, the translation leaves something to be desired. His intuitions sometimes deceive him.
8. Heidegger has equally emphasised very well the notion of philosophy as return to a trusting or confident relation with things. Giving himself over to a somewhat adventurous etymology, he says that being a philosopher means being familiar with things like a friend even more than having friendship with wisdom. The philosopher is the one who finds the profound union of human being with being (Lecture Course of 1928–29 [Einleitung in die Philosophie, GA 27], lectures 2, 7, and 16). It is this that he still conveys by the idea that Dasein is Being-in-the-world; it constitutes a world, starting from which it understands itself.
9. Heidegger says that science sees today that it is surrounded by something that as science it needs but that it can neither understand nor conceive. It is running up against its limits. Something “other” supports science and yet cannot be known by it (Lecture Course of 1928–29 [Einleitung in die Philosophie, GA 27], lectures 4 and 5.
10. [Wahl uses this expression attributed to Cézanne twice; I find it totally untranslatable. The verb faire has a thick layer of possible meanings. Here Wahl, following Cézanne, wants to express the creative power of the artist but more importantly, I think, the paradoxical originality of the image itself.]
11. This leads me to say that the theory of knowledge does not come first: it is not, for it presupposes a theory of reality. Doubtlessly, the theory of reality presupposes a theory of knowledge. There is a necessary circle of these two theories. But while the theory of reality does not hide from the demand for a theory of knowledge, the theory of knowledge hides from the demand for a theory of reality. The way that the theory of reality operates, therefore, is more straightforward. In the second place we could say—and Nicolai Hartmann felt this idea strongly—that at the very point where the theory of reality opens its eyes, the theory of knowledge takes things at a slant, squinting while observing the shimmering reflections of reflection. See equally Heidegger, Lecture Course of 1928–29 [Einleitung in die Philosophie, GA 27], lecture 15.
In particular, all the theories of knowledge founded on the idea of a subject standing over-against an object should be thoroughly reworked. As Heidegger said, “Some think that with the theory of the subject-object relation they have a fitting point of departure. Instead, they have closed the path that leads to a solution of the ontological problem.” Between the subject and object there is an intimate union, in relation to which the theory of prehension in Whitehead, co-presence in Alexander, knowledge (in the Claudelian sense) in Claudel, attract our attention, at the same time as knowledge no longer appears as anything but the particular case of a more general relation. On this latter point we could refer to the efforts of Holt and Montague. For Holt consciousness is a cross section, for Bergson it is a cross section and a selection. Here we have an ingenious and important effort to determine consciousness from the starting point of something other than it. This attempt was a paradox, rarely attempted with so much consequence as at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries.
We can fruitfully read Heidegger’s critique of bad subjectivity (Lecture Course of 1928–29 [Einleitung in die Philosophie, GA 27], lectures 7, 10, and 15): “Philosophers have established subjectivity at too low a level.”
We have already spoken above of the inadequacy of the concepts of the objective and subjective. In relation to this we cite here the passage in Heidegger who follows Husserl on this point more than he thinks, showing the inadequacy of the concepts of the objective and subjective to characterize intentionality: “Intentionality is neither objective, extant like an object, nor subjective in the sense of something that occurs within a so-called subject. Intentionality is neither objective nor subjective in the usual sense, although it is certainly both, but in a much more original sense, since intentionality, as belonging to Dasein’s existence, makes it possible that this being, the Dasein, comports existingly toward the extant … For the Dasein there is no outside, for which reason it is also absurd to talk about an inside…. Perceivedness is a qualification which pertains to the object without being objective, and to the subject without being subjective” [Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 65, 66, 69].
Generally speaking, classical philosophy over-isolated its notion of intentionality. As Plato saw, every logos is a logos of something. From Aristotle to Hegel, every philosophy has left too far to the side the character of designation and judgment, what Heidegger calls its apophantic character.
Moreover, moved by a kind of pride, the idealist only wants to see the active element of perception, and even more so of judgment. But in both of these there is as much passivity as activity. As Heidegger said, the one who perceives surrenders himself to things and lets the things surrender themselves (Lecture Course of 1928–29 [Einleitung in die Philosophie, GA 27]).
12. Heidegger said that one could not even say that realism is not tenable since it has not penetrated into the realm of the philosophical problematic.
13. Nietzsche’s philosophy passed through different periods: a philosophy of illusion, a positivist period, and a Dionysiac period. If we left the second period in the background, nevertheless it ought not to be neglected. Philosophy as hammer was forged through this second period when principal philosophical concepts were critiqued as rarely as they ever have been. In Bergsonian philosophy we can find a positivism that is no less penetrating and destructive. We see such positivism in the critiques of the ideas of nothing, disorder, and the possible. Some of the affirmations of this negative philosophy, of this “positivism” that could be equally inspired by Nietzsche or Bergson, are: the primacy of the modality of reality over all others (mostly well discerned by Kant, but neglected, it seems, by the existentialists), the superiority of the pseudonegative over the pseudopositive (unknown by classical philosophy when it accorded a privilege to the perfect and the infinite over the imperfect and the finite). Something similar could be said about the idea that all knowledge, all truth, is retrospective.
It is finally Heidegger who will give some invaluable indications for the sake of this destructio philosophorum, at least in relation to the philosophers of the philosophia perennis, and toward a philosophia actualis, real and in act. Since the Greeks, philosophy has been oriented by the logos, which expresses, and the eidos, which is essentially expressible, the form inasmuch as it is expressible. Man, the being who speaks and sees, develops a world of words and spectacles. Yet the real world is not one of propositions and perspectives. This world of words and spectacles has been modeled on perception and production; everything is imagined under the form of the produced and the perceived. These two ideas are linked: that which is produced is first produced according to a model that is perceived. It is secondly perceived as independent. From there arises the distinction between essence and existence, form and matter. And from there the idea of an intellectual intuition, which Kant reserves for the Creator alone. But these schemes of production and the empirical (here the critique of Heidegger meets that of Brunschvicg) do not suffice: production presupposes the nonproduced, and this suggests the idea of matter. In the second place, there are some cases where the scheme of production just does not apply. This is precisely the case with the human being, which has no essence, no quiddity. It is not a quid, but a quis, a someone and not a something. It repels every application to itself of the distinction between essence and existence.
14. We could conceive of an empiricism founded on internal observation that allows for existential theories of space and time and attempts to explain time by anticipation, memory, hope, fear, regret, and remorse. On the other hand, external observation allows us to say that time is not, space is not: whatever is, inasmuch as this word has meaning, are the things before and after, things in time. It is from abstraction, based on what we can call common things [choses courantes] rather than the course of events [cours de choses], that composes the idea of time, just as juxtaposed things, or things placed behind [arrière-posées] or before [devant-posées], compose the idea of space. Of course, to an idealist, what we are saying only forms a vicious circle.
15. This idea of the “always already,” of the preliminary, plays a great role in Heidegger. In order for truth to have any meaning, it is necessary that man has always already a path of access to things. Excuse the barbarity of the expression: where there is knowledge, there is always a “setting up shop” beside that which we know. Every intentional relation has a specific understanding of the being to which it is related. This means that there is always already something unveiled.
But this idea of the preliminary is essential to the very definition of the truth: the truth uncovers the being as what it was independent of the fact of being uncovered or not.
Thus, from the idea of intentionality, Heidegger moves to that of a comprehension of the being of the being for which being is a concern, a variable comprehension following beings, and from this comprehension of the being of the being he moves to the idea of a preliminary moving among things.
Said in yet another way, what is given thematically is first given non-thematically.
Or: Dasein, human being, always understands itself starting from a world that constitutes it.
16. Not only regarding the relation between judgment and its object, but also within judgment itself, Bradley has admirably demonstrated this tearing apart and fragmentation.
17. The idea of a negative ontology should not lead us to believe in an objective nothingness. As Bosanquet has said, thought can only be thought with a content. It is therefore the feeling before being (I use this word because a better one does not exist) which is negative; but everything thought is objective, and the negative is so more than anything else.
18. [The demigod Phaëthon (as Ovid tells the story) sought to drive his father Phoebus’s sun-chariot but lost control and was struck by a thunderbolt to save the earth. Empedocles was said to have cast himself into the volcanic fires of Mount Etna as an apotheosis.]
19. [“Whether one is or is not, it and the others both are and are not, and both appear and do not appear all things in all ways, both in relation to themselves and each other” (Parmenides 166c, in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper [Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997], 397.)]