I.
The idea of space. I would first like to articulate the paradox that is born as soon as one draws together the two notions of space and the idea. Space is this in which we are, this present density of which we are a part. But the very words let escape what they want to communicate. For it is not a matter of “part” or “in”: as soon as the idea of space arises in my mind, there also arises the negation that scientific speculation reaches with Whitehead, the negation of what one commonly intends by space. This is what I would like to say first, as a beginning.
But this beginning already presupposes another beginning. Here my dialectic is regressive because it is negative. This space that I am negating is the space that Descartes and Kant set their eyes on, the space necessary for science, moreover, not the vibrant space of our organs, the palpitating space of clouds, the space dug out by the Venetian baroque, which plays everywhere starting from columns and wheels of light, but also the space of the juxtaposition of undifferentiated points, the space that is not thought of as interiorly withdrawn but as apart and beyond.
Nevertheless we note that these two philosophers do not agree about the idea of space. Whereas Descartes sees only absolutely transparent relations for pure intelligence, Kant senses something qualitative and heterogeneous. We are tempted to say then that Kant is much closer than the Cartesians to the idea of a qualitative space, as I presented it at first in the false beginning that led me back (perhaps) toward a truer beginning.
Between Descartes and Kant there is Leibniz, whose perspective surely deserves to be mentioned. He is less profound on this point than Kant. Further, then, from my own thought (I mean this in a way that is at once modest and immodest), he sees in space a collection of purely intellectual relations. Although, more profoundly, he sees in space an order of relations, in a manner that is less thing-like, less realist (less productive of abstractions). Space is not for him an empty milieu; it is something that comes after, which comes from reflection on some originally given qualities. He is wrong to expel qualities from space; he is right to see that space derives from qualities and is an order of qualities.
What remains within our grasp? Space as negation of space, of the space necessary to mathematics and for action—what remains is space as interiorly withdrawn (words here fall short), as entanglement, intermingling, and which is opposed to space as apart and beyond. What matters is seeing the presuppositions and consequences entailed by these two ideas of space.
Clearly the first assumes the second. Here we meet back up with the discussion between the partisans of immanence and the partisans of transcendence: immanence is the negation of transcendence. But it becomes clear a little later that transcendence assumes negated immanence.
This is not surprising. Our mind only advances through negation, we only write by means of crossing out, and we only adjudge through dilemmas in which we accept one of the terms.
And I am always rediscovering this old thought by which I meet the negative theologian, a negative theology without God, a negative ontology—to wit, that negations speak a plenitude of reality situated beyond every negation. Consciousness chooses, differentiates, and draws out inseparable aspects.
Here we find ourselves already arriving at the point. I have now already said everything. Can we find another means by which to go further or somewhere else in order to escape this operation of mind that is always the same that I for one would really like to diversify or avoid altogether? What is the genesis of space itself? Few philosophers have attempted to respond to this difficult question. To my mind it invokes two names: Plotinus and Boehme. In the modern era no one has taken on this problem with the audacity of the authentic successor of Plotinus, Bergson.
Space conceived as outside is born from a sort of need for separation that exists within being, a need for an essential diaspora which, already visible in the domain of the intelligible, is accentuated to the degree that one moves toward the sensible. (Recall Bergson’s beautiful passage in the last pages of Creative Evolution where he compares space with a nullity that, while being nothing, yet multiplies numbers. Recall then the beautiful vision of union in the ancients between the idea of emptiness and the idea of multiplicity. There is an analogy here between Plato and his contemporary, Democritus.) One could likely, and without too much implausibility, attribute this idea to Boehme (interpreted only a little), for whom space is the child of the wrath of God.
What differences emerge between Plotinus and Boehme! The space of Plotinus, akin to Plato’s, despite all, lies on the path that leads to Cartesian science, of which it is the origin. Whereas the space of Boehme, at least as I present it, is even more akin to Whitehead’s anti-Cartesian science. Like a word that is scratched out, it is thickly crisscrossed with qualitative streaks that are deep, sulphurous, and aching.
It is certainly necessary to realize that in this second (very brief and very insufficient) part of my study, I remain in the region of myth. And myth should not be eliminated. This is one of the great lessons of philosophy, of its history, and of Plato especially. It is especially necessary because everything that is not designated as myth is still speech—is still, therefore, myth. Fabula narrator. This leads me to wonder about the relations between the idea of space and the idea of unhappy consciousness. At the origin of the idea of space do we not find the more general idea of separation and perhaps even of time, direction, and tendency toward? But we should be careful not to slide in this way into panpsychism or, worse still, into that spiritualism that makes the world the product of the “creative activity of mind.” If there exists a philosophy to which my mind says a loud “no,” that is it. Yet, on the other hand, I am deeply attracted to the magical idealism of Novalis, which is rather similar. Should we thus say that at the root of the idea of space there is the fact that I do not see actualized everything toward which I strain, and that therefore there is a toward? Is personal dissatisfaction at the origin of the idea of space?
I am inclined to say so, or rather, to say that this is its—very general—symptom. Judgment in general is a similar dissatisfaction. The rose is also outside of the rose. And this is what the word is partly signifies. Here we meet back up with Bradley’s theory of judgment and perhaps at the same time the idea for which the affirmation of an intelligible space is the translation. Space is the affirmation of dualities and pluralities.
And here the great problem of the interiority and exteriority of relations arises before my mind, as the English philosophy of the nineteenth century formulated it. Suddenly I better see the reason why I would not reach a successful conclusion that I already saw from the beginning. Space as affirmation of the exteriority of relation is also the affirmation of the interiority of relations.
The idea of relation is inadequate. And space is necessary for me, but it is necessary for it to break apart. It is necessary (to follow Jaspers’s expression) that my thinking run aground.
I can at least say that, without having spent too much effort, I have approached a view that intensely unites space and my existence: space is my immersion in things, and it is my emersion out of things. Space is my existence, as it is inherence in things; it is my existence as much as it is a distance in relation to things and to myself.
Ainsi sur des béquilles avance ma philosophie,
Comme la sagesse de Dieu;
Elle n’a pas tout le temps pour arriver,
Mais elle sait que là où elle s’assoira, elle sera aussi bien qu’ailleurs,
Voyant une route très longue devant elle et derrière elle.
Les yeux bandés,
Des cornes sur son front,
Et pleurant sur sa tombe au seuil de Chanaan.
And on crutches advances my philosophy,
Like the wisdom of God;
It does not have all time to arrive,
But it knows that where it will come to sit will be as good as anywhere,
Seeing a very long road ahead and behind.
Eyes covered,
Horns on its head,
And weeping over its tomb on the threshold of Canaan.
Pleurant sur sa tombe/Weeping over its tomb. I mean that this land beyond relations, this land of the finite center so well described by Bradley, is always destroyed as soon as I become aware of it. There is only unhappy consciousness. There is only consciousness that is set at a certain distance from itself. In this sense we could say that consciousness is space.
But in this same sense I would also say that consciousness, being the negation of space, can, in a specifically absent manner and as weeping [pleurante]—I almost said “[as a] whiner” [pleurarde]—accomplish its happiness.
It is appropriate, however, to pose a formidable question here. Science has succeeded thanks to the quantitative conception of space, thanks to the idea of numerical relations, thanks to the idea of truth. Now it is not a matter at all of denying these ideas. Here also we must maintain the problematic character of the solution. The certitude of science also poses a problem. These numerical relations are the skeleton of reality perhaps, but the skeleton is not the flesh (although it is necessary for the flesh). It is also necessary to take into account the fact that science is more and more coming to see that the skeleton without the flesh is not even the skeleton. We must also realize that if we were merely skeleton, all reality would be for us a skeleton. (This is the way I am translating the classic phrase: if we were merely mind, all reality would be for us mind.) The idea of a scale must also be acknowledged. At a certain level, we grab onto regularities; but a little above or a little below, we grasp them much less. And yet, the real is at all stages of the scale.
It is perhaps even here where things become things and are conglomerated into masses, as it is here where they are decomposed in complete juxtaposition.
Is it not that “science” finally becomes aware of this? Some, who hold tightly onto the idea of determinism, are led by their prejudgment to doubt in a profound and lasting way the idea of individuality (in the microscopic); others, seeing that things are neither points nor instantaneous moments, let determinism drop from their hands, at least in its flat and unilinear form.
A vast collection of studies and analyses would be necessary. Note how space has been conceived in diverse ways by the Chinese (Granet) and the Greeks, by the Gothic and the Baroque. It is something that should be geometricized—or smashed through, pierced—or inflated, dug out. I mean to invoke the space of Cézanne with its distances, its dark iridescences, its transitions.
We would have to see the diverse ideas out of which the idea of space is made: the insubstantial idea from the outside, the ideas of distance, orientation, envelopment. None of these ideas is necessarily implied by any other.
One is not ever very quickly finished with an idea …
I cannot help thinking that these reflections call attention to the decadence of philosophy. It is curious since the idea of decadence has a stronger grip on me than the idea of progress. “Paradise is behind us.” (I have always been afraid of having lost some idea that I could never find again. It is as if someone is saying: “I am doing less and less well.”) (But this is no longer absolutely precise—neither for myself, nor for the world. It is going so poorly that I am beginning to believe in progress.)1
Here things are equally easy for the Marxist, Thomist, and Critical Idealist. They call me petty bourgeois, unbeliever, realist. They speak of a philosophy or poetry of despair even though it is completely the reverse.
I refuse their interpretation, or rather, I accept it. Man’s state is divided and problematic. At this end of civilization we are closer than ever to the essence of man (closer than we were under the domination of Catholicism or Stalin or classical thought). It is man who appears pure-impure, attached to the earth, to mysterious influences, miserable, happy in his misery, joyful in his boredom, pitiful: the spectacular, tiny beast.
Seeing things, each apart from the others, seeing things in others: these are the two modes of contemplation of the universe. The first is tied to objectivity; the second to subjectivity. Subjectivity, totality, interiority—objectivity, partiality, exteriority!
We could wonder whether the idea of space will not come to be identified with a more general idea, the idea of alterity. But one could also wonder if in one way or another the idea of alterity, at least in the strong sense of the term, does not assume the idea of space. Here we encounter anew the problems of the interiority of relations and the principle of indiscernibles.
At the moment when the idea of alterum is transformed into the idea of juxta the idea of space is born—if it is not already contained in the idea of alterum.
From here we would be led to take a look at the relations between the idea of space and of cause and substance, in order to see how spatiality is necessary to all our essential ideas—but also to add that this is not necessarily a completely intellectual spatiality, but this primitive, irreducible spatiality to which Kant has so profoundly drawn attention, and which, once attention is drawn to it, actually exceeds Kantianism and its theory of the separation of form and matter, of understanding and intuition.
Perhaps it is best to refuse to pose the problem of time. There are only problems of time.
Time, like space, is one of the general, abstract ideas that Berkeley so rightly combated.
There is time in the sense of before and after; there is time in the sense of “at the same time as” [en même temps que].
Time could be defined as the fact that nothing happens at the same time—if this assertion does not assume the definition of time, on the one hand, and exclude the “en même temps,” on the other.
It is also a way to cope with the principle of [non]contradiction.
Everything is not finite in this moment; I can peer ahead and behind, beyond the moment and in it, discerning the before and behind.
Hence the plurality of times and the nonfinite character of time, whether it be the time of things or of thought. Problem: does time derive from the dialectic, or does the dialectic derive from time? In reality, the dialectic presumes time and time makes itself felt by a kind of dialectic.
From this idea of the plurality of times we can pass to the idea of time no longer as idea but as feeling. Behind the “already” and the “not yet” we will find memory and expectation, and behind memory and expectation, we will find remorse and regret, desire and fear. Here we reach what can be called the existential basis of time.
So that which can be touched by the dialectic of thought on the one hand, can also be touched by observing feeling on the other hand.
At the root of time do we not find presupposed (more or less rightly) the idea of truth and falsity on the one hand, and good and evil on the other?
My empiricism, which intends to be radical, like that of James, does not refuse the same consequences, or better, the same presuppositions. We are left to wonder if later it will not be a matter of destroying them. (Later, with time.)
I find that the following line of verse expresses one of my most satisfying and simultaneously unsatisfying ideas: “we are in time like a fish in water.”
But the fish is not composed of water, and, in a sense, we are not merely composed of time.
I have spoken of the kinship, perhaps the identity of dialectic and time. But there is something, there are even some things that are beyond the dialectic and time. The least of our judgments, in a sense, rise above time, as do, even more, the least of our perceptions. Here there are a multitude of little eternities thought and lived in certain—privileged—fragments of time. These are, in a sense, condensations of duration (see Bergson’s theory).
Moreover, there are impoverished eternities, like those of the school of Brentano—so very interesting—those reifying thinkers who insist on the region of past facts, on the “it is true that.” And there are rich eternities. Or rather: there are dead or dying eternities and living eternities.
The theory of the discontinuity of time is often found tied to a theory of the exteriority of relations (explicated by Russell) and to a theory of the possible. But it would be necessary to study the value of these presuppositions. This idea of the discontinuity of time is today found in certain forms of quantum theory and in the conceptions of Whitehead. Like James, Whitehead conceives of a time that is at once compacted and discontinuous.
In Descartes, the idea of discontinuity, thanks to the idea of the instant, is tied to a certain conception of eternity. Or rather, it assumes this conception of eternity.
Today I realize that this idea of the instant is only an ersatz of the idea of eternity, a phantom.
Yet perhaps we attain the instant in certain moments of unconsciousness. As soon as we think it, it no longer exists.
And the instant that I think is already far away.
1. [The last sentence from this parenthesis more than recalls the first line of an unpublished poem of Wahl’s (date of composition unknown), “L’esprit de droiture” (perhaps “Spirit of Rectitude”): “Les choses vont si mal que je crois au progress.” The entire poem is found in Barbara Wahl’s article in homage to her father’s legacy, “Autour de Jean Wahl: Textes, traces, témoignages,” Rivista di storia della filosofia 3 (2011): 517–38.]