
# Time "Matters"

## Carolyn Norman Slaughter

Copyright (C) 2020, Carolyn Norman Slaughter. All rights reserved.

Second edition, July 12, 2020

Published by Elliott Slaughter  
<https://elliottslaughter.com>

Cover design by Donna Snyder  
<http://rsdesign.net>

This book was created with BookMD, a simple book-authoring tool for Markdown. <https://bitbucket.org/elliottslaughter/bookmd>

To Charles,  
whose time counts  
for far more than anyone else's....

Inexpressible gratitude to beloved, inimitable Elliott,  
whose professional expertise and indefatigable generosity enabled--  
guided and produced--this second group of my essays. 

# Time "Matters"

  1. Preface
  2. Turning Back to Heidegger
  3.  _Absalom, Absalom!_ : "Fluid Cradle of Events (Time)"
  4.  _The Sound and the Fury_ : Time As Mausoleum
  5. Kant's Monster: _In the Labyrinth_
  6. Heidegger's "Time-Space" Vs. Greene's (Einstein's) "Spacetime"

  1. Cover
  2. Table of contents

# Preface

Studying literary theory at the University of Arizona in 1988, it became my pleasure and passion to apply the philosophy of Martin Heidegger to my literary-philosophic studies, i.e., to work toward restoring Heidegger's early influence in these matters to its original force which at that time had been weakened if not superseded by the hegemony of the philosophic/artistic glamour of Jacques Derrida's Deconstruction.

In the introduction to my Ph.D. dissertation I drew a contrast between the two thinkers, arguing in some detail against Derrida's representation and evaluation of Heidegger's thinking. I include here a revision of the same essay, an improved argument to the same purpose.

The dissertation, _Language As Disclosure; Reading Language in the Works of Five American Modernists,_ used Heidegger's insights into the "speaking" (Heidegger's word in, e.g., "Language," _Poetry, Language, Thought_ ) of language to analyze the language used and depicted in works of a few modernist American authors who, I had discovered, were showing (representing) in their literary works what Heidegger had been seeing (thinking) in his philosophy.

I am offering here a later study of mine applying Heidegger's transformational notions on the subject of time to three classic works of literature (two by Faulkner, another by Robbe-Grillet), which are offering their own equally radical treatment of the same unfathomable enigma. I offer, as well, a later essay of mine contrasting Heidegger's notion of Time-Space to Einstein's Spacetime.

# Turning Back to Heidegger

While the political motives, involvements, and repercussions of de Man's and Heidegger's lives and oeuvres are under review, our general impressions of these figures and others lose definition for a time; judgment is suspended—not while we determine the facts in each case, but while we attempt to define the principle. The principle as to the im/possibility of separating an author's or thinker's works from his/her political milieu, art or philosophy from politics or history—however it is given formulation, whenever engaged—draws all authors, all art, all history into its purview. More specifically, the cases of de Man and Heidegger bring along with them, part and parcel with them, the moderns in general and modern to current philosophical tendencies resistant to humanism and democracy.

In fact, the philosophy-politics issue did not surface with the de Man-Heidegger revelations, but had been for some time a matter of intramural controversy in literary studies, controversy that centered on or radiated from the deconstructionist project of Jacques Derrida. Objections to this strain of post-Heideggerian thinking had subsided to a steady murmur of peripheral defensive complaints until eventually gathering force, not as one opposing voice but as a rising, restive splintering of voices resisting a quiescence in deconstructionist theory or a passivism or at worst a perversion in the face of the historical moment's demand for decision and action. My argument below is situated differently; it encounters (confronts) Derrida's project from behind, with the recollection of positive power in Heidegger's rejected project. I wish to argue here, from the site of Heidegger's and Derrida's differences, which is where many of us situate our thinking today, and in spite of the political charges outstanding against Heidegger, charges which must be thought through as far as we are capable,1 that the "way" of Heidegger offers positive theoretical power (and I am assuming that theory exerts some unspecified pressure upon political realities) beyond or adjacent to, at any rate not exhausted by, Derrida's project of deconstruction.

Derrida's most farreaching Heideggerian achievement has been, in my view, to bring a greater awareness of the nearness and the necessity of: nothing, i.e., spacing in time, in language, in all thinking and in the possibility of thinking. Two and a half decades of deconstructionist hermeneutics have worn a clear path—describing the method at least—that separates out "Being" (traditional representation of being as presence, the ontotheological) on one hand, and exposes and emphasizes the remainder (what escapes representational language, the a- or the il-logical) on the other. Derrida's "way" of bringing the nonlogical into language (logic), indicating this reserve of "the unthought, the suppressed, the repressed [ _l'impensé, le réprimé, le refoulé_ ]"2 at the margins of philosophy, and his attempt to begin to distinguish differences there are at once the achievement and the renunciation of the Heideggerian project. I wish to suggest here, in Derrida's words—referring to Sartre's "monstrous translation in many respects" of Heidegger's _Dasein_ in _Being and Nothingness_ —that there is "much to think about the reading or the nonreading of Heidegger during this period, and about what [is] at stake [ _l'intérêt qu'il y avait_ ] in reading or not reading him in this way."3

Derrida claimed to begin his own thinking on the horizon of Heidegger's ontological difference; thus there is no access to his thinking except through Heidegger's. Besides acknowledging that debt, he has often cited and adopted Heidegger's work on certain points, sometimes with loyal defensiveness,4 as indeed he might; the Heideggerian project is the very territory which Derrida staked out here for himself.5 But Derrida has maintained fundamental differences from and objections to Heidegger's thought, effecting by the power of his thinking and of his art an intercession for and against Heidegger here among us. It is Derrida's deconstruction, and not Heidegger's radical _destruktion_ , of all historico-ontological "meaning" that has wielded a dominating influence on the positions and the direction and the tone of institutional thinking.

Derrida has maintained an ongoing discourse with or about Heidegger, but the fundamental difference between the two, which I wish to discover and peruse, occurs from the beginning of Derrida's thought because it occurs _at_ the beginning. All that follows always differs from the foundation up. To recall this original point of divergence, I offer an early Derridean passage (one among a host) that challenges Heidegger. It is in such passages that Derrida has led us to bypass Heidegger.

In " _Différance_ " Derrida posits an affirming Nietzschean laughter and dance as the vantage, outside dialectic and past nostalgia, from which to deal with the unnamable.6 The (non)site and (non)circumstance he delineates as _différance_ contrasts, he notes, with Heidegger's ontological difference, the contrast bringing to view what Derrida calls "Heideggerian _hope_ [ _l'espérance_ ]" (27), a metaphysical residue he believes he discovers in "The Anaximander Fragment": "the quest for the proper word and the unique name [ _la quête du mot propre et du nom unique_ ]." Derrida quotes a passage in which Heidegger, writing about the unique relationship between presencing and presence, between Being and beings, suggests that "in order to name the essential nature of Being ( _das wesende Seins_ ), language would have to find a single word, the unique word ( _ein einziges, das einzige Wort_ )." Heidegger continues, "From this we can gather how daring every thoughtful word ( _denkende Wort_ ) addressed to Being is ( _das dem Sein zugesprochen wird_ ). Nevertheless such daring is not impossible, since Being speaks always and everywhere throughout language" (Derrida is quoting from "The Anaximander Fragment," 527).

The point of Derrida's objection, "the quest for the proper word and the unique name," signals the fundamental Heidegger-Derrida difference, which is not so much a difference in their awareness of death, nothing, the unspeakable and the unthought, interrupting and disrupting logocentricism; not in their conviction of the necessity of rethinking and abandoning metaphysical philosophy; and not even in their respective structuring of the point of ontological difference; but in what their different metaphilosophies signify for the nature and significance of language.

A response to Derrida's complaint in the passage above requires a review of some of Heidegger's notions of language. We know that though Derrida does not provide the German word which is translated "to name," _heißen_ , it means also "to call," and that Heidegger has exploited that meaning. Words or names call. Matters are called (named) in thinking when they themselves call for thinking.8 The most unlikely and the most essential point about this calling is that it calls from out of silence into which it ("it gives," a subjectless giving) has withdrawn or fallen forgotten. This primal absence must be heeded.9

As for words themselves, they are not _things_ , beings.10 Nor are they _terms_ ; they have no _content_. Words are not _signs_. Instead they are "wellsprings" [ _Brunnen_ ], sources, to be looked for and discovered and uncovered. They are losable and must be rediscovered, recovered. Sometimes they "well up [ _quillend_ ]" on their own.11

Though words are not signs, they signal—point out, show (compare Aristotle's Diction as manifestation, below). The nature of language is Saying as showing, bringing to appearance; thus, signs, which belong to language, can be signs; that is, signaling is the condition for signs, and not the other way around.12 (The case illustrates the priority of Being over being. The difference between the two, the ontological difference, is the point Derrida concedes to Heidegger. But the difference that differs in the structure or function—or whatever we can say—of Being itself: giving being and withholding it; the differing that denies any station, status, or stability to being, ever again; the differing that disrupts and invades every notion, every event—this difference too is Heidegger's, is Heidegger's Being.) Further, showing, bringing into appearing, means bringing into being. Being is the event of appearing, and words "give" the event. "The ... word's hidden essence (verbal) [ _verborgene Wesen_ (verbal)] ... invisibly in its Saying [ _das sagend unsichtbar_ ] and even already in what is unsaid [ _im Ungesprochenen_ ], extends to us the thing as thing."13

Language, here, does not work in an Aristotelian fashion,14 much less a Saussurean. Words neither represent things nor signify concepts. They call matters which call for thinking; in the saying and in what is already not said they give being.

Now the matter that calls for thinking and remains unnamable in Heidegger's Anaximander essay is the forgetting of Being, the withdrawal and subsequent oblivion of Being which marked the beginning, thus the destiny, of Western metaphysics. For Heidegger it is always by way of language that matters call for thinking and are called; but language is the very "way" from which Being has withdrawn. If this forgotten Being is to call for thinking, it can do so "only if it has already unveiled itself with the presencing of what is present [ _mit dem Anwesen des Anwesenden_ ]; only if it has left a trace [ _eine Spur geprägt hat_ ]15 which remains preserved in the language to which Being comes" (51). The language of Anaximander's fragment, according to Heidegger's exegesis here, bears a trace of the early Greek experience of the presencing of what is present. The translation of this fragment requires a "mysterious" (we say "ambiguous," but ambiguity is not undecidability in Heidegger's thought) genitive construction, an "of" that admits two possibilities (this "of" is familiar to readers of Heidegger and of Derrida), which taken together suggest a relation and thus a distinction between Being and beings. This word of Anaximander's does not "call" or name this difference; but it does call the possibility of the distinction into existence.16

(" _Already_ , [ _déjà_ ], such is the name for what has been effaced or subtracted beforehand [ _ce qui s'efface ou d'avance se soustrait_ ], but which has nevertheless left behind a mark [ _une marque, une signature_ ], a signature which is retracted in that very thing from which it is withdrawn." Derrida is describing another trace, the trace by which style's _éperon_ [ _Spurs_ , 38-9], by negotiation or defensive opposition, has marked the other it negotiates or defends against, marking thereby the distinction [difference] between not what the Greeks called _logos_ and _phusis_ , which made something of a return after two thousand years in Heidegger's Being and being, but between what was for Kant subjectivity and the thing in itself, which in Derrida after Heidegger has "slidden" to "style" and "[... that] which _presents_ itself." Derrida does not step back into Kant's subject-object difference, but as in Heidegger that difference moves into new differentiation [Saying] _in the realm of Dasein and/or the Ereignis_ —neither subjectivity nor objectivity, transforming the former and eliminating the latter—in Derrida the difference moves _into a realm [inasmuch as we are anywhere] of undecidability_ —again neither subjectivity nor objectivity, eliminating the former and transforming the latter. For example, in _Spurs_ what Derrida calls "style" works like the prow of a ship clashing with and penetrating the sea [or "the terrifying, mortal threat (of that) which _presents_ itself," 38-9] or it works like a veil/sail [ _des voiles_ ] eluding/fleeing such a thing, 36-41. Either way it becomes matter [human, perhaps psychological] against [other] matter—perhaps a matter of physics; and calling it "style" empties it of substance and removes it from what we call "life" by a dimension17—according to prescription. "Style" is in the end an unintelligible scrap of freefloating non-sense, 122ff.).

To approach more closely the difference between presencing and what presences, to think its "essential nature," would mean, writes Heidegger as we have noted, to "find a single word, the unique word"—a "daring" but "not impossible" quest, "since Being speaks always and everywhere throughout language" (52). The notion of a literal or simple (or metaphysical) univocity in this "word" is disturbed by a phrase in the passage, untranslated in English and inadequately rendered in the French:18 " _denn das Sein spricht_ in der verschiedensten Weise _uberall und stets durch alle Sprache hindurch_ " (emphasis mine), as it is by such passages as this one from _What Is Called Thinking?_ : "we are moving within language, which means moving on shifting ground or, still better, on the billowing waters of an ocean." The argument that Derrida mounts in " _Différance_ " against a "name" for Heidegger's "trace" is telling only if naming is considered as Heidegger considers it in, for example, _Being and Time;_19 i.e., as representational (metaphysical) language, and in that case the argument against it is Heidegger's. In its iteration in the Anaximander fragment and in its reiterations in other works, Heidegger's trace outstrips Derrida's nomination.

The difficulty in Heidegger's language in these pages (like the difficulty in Derrida's explication of, e.g., _différance_ ) "shows" the difficulty of approaching the unthought matter without the gift of the word. A little earlier Heidegger wrote, in reference to retrieving the word denied to Anaximander, "Perhaps only when we experience historically [ _geschichtlich erfahren_ ] what has not been thought—the oblivion of Being—as what is to be thought [ _das Ungedachte der Seinsvergessenheit als das zu Denkende_ ], and only when we have for the longest time pondered [ _gedacht_ ] what we have long experienced in terms of the destiny of Being [ _aus dem Geschick des Seins_ ], may the early word [ _das frühe Wort_ ] speak in our contemporary recollection [ _im späten Andenken ansprechen_ ]" (51). Much of Heidegger's thinking bears upon this problem (perhaps much of Derrida's upon this projected experience) of enduring the night of our abandonment (nihilism) and of holding ourselves available to a new word (see for example "Nihilism and the History of Being"20). Derrida's suggestion that Heidegger's "call" for a unique name is a nostalgic return to metaphysics is at least surprising given his own preoccupation with the problem indicated here. A comparison of the Derridean project of "writing," its progress from word to word— _différance_ , trace, prewriting, dissemination, the _pharmakon_ , the hymen, _éperon_ , re-mark, etc.—would discover the Heideggerian discourse moving beneath the Derridean text.

The "unique" word would function, according to Heidegger's notion of language, to call into being what calls (however faintly, remotely) for thinking. What calls does not become the word; by the giving of the word what calls draws into unconcealment, i.e., appears in its unconcealing, presencing. Words do not unveil preexistent beings. Beings do not appear as present entities or objects or things in themselves. The difficulty of unconcealing does not dissolve into the finally successful achievement of being. That is, words do not circumscribe or explain or settle contradiction, nor do they simplify or reduce complexity any more than they conquer the unknown. They bring what calls for thinking into appearing, in which light being appears in its "mystery" ( _Geheimnis_ ): as the "unsaid," the "unshowable"21). (Compare Derrida's _pharmakon_ and hymen disseminations where the word's freedom precludes decidable meaning in the absence of an "external" or "transcendental" reality [ _qu'aucune référence absolument extérieure,_ _qu'aucun signifié transcendant_ ] that could stop its play, _Dissemination_ , 89.22 Here the inexhaustible fertility of writing breeds inexhaustible fertility. In Heidegger too meaning and reality dissolve and the word is inexhaustible, as we shall note, but the effect of endlessness is different; "undecidability" becomes the contradictory "essence" of being, language its condition. In both cases we avoid the metaphysical notion of being. But in Heidegger the _destruktion_ removes an obstacle to being there [Da-sein]; in Derrida it removes the possibility.)

The word which Heidegger calls for will be "unique." This uniqueness is not Aristotelian sameness or unity. Heidegger has used the word more than once in reference to language. Indeed, in Heidegger's thought essential language is always in each case a single word which at once says one unique thing, forever originary and inexhaustible. In _What Is Called Thinking?_ there is a passage similar to the one quoted above by Derrida:

> A wide range of meaning [ _Die Weite des Ausschlages seiner Bedeutung_ ] belongs generally to the nature of every word [ _zum Wesen jedes Wortes_ ]. This fact, again, arises from the mystery of language [ _beruht im Geheimnis des Sprache_ ]. Language admits of two things: One, that it be reduced to a mere system of signs, uniformly available to everybody, and in this form be enforced as binding; and two, that language at one great moment says one unique thing, for one time only [ _in einem großen Augenblick ein einziges Mal Einziges sagt_ ], which remains inexhaustible [ _erschöpflich_ ] because it is always originary [ _stets anfänglich_ ], and thus beyond the reach of any kind of leveling [ _unerreichbar für jede Art von Nivellierung_ ]. These two possibilities of language are so far removed from each other that we should not be doing justice to their disparity even if we were to call them extreme opposites. (191-92)

Earlier in this work Heidegger has written that language is not the _medium_ of thought and art, but that thought and art are themselves "the originary, the essential, therefore also the final speech" of language; and _man_ is _its_ medium.

> Language is neither merely the field of expression [ _Ausdrucksfeld_ ], nor merely the means of expression [ _Ausdrucksmittel_ ], nor merely the two jointly. Thought and poesy never just use [ _benutzen_ ] language to express themselves with its help; rather, thought and poesy are in themselves the originary, the essential, and therefore also the final speech [ _das anfängliche, wesenhafte und darum zugleich letzte Sprechen_ ] that language speaks through the mouth of man [ _das die Sprache durch den Menschen spricht_ ]. (128)

The language of every thinker tells (shows) "what is" uniquely:

> ... the thinker's language tells what is [ _die Sprache der Denker sagt das, was ist_ ].... We must acknowledge and respect it. To acknowledge and respect [ _das Anerkennen_ ] consists in letting every thinker's thought [ _Gedachte_ ] come to us as something in each case unique, never to be repeated, inexhaustible [ _als etwas je Einziges, Niewiederkehrendes, Unerschöpfliches_ ]—and being shaken to the depths by what is unthought in his thought [ _das Ungedachte in seinem Gedachten uns bestürzt_ ]. (76)

This "language" is not speech or writing, not "a mere human faculty" ("mortals ... can speak only as we respond to language [ _nur insofern sprechen können, als wir der Sprache entsprechen_ ]," "The Nature of Language" 107), but a Saying, comparable to Derrida's prewriting, described in _Of Grammatology_ as an anterior and prior (anterior even to space, prior to differentiation in time) provision of the preconditions for and the intrinsic possibilities of sensibility and intelligibility—for human experience and for a world. It differs from Derrida's prewriting, it seems to me, in especially this respect: prewriting precedes and exceeds the world; Derrida calls it an erased origin but it is not an empty one, since all that "is" is prescribed there ( _Of Grammatology_ 44f.). Heidegger's "language," on the other hand, _is_ the world, is the opening, the clearing. Being in general (No-thing) does not precede being and is not anterior to it but pervades it. The ontic and the ontological are a unity (Heidegger's unity, located in language, not Plato's), though Western philosophy has taken account of the ontic only, to the exclusion (forgetting) of Being. In Heidegger's thinking the horizon of nothing, available in "presencing" in the passage Derrida cites above, permits beings to appear _in their appearing_. That is, beings appear _as beings_ ; the being is not only ontic; it is also ontological. Further, the relation of nothing to being "rules" in the appearing of the being ("The relation to what is present that rules [ _waltende Beziehung_ ] in the essence of presencing itself"). The ontological (Being) has priority, not in being or time, however these are rewritten, but in "rule"—in giving, appropriating. "Origin" is not erased and not preserved; it is inhabited. "It gives" is an active, presencing, subjectless giving of language (the "of," of course, works twice).

Derrida's suspicion of residual metaphysics in Heidegger's calling for "the unique name" bears not upon just one Heideggerian passage which betrays a "hope" otherwise restrained or overcome, but, as Derrida's works will continue to reiterate, upon the essential meaning that language manifests in Heidegger's thought. There can be no refutation of Derrida's charge. My attempt at a kind of "answer" is an attempt to set Heidegger's thinking against Derrida's (a reversal of the contrast that Derrida's works have delineated again and again, i.e., his own thought against Heidegger's), giving the emphasis and preference back to Heidegger. In the disputed Heideggerian passage above the meanings of "name" and of "unique" undergo radical revision; Being becomes not-being, and "nothing" rules in the giving of language. The traditional Western meaning of Being as essence, totality, unity, is undermined, abandoned, even while a kind of human being (Dasein) is given (meaningless) "meaning" and (groundless) ground.

Another aspect of Derrida's charge, above, concerns the notion of propriety, "the finally proper name" (27), a matter to which Heidegger has given emphasis. In a passage in _What is Called Thinking_ the "proper" meaning of a word is addressed directly. We prefer to take the word "to call" to mean "to give this or that name," he writes, though perhaps "the unaccustomed and apparently uncustomary signification of the word 'to call' is its proper [ _eigentliche_ ] one: the one that is innate to the word [ _die dem Wort angestammt_ ], and thus remains the only one [ _einzige_ ]—for from its native realm stem all the other [ _als in ihrem Stammesbereich alle übrigen beheimatet sind_ ]" (118). The proper meaning (as signification) is the word's _own unique_ meaning, but its uniqueness indicates a _realm_ from which "other" meanings also derive. The proper signification of "to call" has become unfamiliar, he continues,

> ... not because our spoken speech has never yet been at home [ _heimisch_ ] in it, but rather because _we_ are no longer at home with this telling word, because we no longer really live in it [ _wir es nicht mehr eigentlich bewohnen_ ] .... It is as though man had to make an effort to live properly with language [ _die Sprache eigentlich zu bewohnen_ ].... The place of language properly inhabited [ _eigentlich bewohnten_ ] and of its habitual [ _gewohnten_ ] words, is usurped by common [ _gewöhnlichen_ ] terms.... Anything that departs from this commonness, in order to inhabit the formerly habitual proper speech of language [ _das vormals gewohnte eigentliche Sprechen der Sprache zu bewohnen_ ], is at once considered a violation of the standard. (118-19)

Living properly _with_ language is living properly _in_ language. Propriety means proper realm, proper habitation. The propriety of a proper word refers not to the word as a thing or as a thing in its relation to a thing (or to a concept), but to the place it establishes in which "we" and "what calls for thinking" dwell, related in our proper nature (respectively, thinking and calling).23 Again in "Building Dwelling Thinking" the proper meaning of a word as original, essential, and genuine is discussed in relation to place and habitation, dwelling. "Dwelling .... is _the basic character_ [ _der Grundzug_ ] of Being in keeping with which mortals exist [ _die Sterblichen sind_ ]" (338).24

For comparison and for clarification we turn to Derrida's discussion of the concept of propriety. Since the metaphysics that Derrida "detects" in Heidegger's " _hope_ " belongs essentially to the Aristotelian notion of language, I shall divert here briefly to "White Mythology" to solicit Derrida's meaning in the phrase "the finally proper name."25 In this as-always rigorous, subtle study, Derrida's subject is metaphor: a kind of noun which in his analysis usurps and overturns the very notion of noun. "What is proper to nouns is to signify something ..., an independent being identical to itself, conceived as such [ _un étant indépendant, identique à soi, et visé comme tel_ ]" (237). Aristotle's notion of language attributes to each word a single meaning or a limited number of meanings as the very requisite of thinking or reasoning (and thinking or reasoning as the requisite of man; Derrida translates and interprets Aristotle, 248-49). At one point we find this summary, to our purpose here:

> A noun is proper when it has but a single sense [ _Un nom est propre quand il n'a qu'un seul sens_ ]. Better, it is only in this case that it is properly a noun. Univocity is the essence, or better, the _telos_ of language. [ _L'univocité est l'essence, ou mieux, le_ telos _du langage_.] ... Language is what it is, language, only insofar as it can then master and analyze polysemia [ _maîtriser et analyser la polysémie_ ]. With no remainder. A nonmasterable dissemination is not even a polysemia, it belongs to what is outside language [ _elle appartient au dehors du langage_ ]. (247-48)

Further, "each time that polysemia is irreducible, ... one is outside language. And consequently, outside humanity [ _hors de l'humanité_ ]."

If we take this fragment to represent Derrida's notion of Aristotelian propriety, then we will expect that something essential here will be found to be essential also in Heidegger's sense of the proper name. But before we compare the one with the other, I offer an objection. Derrida's language interjects significations into Aristotle's discussion that I do not find in the _Metaphysics_ —in the meanings attributed here to "sense," "univocity," "polysemia." The notions of _meaning_ separate from things, of the (non)splitting of the voice, of the proliferation of semes, carry post-Saussurean (Derridean) significance. These meanings are essential to Derrida's argument: "There is _lexis_ , and within it metaphor, in the extent to which thought is not made manifest by itself, in the extent to which _the meaning of what is said or thought is not a phenomenon of itself_ [ _le sens de ce qui est dit ou pensé n'est pas phénomène de lui-même_ ]" (233, emphasis mine). In the italicized phrase "meaning" is separated out from or added onto _dianoia_ and _lexis_ —as these are effectively equated; that is, the phrase "the meaning of what is said or thought" gives to saying and to thinking the same "meaning" or the same relationship to meaning as content, which is "not a phenomenon of itself."

Aristotle's schematic is different. As Derrida has already indicated in the essay, for Aristotle Diction ( _lexis_ ) brings Thought, what is given to thinking ( _dianoia_ ), to manifestation (appearance, phenomenon). Diction _is_ the phenomenon (appearing, bringing to light) of Thought. And Thought, which Aristotle argues must think something definite to think at all, thinks what is given to Thought: but what is given to thought is not "meaning"; it is the being of what is thought about. Thought is not separate from the "thing" ( _pragma_ , _res_ , _Metaphysics_ iv.1006a.30-1006b) it thinks about; "... whether thing or idea, such a being must be identical with what it is to be that something" (vii.1031b.19-20; see vii.1029b-1031b). Derrida acknowledges this integration but interprets it as "a unity of meaning": "what [the noun and the verb] have in common is that they are intelligible in and of themselves, have an immediate relation _to an object or rather to a unity of meaning_ [ _à un objet ou plutôt à une unité de sens_ ]" (233, emphasis mine). In Derrida's restatement the nature of the unity of thinking/thing takes the character of "meaning." In Aristotle, however, "in the case of being primarily and essentially the being is one and the same with its 'what' or intelligible constitution" ( _Metaphysics_ 1032a.5-6). Thinking/thing ("intelligible constitution" and "being") are one and the same. "[I]f the being of ideas and the meaning of ideas are disconnected from one another, there will be no knowledge of the former, and the latter will not be" (1031b.3-5). Further, "meaning" has no primary being according to Aristotle. To add this "meaning" into the schematic is to bestow gratis an extra structure, something like Plato's and others' notions of ideas, perhaps, which Aristotle argues against (i.6-10,vii.6.1031b.14-20), as he would surely dismiss on the same grounds Saussure's concepts (which have perhaps acquired psychological reality by now, questionable on other grounds as well; cf. _Being and Time_ H. 216-17, 258-61).

In my view, the "theory of metaphor [as a kind of noun belonging to Diction] remains" _not_ , as Derrida has it (233), "a theory of _meaning_ ," but a theory of manifestation. What is manifest in Diction is Thought; and what Thought thinks is what is "in fact" ( _pragma_ ).26 Thought (what is thought) is not repeated in Diction but is brought to light there, made manifest, made seeable (see Derrida's translations of _lexis_ , 232-33).27 Metaphor, then, is not anomalous among Aristotle's nouns; it functions in a way not essentially different from Diction proper. What is "proper" to nouns is not univocity but truth—manifestation of Thinking/the thing. (The source of truth is intuition, which "apprehends the primary premisses" that science demonstrates, _Posterior Analytics_ II.19.100b.)28 Aristotle's _lexis_ (Diction; "language" in Derrida's paraphrase) does not "master" _dianoia_ (Thought; Derrida's "polysemia"); it manifests it.

Heidegger joins our conversation ( _What Is Called Thinking?_ , Lecture IX, 212):

> But all of the great thinking of the Greek thinkers, including Aristotle, thinks non-conceptually [ _begrifflos_ ]. Does it therefore think inaccurately, hazily [ _ungenau und unscharf_ ]? No, the very opposite: it thinks appropriately, as befits the matter [ _sachgerecht_ ].

Indeed Aristotle's ontology of language is more accessible via Heidegger's notions of language as disclosure than by Derrida's polysemantics. If something in Aristotle's thinking is residual in Heidegger's, it may be, as Heidegger claimed, the residue in Aristotle from the presocratic Greek experience—which precedes conceptual, representational (metaphysical) language.

To return, then, to the passage cited in the beginning, Derrida writes that there can be no "proper word," no "unique name," for the uniqueness of Being. Thus he cites a metaphysical, substantialist propriety of language and identity of Being. However, if my collection of related passages is evidence that Heidegger's "propriety" escapes that characterization, Derrida has made a different characterization of the same word—realm of words—in _Spurs_ in an analysis that takes the argument along a different route to the same end.

The case: Derrida, reading Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche, picks up a phrase ("Platonism now rules....it becomes more subtle, insidious, ungraspable— _it becomes woman_ " ( _Nietzsche_ , Vol. I, 205).29) and takes Nietzsche's "woman" as the very figure for his own "writing"—the figure here is "spur," style. Derrida carries the question of "woman" (writing, style) from a question of sexual difference to a question of "a process of propriation" produced by the graphic of the hymen beyond any possibility of ontological decidability (111). Then he turns to the question of propriation in the thinking of Heidegger, which he describes as a similar progress of a similar "process of propriation" leading to the same (in)conclusion: i.e., Heidegger's "process of propriation" loses its footing in metaphysics as it surpasses the limits and the form of opposition and falls into the abyss of nontruth, nonBeing. Now Heidegger's Ereignis and (Derrida's reading of) Nietzsche's "woman" share with Derrida's "style" or the _pharmakon_ the abyssal character of what Derrida calls undecidability. "On such a track one might flush out [ _relancer_ ] once again Heidegger's reading of 'Nietzsche' and abscond with it [ _la voler_ ] outside the speculum and the hermeneutic circle and everything it points out ( _tout ce qu'il flèche_ ) towards an enormous field of dimensions immeasurable—except perhaps by the steps of a dove" (123). (Except perhaps by the progress of the project of Derrida, in _Spurs_ for example.) But I shall argue that just as Derrida's reading of metaphor, above, intending to deconstruct Aristotle's, serves instead to render a Heideggerian propriety to it, so his reading of Heidegger's "propriety" in _Spurs_ serves to render back to Heidegger the nonmetaphysical dimension and range of the "proper word."

For I submit (1) that "the proper-ty of the abyss ( _das Eigentum des Ab-grundes_ )" is _not_ "necessarily the abyss of proper-ty" (119) and (2) that _das Eigentum des Ab-grundes_ is _not_ "an event which befalls without Being" (119)—for Heidegger's Being has perhaps already passed "outside the speculum" and perhaps outside Derrida's reading of "the hermeneutic circle and everything it points out." An alternative to these contradictions already inhabits Heidegger's language, for example in this passage from _Nietzsche,_ Vol. IV, which compels comparison with the section Derrida is citing from _Time and Being_ :30

> Do we dare think the possibility that the nothing is infinitely different from vacuous nullity? In the present case, the characterization of the essence of nihilism proper [ _des Wesens des eigentlichen Nihilismus_ ], in which there is nothing to Being itself [ _mit dem Sein selbst nichts ist_ ], would have to contain something more than a merely negative conclusion. (214)

Containing, instead, two pages later:

> _The essence of nihilism proper is Being itself in default of its unconcealment_ [das Sein selber im Ausbleiben seiner Unverborgenheit], _which is as its own "It"_ [die als die seine Es selber ist], _and which determines its "is" in staying away_ [im Ausbleiben sein "ist" bestimmt].

Not only in works such as _Time and Being_ and _Nietzsche,_ Vol. IV, which treat the issue directly, but from the beginning and throughout Heidegger's thinking, concealment, the mystery, the abyss, Nothing, has participated in the event of Being; and "ownness," "proper-ty," has been the distinctive character of whatever is, i.e., of whatever is let-be in Dasein's Being-uncovering.

Thus the Ereignis, the event of Appropriation, cited here from _Time and Being_ , denies and withholds—i.e., withdraws, expropriates—itself from itself ("By this expropriation, Appropriation does not abandon itself—rather, it preserves what is its own [ _Durch sie (die Enteignis) gibt das Ereignis sich nicht auf, sondern bewahrt sein Eigentum_ ]" 23) even as it sends and extends time and Being. Not only does this withholding of itself from itself _not_ mean the end of propriation but rather its preservation; but it means the possibility of human propriation as well:

> (We catch sight of the other peculiar property in Appropriation [ _Eigentümlich im Ereignis_ ] as soon as we think clearly enough what has already been said. In Being as presence, there is manifest the concern which concerns us humans in such a way that in perceiving and receiving it we have attained the distinction of human being [ _daß wir im Vernehmen und Übernehmen dieses Angangs das Auszeichnende des Menschseins erlangt haben_ ]. Accepting the concern of presence, however, lies in standing within the realm of giving [ _Reichens_ ]. In this way, four-dimensional true time [ _eigentliche Zeit_ ]31 has reached [ _erreicht_ ] us....) _Time and Being_ 23

The event of Appropriation is a radically different version of what we have called source and origin, time and space, Being—and nothing. This uncanny giving and receiving is quite different from Derrida's sexual "process" of "production, doing, machination [ _de la production du faire et de la machination_ ]" (119), and even from the "give-take, give-keep, give-jeopardize [ _du donner-prendre, du donner-garder, du donner-nuire_ ]" of an undecidable and irreducible exchanging at "the very limit of being itself [ _la limite de l'être même_ ]" (113), different most of all in its effect: the giving of Being and time _and propriation_.

> (Because Being and time are there only in Appropriating [ _Ereignen_ ], Appropriating has the peculiar property [ _Eigentümliche_ ] of bringing man into his own [ _in sein Eigenes bringt_ ] as the being who perceives [ _vernimmt_ ] Being by standing within true time. Thus Appropriated [ _So geeignet_ ], man belongs [ _gehört_ ] to Appropriation....) _Time and Being_ 23

Heidegger's "propriation" is no more the physio- psycho- logical "process of propriation" of Derrida's spurs than the totalizing "univocity" of (Derrida's reading of) Aristotle's noun.

To return then once more to Derrida's discussion of "The Anaximander Fragment," let us not forget that Derrida writes the proscription against the proper word, the unique name, in reference to his own annunciation of his own word ( _différance_ ) as well as to Heidegger's (Being). It is interesting to note that Derrida at the same time advances a new word ( _différance_ ), which is not to be thought of as Heidegger's "unique name," and produces in his essay a very Heideggerian function for it: to give, wellspringlike, more and more differentiation, "meaning" ("meaning" meaning _semia_ for Derrida, _manifest Being_ for Heidegger). As Derrida offers a word and at the same time takes it away (a fair demonstration of the function of the word for Heidegger), so Heidegger offered "Being" to "call" what "is" not.32 At issue is the nature of names, naming, of speech and of language. Heidegger escapes the metaphysics that inhabits these words, if he does, by rethinking (re-calling) what each one thinks or calls, letting it be in its own freedom (according to his renewed sense of "propriety," above), a Nietzschean freedom which Derrida too has appropriated, as "play" among "false" participants in a (provisionally true) system, game (" _Différance_ " 26-27). The difference between the freedom in Heidegger's language and the play in Derrida's is the point of Derrida's charge here. Derrida's intention toward and his interpretation of the nature of proliferating language oppose Heidegger's.

> ... the destruction of discourse is not simply an erasing neutralization [ _une simple neutralisation d'effacement_ ]. It multiplies words, precipitates them one against the other, engulfs them too, in an endless and baseless substitution whose only rule is the sovereign affirmation of the play outside meaning [ _dont la seule règle est l'affirmation souveraine du jeu hors-sens_ ]. Not a reserve or a withdrawal, not the infinite murmur of a blank speech erasing the traces of classical discourse, but a kind of potlatch of signs that burns, consumes, and wastes words in the gay affirmation of death [ _l'affirmation gaie de la mort_ ]: a sacrifice and a challenge.33 "Force and Signification" 274

Or perhaps I may say that Heidegger's notion of proliferating language opposes Derrida's:

> If we may talk here of playing games at all [ _Wenn hier schon von einem Spiel die Rede sein darf_ ], it is not we who play with words, but the nature of language plays with us [ _das Wesen der Sprache spielt mit uns_ ], not only in this case, not only now, but long since and always. For language plays with our speech—it likes to let our speech drift away into the more obvious meanings [ _die mehr vordergründigen Bedeutungen_ ] of words. It is as though man had to make an effort to live properly with language [ _die Sprache eigentlich zu bewohnen_ ]. It is as though such a dwelling were especially prone to succumb to the danger of commonness [ _das Wohnen der Gefahr des Gewöhnlichen am leichtesten erliege_ ].... This floundering in commonness is part of the high and dangerous game and gamble in which, by the nature of language, we are the stakes [ _Dieser Taumel im Gewöhnlichen gehört zu dem hohen und gefährlichen Spiel, auf das uns das Wesen der Sprache gesetzt hat_ ].

> Is it playing with words when we attempt to give heed to this game of language and to hear what language really says when it speaks [ _was die Sprache eigentlich sagt, wenn sie spricht_ ]? _What Is Called Thinking?_ 118-19

It is this "really saying" that Derrida suspects and denies.

Thus another related charge which Derrida has repeated is that Heidegger privileges spoken language, this charge related to another, that he privileges the human.

In _Being and Time_ one of the primary structures of Dasein is discourse ( _Rede_ , H. 160-67). Rooted in the constitution (constituting) of the disclosedness of Dasein, discourse "is the Articulation of intelligibility ... [which] underlies both interpretation and assertion" (203-4). To discourse belong voice (speaking) and hearing, but equally not-speaking and not-hearing, and equally "keeping silent." Speaking and the voice are modes of discourse, secondary to it (as signs are modes of signaling, above).34

Heidegger privileges "voice"; but he does not use the word in its usual signification. In work after work Heidegger writes in terms of a "voice of Being," eventually a Saying which is the very giving of Appropriation, above ("The Way to Language" 127); and at the same time he dissociates the notions from vocal apparatus, from notions of the sensory or the physical as well as the metaphysical. We catch the voice in its ultimacy, perhaps, in the trace Heidegger detected in the Anaximander fragment, above, wherein it proceeds from oblivion.

In _Being and Time_ language belongs to Dasein, and since language establishes and sustains the very clearing that is the world, we can say that Heidegger's early thinking gives the human a priority, a radically new kind of priority, to be sure, and that this theme is never abandoned, though it is modified and attenuated (see, e.g., "The Way to Language" 120-23f.). In "The Nature of Language," a lecture delivered in 1957-58 and published in 1959, language still needs man (90), but language, "Saying" [ _Sagen_ ], is more than "a mere human faculty [ _keine bloße Fähigkeit des Menschen_ ]" (107). Holding itself in reserve [ _an sich haltend_ ], it holds all regions (the fourfold) in their relations, is itself "the relation of all relations [ _das Verhältnis aller Verhältnisse_ ]." And only thus does language "[concern] us, us who as mortals belong within this fourfold world, us who can speak only as we respond to language [ _der Sprache entsprechen_ ]" (107). Similarly in "The Way to Language," another lecture in the same series, where the nature of language is Saying, and Saying is showing [ _das Zeigen_ ], again language does not "exclusively, or even decisively [ _weder ausschließlich noch maßgebend_ ]" belong to the human. It marks the appearing, presencing, of every present being, whatever its nature or order, in its presence and absence.35 Afterwards it may occur in a human saying (123-4).

In "Letter On Humanism"36 Heidegger denounces Sartre's humanism—but Derrida argues that he does so for the wrong reasons ("The Ends of Man" 128f.): not because it fails to displace or erase "man" (the right reasons), but because it misses the essence of man. Indeed (Derrida quotes Heidegger), "Humanism is opposed because it does not set the _humanitas_ of man high enough." Heidegger fails to escape metaphysics, fails to forfeit "the values of neighboring, shelter, house, service, guard, voice, and listening" (130),37 a project Derrida designates as "an entire metaphorics of proximity, of simple and immediate presence [ _de toute une métaphorique de la proximité, de la présence simple et immédiate_ ]." We have seen that Heidegger's thought appeals not to the in- or non-human, the outside, the farthest from us, but to the nearest, the deepest inside us; calls for a leap into where we already are. Man's position is elevated, not that it is essentially changed, but that it becomes recognized in its essence for the first time. Western history and "man" are not forfeited; they are discovered. Heidegger does not climb out of metaphysics into an other clime or authorize another _relève_ ; he discovers an "other" prior to and participant in Western man and history.

As for "metaphoricity," I have argued above that Derrida's reading of metaphor in "White Mythology" only demonstrates what Heidegger has asserted, that metaphor, as language, operates and emanates from outside the notion of Being as presence, the metaphysical paradigm. Heidegger calls the epithet "metaphor" a metaphysical misnomer ("The Nature of Language" 100); meanwhile, the "metaphor" he uses throughout his works assumes the same locus and absence-ridden character that Derrida discovers in his deconstruction of the term.38 "Metaphor" moves and provokes meaning for Heidegger in, I suggest, the same region where Derrida's psychoanalytic gambles operate, the area where Derrida hopes to surprise his way into a new position—outside representational language.

But where would "outside" be? Derrida writes often in terms of the inside and outside, of margins. One of the most meditationworthy passages in _Of Grammatology_ describes the outside already having displaced or preceded (transgressed, prewritten) the inside. The tympan ("Tympan") figures the site where an unattainable something-outside, at the point of entry to an inside, undergoes a kind of alchemical accommodation to correct its nature so that something of it, of its, enters, assimilates, but the thing as it is in itself remains outside, inaccessible, alien. In "Living On: _Border Lines_ "39 a subject finds itself displaced by an other, finds itself (re)placed on the (alien) ground of the other, placeless. In notions such as these the subject is cut off not from the object, but from itself. In _Dissemination_ , inside/outside resolves into textuality: "The text _affirms_ the outside [ _Le texte affirme le dehors_ ], marks the limits of [Hegel's] speculative operation [ _marque la limite de cette opération spéculative_ ], deconstructs and reduces to the status of 'effects' [ _déconstruit et réduit à des "effets"_ ] all the predicates through which speculation appropriates the outside" (35).

This theme derives from and reverses a theme of Heidegger's.40 From the notion of ek-sistence as Da-sein (Being-there) to the elaborations of Being-in-the-world, Being-toward, Being-with, and so on to the notion of temporality as ek-stases, Heidegger's thinking overturns ordinary notions of inside-outside. Dasein is always already outside (beside) itself. Temporality (in _Being and Time_ and in _Time and Being_ , e.g.) is a radical revision of past-present-future ( _Ekstases_ ) in which each of these moments is outside itself, involved in the others. Notions of separate, essential, integral realities disappear. The configuration of inside-outside as we have thought it becomes unthinkable, for the "inside" is always already outside, involved in contextuality, directionality, region, world. Beyond these lies Nothing or death. But this other is not without its "effects": all that "is."

In Derrida the conditions above have been repeated or translated, with this salient difference, that the "in" structures are not only invaded by the outside; they are displaced to the outside. The shift leaves the inside out. For in Derrida "inside" (as "outside") is a concept or the edge or limit or other of a concept, concept providing the definition in each case; e.g., the other place is _alien_ because it is other, the original place _displaced_ because it is original. "Text" as what limits the "speculative operation," reducing the outside to "effects," is, if not in its "effects" then in its own operation, intellectual, conceptual (as in _Positions_ "thinking" is displaced by "textual work," 67, 69).41

But in Heidegger the concept does not count. Heidegger's thought of proximity escapes conceptualization as it discounts borders by which concepts define themselves. Derrida's thought fails to escape conceptualization, for it is those definitions that determine and delineate the (meaning of) violation, alienation, displacement, substitution, that his thought discovers.

One effect of the difference is what we observed above, that Derrida's thinking excludes what Heidegger called "Care," mineness, the fundamental character of Dasein. Perhaps this is the crux of the difference that I am trying to delineate between the two. Derrida, and much more his imitators (more of imitation below), erasing so-called "presence" erase what "presence" mistook, what Heidegger takes back as "presencing." It was Heidegger who erased such words and their concepts along with the world they defined and supported—leaving us vulnerably and immediately in _touch_ (compare "texts," the "textual," the current version of/aversion to mineness) with the un-named. Derrida's nonexperiential experimentation with rational language engages us, often dazzles, always returns to us what it requires of us—legitimate demands and challenges; but at the end: we do not _care_.

The very thinking (including Heidegger's) which bears the burden of proof for all the negativity that marks our themes today carries in it not only an alternative direction or emphasis, but a different fundamental thrust. Heidegger's thinking opened up themes and directions; it introduced new ways of thinking, of argument—turns and shifts as well as revolutions. These transformations have marked Western thinking in this century, and yet, in the United States at least, the radical difference in his thinking is overlooked.

In the argument above I have attempted to follow Heidegger's lifelong following of language out onto the moor: his redefinition—not of representational language but of a more original, originary poetic language, recovering renewing meaning. Derrida's thinking remains inside representational language even as it reverses, denegates, or disables it. It succeeds to attack and destroy the root; yet what remains, by whatever means and to whatever purpose, is an obscure, antihuman will to dance, a kind of Derridean "hope" that words may fall against words in such a "way" that some enabling fire may spark. His language is essentially or eventually negative. It speaks of deprivation, loss, death; and it yields a victimization or at best a sinister, macabre heroism, the "gay affirmation of death." Affirmation of life would be metaphysical positivism. According to a foreknowledge which is just another application of the rational principle of noncontradiction, no "calls" can call in or as language and a direct response would be out of the question. Derrida's refusal to give way to leading, his denial of leads per se, cuts human experience off at the source, repelling originariness, resisting historical renewal, and entangling the literary community in hypocrisies and paranoias.

But what is loss of meaning or renunciation or even forgetting of it but the attainment of a higher (lower, other—orientate or situate it however we may; we must) "meaning." Rewriting, unwriting—writing—"meaning" as "meaninglessness", as it avoids repetition risks reversal of the paradigm. Derrida is perfectly aware of this familiar dilemma. He avoids reversal, if he does, by acknowledging the problem and then describing the possibility or practice of avoiding it: by (after Bataille in "From Restricted to General Economy"42) finding and using words and objects which slide, make us slide: toward other words of the same kind. The trick is to avoid falling into meaning and to awaken Bataille's "furtiveness [ _le furtif_ ]" (263), a kind of wary awakening to nonmeaning, nonpresence. "A certain strategic twist must be imprinted upon language [ _Il faudra imprimer au langage un certain tour stratégique_ ]; and this strategic twist, with a violent and sliding [ _violent et glissant_ ], furtive, movement must inflect the old corpus in order to relate its syntax and its lexicon to major silence [ _en infléchisse le vieux corps pour en rapporter la syntaxe et le lexique au silence majeur_ ]" (264).

If the trick succeeds, it "relates" itself to the region Heidegger opened up, the acting and activating blank spaces of what has been unspoken and unthought in Western philosophy. Heidegger shares Derrida's uncertainty as to the possibility of addressing that silence in language. (This uncertainty touches the capability of thinking to think the nature of language; it does not touch the event or the way of language. The event, "it gives"—or the Ereignis, the event of Appropriation—is a fair example, it seems to me, of the unthought, perhaps unthinkable, nonthing that marks language or the world without appearing there.) But whereas for Derrida the way to bring this problem "to terms" is to get outside of or beyond language, Heidegger's way, as we have seen, traverses language along an ever deepening way, language leading the way.

Our experience of reading the two is similarly disparate. In Derrida's prose rigorous, lucid logic rules the argument and otherly arbitrary or artistic or psychoanalytic tendencies intervene, often guide, and take responsibility for whatever eventual nondecision is reached. Heidegger's prose moves and motivates, as he predicts, by showing. The rigor of his logic is impeccable or, more precisely: care-ful (and Derrida learned meticulousness and method from Heidegger, as a comparison of their works shows), but we come to know that "saying" does not reside in the _lexis_ that states it. Instead, reading Heidegger means a profound probing of language itself, "meaning" itself, in a continual discovery of more language, "meaning," not dissemination but disclosure. To follow Heidegger's thinking is to change the traditional meaning of reality, but not the human "sense" of reality. It is this elusive, unsaid "sensing" experience that opens itself to his thinking, the being-shaken-to-the-depths by what is unthought. Heidegger and Derrida agree that a new epoch will require a new "man"; and each places emphasis on Nietzsche's "call" for such a human being. They disagree about the nature of the "last man," the dispensable "humanity." It appears that the Dasein which Heidegger wants to preserve is the human Derrida wants to put behind us. For Heidegger language (renewable) as the world is our domain and our resource, and shall be for the (uncertain) length of "human" "history." The human is heartened and enabled in Heidegger's world, whereas in Derrida's _abyme_ it struggles to immolate itself.

We have observed that Heidegger's thinking is poetic. The anomalous but most-powerful experiences of "seeing" and thinking that art has always managed to bring along with us, however ignorable or ignoble we have maintained them to be, become the field and the stuff of a new way of thinking a heretofore unthinkable world. Derrida's work is post-poetic. His works have become a work of postmodern poetry. As his method becomes _éperon_ it becomes more difficult for followers to follow without imitating. (See, for example, the introduction to _Spurs_ by Stefano Agosti, whose art rivals Derrida's but who concedes that it only extends it, 25.) Derrida's "way" is "style"— _and that style is Derrida's_. Others must imitate or ... read Heidegger for ourselves.

* * *

  1. See Derrida's contribution to the controversy concerning Heidegger's involvement in National Socialism, _Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question_ , trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: U of Chicago, 1989). See also _Heidegger and Modernity_ by Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, trans. Franklin Philip (Chicago: U of Chicago, 1990), which provides a bibliography as well as a (polemical) summary of the history of the debate.↩︎

  2. "Tympan," _Margins of Philosophy_ , trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: U of Chicago, 1982) ix-xxix. Compare Heidegger's "unthought" in, e.g., _What Is Called Thinking?_ trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper Colophon, 1968) 76-77.↩︎

  3. "The Ends of Man," _Margins_ 115.↩︎

  4. See e.g., "The Ends of Man" 128.↩︎

  5. One way to get a sense of the "identity and difference" of the two thinkers is to read _What Is Called Thinking?_ alongside the essays in _Margins_. The similarities and differences in problematic, argument, tone, and direction engage each other in a veritable dialogue.↩︎

  6. _Margins_ 1-27.↩︎

  7. _Early Greek Thinking_ , trans. David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1984) 13-58.↩︎

  8. Derrida has appropriated this point as a linguistic condition; his syntax gives a "certain," as he might say, priority to language, operating on its own, playing, essentially free or unbound by human intention, decision, achieving a kind of objective arbitrariness; i.e., Derrida imposes a rational definition ("effects") or limitation (undecidability) on the otherness that haunts Heidegger's "it gives," the event of _Ereignis_.↩︎

  9. See, e.g., "Building Dwelling Thinking," _Basic Writings_ , ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1977) 326: "That language in a way retracts [ _zurücknimmt_ ] the proper meaning [ _die eigentliche Bedeutung_ ] of the word _bauen_ , which is dwelling, is evidence of the original one [ _Ursprüngliche_ ] of these meanings; for with the essential words of language [ _wesentlichen Worten der Sprache_ ], what they genuinely say [ _ihr eigentlich Gesagtes_ ] easily falls into oblivion [ _fällt ... in die Vergessenheit_ ] in favor of foreground meanings [ _vordergründig Gemeinten_ ]. Man has hardly yet pondered the mystery of this process. Language withdraws from man its simple and high speech [ _Die Sprache entzieht dem Menschen ihr einfaches und hohes Sprechen_ ]. But its primal call does not thereby become incapable of speech [ _dadurch verstummt ihr anfänglicher Zuspruch nicht_ ]; it merely falls silent [ _er schweigt nur_ ]. Man, though, fails to heed this silence." This passage has significance for the discussion below.↩︎

  10. "If our thinking does justice to the matter, then we may never say of the word that it is, but rather that it gives [ _Vom Wort dürften wir ... nie sagen: Es ist, sondern: Es gibt_ ]—not in the sense that words are given by an 'it,' but that the word itself gives. The word itself is the giver [ _Das Wort: das Gebende_ ]. What does it give? To go by the poetic experience and by the most ancient tradition of thinking, the word gives Being [ _gibt das Wort: das Sein_ ]." "The Nature of Language," _On the Way to Language_ , trans. Peter D. Hertz (Cambridge: Harper and Row, 1959) 87-88.↩︎

  11. "Words are not terms [ _Die Worte sind keine Wörter_ ], and thus are not like buckets and kegs from which we scoop a content that is there. Words are wellsprings that are found and dug up in the telling, wellsprings that must be found and dug up again and again, that easily cave in, but that at times also well up when least expected" ( _What Is Called Thinking?_ 130).↩︎

  12. "In keeping with the most ancient usage of the word we understand saying in terms of showing, pointing out, signaling.... _The essential being of language is Saying as Showing_ [ _Das Wesende der Sprache ist die Sage als die Zeige_ ]. Its showing character is not based on signs of any kind; rather, all signs arise from a showing [ _entstammen einem Zeigen_ ] within whose realm [ _Bereicht_ ] and for whose purposes [ _Absichten_ ] they can be signs" ("The Way to Language," _On the Way to Language_ 123).↩︎

  13. "Words," _On the Way_ _to Language_ 154. For a graphic description of the uncanny and violent nature of the word's disclosure of the essent, see _An Introduction To Metaphysics_ , trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale UP, 1959) 170-72f. For the nature of the thing as what gathers the fourfold, as what "stays the fourfold into a happening of the simple onehood of world [ _verweilt das Geviert in ein je Weiliges von Einfalt der Welt_ ]" see "The Thing" (181).↩︎

  14. But I shall argue below, after Heidegger, that Aristotle's works invite a non-"Aristotelian" interpretation of language.↩︎

  15. Compare also Derrida's "trace" as erased origin in _Of Grammatology_ , trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1976) 47f.↩︎

  16. Derrida argues otherwise, _Différance_ 23ff.↩︎

  17. The style indicated in the analogy at the beginning of the work is not the style that is the subject of the work—Nietzsche's, woman's—and not the style _of_ the work. Perhaps infected by the nearness of the style of Nietzsche (and/or woman), Derrida writes more warmly, argues more seductively, than ever; and giving the end of the work over into the voice of Heidegger moves the reader (this one) several ways at once. Yet the discourse is essentially conventional; it advances and illustrates a set of propositions which conceptually account for a new concept of language as style: disconnected from signature or intention, disengaged from context or relation, undecidable because cut off from truth—a metaphysical lament. _Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles_ , trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago: U of Chicago, 1978).↩︎

  18. " _... car l'être parle partout et toujours au travers de toute langue_ ," " _La Différance_ ," _Marges de la philosophie_ ( _Les Editions de Minuit_ , 1972) 29.↩︎

  19. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962).↩︎

  20. _Nietzsche_ , Vol. IV: _Nihilism_ , ed. David Farrell Krell, trans. Frank A. Capuzzi (San Francisco, 1982) 197-250.↩︎

  21. "The Way to Language," _On the Way to Language_ 122.↩︎

  22. Trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: U of Chicago, 1981).↩︎

  23. "... [T]he source of the calling wants to be thought about by its very nature [ _das Heißende selber ... von Hause aus bedacht sein möchte_ ]. ... it gives food for thought in the much wider-reaching and decisive sense that it first entrusts thought and thinking to us as what determines our nature [ _es uns überhaupt das Denken als unsere Wesensbestimmung zutraut_ ]" ( _What Is Called Thinking?_ 125).↩︎

  24. See also a similar explication of "the proper character of the being of language" in "The Way to Language," _On the Way to Language_ 119-125.↩︎

  25. _Margins_ 207-71. In fine, this essay's representation of the nature of metaphor and of language per se is comparable to Heidegger's nonconceptual event, as I describe it here, except that the event is not relationship, and the site is not an abode of habitation.↩︎

  26. Applying the principle of noncontradiction, Aristotle writes: "The question is not whether the same thing can at the same time be and not be a man in name, but in fact" (iv.4.1006b.20-22, 70).↩︎

  27. See also Heidegger's discussion of _logos_ as discourse, "letting-something-be-seen," in, e.g., _Being and Time_ H. 148-167.↩︎

  28. The problem is that the certainty with which intuition knows things ( _Posterior Analytics_ II.19.100b), though necessary in Aristotle's paradigm, necessary to the possibility of thinking and the nature of man, has come to appear as only a conceptual necessity, not a real one—signaling the unraveling of the Western tradition.↩︎

  29. Heidegger did not address the question of "woman" ( _Spurs_ 109)—or did he? Since Derrida turned the question of woman from a matter of gender or human being to a figure in the economy of writing, is it fair to say that he wrote of woman any more than Heidegger did, who ignored Nietzsche's analogy but treated "the sensuous" in the work instead: and did so in the very configuration that Derrida borrowed for his own treatment of Nietzsche's "woman." (Compare Heidegger's _Nietzsche_ , Vol. I: _The Will to Power as Art_ , trans. David Farrell Krell. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1979), Chapters 17, 24, and 25 with Derrida's _Spurs_ , esp. 56-59.)↩︎

  30. Heidegger, Martin, _On Time and Being_ , trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1972) 1-24.↩︎

  31. "[P]rior to all calculation of time and independent of such calculation, what is germane to the time-space of true time [ _das Eigene des Zeit-Raumes der eigentlichen Zeit_ ] consists in the mutual reaching out and opening up [ _im lichtenden Einander-sich-reichen_ ] of future, past and present. Accordingly, what we call dimension and dimensionality in a way easily misconstrued, belongs to true time and to it alone. Dimensionality consists in a reaching out that opens up, in which futural approaching brings about what has been, what has been brings about futural approaching, and the reciprocal relation of both brings about the opening up of openness [ _die Lichtung des Offenen_ ]" (14-5). The fourth dimension of true time is the "interplay" among the three dimensions (present, past, and future)—an interplay "playing in the very heart of time [ _im Eigenen der Zeit spielende_ ]," i.e., "the giving that determines all" (15). "Time is not the product [ _Gemächt_ ] of man, man is not the product of time. There is no production [ _Machen_ ] here. There is only giving [ _Geben_ ] in the sense of extending which opens up time-space [ _den Zeit-Raum lichtenden Reichens_ ]" (16).↩︎

  32. As to Derrida's emphatic "decapita(liza)tion" of his new word, Heidegger's Being [ _Sein_ ], is indeed distinguished by capita(liza)tion, but only by translators in order to distinguish being in general from the being of particular beings ( _Seiendes_ ).↩︎

  33. "Force and Signification," _Writing and Difference_ , trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: U of Chicago, 1978) 3-30.↩︎

  34. Compare also "Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry," trans. Douglas Scott, _Existence and Being_ (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1949) 277-80.↩︎

  35. _Das Sichzeigen kennzeichnet als Erscheinen das An- und Abwesen des Anwesenden jeglicher Art und Stufe_.↩︎

  36. _Basic Writings_ 189-242.↩︎

  37. Heidegger forfeits values per se, _Nietzsche_ , Vol. IV, e.g., 6f, 250.↩︎

  38. See Heidegger's treatment of blueness in "The Nature of Language" 166f. See also David Halliburton's analysis in _Poetic Thinking: An Approach to Heidegger_ (Chicago: U of Chicago, 1981): "[W]hen Heidegger seems to use metaphors, he is actually using something else, namely words, which do not operate in relation to the literal because there is no such thing as the literal; there is just whatever the words say. Words operate, for lack of a better term, kinetically" (157).↩︎

  39. Harold Bloom et al., _Deconstruction and Criticism_ (New York: Continuum, 1986) 75-176.↩︎

  40. Compare also _Of Grammatology_ 66f.↩︎

  41. Rodolphe Gasché sets out the logic of the "method" (the " _general system_ ") of deconstruction in "Infrastructures and Systematicity," _Deconstruction and Philosophy: The Texts of Jacques Derrida_ , ed. John Sallis (Chicago: U of Chicago, 1987) 3-20. He summarizes deconstruction as the " _general system_ ... of undecidables, of syntactically re-marked syncategoremata articulating prelogical and lateral possibilities of logic [or] ... a syntax of an infinity of 'last' syntactically overdetermined syntactical objectivities" (18). This system brings philosophy to "a certain close," not an end but an opening into "an Other in which philosophy becomes inscribed, and which limits its ultimate pretension to self-foundation.... Philosophy comes to a close, paradoxically, because the system of its heterological presuppositions constitute it as, necessarily, always incomplete" (19).↩︎

  42. _Writing and Difference_ 252-277.↩︎

# _Absalom, Absalom!_ : "Fluid Cradle of Events (Time)"1

Discussing _The Sound and the Fury_ in 1939, Sartre wrote that Faulkner "decapitated time," cut off its future. That left a perforated present ("it is full of holes") into which there drifted a ghostlike past. "The present does not exist, it becomes; everything _was._ " "At every instant we draw a line, since the present is nothing but disordered rumor, a future already past" (227-28). Citing Heidegger, he chided Faulkner for that phrase of his, "man is the sum of ...," for man summed up is bereft of his potentiality, his not-yet, his might-yet: his hope. Faulkner's disturbing vision is a distortion owing to his flawed metaphysics of time. The essay on time does not mention _Absalom, Absalom!_.2

John T. Irwin gives a more recent extended treatment of time in Faulkner, discussing temporality in the Oedipal relationships he identifies, especially in _Absalom, Absalom!_ and _The Sound and the Fury_ , where Quentin and the others are "doomed" to the circle or cycle of time, or rather to "the _debilitating_ sense that time is a circular street and recollection is prophecy" (70; emphasis mine). Giving a Freudian turn to the notion of time, and routing through a couple of Stevens's lines (81), Irwin arrives at Nietzsche's eternal recurrence (or Aristotle's _nun_ ): "The essence of time is that it has its being by always becoming, it _is_ by always ceasing to be, it is the same by always being different." The disappointing aspect of the definition to my mind is that it reifies time even while revising the meaning of being. In Irwin's analysis of repetition and memory as they operate in the Oedipal triangle and in his application of the method to Faulkner's works, Aristotelian time goes unchallenged; tear off the hands of the clock though Quentin may, he cannot arrest time's progress, divert its direction, negate its negation. Time passes, linear, objective; what changes in Irwin's study is the configuration of the interplay of mind, memory, and imagination as doubling and incest, repetition and revenge.

If Faulkner did not read Henri Bergson, he listened to others who did (Minter 48). In any case, some of Bergson's notions of matter and memory are positively helpful in articulating Faulkner's treatment of them in _Absalom_ —for example, the separation of memory and mind (the ineffectuality, indeed irrelevance, of the mind or spirit or soul is a motif in the novel); the unity, or union, of memory and matter (see, e.g., the passage in which Rosa asserts that there is no memory but that "the substance of remembering" is "the muscles with which we see and hear and feel" [178]); see the constant availability of the totality of memory and the possibility of "living" there—Ellen's illusory existence as the extreme case; Bon's unrealistic appeal to the others as the most compelling force of the kind; the story's hold on, say, Quentin or on us as the fundamental problem of the novel and the most salient case of all). Most important to my project here are Bergson's notion of time as pure heterogeneity—as qualitative, not quantitative, change—and his discussion of duration and endurance.

There is no indication that Faulkner had any direct knowledge of Martin Heidegger's philosophical configuration of temporality. Paul Ricoeur's study _Time and Narrative_ , which addresses systematically the problems I shall encounter below, makes selective use of Heidegger's elaboration of time in _Being and Time_ and _The Basic Problems of Phenomenology_ to develop his thesis "that the poetics of narrativity responds and corresponds to the aporetics of temporality" (1: 84).3 In an early issue of this journal Bernhard Radloff, using Heidegger's structures of temporality from _Being and Time_ , analyzed time in _The Sound and the Fury_ , offering it as a mirror image of the "temporality of reading" by which the reader "performs the fictional world" of the text (1: 57). I too shall carry a quantity of Heidegger's thought with me in my foray into time and narrative in _Absalom, Absalom!_. Some characteristics of temporality, which I prefer to cite from _Time and Being_ , may set a stage for the work below. Here time, though futural and irreversible, is not sequential; the three ecstases (present, past, future) play, interplay, in a temporality more phenomenologically comprehensive than Bergson's notion of time as duration and heterogeneity and freedom, his differentiation and dissociation of time and space. In Heidegger the past remains, in its way, in the present: "that which is no longer present presences immediately in its absence—in the manner of what has been, and still concerns us." The future also is present in our concern: "what is not yet present ... is present no less immediately than what has been" (13). Heidegger designates the interplay itself as the fourth dimension of time, "the true extending playing in the very heart of time," and calls it the Appropriation or _Ereignis_. The "event" of Appropriation opens up time-space as it denies (and preserves) what has been and withholds (and preserves) what is approaching. Meanwhile the distinctive character of this _Ereignis,_ this "giving," which extends the three dimensions toward each other while it holds them apart, Heidegger identifies as "nearing nearness, nearhood _(Nahheit)_ " (15). The interplay of present, past, and future, this "playing in the very heart of time," is at the same time the denying or withholding of what is being offered and extended: nearness. This is a provocative suggestion, awakening time from its dream of abstract or theoretic calculability to an as-yet unspeakable because unthinkable possibility as founder, or giver, of all that is said and thought, and, even more fundamentally, of all that matters, of all _as it matters_ , or, perhaps, of all _because it matters_ or _because of mattering_. Heidegger's idea will not be explored here, but the potentialities it urges enable and encourage the exploration of the bewildering presentation of time that we find in Faulkner's experiments in _Absalom, Absalom!_

If we ask how the novel presents time in itself, objective time, the answer is that it does not. Objective time is not missing from the novel— there are enough facts of datable history and of verifiable astronomical, meteorological, and climatalogical change, enough ordinary (if unreliable)4 indicators of calendar and clock time—but it is not objective. Time, fractured and "confused," disjointed and rearranged, conjectural or experiential, "exists" in the novel as a human structure; not as a construction by humans but as a structure of the human, in which we find, shall we say, a "confusion" of what we call past, present, and future. Ricoeur (vol. 2) surveys and analyzes linguistic studies in which "lived time" is different from linguistic time (i.e., the present, past, and future in assertion or narration) and linguistic time is secondary to objective time. Ricoeur argues that the temporal "experience" ("lived time") which lies prior and posterior to linguistic structuration is primordial, that so-called objective time is secondary to it. I shall not argue the case here, but giving human temporality the benefit of the doubt, shall peruse Faulkner's novel for its treatment of time without prejudging its "subjectivity." I find a "modern" structuration of temporality—we have learned to recognize the measureless a-rhythm of "modernity." Faulkner is "modern" when he renders time as an arbitrary clustering of groundless multi-inter-ruptions.

In the beginning is the end: Sutpen's story is summarized on p. 13. The summary is incomplete (there is the midnight drive out to what remains of Sutpen's domain before the apocalyptic cataclysm), but then the story will not be finished even when the novel is finished, since the book's sequel, _The Sound and the Fury_ , will carry it on (though that novel's publication has preceded this one's by almost a decade). This dis-order is appropriate to the temporal schematic in this novel, since the ending leads, invades, intervenes, usurps the story throughout. In the beginning and everywhere else is the end. That is, in the opening pages Miss Rosa evokes the ghost of Sutpen's story, the problem in a figure: Sutpen and his domain (11-13); then from Quentin's own plural consciousness arises the story, i.e., the stories, already settled into inconclusive past time—the opening pages reminiscent, in this work that continually recalls the ghost of Hamlet's story, of the pantomime that precedes the tragedy Hamlet has rigged for the king. A mirror for the novel as a whole: from indefatigable recapitulation to indeterminable denouement.

But it was Rosa who set the story off in reverse—Rosa, who tells time from the future:

> ...as though she actually had some intimation gained from that rapport with the fluid cradle of events (time) which she had acquired or cultivated by listening beyond closed doors not to what she heard there but by becoming supine and receptive, incapable of either discrimination or opinion or incredulity, to the prefever's temperature of disaster which makes soothsayers and sometimes makes them right, and of the future catastrophe....(79)

Doubtless Rosa is a special case: the embattled, embittered old-maid poetess, a sensibility stunted, biased and effuse, another incredible Cassandra. However, this characterization of Rosa and of time implicates not only Rosa's sensibility, but Mr. Compson's, for it is rendered in his voice (Chapter II). If we remember his voice from (the future) _The Sound and the Fury_ , we recognize the bitter inflection given the ancient oracle. Time is "the fluid cradle of events," a figure suggesting that time (1) shall be fluid: plastic, unfixed, unstable, while it (2) shall cradle, i.e., hold, secure; shall encircle or embrace. Time: the inclusive flux of what has happened, happens, will happen. Yet there is something contradictory if not perverse about an unstable cradle, about a "cradle" of disaster, of catastrophe.

Rosa is Mr. Compson's modern seer, psychologically disturbed, at odds, outside the flux listening in, telling Quentin what he knows she "wants told." Her narrative, starting out from her outrage (11-12), returns to her history—that nonchildhood where she haunted the often-cited "womblike corridors" (202) beyond the closed doors, learning listening.5 What she heard, says Mr. Compson, was the temperature of the prefever of disaster and catastrophe. What will happen later is already available to the senses, at least to Rosa's; the future can be "received" in the present, though it "is" not yet. Something Rosa listens in to, call it time—events preceding themselves, as symptoms of themselves—bears a relation to the human; in fact, according to Miss Rosa or Mr. Compson its attitude is retributive or indifferent. Subjectivity in either case, we say, setting it aside. Still, since today so-called objective time is undergoing radical redefinition, the phenomenon inscribed according to Faulkner's relatively untutored or uncorrected perception of it (his listening-in to it), may discover some points of interest. To proceed, then: telling time from the future is not the prerogative of Rosa or of Mr. Compson. As we shall see, it is endemic to the novel and comprehensive.

The principle works at several levels. There are what appear to be technical difficulties, as when a stray fact wanders in from the future: Quentin, telling Shreve what his father told him (that _his_ father told him that Sutpen told him about what he remembered about his childhood—time is stretching back or expanding to recover an origin), has it that the Sutpens fell from the mountains of West Virginia back to the place where the first Sutpens had probably touched shore near Jamestown (278). But, Shreve remonstrates, West Virginia was not a state in 1808; in fact, not only was West Virginia not a state in 1808 at about the time Sutpen was born, but it would not be a state for another thirty years when Sutpen, at age twenty-five or so, told the story. "All right all right all right," Quentin eventually concedes, pausing to acknowledge the error without relinquishing it, diverting through the future without changing course.

Or consider this more subtle futural invasion. Chapter 11 opens upon the "summer of wistaria," upon Quentin and his father "as they sat on the front gallery after supper until _it would be time_ for Quentin to start" (my emphasis; not "until it _was_ time")—the first hint in the language of the chapter that the narration is moving in a circle. It is the summer of wistaria and of Quentin's father's cigar, the odor of which "five months later Mr. Compson's letter would carry up from Mississippi ... into Quentin's sitting-room at Harvard" (34). The flashforward device is a convention of fiction; the narrator, omniscient, scatters light in whatever direction he chooses.

The language drifts softly about the present, the twilight, pipesmoke, wafts gently into the future in the phrases I am pointing out, and turns back into the past, or turns the past back into the present, whichever stories do. At any rate, we note the "presence" of the future, as well as the past. That there is more at stake here than temporal or psychological coherence we may establish by looking ahead to Cambridge when the scent arrives as promised (217), bringing along with it the twilight (and the fireflies, as well):

> Then on the table before Quentin, lying on the open text book beneath the lamp, the white oblong envelope, the familiar blurred mechanical _Jefferson Jan 10 1910 Miss_ and then, opened, the _My dear son_ in his father's sloped fine hand _out of that dead dusty summer where he had prepared for Harvard so that his father's hand could lie on a strange lamplit table in Cambridge_ (217; emphasis in last phrase mine).

The letter is dated January 1910, but the narrator places its genesis in the preceding summer (places it there not in time but in place: "that summer where") along with a retrospective purpose. A kind of reciprocal causal relationship is indicated between the summer of wistaria "where" Quentin prepared for Harvard (past) and the unread letter on the table (present); that is, it is/will be what happens later (the letter) that determines the purpose of what happened earlier (summer). More is indicated in the relation than Mr. Compson's abstract design or logic and its issue (sending Quentin to Harvard to extend his own "hand"), though that cause-to-effect is fundamental. Mr. Compson's abstract purpose, his intention, e.g., his letter, does not work literally to cause. That is, the effect of the letter will be far more than its express content or intention; unread until the end (read then when reading it is literally impossible; see Edgar A. Dryden's provocative reading of this point, 158ff), its non-literal "content" or effect or presence will have precipitated the second half of the novel.6

The multi-dimensional aspect of the reciprocation between Mississippi summer and Cambridge winter, between father's purpose and son's experience and vice versa, is neither strictly causal nor expository but, call it, temporal; the letter exceeds its own present (winter—even in Mississippi wistaria does not bloom in January), expands into and issues from the preceding summer (past): as the summer, according to the narrator's prediction, exceeded its own present to anticipate, even incorporate, the future. But, we may object, to the omniscient narrator the future is as present as the past; time is all one, afterwards (or beforehand). John Irwin has pointed out that in Faulkner the present repeats the past as it circles round according to fate or the "will of time," that avenger (59 ff). Ricoeur argues that this aspect of narrative, which Gerard Genette called its "retrospectively synthetic character," belongs to "the set of temporal strategies" by which fiction may articulate a new conception of time.7 We may take the present intrusion of the future letter carrying the future-perfect pipesmoke to belong to the conventional poetics of the novel or to the thematic, or we may (as I shall) with equal confidence consider it among the clues to an elaborate schematic of unorthodox temporality.

The temporal-causal reciprocity noted above offers in miniature the interrelationship we find between _Absalom, Absalom!_ and _The Sound and the Fury_ , that relationship not analogous to but continuous with this one. From his introduction in the opening pages of this novel, we read Quentin from the futural perspective of his fastidious suicide in the former one; it is thus that we recognize or remember in some futural sense the point where he is "stopped" here; i.e., the point where "innocence" or "the logic of morality" brings love into checkmate. If there is a primary Absalom in this novel, it is Quentin, the one (to-be-) lost son "present" in the novel, the one living in the novel's "present," the one in whom the problems of the others converge. If there is a primary motif, it is the abnegation of the father, the misbegotten paternal design gone awry. Mr. Compson's "design," we think back into the future to recall, is/was/will-be to sacrifice Benjy's pasture (present) and Jason's legacy (future) in order to send Quentin to Harvard and to buy Caddy a wedding. A comparison of Mr. Compson's design with Sutpen's, of Quentin's (pending) rejection and renunciation of his father's design with Henry's, discovers a similar regular declension from the father's (fathers') "impotent logic and morality" (279) to its baffling dissolution and annihilation in the son's (sons'). The Compson father-son problem motivates this novel, is illuminated though it is not articulated here (Irwin has made the case [73ff.]; Peter Brooks argues otherwise).

We find it sleeping in the passage we are reading as it continues:

> ... that dead summer twilight—the wistaria, the cigar-smell, the fireflies—attenuated up from Mississippi....—the letter bringing with it that very September evening itself ...—that very September evening when Mr. Compson stopped talking at last, he (Quentin) walked out of his father's talking at last because it was now time to go, not because he had heard it all because he had not been listening, since he had something which he still was unable to pass: that door, that ... youthful face ..., the sister facing him across the wedding dress which she was not to use .... (217-18)

We ponder from his future this sullen Quentin, brooding over his father's open, unread letter, the letter obscuring the open, unread text book, both of them, read or not, emitting the same "code" (349-50), which directs Quentin's version of the Sutpen story toward the father's betrayal, diverts his course toward _The Sound and the Fury_.

Now _we_ are doing it—listening into the future for the temperature to set our clock by. Quentin in the present, not reading the letter, involving himself in the past which the letter brings along, is repeating the future. Past and future interpenetrating in the present, neither mirror nor cause to each other but reciprocal repetition, recapitulation, exchange, interchange—in the present, where events "are," i.e., "happen." This is not Irwin's analysis of repetition as a concept, but Faulkner's uncanny schematic of time.

Though our lure has drawn something from the deeps, we withdraw it again and, neglecting for the moment several temporal surprises in this passage, we skip to the last chapter to note another typical futural aberration. Particular details that belong in the future show up in the story's present time: "There would be no deep breathing tonight ... soon the chimes would ring for midnight, the notes melodious and tranquil, faint and clear as glass in the fierce (it had quit snowing) still air" (366). This sound of the bells is not simply their anticipated customary ringing. Instead the narrator is describing the very sound that the chimes will make later tonight, "faint and clear as glass in the fierce still air" owing to a particular climatic condition, i.e., "it has already quit snowing" at the moment of the preternatural prediction. It is not Quentin whose memory or meteorology is questionable this time, but the narrator, our best hope of veridicality, and we take these bells for "fact," not speculation, belonging to his special out-of-time omniscience. However, we cannot suppress a "double-take"; since the syntax expresses the temporal anomaly, brings it to our attention as it continues on all sides to express others, we cannot fail to notice that once again the "future" is showing up in the "present," opening up a dimension there which deepens the sense or the significance—or the "reality"—of the "present" moment.

The circle of temporality is drawn more elaborately in a nearby passage where, the narrator tells us, Quentin-and-Shreve are thinking

> ... how after the father spoke and before what he said stopped being shock and began to make sense, the son would recall later how he had seen through the window beyond his father's head the sister and the lover in the garden, pacing slowly.... (368)

The interval of shock is not named in itself but in terms of the before-and-after frame of other events: the father speaking, the shock of what he said stopping and becoming sense. Shock is the empty space between—yet not empty, since it is in this interim that Henry is seeing the lovers "pacing slowly." Further, the view of the lovers pacing is not presented as it occurs in time, that is, at the same time that the father and son are talking; but it is purchased by coming back from the future through recollection ("Henry would recall later how he had seen"). Two kinds of time are occurring or are being experienced at once: time collapse or release and time in slow motion. (1) We have an interval of time that suspends "telling time" until afterward, since it is the aporia itself that will define the interval for what it is. (2) At "one time" and in one and the same sensibility, time is "happening" at two tempos. Time is not of a piece, integral, or continuous, then. Time is "occurring," however, not in theory but in experience. We shall see that "experience" as storytelling splits human sensibility horizontally, from generation to generation, though the stories intermingle freely, but in this case it is split vertically, split apart from itself, without compromise to either experience.

In the first instance we can say that one effect of the futural approach to the present is loss of immediacy, the substitution of memory for presence. Or we can say that the effect is to gain a different sense of immediacy, of "presence," the "present," giving over the ordinary sense of time as the regular "passing" of time—the irresistible, invariable rhythm of the passage and progress of discrete, undifferentiable now's—for a sense of the present as a sort of (non-spatial) place into which the future draws (or pushes) the past. In the narrative, time is not serial or simple; it is not regular or predictable in its rate or mode of "passing." Its span of duration, the unit of time, is defined according to an afterward, a future, cooperating to move or motivate the present as though from behind, preempting "cause." (Compare Rosa's 43-year outrage, the duration having extended year by year, against that "destiny" she doted on to define the interim and its significance.) Time is less a conveyor belt than a wheel—or dynamo.

In the second instance, where time is operating at two rates "at the same time," it may be argued that shock is what Henry may be supposed to experience, slow time what he observes and will remember having noted. A single sensibility is absorbed in one experience while it registers another which, preserved in the memory, will become available for placing in time later. But according to Quentin-and-Shreve, this "observation" is more than simple perception: it observes the lovers pacing "slowly on in that rhythm which not the eyes but the heart marks and calls the beat and measure for" (368). We are familiar with the Faulkner penchant for providing the words for his characters' inchoate sensibilities; Vardaman is the ultimate case. But it is not necessary therefore to subtract the articulated sensibilities from the characters, nor in this case to rob Henry's memory of the narrator's interpretation. Foregrounding one experience in respect to another, differentiating and prioritizing, we do not alter the case: two experiences and/or impressions of time, simultaneous, differ in their " _timing._ " Human time is different from clocktime; it is different from itself as well. When time is not time—regular measurement of regular intervals—when time in one case is incommensurate with time in another, what does "time" mean?

And what is the temporal meaning of shock? Consider another example: Sutpen as a boy, warned by "the Negro" at the white man's house to go to the back door, stunned with sudden recognition: "rushing back through those two years and seeing a dozen things that had happened and he hadn't even seen them before" (287). In the case above shock obscured everything momentarily, though later Henry would recall the lovers he had been aware of, unawares, in the garden; in the second case, however, Sutpen will not remember later what the shock displaced, what the Negro actually said to him at the door; what he will remember is that in a brief, indeterminable space of time he was sent hurtling back through the previous two years which the shock all-at-once illuminated. This shock has a modified effect, displacing perception in time rather than sharing it. And this shock does not cancel its share of time (awareness); rather it concentrates it: in the past.

Now we can compare Sutpen's memory to Henry's; the memory has worked similarly in both cases to preserve so-called unconscious experience. What young Sutpen "hadn't even seen before" his memory (we presume) has recorded and preserved—three pages of telling impressions in intimate detail. Similarly, the impressions later become available for review, reinterpretation. Now, we may muse more broadly, the "content" of this novel as a whole, the story it tells, consists of the stuff of "memory"; such stuff is unraveled in time, in its own time as well as the storyteller's time (the relays are legion and extend to our own time). The memory condenses or expands its contents, strangely enough, losing touch with clocktime with no loss of temporality, holding its content continually available to present time. When the content of memory (the past) is admitted into the present, what time is it?

The problem of temporality is complicated and extended by a (non-) spatial problem. The problem of the spacing or placing of time asserts itself in the novel, is emphasized and exaggerated there—the experiment is implicit and explicit. Times occur on top of each other or in layers. I do not mean the avatars, the fathers and sons, for example, in perpetual and reciprocal recapitulation, for we are used to assigning repetitions such as these their causal genealogies, and it will be only when, say, Shreve (1909) intervenes between the "air" and the honeysuckle at Sutpen's Hundred (1849, below) that time will become an issue. The spatial issue asserting itself here is that the "present," more or less ignored, is not only determined and sometimes altered as it is in some sense preceded by the future (and in a complex multiplicity of ways), but it is primarily occupied by or preoccupied with the past—not a simple or single past, but multiple, interconnecting and interrelating pasts.

When _is_ the story? Consider, for example, Rosa's Sutpen story, stamped and embellished in outrage. Or reconsider the passage cited above (368) in which the narrator (layer 1), presenting time in the novel as though from outside it (time), gives an account of (2) the "thinking" of the boys, in the novel's present time, in which we find, not (3) the experience of Henry in Mississippi in 1860, including (4) his memory-interpretation, as the boys have it, his detour through a future memory to reach part of the experience, but (and from this point I decline to enumerate) Quentin-Shreve's _version_ of it, available to them in the dormitory room in Massachusetts in 1910 only (or so we are used to think) from Quentin's memory (and, we presume, Shreve's from a version, at least partial, that Quentin has previously given him) of what Miss Rosa and his father have told him (of what they remembered or remembered being told—by Quentin's grandfather, for example, or his grandmother or people in the town or by Sutpen himself telling what he remembered or what, so he said on one occasion, anybody with good whiskey could have told). The layers of time are neither separate nor combined, but they are recombinant, mixing, filtering, infiltrating—changing—each other. For example, as the narrative continues the narrator will critique the boys' interpretation (they were probably right, he will say), as they will critique (and correct) Mr. Compson's; the narrator has added the character Shreve to the story perhaps as expediently as Shreve has added the lawyer (or as desperately or extravagantly as Judith has sought out Quentin's grandmother), and at least in the case of the boys we see that inspiration can alter the story substantially, as when they give the war wound, which in previous iterations was Bon's, to Henry. Or, again, the narrator from his perspective of inclusive time has impregnated the present with the future, to what issue we are trying to determine, as we see Quentin-Shreve remember Henry's future into their account, with the extraordinary implications we are perusing.

An effect, then, of approaching the present from the future through the past is expansion—of context and dimension and significance (Richard Poirier calls it "retroactive distortions," in Rosa's case [24]; Irwin calls it creating one's predecessors, in Quentin's [35]; Radloff calls it the "priority of the rhetorical heritage of the characters over their individual speculations and particular points of view," citing "the ontological priority of language over the 'subject'" [Heidegger 46]). The boys' version, like each former account, essentially recreates the event of the story. Shreve and Quentin have appropriated this story (or vice versa), rejecting or inventing or substituting events and characters at will (theirs or the story's), to new purpose (theirs or the story's). Compare Mr. Compson's account or Miss Rosa's. In the passage above, the boys have revised Sutpen's confession and admonition ("he is your brother") as they have redirected the whole story; the love and grief and tragedy, which for Miss Rosa attached to the lovers and for Mr. Compson belonged to the brothers, are laid this time at the feet of the father, the "bloody mischancing" now accruing to the son's (sons') "dreadful need" (396), "fearful intensity of need" (409), in their "embattlement" with the "incontrovertible fact" (420) of the father's "ambiguous eluded dark fatherhead" (373).

If appropriating the past from the standpoint of the future contracts or condenses all aspects of time into the space of the present, consider the dimensions of that space in the following passage (continuing from a previous citation); Quentin-and-Shreve are reconstructing the scene in the garden:

> ... the sister and the lover in the garden, pacing slowly ... on in that rhythm which not the eyes but the heart marks ... to disappear slowly beyond some bush or shrub starred with white bloom—jasmine, spiraea, honeysuckle, perhaps myriad scentless unpickable Cherokee roses—names, blooms which Shreve possibly had never heard and never seen _although the air had blown over him first which became tempered to nourish them._ (368; my emphasis)

The violations of fact discussed in the text, such as that Shreve is inventing "actual" flowers he has never seen or heard of, or that it would have been winter in Mississippi, or that perhaps the whole episode is doubtful, may be charged to the stereotypical (youthful) "thinking" of the boys. But in the last phrase, not attributed to the boys' thinking, the narrator has it that the air blew over Shreve in Canada (aged 19 in 1909) _before_ it passed gentling into the South _in about 1849_. Time, in some arche-sense, ignoring and overriding the dispensations or segmentations we have always assigned to it, is behaving at once or as one—not as contraction or condensation of time into the present but as an expansion or comprehension that transforms the meaning of "present." In fact, Shreve seems to share some sort of larger "presence" ("being") with _Canada_ that displaces time.

On the last page of the novel Shreve will take the same attitude: predicting that the Jim Bonds will someday dominate the western hemisphere, he will conclude, "and so in a few thousand years, I who regard you will also have sprung from the loins of African kings." Here is the futural attitude par excellence. From a "present" standpoint, 1909, Shreve surmises an afterwards, after a few millennia, when he, the 19-year-old, red-headed Canadian Harvard freshman, will have descended from African kings. Time all but ceases to differentiate, to separate and to keep separate, and instead something we thought subject to time overruns time, runs freely to and fro over its boundaries, spreads out in it, rules. Being usurps time? Yet it is only time that differentiates between Shreve as Canadian Harvard student and Shreve as African descendant. This being-in-general would seem to require time for being-in-particular.

In the language of the novel we have discovered an impetus or movement toward the nonexistent future—an impulse toward outside-time, beyond-time. It is different from the philosophical tendency toward objectivity—the thinker's attempt to detach himself from the object of thought in order to "see" it as a unified whole. The absolute impossibility of that detachment is the major effect—representation and theme—of the entire work. Yet the tendency toward outside-time does yield an effect of unity of sorts, of relation and integration, if not of essence or objectivity.

The effect is clearest in the case of Judith, for whom the meaning of this futural tendency toward outside-time is unequivocal. Deliberately she carries Bon's letter to Quentin's grandmother; like Sutpen's design, hers is an attempt to come to terms with futility (and like his it appeals to the "blind chancy darkness" of the future [396]):

> ... your grandmother [Mr. Compson tells Quentin] saying "Me? You want me to keep it?"
> 
> "Yes," Judith said, "Or destroy it. As you like. Read it if you like or dont read it if you like. Because you make so little impression, you see. You get born and you try this and you dont know why only you keep on trying it ... and then all of a sudden it's all over and all you have left is a block of stone with scratches on it provided there was someone to remember to have the marble scratched and set up or had time to, and it rains on it and the sun shines on it and after a while they dont even remember the name and what the scratches were trying to tell, and it doesn't matter. And so maybe if you could go to someone, the stranger the better, and give them something—a scrap of paper—something, anything, it not to mean anything in itself and them not even to read it or keep it, not even bother to throw it away or destroy it [cf. Quentin's father's letter, the textbook, the novel], at least it _would be something just because it would have happened_ [my emphasis], be remembered even if only from passing from one hand to another, one mind to another, and it would be at least a scratch, something, something that might make a mark on something that _was_ once for the reason that it can die someday, while the block of stone cant be _is_ because it never can become _was_ because it can't ever die or perish.... (157-58)

"Being something" depends on a futural having-happened (not on present "happening"), i.e., on being "remembered." Judith's futural prospect, a forcing-beyond into the absolute-afterward, brings the out-of-time to bear upon the in-time in an ultimate sense: a totalization of sorts, _counted_ , or _counted on_ , beforehand. What will have counted is to have made an inscription, not on tombstones but on memories; it means to have made a "scratch" in the memory of a stranger, perpetuating an "is" by passing it into another "is," which "is" by virtue of the fact that it too will become "was"—it too will-have-been. "Will have been" means mortality; "is" means "will have died." The issue at stake for Judith in the futural perspective is _being_ : being as having-been, as will-have-been.

It is not that "being" is to occur in retrospect, that it will somehow take effect after Judith is dead. The futural prospect is not the prospect from the future, but the prospect from the present of something as viewed from the future; it is the way her life appears in time, against the prospect of out-of-time or of futility—nothingness: an horizon against which things that happen "are"—and continue to "be" in "memory." "Being," Judith seems to think, means figuring in the ongoing story (collective memory) that these generations of mortals inter-counter-weave among themselves. Here is the middle portion of Judith's speech to the grandmother, which I skipped above:

> You get born and you try this and you dont know why only you keep on trying it and you are born at the same time with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with strings only the same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs and the others all trying and they dont know why either except that the strings are all in one another's way like five or six people all trying to make a rug on the same loom only each one wants to weave his own pattern into the rug; and it cant matter, you know that, or the Ones that set up the loom would have arranged things a little better, and yet it must matter because you keep on trying or having to keep on trying and then all of a sudden it's all over.... (157)

Miss Rosa and Mr. Compson and Quentin offer competing notions of the "design" of things, but we take the view of Judith, the unwed widow all but isolate in her independence, to represent the extremity of necessity to which the community of "story" corresponds. The futural prospect is an existential imperative embedded in storytelling, i.e., remembering.

Yet "there is no such thing as memory" (178), Rosa asserts; and stories are, as Mr. Compson says, "just incredible"; "they dont explain" (124). Time turns toward or into being, a provocative turn; but being turns toward or into memory and story, and these, or our ordinary understanding of them, are explicitly rejected in the novel.

As to memory Rosa renders a Bergsonian opinion:

> Do you mark how the wistaria, sun-impacted on this wall here, distills and penetrates this room as though (light-unimpeded) by secret and attritive progress from mote to mote of obscurity's myriad components? That is the substance of remembering—sense, sight, smell: the muscles with which we see and hear and feel—not mind, not thought: there is no such thing as memory: the brain recalls just what the muscles grope for: no more, no less: and its resultant sum is usually incorrect and false and worthy only of the name of dream. —See how the sleeping outflung hand, touching the bedside candle, remembers pain, springs back and free while mind and brain sleep on and only make of this adjacent heat some trashy myth of reality's escape: or that same sleeping hand, in sensuous marriage with some dulcet surface, is transformed by that same sleeping brain and mind into that same figment-stuff warped out of all experience. Ay, grief goes, fades; we know that—but ask the tear ducts if they have forgotten how to weep. (178; cf. Bergson, _Matter and Memory_ , ch. 3.)

Here Rosa sets the bewitched brain against the remembering senses, muscles; in an earlier chapter she developed the motif: _the flesh_ , where or from or about which the uncanny, the immediate (the "private own"), awakens and moves, versus the insubstantial, easily-willingly-duped ("anyone's") _spirit_ or _soul_ or _mind_ :

> Because there is something in the touch of flesh with flesh which abrogates, cuts sharp and straight across the devious intricate channels of decorous ordering which enemies as well as lovers know because it makes them both, touch and touch of that which is the citadel of the central I-Am's private own: not spirit, soul; the liquorish and ungirdled mind is anyone's to take in any darkened hallway of this earthly tenement. But let flesh touch with flesh, and watch the fall of all the eggshell shibboleth of caste and color too. (173)

The difference and the priority do not belong to Rosa (see Bon's letter to Judith [160] or Mr. Compson's remarks on Sutpen's insufficient code [339, 334]) or to a few disturbing passages; the novel thematizes a systematic differentiation and confrontation: the spirit and/or mind—including the literal (cf. Mr. Compson's "letter"), including, then, the memory, the welter of stories the novel consists of—against, on the other hand, a different kind of "saying"—"the physical touch" (399), the "flesh," the actuality of living passions (see for example the confrontation between Miss Rosa and Clytie on the stair [71-77]).

But the word "memory" is resilient in the novel. If memory is a mental function, it is a vital one. When Rosa remembers and enumerates the necessary attributes of Sutpen, memory numbers one: "Yes, the body, the face, with the right name and memory, even the correct remembering of what and whom ... it had left behind and returned to" (209). Or if "memory" is the wrong word, what it means remains, remains essential; e.g., Mr. Compson, in order to discount the personal existence of the octoroon, divests her of memory: "she would not grow from one metamorphosis ... to the next carrying along with her all the old accumulated rubbish-years which we call memory, the recognizable "I" (245-46). And Quentin, thinking to himself, provides the link between "memory" and where the past can always be found in this novel: "But you were not listening, because you knew it all already, had learned, absorbed it already without the medium of speech somehow from having been born and living beside it, with it, as children will and do: so that what your father was saying did not tell you anything so much as it struck, word by word, the resonant strings of remembering" (266). We may forget, forsake, "memory," then, without diminishing the past, for in _Absalom, Absalom!_ that shadowy omnipresence is always available: in the "air."

The novel gives no scientific identification to this "air,"8 but it figures regularly and consistently in the novel to extend or supplant memory. A typical reference:

> It was a day of listening too—the listening, the hearing in 1909 even yet mostly that which [Quentin] already knew since he had been born in and still breathed the same air in which the church bells had rung on that Sunday morning in 1833 and, on Sundays, heard even one of the original three bells in the same steeple.... (34)

Or, after her aunt disappeared, Rosa

> ... did not even have to go out there and breathe the same air which he breathed and where, even though absent, he still remained, lurked, in what she called sardonic and watchful triumph. (76)

" Air" is not air, and what it is—a kind of holding place, impressionable, and without volition—other constituents of the physical universe can be as well. Rosa tells Quentin (who is not listening):

> I was not spying while I dreamed ... upon the nooky seat which held invisible imprint of his absent thighs just as the obliterating sand, the million finger-nerves of frond and leaf, the very sun and moony constellations which had looked down at him, the circumambient air, held somewhere yet his foot, his passing shape, his face, his speaking voice, his name. (184)

A more complex extension of or substitution for "memory" in the novel is the "blood," which not only holds, carries, and mixes "story," as the air does, but extends beyond or outside "story" and is the primary mover of the novel, for it is genealogy that determines the rest: from Sutpen's "design" through the transgression it effects to the catastrophe. What "is" and/or operates in the blood seems to partake of a "reality" more real than air or memory (or forgetting) or even time (its shocks and violences can "abrogate" time [311] as well as "design"), belongs to what Mr. Compson calls the "horrible and bloody mischancing of human affairs" (125). In the novel's _Heart of Darkness_ section, i.e., Sutpen's account of his experience in the West Indies (301-18), "the old unsleeping blood" of the ravished continent "still [crying] out for vengeance" (312), erupts in the violent insurrection that only Sutpen's "innocent," raw "courage" or his "indomitable spirit" can subdue. Yet in this section this all but unassailable "blood" is equated with or related to "black bones and flesh _and thinking and remembering_ and hopes and desires" (212; emphasis mine). Thinking and remembering have seemed to belong to the spurious but reliable "air." It seems that there are no fixed definitions or categories here, no rational schematic. Instead, the novel seems to describe the unnamed if not the unnameable, to indicate the differentiable but undissociable. Both air and blood exist and operate in the novel not as existents or operations but as more-than-material presences which are only quasi-present—like the absent, insubstantial "reality" of Sutpen or of Bon (or of Caddy) or like those undeniable but untraceable effects of " _flesh_ "—more called than named, according to which the "stories" hover, turn, assume substance and form. What "is," which according to Judith is what "happens," i.e., what will be remembered, and which according to Miss Rosa will be what gets "told," "exists" as such figments and makeshifts or "realities."

What is this indeterminate "story" upon which turns the determination of time and being? We have found it to be a Conradian echo chamber of voices—the narrator's, Quentin's, Shreve's, Miss Coldfield's, Quentin's father's, Quentin's father's father's, the incorporated town's, not to mention the voices, direct and indirect, of their sources (most of them dead). Sometimes we find that the story dissolves into thoughts or ruminations private to one character. Continuity and cumulation are not chronological or sequential; when, for a literal example, Miss Rosa is expressly addressing Chapter V to Quentin, he is not listening, is preoccupied with one previous point in the story; thus though the story becomes Quentin's in the next iteration, he has missed Miss Rosa's frantic, poetic philosophizing, and the story's initiating impulse, Miss Rosa's, toward what she "wants told," would drop off here, blunted, blighted, but for the narrator/tion's capacious web.

Stranger yet, as critics continue to note, the story, which exists in the telling, exceeds the telling, or at least it escapes the tellers; sometimes it "erupts" on its own among the voices, no less vocative for being voiceless (433ff). Eventually, in the last chapters, the storytellers (now Quentin and Shreve) "exist in" the story, interchangeable not only with each other but with the characters in the story. History and story, memory and illusion, explanation and rationalization, mingle freely, promiscuously, to perplex, to confound, to preempt, the "life" they ostensibly recall and justify.

It would be a hopeless proposition, then, to untangle and sort the sources of the story in _Absalom_ , to aggregate, assimilate, and validate the details, to refine and order the material and add it up, conclude—and it would be a useless exercise, irrelevant, deviant. The project of the story is different, though equally hopeless. Its futility is expressed by Mr. Compson, trying to recount that moment in the story when Bon and Judith are strolling in the garden, a point repeated in some wise in every iteration:

> You can not even imagine [them] alone together. Try to do it and the nearest you can come is a projection of them while the two actual people were doubtless separate and elsewhere—two shades pacing, serene and untroubled by flesh ... who seem to watch, hover ... above and behind [the violence of the story being told]. (120)

The attempt to recreate what happened or to imagine it or to get it told is just an attempt—a failure if success would mean telling the "truth."

> We have a few old mouth-to-mouth tales; we exhume from old trunks and boxes and drawers letters without salutation or signature, in which men and women who once lived and breathed are now merely initials or nicknames.... They are there, yet something is missing; they are like a chemical formula exhumed along with the letters from that forgotten chest ... the name and presence of volatile and sentient forces; you bring them together in the proportions called for, but nothing happens ... just the words, the symbols, the shapes themselves, shadowy inscrutable and serene, against that turgid background of a horrible and bloody mischancing of human affairs. (124-25)

This is the voice of the pessimist. Later, when Shreve's (and/or Quentin's) voice holds sway, the story rises to ringing exoneration of that phantom Bon (448), and the young Harvard initiates have justified their preferences with their exhilaration, have justified their exhilaration with their uncanny experience with the story, with telling the story—or with being overtaken by the story, routed, the story usurping the consciousness and will of both of them, irrespectively, violating the conventions of identity and personality, of history and genealogy, even of simple spatiality and temporality. But exhilaration is not truth either, even if it were truth the boys were seeking. Yet they seem to have found what they were looking for.

As to the nature of this wash of story, the novel openly speculates. Quentin tells Shreve what (his father told him that) his grandfather said that Sutpen told about his life before he came to Jefferson (I count five removes if I ignore the fact that Quentin is openly speculating):

> And I reckon Grandfather was saying 'Wait, wait for God's sake wait' about like you are until he [Sutpen] finally did stop and back up and start over again with at least some regard for cause and effect even if none for logical sequence and continuity.... (308)

Story requires a modicom of the logic of cause and effect, though it can dispense with sequence and continuity. But cause-effect without sequence and continuity is not the cause-effect we know. If the novel demonstrates the dictum, we can say that "the story" comes piecemeal and scattered from and among participants and nonparticipants. I (enter the novel, join the chorus, to) speculate that a cause-effect principle does not relate the events or characters to each other so much as it relates the events and characters to the events and characters of telling the story—a multiplex collage: of memories freighted with emotion and limited by perspective, and of surmises and inventions according to the imagination and preferences of the speaker.9 Such a cause-effect relation tends or extends to the psychological, but is not satisfied there.

> Or maybe it was the fact that they were sitting ... before the fire drinking some more of the whiskey and he telling it all over and still it was not absolutely clear—the how and the why he was there and what he was—since he was not talking about himself. He was telling a story. He was not bragging about something he had done; he was just telling a story about something a man named Thomas Sutpen had experienced, which would still have been the same story if the man had had no name at all, if it had been told about any man or no man over whiskey at night. (308-09)

If we take this passage as the novel's definition of storytelling, ignoring the problems of attribution, acknowledging that like every other passage it renounces truth claims, "affixes no salutation or signature," we find some unfamiliar distinctions. The story seems to be connected to the whiskey, not to truth (to how and why and what), and not even to Sutpen's life. Story is not imitating or representing life (though the novel presents scenes, vignettes, pictures, paintings). Nor is it psychological expression or confession—Sutpen is not talking about himself, Mr. Compson contends, not bragging. He is "telling a story about something a man named Thomas Sutpen ... experienced," something that would be the same if the man had no name or was no man. But what is "experience" divorced from the "self" or from "bragging," from personal or human identity? (And did not Faulkner himself say that all his characters are talking about themselves, telling biographies [ _FU_ 275])? What "is" the story? Independent of all but experience and whiskey, it attains a kind of absoluteness found nowhere else in the novel. There is something in story that "is" regardless of identity or presence, that lives in the air so that Quentin "knows" it without listening to his father (31), that overtakes, overrules the selves and circumstances of Quentin and Shreve eventually in a breathless ecstasy of transcendence:

> He [Shreve] ceased again. It was just as well, since he had no listener. Perhaps he was aware of it. Then suddenly he had no talker either, though possibly he was not aware of this. Because now neither of them was there. They were both in Carolina and the time was forty-six years ago, and it was not even four now but compounded still further, since now both of them were Henry Sutpen and both of them were Bon, compounded each of both yet either neither, smelling the very smoke which had blown and faded away forty-six years ago from .... (438-39)

The boys transported out of their Harvard dormitory room as one (or four or two), the story takes over on its own, without assignable narrator or voice for seven pages till Shreve intervenes, telescopes the ending and brings them both back in a shock of recoil and recognition to where they "are": "Let's get out of this refrigerator and go to bed" (448).

It is the riddle of time, and the trick of story. There can be no extricating one problem from the other, or both from questions of being and knowing and remembering, etc.; there is no reason to make the attempt.

Time, tumbling, futures over pasts into presents: wheels of stories, the novel beginning not _at_ the end but _from_ the end, the end moving ahead and about. As the ending is moving about and is moved, the story as a whole changes about and is changed. Like a dye the ending colors the rest, now Miss Rosa and now Mr. Compson (and it moves about among Mr. Compson's father and the townspeople and Sutpen), hues separating and mixing with the spontaneity of Northern Lights; and from those generations and the South we see it move into the voice/s of Quentin and Shreve and the domain of Harvard. From fatalism and pessimism it moves to inflammatory idealism, youth—stage for tragedy.

But the drift is not sequential: the endings (perspectives, "meanings") are not added together. They clash or they coincide. One displaces another or gives way to it. The movement is not a gradual accumulation and assimilation of stories, but an active confrontation between them or outright appropriation—interpretation or invention put to present purpose. Telling the story is a futural appropriation of the past, is choosing, shaping, entering the future in terms of the past, i.e., that which is "remembered," what in a sense _is_ : is alterable. It appears that changing the story (the past) is being-present for the boys; it is what they _are doing_ , regardless of the vacant room. (Perhaps it is what Quentin ceases doing in _The Sound and the Fury_ , as Marsha Warren suggests, "denying time and ultimately language" [110].)

The case is demonstrated graphically in the last instance when Shreve, who has never even visited the South and knows only Quentin among the participants (has known him only since September), provides the primary voice for the story—and not simply to convey it but to correct it, choose and recreate it, to fuse (confuse) or to be fused (confused) with Quentin's storytelling in an ecstasy of transcendence, overwrought (and overwritten), yet effectual to force Quentin's barrage of denial, which like other lies in the story broadcasts the truth back over this novel and forth into the next one (or vice versa).

The novel has presented the "fluid cradle" of time as the interpenetration and interchangeability of time and being. What we have not conceptualized or measured we have felt and pondered: the teeming of time in the book, the wealth of it, abundance—not a thin trickle of now's but a multidimensional world full of luxuriant plasticity, enabling if not determining the dynamic of what Miss Rosa calls "the dark turnings which the ancient young delusions of pride and hope and ambition (ay, and love too) take" (170), what Mr. Compson calls "a horrible and bloody mischancing of human affairs," the "telling" of which, absorbing and draining the young Quentin, leaves him in a state "Nevermore of peace. Nevermore of peace. Nevermore. Nevermore. Nevermore" (465).

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Radloff, Bernhard. " _Absalom, Absalom!_ : An Ontological Approach to Sutpen's 'Design.'" _Mosaic_ 19.1 (1986). 45-56.

Radloff, Bernhard. "The Unity of Time in _The Sound and the Fury_." _The Faulkner Journal_ 1.2 (1986). 56-68.

Ricoeur, Paul. _Time and Narrative_. Trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Vol.l. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Ricoeur, Paul. _Time and Narrative_. Trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Vol. 2. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. "Time in Faulkner: _The Sound and the Fury_." Trans. Martine Darmon. _William Faulkner, Three Decades of Criticism_. Eds. Frederick J. Hoffman and Olga W. Vickery. Michigan State UP,1960. 225-32.

Warren, Marsha. "Time, Space, and Semiotic Discourse in the Feminization/Disintegration of Quentin Compson." _The Faulkner Journal_ 4.1-2 (Fall 1988/Spring 89). 99-111.

* * *

  1. This essay appeared in _The Faulkner Journal_ , Vol. VI, Number 2, Spring 1991 [published Winter 1993], pp. 65-84.↩︎

  2. Faulkner, William. _The Sound and the Fury. The Corrected Text_. New York: Vintage, 1987.↩︎

  3. For an account of Within-time-ness see Heidegger; for its difference from and priority to nowness, see Ricoeur (I: 60-64).↩︎

  4. Robert Dale Parker has compiled a shortform catalog of "errors" in the text and/or in the chronology.↩︎

  5. Listening is a motif in the novel (Rosa's, Clytie's, Quentin's), as well as not-listening (Quentin's). Cf. Quentin-and-Shreve's "happy marriage of speaking and hearing" (395).↩︎

  6. Krause discusses sections of the novel and the novel as a whole as they originate in "acts of reading letters."↩︎

  7. Ricoeur writes: "But must we not then say that what narratology takes as the pseudo-time of a narrative is composed of the set of temporal strategies placed at the service of a conception of time that, first articulated in fiction, can also constitute a paradigm for redescribing lived and lost time?" (2: 84).↩︎

  8. However, a diagram in Bergson showing memory (not a function of brain or mind) as an open funnel pyramiding into the moving present is suggestive (152). I think of Heidegger's "world" or "open."↩︎

  9. Studies on narratology and epistemology in _Absalom_ are proliferating. Though Engler surveys studies of the novel to 1987, a better guide to recent Faulkner studies would be the footnotes to Hoffmann's 1989 article.↩︎

# _The Sound and the Fury_ : Time As Mausoleum

Like a spider I cast the filament of my gaze (my "self"?) out to the mountains in the west, return, cast above the mountains to the lowering sky this morning, return to cast about the room, touching as usual the Dali lithograph, returning to my desk, papers. Weaving a cohering place where I am. _Where_ (place) _am_ (presence, present) _I_ (who, subject, being)?

Here, now, I: am facing the problem all writers face: to say, in time—that is, to put into words, one word at a time—the many matters that I have here (somewhere) to say: matters that come and have come (and will come) to mind in time/s different from this projective kind. It is time I want to write about, time as it figures in Faulkner's _The Sound and the Fury_ , and I could begin with the problem of time as it has been occurring in the months and weeks and days I've spent gathering, sorting, arranging: these words that you are reading. I too have been reading—in books and articles, one word/book/article at a time; the notions, meanwhile ("all the time"), washing upon and among and beyond the words. I have been writing notes and drafts, each separate consideration spreading out from the written words in reflections, patterns, and associations drawn from other works—fictions, histories, philosophies, criticisms, biographies, comprising a veritable flood of times—among and beyond Faulkner's and others' my own: myriads of notions competing for attention, recognition, assimilation here. My life's meanings, memories, knowledge, thoughts, urges, possibilities, crowding up to the liminal moment with (as?) Faulkner's, his characters', his story's. "When" am I at such a "time"?

There are formal conventions for making a way through this maze—but this maze, not the conventions, is where we might find time: the simultaneous "present" of what has-been/is/can be/could be thought, imagined, etc. Everything, forever, insofar as it "is," is "present."

And where is "presence"? These things becoming-"present" all at once, flocking (to change the image) from every sort of assignable time: do these droves of pasts and (who knows?) futures come "here" to be present, or do "I" leave the present to range about among them? Neither would be possible to imagine if time were, as Aristotle had it, a sequence of "now's." Neither could these questions occur without that presupposition. We have dislocated the traditional concept of time without re-thinking it. [Please see Appendix A.]

Time in _The Sound and the Fury_ has been "told" already, of course. It has been characterized by critics as dynamic and static, as durational and transcendent, as nihilistic, existential, and Christian, as the stuff of human consciousness and of Bergson's wider durée.1 It has been compared to notions of Bergson's but also to Derrida's (Matthews) and Heidegger's (Radloff). My attempt in this reading will not be to place or align Faulkner's vision with others' but to "tell" its dimensions and shapes and structures as they appear in the work, i.e., to follow Heidegger's "letting-be" dictum, and to "tell" what shows up in the experiment.

_The Sound and the Fury_ is a tale told four times, in four ways; or from four perspectives, in four voices. Since what the four tales tell is supposed to have "happened" in time once, the "four times" of telling it break up the illusion of "real" time, take time out of time. Now time runs (or crawls, skips, turns) at the will or impulse or fancy of whichever narrator tells it, or according to the will and way of the author or, as perhaps this essay will illustrate, the reader. Time uprooted from time "is" when? (Of course, semiotic studies have for a long time divorced narrative time from lived time.)

The author places a story, in time. Faulkner writes in 1928 (publishes in 1929) a story whose chapters he dates: "April Seventh, 1928," "June Second 1910," "April Sixth 1928," and "April Eighth 1928." Each reader arbitrarily takes up the novel in his/her own time (May-August 1994, December-spring 1995), takes his/her own time into Faulkner's, into each chapter's. (When—or is it where?—is the author's, the story's, the reader's own time?)

In this novel there are many passages that suggest the deliberate radical unhinging of the concept of time. For example, Quentin's chapter begins:

> When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between seven and eight oclock _and then I was in time again_ , hearing the watch...(48, emphasis mine).

Where (when) was Quentin before the shadow of the sash appeared, before hearing the watch? 2 Perhaps he was where he and Caddy are, in the scene by the brook when he drops the knife he is holding to her throat:

> its my knife I dropped it  
>  she sat up what  
>  time is it  
>  I don't know (96)

... or where, in Jason's chapter:

> Something ... permitted him to forget Jefferson as any place which he had ever seen before where his life must resume itself (195).

In the latter case Jason is somewhere in his headache, somewhere among the invisible ravels of his unraveled life, and the unidentified narrator remembers what Jason has forgotten—that Jefferson exists and that it is there that he must resume his life. Apparently Jason (like Quentin) is _presently_ suspended somewhere (some time) outside his life, somewhere (some time) between his life and his to-be-resumed life.

As the supplemental Appendix that Faulkner added to the novel in 1946 seems to indicate, the novel is an exposition on time, time as sequence, consequence: as history, decline. "I've seed de first en de last.... I seed de beginnin, en now I sees de endin" (185), Dilsey says in this closing section. The "rotting portico" of the "square, paintless house" as it last appears says the same, and also the cage-fence now holding Benjy off from his former pasture where in the afternoons golfers now cry "caddie," oblivious to the meaning the sound carries to the hulking thirty-three year old child fumbling at the fence, stumbling alongside his forgone future which they play upon.

But, I rush to add, Dilsey's final "now" reprises the very first "now" at the beginning of the novel, where in Benjy's naive narration time is not given as sequence and consequence, though transience and loss are given in stark immediacy. Of course, Benjy's narration could be recast or reconstituted chronologically, but Benjy's _experience_ of time would be lost in the reconstruction.

The novel presents progressive time, but not in progression. It presents accumulated time—layered or pooled or strung together—, but it also presents time disjointed—interrupted and arrested. The novel as a whole presents a certain totality of time, but the whole is cut up into segments and is disordered, confused.

Martin Heidegger writes about temporal wholes and fragments (reading Kant's "circumscription" of time in _Critique of Pure Reason_ ):

> ... Different times ... are only parts of one and the same time. Different times are only as delimited in one single whole time. Time is not first composed by a piecing together, but is unlimited, endless, not made by a composition, but _given_. The originally united, single totality of succession is represented immediately, in advance, i.e., time is an _a priori_ intuition, a "pure intuition." ( _What Is a Thing?_ 230)

Though time as an a priori intuited, unlimited whole is the given stage upon which events happen, time does not determine or fix the events; in fact, time is the "given" condition for undetermined, unfixed events to occur.

Heidegger is still reading Kant:

> Time itself is "unchangeable and permanent," "it does not run out." "... Time itself does not alter, but only something which is in time.... In each now time is the same now; time is constantly itself. Time is that enduring which always is. Time is pure remaining, and only insofar as it remains are succession and alteration possible. Although time has a now-character in each now, each now is unrepeatably this single now, and different from every other now. Accordingly, time itself permits different relations between appearances with regard to itself.... Accordingly, Kant designates three modes of time: duration, succession, and co-existence. ( 231 )

Let us take this representation of time that Heidegger gives to Kant's thought to represent what we are finding in the novel.3 We observe: If Quentin and Jason belong immediately (intuitively) to time as duration, _where_ they find themselves, without disorientation; _from time to time_ they are nonetheless involved consciously, tortuously, in time as succession. Quentin's suicide is motivated by the will to stop the sequence of time, prevent its consequence: change, loss. Jason's bitter vengefulness is motivated by the will to correct time's sequence, negate its consequence: injustice, bondage.

## _Benjy_

Let us turn (return) to the beginning, the novel's first "present"-ing of time: Benjy's. Benjy is unaware of "time"; therefore, time swarms about him, courses through him, one "time" indistinguishable from another. He inhabits the past, or vice versa, as fully as the present. He has no future. This is his idiocy, his displacement, disfigurement; it seems to set him outside the "human" experience while it delivers him over to the pure experience of unconceptualized time, perhaps Kant's a priori intuited time. He is "out of time": wherever Quentin was just before the shadow reached the curtains.

Benjy's narration seems to reflect the "present" around him like a mirror, giving it back without comprehension, interpretation, or comment.4 What he mirrors back immediately are what he senses—sees, hears, smells, etc.: sounds and words and events; but these phenomena send his "present" recoiling across chains or through layers of earlier experiences to, usually, Caddy (for Benjy "experience" always involves Caddy). Benjy does not "present" his early experiences as anecdotes, as memories, as "past." Instead, _there_ ( _here_ ) they _are_. He presents them in no chronological sequence. They come willy-nilly—in chains or layers, vying for priority—i.e., articulation—and only narrative time requires and gives order to them. They "are" all _at once_ , we sense, though they must be narrated one at a time.

_Is_ Benjy _where_ (thus _when_ ) his narrative-register is? The question becomes, _Who_ is Benjy? That is, _is_ Benjy his narrative-register (language, "consciousness")? Certainly, the fictional characterization of Benjy, who "is" this narrative-register (story), is un-"conscious"—that is, unreflective, unreflexive—of "being" at all. Thus this representation of his inner experience is "present"-ing a naive, primary (un-self-conscious) "consciousness." The range of associations he relates "is" in the present as he draws it in or as it "is" always already "there" to be drawn upon.

Is the past _present_ , then, since he "is" there—i.e., since his attention seems absorbed in it alongside the current situation? Answer: not exactly. For in the novel's "present" someone often asks someone else, "Can't you make him stop that?" indicating in some such phrase that Benjy is moaning or bellowing. Benjy does not usually "see" or register his own pain, but he "is" clearly _there_ in it (or it is clearly _here_ in him?). Throughout his chapter he gives voice to suffering, his own suffering, which he does not recognize and cannot articulate. What "presences" is his loss, grief, desolation—against the fullness of what is no longer present. People and events from the past are present in the power of the vacuum of their not-being-present. The more vivid their having-been, the more present their absence. The ontology of both their having-been and the presence of their absence is not that of entities but that of the fabric of being-human, a "being" that physiology or biology—or psychology—cannot account for if it approaches only the entity aspect of the human phenomenon. The maze in Benjy's experience, described above, answers to Heidegger's probing of the meaning of _έόντα_ ["beings" as "all that becomes present"] in a passage from Homer ("The Anaximander Fragment," 34-5):

> ...The _gegen_ in _gegenwärtig_ [presently] does not mean something over against a subject, but rather an open expanse [ _Gegend_ ] of unconcealment, into which and within which whatever comes along lingers. Accordingly, as a characteristic of _έόντα_ , "presently" means as much as "having arrived to linger awhile in the expanse of unconcealment.... Such a coming is proper arrival, the presencing of what is properly present. What is past and what is to come also become present, namely as outside the expanse of unconcealment. What presents itself as non-present is what is absent. As such it remains essentially related to what is presently present, inasmuch as it either comes forward into the expanse of unconcealment or withdraws from it. Even what is absent is something present, for _as_ absent from the expanse, it presents itself in unconcealment. What is past and what is to come are also _έόντα_. Consequently _έόν_ means becoming present in unconcealment.
> 
> ...in Greek experience what comes to presence remains ambiguous, and indeed necessarily so. On the one hand, _τά έόντα_ means what is presently present; on the other, it also means all that becomes present, whether at the present time or not. However, we must never represent what is present in the broader sense as the "universal concept" of presence as opposed to a particular case—the presently present—though this is what the usual conceptual mode of thought suggests. For in fact it is precisely the presently present and the unconcealment that rules in it that pervade the essence of what is absent, as that which is not presently present....

Benjy is "human," then, though he is an idiot, in that he receives or registers or witnesses the "unconcealment" (i.e., the "appearing") of not only events "presently" happening (the new carriage wheel, 6) but previous and related occurrences of the same—and their difference (e.g., the old carriage and Dilsey's remark about the same condition of the wheels—plus Jason's negligence and Mother's whining and Dilsey's caring-for/managing-of all of them, and T.P., and Jason, and the cemetery). He is human, perhaps more than human, in what his fundamental openness, vulnerability, allows to invade him: his distress comes to be recognized as a reliable signal to the reader for things in disarray, out of their "ordered place"—i.e., things changed or corrupted in some sense (Caddy's experimenting: with perfume, with lovemaking in the swing, with death), as well as things missing, lost. Without thought or understanding (or prejudice or resentment) to shield him, Benjy receives the present event along with the altered and the lost or absent in their intercoursing presencing.5

Perhaps we can take Luster's remark in the following passage to answer the question "Where/When _is_ Benjy?":

> ... In the corner it was dark, but I could see the window. I squatted there, holding the slipper. I couldn't see it, but my hands saw it, and I could hear it getting night, and my hands saw the slipper but I couldn't see myself, but my hands could see the slipper, and I squatted there, hearing it getting dark.
> 
> Here you is, Luster said.... What you doing, off in here.... Aint you done enough moaning and slobbering today, without hiding off in this here empty room, mumbling and taking on. (46)

We recall how Faulkner uses Bergson's notions of material memory in _Absalom, Absalom!_ , where the past is still present in, e.g., the bench in the orchard or in the air, in the blood, as well as in memory or in stories, heard or told.6 Similarly, here, Benjy's hands see in the dark what his un-self-seeing (un-"conscious") register misses: Caddy's presence/absence or presencing absence. But though Benjy's physiological memory is intact and acute and his vulnerable openness to what-is-happening is unwavering, his understanding is dark. Benjy inhabits an empty room: a presencing empty past; the emptiness is his present experience, no matter what is happening. Benjy "is" the unguarded subject of "time," victim of immediate, undifferentiated, un-"corrected" time.

Since Benjy does not recognize time as such, does not regulate his experience in deference to the clock or to "regulated" time, his existence, always all-at-once, seems timeless. Or time-full. He passively receives "time," experiences it, in its own time/s. We may take his "existence" as a sort of tablet that time freely inscribes; we could compare tree-rings, I suppose, or, with more complexity, Bergson's notions of bodily memory (habits of sensori-motor systems) and pure memory (planes of consciousness available to a present perception, _Matter and Memory_ , 150ff., 239-40).

Thus Benjy's "timeless" narrative, which begins at the ending of the story, ends with Benjy going to sleep in, shall we say, the beginning. That is, Benjy's chapter ends near the story's point of origin, the night Damuddy died, the night the children watched Caddy's dirty drawers ascending through the branches of the tree outside Damuddy's window (the image that first ignited the novel in Faulkner's imagination ( _Lion in the Garden,_ 244-45). After being put to bed, Benjy is going to sleep, lying consolate against Caddy. _But at the same time_ Benjy is "in fact" (fiction) going to sleep on the night after Quentin has reversed her mother Caddy's climb up that tree: breaking out of that bedroom, that house—not to climb down into innocence, to complete the reversal, but to consummate disaster, to bring the house down with her.

Benjy is at peace again here at the end of the chapter. "Caddy held me and I could hear us all, and the darkness ..." until it "began to go in smooth, bright shapes like it always does ...." But this respite comes only when he has closed his eyes to the changed, changing present—of which we know he has been painfully aware, for he has been moaning and slobbering, mumbling and "taking on" (46), unconsolable the livelong day. All day he has sifted time, shifted it about, looking for Caddy, circling about that (non-) center, gravitating toward that "was" ("was the saddest word of all there is nothing else in the world its not despair until time its not even time until it was," 113), giving voice to inarticulate suffering, loss. This is Benjy's tragedy, his idiocy: that he lags behind, about the beginning, the empty room, unable to operate upon or enter into the ongoing history he vacantly registers.

Perhaps we should say that Benjy's naive experience represents the [primary] psychological principle of displacement. The Freudian-Lacanian notion of displacement conceptualizes this problem of pooling or associating or conflating or confusing the repetitions (and missing or mistaking or eliding the differences) in time.7 Let us detour through that notion, or that kind of notion, to dissociate the kind of thinking I am attempting here from it and to justify the difference.

Just as physics (and physical science in general) attempts to discover or abstract the "law" of nature from the diversity of phenomena observed, so Freud-Lacan and psychoanalytic studies have attempted to discover or abstract the symbolic thrust/trajectory/temper of psychological phenomena. The result has been a systematized overview of the phenomena that yields in turn a further system of predictive and manipulative (in the case of psychoanalysis diagnostic and therapeutic) intervention. The problem is that the new problematics of postmodern, post-logocentric, post-Marxist, Nietzschean-Foucauldian neo-structuralism and appropriation does not deliver us from the very dilemma that Nietzsche, say, discovered in the former logocentric interpretation of the world. To wit, the new approach removes us from "life" in the same way the old one did. In the old one the logic-grammar of language pre-posited a fractured, mis-ordered (ordered) concept of "life" (subject cut off conceptually from verb, e.g.) that separated the conceptual thinker from the world conceptualized; or the rational paradigm (philosophic-Christian) removed meaning/significance and truth to an other-worldly realm out of the realm of "life," so that "life" was "lived" in a conceptual framework that was artificial and deluded and life-degrading. Similarly, in the twentieth century, not post-structuralist but neo-structuralist paradigms (because they are paradigms) reduce life to schemata, replace one grid that limits and reduces "life" with another (insofar as it is another) that does the same.

One aspect of the problem is that in each case the underlying concept of time is linear, sequential, in spite of the fact that physics and philosophy in this century have uprooted that concept and broached different notions of temporality. One reason that the postmodern "world" is dis- or un-located, dis- or un-oriented (post-) philosophically adrift, may be that it thinks temporality after Derrida's _différance_ rather than Heidegger's letting-be.

To return to the problem of displacement, if Benjy's repetitions, substitutions, and multi-uni-identifications are all ascribed to one problem: one lost Caddy (one displaced mother), then a multiplicity of desires, needs, events, can be correctly identified at once. The novel presents a catalogue of mother-issues: Caroline's non-relation to each child; Caddy's relation to each brother—as, respectively, mother/lover/scourge—and her tortured relation to her own daughter; Gerald's parodic relation to his mother; Dilsey's corrective relationship with them all, since she manifests what remains of what is needed to arrest the fall of this family—though the family itself is incapable.

Not only Benjy's blind suffering but Quentin's radical disorientation and Jason's anger and malice (distortions of father/man-hood) can be bundled up at once and dumped at the feet of Caroline. But though Caroline is clearly implicated in all these family disasters, the problems are more complex and interesting than her characterization alone can explain.

I prefer not to call Caddy a displacement for the mother, though her characterization fulfills all the concept requires. For if "motherhood" is not reduced to general functions and general fulfillment of general needs and general desires ..., then the oneness of each mother returns to her. When the general rule of general relationship is lifted, each relation evinces its innumerable, bounteous manifold of attributes. Similarly if time is released from its concept to its freely-changing/interchanging/extrachanging "reality," a wealth of not-identified phenomena shows up.

## _Quentin_

If at the end of Benjy's narration we discovered a negative image of time, we read a different contradiction in the final pages of Quentin's chapter. Having planned and set into motion the act of suicide, Quentin puts the final touches on the final preparations for the final scene with bandaged hand, fresh handkerchief, brushed teeth, and with time to brush his hat before the performance. This meticulous attention to order and arrangement, this kind of scruple with which he has intended to direct this drama from dawn to dusk, is at odds with the subterranean voices and visions that have inspired and informed his chapter-account of his day, is contradicted point for point by the circumstances that have doubled back to mock every step he has taken, and is opposed outright by the underlying disorder we discern in these pages. At the end, when depths are turbulent, does Quentin cling to surfaces (detail, good grooming) as a drowning person clings to whatever is afloat? Does mere appearance take priority in the end, or does it merely float to the surface like debris when weightier, more substantial things (what "self" might reflect, or reflect upon) are submerging, losing coherence?

From-the-beginning-to-the-end is not, for Quentin, an organic or a genealogical development and demise, for time is not linear for him (though he orders his day down to the minute). The ending does not fulfill the beginning; it negates it. The last does not bring the first to closure; it opens it to question. The problem is temporality as an existential problem in Quentin's chapter; temporality is the condition and the setting for the dilemma proper: Caddy. Caddy, the absent center of the chapter and the novel, is the point where desire and death clash, where purity and transgression (beauty and corruption) kindle one eternal flame. Quentin's attempt to deny absolutely Father, Dalton Ames, Herbert, self, time, life—and thereby to confirm absolutely his incestuous adoration, thereby to set himself and Caddy beyond Father and lovers and time and life, to put an "ending" to all that always ends what-is by changing it—is thwarted. He does perpetrate the suicide; but the suicide does not immolate time or preserve his passion. He contradicts his father's nihilism with his suicide—or consecration; but the chapter and the novel do not ratify his resolution. Instead they offer: every instance of his courageous objection put forward, gesture after gesture, defeated.

The case: breaking the crystal on his watch and tearing off its hands, choosing all day to eschew the "regulation" of clocks and chimes, he falls nevertheless upon more compelling indicators of more essential time—shadows, noontime hunger pangs, the afternoon droning of butterflies. Trying to trick, drown, stamp out, his persistent shadow, he finds himself continually dogged by its continual reappearance. Or, taking the shadow further: trying to trick, drown, stamp out, his "self," he asserts it with clearer definition. For example, taking the train out of Cambridge (already the "outside" of Mississippi) into the country to the river—the "beyond" and "beneath" of everything, in his senses as in his calculations—he finds the afternoon redolent with the sounds and scents of his own remembered Mississippi summer afternoons. Or, among the Italian immigrants, "Foreigners" (81) living along the river (outsiders), he becomes embroiled in a little-sister tragedy of errors which is a mock mirror-image of the one he brought with him from Mississippi. Again, fleeing the problem of the absence of the mother, he is plagued by the parodic negative of the mother, Mrs. Bland. In short, the dress rehearsal flight into the absolute other is caught, embedded and circumscribed in the same.

The backdrop, prompter, and antagonist for Quentin's futile charade of action is Father's ever-present voice inhabiting Quentin's mind, re-minding of futility, meaninglessness: a nether-ego, an abyss, a Nothing. It is echoed or repeated or counterpointed in the ever-present sound and sense of the river in Quentin's senses and consciousness all day, the outside and underneath and beyond toward which he directs his suicidal yearnings and program. If there is a timelessness or timeliness in Quentin's experience-register comparable to Benjy's, perhaps it is in these "present"-negating influences from fore and aft, pushing-pulling, in and between and against which he re-members Caddy in fractured, tortured revisitations of past time. Of course, Quentin's narrative also thematizes temporalization as a conscious intellectual problem. In the climactic final pages of the chapter, Quentin recalls Father's voice and pronounces his final responses. To Father's dark preachments on death and change, on human obligations to mother and to others, on time's levelling "was," Quentin answers, "temporary." (To Father's secularizing of love Quentin returns an absolute denial.) If Father is saying, "Time will level desire and loss," Quentin is replying, "Time is temporary." To Father's time Quentin opposes his own (112-13).

We can tell Quentin's "own" (conceptualizations of) time from the striking figures for time given in his chapter. In the passage below, e.g., besides a representation of Quentin's experience of time, as irregular and uncorrected (primordial) as Benjy's, there are several striking figures distinguishing Quentin's temporal discrimination from Benjy's helpless absorption:

> I walked upon my shadow, tramping it into the dappled shade of trees again. The road curved, mounting away from the water.... I sat down at the roadside. The grass was ankle deep, myriad. The shadows on the road were as still as if they had been put there with a stencil, with slanting pencils of sunlight. But it was only a train, and after a while it died away beyond the trees, the long sound, and then I could hear my watch and the train dying away, as though it were running through another month or another summer somewhere, rushing away under the poised gull and all things rushing. Except Gerald. He would be sort of grand too, pulling in lonely state across the noon, rowing himself right out of noon, up the long bright air like an apotheosis, mounting into a drowsing infinity where only he and the gull, the one terrifically motionless, the other in a steady and measured pull and recover that partook of inertia itself, the world punily beneath their shadows on the sun. _Caddy that blackguard that blackguard Caddy_. (76-7)

Consider, first, the shadows. This chapter opened onto Quentin's waking awareness of the shadow on the curtains as his waking/falling into time. All day he has tracked or tricked his own shadow, a self-reflection of his projected self-obliteration. Here Quentin tramples the shadow, shreds it into "the dappled shade of trees again." As always, the shadow signifies or fails to signify or is prevented from signifying his own presence or being. As always, the shadow indicates time, whatever projection provides the sundial. Now, when Quentin sits down beside the road in the grass, the shadows are absolutely still. He has crossed over the bridge where he planted the flatirons and is sitting beside his silenced shadow far from his familiar life, in the countryside near the community of "foreign" Italians. He has been moving himself outside himself as carefully, methodically, as possible. The scene is as removed from time as art is: the shadows as still as if slanting pencils of sunlight had stenciled them on the road. This same sunlight was active, scintillating, in the passage just preceding this one when the boys were leaning on the rail of the bridge "looking down into the water, the three [fishing] poles like three slanting threads of yellow fire in the sun." The paragraph that follows this paragraph will begin, "Their voices came over the hill, and the three slender poles like balanced threads of running fire." Sunlight will slip and slide and glint in the next pages, interplaying with shade and butterflies and the lane and the boys, until it stops again (78). But here, in this passage, in this pause, sunlight the draftsman or sunlight the draftsman's pencils—in either case sunlight the agent—has drawn the shadows out of time; light in ascendance, reversing or opposing itself. A reflection of Quentin versus his shadow. A study in false perspectives—or poetic insights. Like this next flash:

Time blinks. An unmarked aporia between the sunlight ( "... with slanting pencils of sunlight. But it was only a train, and after a while it died away ...") and the resumption of language. Without a place or time for it, the train has crashed into the unguarded moment, which resumes with the re-mark "But it was only a train, ...." Where is time in this unmarked interval? Where "is" Quentin?

And where is he during the "while" designated in "after a while it died away beyond the trees, the long sound"? Afterwards he can hear: his watch, the train; can associate the dying, rushing, long sound with another time ("another month," "another summer"), another place ("another summer _somewhere_ , "rushing _away_ "). "Away" is where the month, the summer, went. The experience represented is not unfamiliar, though its representation is, and represents not an aberration of Quentin's but an aberration in the ordinary conception of linearity in time and place.8

Then Quentin's reverie develops even stranger shadows, again a pictorial representation: two shadows on the sun, under which the world, punily. Between the sun and the world, "up the long bright air" in the intervening "drowsing infinity," are the two substantive figures: the gull and Gerald. First, in dynamic counterpoint to the long, dying sound of the train and the yet- (though merely-) audible watch—i.e., the rushing diminishing of presence, the world—appears the gull, poised, "terrifically motionless": potential. Nonmotion equal to motion; motionlessness in absolute antithetical counterbalance to motion. Motionlessness is not impotence in this case, but equal in potency with all things rushing. Time suspended in its possibility. Apotheosis of potentiality.

Gerald, moving—pulling himself, levering himself across the noon in a grand, aggrandizing levitation, a movement so regular and effectual as to fix itself absolutely (to partake of inertia itself). If the gull is facing off motion, equal to it, facing off all things rushing, motionless; Gerald is facing off motionlessness, moving himself against it, surmounting it; both the gull and Gerald in absolute defiance of what opposes them; both holding themselves to them-selves (their own will, purpose) by exerting them-selves against power of an equal and opposite kind. That is, against the movement of all things rushing below, the gull fixes itself "terrifically motionless"; against gravitation Gerald works his ascension, with such regular, reliable endurance (perdurance) that he counterbalances gravity with his own achieved inertia.

These are the figures of Quentin's idealization of temporality (that eternity of damnation he desires): the facing off (opposing and negating) of all things rushing (facticity in time, change); the surmounting of finitude, achieving and fixing by one's own power what one desires and wills. Against these figures of potency, "beneath their shadows on the sun," Quentin descries "the world punily." And immediately, " _Caddy that blackguard that blackguard Caddy_ ": Quentin's own cry, complaint. Against "that blackguard," whether Herbert or Caddy: himself punily; against the capable: himself impotent.

There are other provocative figures for time in Quentin's chapter. Walking along the road with Kenny, "the first boy" of the three he met at the bridge where he planted the flatirons (the "mamma's boy" who refused to go swimming with the others), Quentin, like Benjy in the previous section, "is" slipping in and out of many "times," "presences": a past conversation with Caddy, for instance, in which Quentin suggested that they go away with Benjy and Caddy said that if he did not go to Harvard Benjy would have nothing; nihilistic apothegms of Father's; habits of late August afternoons; the overheard contemporaneous conversation among the boys; and immediate sense/sensibility impressions, including these:

> ...The buggy was drawn by a white horse, his feet clopping in the thin dust; spidery wheels chattering thin and dry, moving uphill beneath a rippling shawl of leaves....
> 
> _Sold the pasture_ His white shirt was motionless in the fork, in the flickering shade. The wheels were spidery. Beneath the sag of the buggy the hooves neatly rapid like the motions of a lady doing embroidery, diminishing without progress like a figure on a treadmill being drawn rapidly offstage. The street turned again. I could see the white cupola, the round stupid assertion of the clock. _Sold the pasture_ (76)

Of course the buggy is "diminishing without progress," because it is receding into the distance. The "figure" is an optical illusion, a problem in perspective. But the problem is a figure too. Quentin's perspective is the issue in the chapter, and the first figure ("like the motions of a lady doing embroidery"), like the second, given to elaborate it ("like a figure on a treadmill being drawn rapidly offstage"), shows Quentin's fixation on futility, and on futility as time.

As in the passage discussed above, both images here implicate (represent and reduce) art. In the first a lady is embroidering; in the second the treadmill is being drawn "offstage." Like the lady's fingers, the hooves of the horse move rapidly, neatly, beneath the wheels of the buggy; but from Quentin's perspective both actions/motions bring diminishment without progress; it's not the embroidery or the horse and buggy that accomplish in this scene, but some unaccountable falling-away. The horse and buggy, and by extension perhaps the embroidery, are compared to the figure on the treadmill being drawn _offstage_. The figure is an actor, whether he knows it or not. His treading/milling is ineffectual, not real; what is effective is the stage management, the manipulation of the scene, machination. But in another reversal, if the craftswoman embroidering here is a shadow of the unidentified craftsman manipulating the scene in the image, then the futility of her craft counter-reflects the profounder futility of the faceless stage manager's.

The movement that is carrying all these seeming-act-ors along and away, which is not their own and not related to what they are "doing," is, from Quentin's point of view, time. Unmoved (uncaring, mechanical) mover (manipulator). The fundamental definition of time for Quentin is that fatal "was." He wants to stop time from carrying off the present, wants to carry the present (his imagined/projected, idealized incestuous love/lust for Caddy) off to condemnation, thus preservation, outside time and beyond its reach, in eternity. His contemplated suicide is his oversimplified version of Christianity's (Plato's) solution to the problem of time, as Father recognized when he warned him against his youth, absolutism, idealization, i.e., against the error in his calculation of time:

> ... you are still blind to what is in yourself to that part of general truth the sequence of natural events and their causes which shadows every mans brow even benjys you are not thinking of finitude you are contemplating an apotheosis in which a temporary state of mind will become symmetrical above the flesh and aware both of itself and of the flesh it will not quite discard you will not even be dead .... (112)

But Quentin, as we noted in the discussion of the previous figures, sees (the gull's) potentiality as outside time in that "drowsing infinity"; sees (Gerald's) apotheosis as overriding time, by its own drive driving itself outside time, across the noon, out of the afternoon, above it across the bright air. Temporality can be negated; whatever is equal to time (pure potentiality, self-apotheosis) can overcome it. Quentin, the idealist, the humanist, ... the impotent.

Impotence versus nihilism. "Man the sum of his climatic experiences ... Man the sum of what have you," Quentin quoted Father in a passage immediately preceding the appearance of the buggy, above. "A problem in impure properties carried tediously to an unvarying nil: stalemate of dust and desire" (78). The last word in the debate is given, as we noted above, by the chapter as a whole in its negation of Quentin's attempt to negate time: nullification of negation of nihilism, problem and solution null and void.

## _Jason_

Quentin's chapter began with Father's dire prediction (time is the mausoleum of hope and desire) and followed Quentin's counter-argument through to his absolute negation of Father's negativity: suicide. The next chapter in the novel, Jason's, is equally contrary. It is another story of distortion, and it sets out its own kind of negativity at the beginning. It is Jason's negation of Quentin's ideal: "Once a bitch always a bitch." And if, according to our predilection, we skip to the end of this chapter, Jason's final statement reiterates: "Like I say once a bitch always a bitch." If Quentin welcomed hell for Caddy's sake, Jason's negation is: "I says far as I'm concerned, let her go to hell as fast as she pleases and the sooner the better" (149). Love/lust's contrary: _ressentiment_.

As to the problem of time, Jason's address to it is not intellectual like Quentin's, and not idealistic, but practical, pettish, hateful. "Regulated" time has enchained Jason. History and genealogy have handed him over to the clock. Jason hoards resentment against time for withholding what was rightfully his (a college education, a job, a wedding, freedom from family and social responsibilities; "I never had time to go to Harvard or drink myself into the ground. I had to work," 114). What Jason desires of time is justification, justice, or, better, vengeance: compensation and retribution (taking from Caddy and Quentin what has been taken from him). He does not want to stop time or to preserve the past for eternity; but to recoup time, the losses of the past, or to slip it, escape the obligations it has laid on the present. For above all he hates the present, where time is caught, bound to and obviated by time passed/past; time present is not "life" happening, but life held-in-check, held up, arrested. He chafes under every obligation he is bound by, internalizing resentment and hate, storing it up toward the future, venting it in spite but using it, shaping it, sharpening it—a practical, crude, cruel weapon for revenge. For he desires, above all, in blind frustration, to punish time.9

The problem of time for Jason casts another shadow of Father's, different from Quentin's but similarly dark, degraded. We can compare the three. Here is Father, giving his watch to Quentin, calling it "the mausoleum of all hope and desire," and continuing in his characteristic nihilistic vein,

> ... it's rather excruciating-ly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father's. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won.... They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools. (48)

And here is Quentin, listening to the campus clock chiming the three-quarter-hour:

> The first note sounded, measured and tranquil, serenely peremptory, emptying the unhurried silence for the next one ...

See his poetic sensibility and his continuous intellectual resistance to the continual, irresistible voice of Father, opposing to its gravity his yearning after absolutism, his lust:

> ... and that's it if people could only change one another forever that way merge like a flame swirling up for an instant then blown cleanly out along the cool eternal dark instead of lying there trying not to think of the swing. (111-12)

Now compare Jason, who says he is "a different breed of cat from Father" (126). In Jason Father's intellectualism and warmth and wit turn to crude, grudging, fatalistic self-pity and spite. Trailing Quentin and the man with the red tie to the next town and locating the carnival show cars, plotting strategy for his ambush, ...

> It never occurred to him that they might not be there, in the car. That they should not be there, that the whole result should not hinge on whether he saw them first or they saw him first, would be opposed to all nature and contrary to the whole rhythm of events.... (192)

For the whole rhythm of events is set in concerted, fatal opposition to his good fortune.

Noticing pigeons flying about the church steeple, hearing their cooing, several months after the minister admonished people not to shoot them, Jason complains, with typical personal resentment:

> But what does he care how thick they get, he hasn't got anything to do; what does he care what time it is. He pays no taxes, he doesn't have to see his money going every year to have the courthouse clock cleaned to where it'll run. They had to pay a man forty-five dollars to clean it. I counted over a hundred halfhatched pigeons on the ground. You'd think they'd have sense enough to leave town. It's a good thing I dont have any more ties than a pigeon, I'll say that. (154-55)

Jason's sense of the meaning of time (a practical negotiation) set against the minister's, here, or against the town's or old Job's or Luster's when the carnival is in town, shows up as rigid, mercenary—"realistic" to the exclusion of "pure" time, uncounted, unaccountable, "free." Set against Earl's or the sheriff's, Jason's uses/abuses of time—to cheat, hoard, punish—appear antisocial if not sociopathic. But at the root of each festering psychological sore is a sense of time as a personal trap, closed or set to trip. In fact that trap is the tight, rigid web he himself weaves of time, the ties that bind him, the binding the pigeons do not have.

For Jason is more his mother's child than his father's, more the shade of Uncle Maury than of Father: compare Jason's speculations on futures stocks or his lies and robberies covered over by his rationalized affectation of practical respectability with Maury's counterfeit pretensions to gentility (not to mention his literary travesties). But it is mother and son who mirror and use each other—for support, for counterbalance. In their dialogue-duels Jason's direct thrusts, which cut through some matter they are discussing to the practical fact at the bone ("I ought to know; you've told me for thirty years"), are parried by her euphemism and moralism ("I know that you have never had a chance ..."); both combatants need the other, else their own swords fall on thin air. Jason's unvarnished truths provide substance to Caroline's hollow truisms, as her conventional facades give the cover of respectability to his crudeness. But these thrusts and counterthrusts are not substantial, are merely stitching needles, fabricating one continuous, constricting web that binds them to each other and to their grievances. The past is held taut, with no give, no forgiveness; the future is withheld, caught-constricted in the past. And the present is the incessant, ineffectual stitching captured in Quentin's figure-play, ploy—a holding action, a boundary, a binding, a net/trap.

Time as fabric. We can follow a thread in Jason's story as it is picked up in the last chapter. Here is the past held rigidly in the place of the present, when resentment chokes off Jason's present purpose:

> Jason told him [told the sheriff about Quentin's theft], his sense of injury and impotence feeding upon its own sound, so that after a time he forgot his haste in the violent cumulation of his self justification and his outrage. (188)

Without assistance from the sheriff, Jason chases after Quentin. Now the future ("the fresh battle toward which he was carrying ancient wounds," 190) is cast into the past along with the present:

> ... Of his niece he did not think at all, nor of the arbitrary valuation of the money. Neither of them had had entity or individuality for him for ten years; together they merely symbolized the job in the bank of which he had been deprived before he ever got it. (190)

In fact, the future, toward which he is driving himself in a fury of vengeance, is as counterfeit as the past, as vacant as the present.

> ... From time to time he passed churches, unpainted frame buildings with sheet iron steeples, surrounded by tethered teams and shabby motorcars, and it seemed to him that each of them was a picketpost where the rear guards of Circumstance peeped fleetingly back at him. "And damn You, too," he said, "See if You can stop me," thinking of himself, his file of soldiers with the manacled sheriff in the rear, dragging Omnipotence down from His throne, if necessary; of the embattled legions of both hell and heaven through which he tore his way and put his hands at last on his fleeing niece." (190)

As Quentin forced Hell in the fervor of his corrupted idealism, Jason in this dream of Satanic usurpation is overriding Heaven under the compulsion of his corrupted realism. Yet not "really." Jason himself is overridden by resentment; his courage is "really" malice and it becomes "actual" only in his fancy. (Again the literary parody recalls Uncle Maury, not Father.)

As Jason registers time, time is fixed in the past; the past is blocking the present, precluding the future. That the present is empty we see in this epiphanic moment of self-revelation. The chase is over; the quarry has slipped him. The past—ten years of concentrated purpose, design, deceit, chicanery—has dissolved, leaving nothing at all.

> He sat there for some time. He heard a clock strike the half hour, then people began to pass, in Sunday and easter clothes. Some looked at him as they passed, at the man sitting quietly behind the wheel of a small car, with his invisible life ravelled out about him like a wornout sock, and went on. (195)

## _Dilsey_

The last section of the novel opens like a curtain rising, or an eyelid. We can see. The light emanates from the authority in the voice, its clarity, certainty, its poetic poise. Order prevails. If we ignore order again, ourselves (or pay attention to it; we have "ignored order" in this way four times; time-after-time yields order), and look next at the ending of the section, we find order again, this time an explicit theme. Luster having violated the routine or ritual of Benjy's drive to the cemetery, and Jason having violently restored it, Benjy's roaring ("horror; shock; agony eyeless, tongueless; just sound") subsides, and:

> Queenie moved again, her feet began to clop-clop steadily again, and at once Ben hushed. Luster looked quickly back over his shoulder, then he drove on. The broken flower drooped over Ben's fist and his eyes were empty and blue and serene again as cornice and facade flowed smoothly once more from left to right; post and tree, window and doorway and signboard each in its ordered place. (199)

The rhythm of the regimen, the reliable. The narrative itself in this fourth section seems _at first_ to carry us safely from _moment to moment_ , from _time to time_. It does not imitate the regularity of the pendulum. Pacing is of the essence in this section. But time is held under control by the voice that delivers and modulates it, orders it. The narration leads, does not follow, time as the earlier sections of the novel did. The superiority, or at least the security, of chronological order tropes the superiority, or security, of Dilsey's experience of time as compared to the other characters'. For against Benjy's inarticulate timelessness and Quentin's tragic idealization of time (set in opposition to Father's "time as mausoleum" axiom) or Jason's cruel fatalism the novel sets Dilsey's perdurance. And if the final scene, given above, seems to portray and predict the degeneration of social/political order in the South, power having fallen from kings and governors (bypassing Father, the paralyzed intellectual) to Jason, the brutish, corrupt psychological cripple (with the irresponsible, black child Luster just waiting his turn), the section, and the novel as a whole, has set Dilsey in counterpoint. Seeing and bearing all, all at once, from the beginning through to the end; beyond change or salvation or justice or consolation, her enduring resoluteness is the redeeming human quality in the book. She experiences time as the fullness of time.10

The narrative offers the notion in a portrait in the opening passage:

> ... She had been a big woman once but now her skeleton rose, draped loosely in unpadded skin that tightened again upon a paunch almost dropsical, as though muscle and tissue had been courage or fortitude which the days or the years had consumed until only the indomitable skeleton was left rising like a ruin or a landmark above the somnolent and impervious guts, and above that the collapsed face that gave the impression of the bones themselves being outside the flesh, lifted into the driving day with an expression at once fatalistic and of a child's astonished disappointment, until she turned and entered the house again and closed the door. ( 165 )

Time the carnivore. Dilsey the indomitable, rising through the scavenged flesh, lifting the bones into the driving day, ascending above (transcending) her very life, monumentally—the image of immortality that Quentin failed to imagine. Time the destroyer, and time the gathering to triumph. Time the redeemer of time. The narrative distributes the image: in narrative detail, in patterns of reflecting mother-images, in epiphanic event.

The opening scene, from which I quoted the passage above, sets out the substance or essence of the character of the whole section. Dilsey tries the dawning day in her shabby Easter finery, she adjusts her plans to its contingencies, and since on this day, which will be definitive as well as climactic for the novel, the _regular_ is in particular disarray, she readjusts: changes her dress, revises her plans to accommodate Luster's unusual tardiness, the lack of firewood in the box and the need to start the fire, to answer Caroline's complaints, to see to Benjy, prepare breakfast, etc., i.e., to reinstitute the morning regimen, "each [constituent] in its ordered place." The morning is in disorder, its constituents as contrary as the "minute and venomous particles" that seemed to constitute the dawn (see first sentence). Dilsey wrestles the chaotic elements into the semblance of ordinary morning. She is disoriented herself, of two minds; it is Sunday, Easter, and though she has less time than usual, every thing is taking more. The clock "tells" time, but Dilsey naturally corrects it. The clock, the narrator will say, "might have been the dry pulse of the decaying house itself" (177). The deranged clock, the decaying house, the degenerating family; the diminished Dilsey. It appears that time is running down, out.

Dilsey does not count the time, does not consider it conceptually, but she holds herself absolutely accountable for regulating the rising of the family, the gathering regularly for meals, the attending to moment by moment concerns of each one in the family.11 Her dedication to regulating (holding together, ordering) is her gift of reliability, responsibility. She herself has no time for she gives it, has already given it. Giving her time she is giving herself. Dilsey's ineffectual and thankless mothering of all of them, her self/time-less, proud devotion to their common family life, sets forth her essential, rudimentary, and exemplary worth and strength of character. For Dilsey there is no distinction between time and not "self" but "life," being. In the absence of "time" is the presence of being. In the vacancy of "time" is the fullness of being.

"I've seed de first en de last," Dilsey says; "I seed de beginnin, en now I sees de endin" (185). The little monkey preacher is preaching Resurrection, Ben "rapt in his sweet blue gaze," Dilsey "bolt upright beside, crying rigidly and quietly in the annealment and the blood of the remembered Lamb." In Dilsey's apocalyptic vision suffering and redemption come full circle in time. The mystery of love, of "self"-lessness, (-abnegation/sacrifice) and of abiding, waiting, is the mystery of Dilsey's thankless courage and fortitude and care.

Or have I been swept along by the power of the depiction? The Appendix says of Dilsey only: "They endured." It isn't clear whether it is through Dilsey that "they" (all) did so, as some readers have claimed, or whether it is Dilsey that the others endured—that scourge, that despised seer. Given her virtual identification with/immersion into Christian faith here, it is not even clear, in spite of Faulkner's remarks about her significance and his affection for her, that she should be too-easily identified as foil for Jason's unredeemable shrinkage of the human. In fact, reexamined with skepticism, her characterization as what yet endures of traditional Christian values in the South, in America, could be taken to represent the disappearing WASP. These are "our" values: family, home, loyalty to the past, to Puritan virtues such as duty, responsibility, industry, self-sacrifice, honesty, justice, endurance, reliability. These are not black (African) cultural values any more than Christianity is Dilsey's native religion.12 What the society and nation has abandoned, distorted, violated, travestied, survives in this survivor from the humblest social class, this political nonentity, an uneducated non-intellectual. Is it Dilsey the ultimate WASP or Dilsey the humanist version of the doomed primordial or naive "human"?

> Dilsey led Ben to the bed and drew him down beside her and she held him, rocking back and forth, wiping his drooling mouth upon the hem of her skirt. "Hush, now," she said, stroking his head. "Hush. Dilsey got you." But he bellowed slowly, abjectly, without tears; the grave hopeless sound of all voiceless misery under the sun. Luster returned, carrying a white satin slipper. It was yellow now, and cracked, and soiled, and when they gave it into Ben's hand he hushed for a while. But he still whimpered, and soon he lifted his voice again. (196-97)

Madonna and child. The Pietá. The Madonna used up, worn out (Jason will say irrelevant, and send her to Memphis). The Innocent vacant and unnatural (Jason will say superfluous, and send him to the State Asylum). Mindless loss enduring. Love, beauty, faded and stained or lost.

Our theme is time. In the novel time shows a tendency: decline, diminishment, demise. The tendency appears irreversible. There does indeed seem to be a "here," a widening here, where time is negotiable, where one may tell the same story four times, where pasts may gather, mingle, con-fuse; but like the gull on the wire, the "here" is moving, away. Does Sartre get the last word: Faulkner's error is that he forgets or subtracts the future?

Faulkner has rendered time four times. Perhaps one positive achievement in presenting four perspectives uncompromisingly different and separate is a "hierarchization of the levels of temporality," to use Paul Ricoeur's phrase for the range of levels of experienced temporality that Heidegger presents in _Being and Time_ —from authentic resoluteness to everyday falling "making-present" (vol. 1, 84ff.; vol. 3, chap. 3).13 I have tried to probe the depiction of each character's relationship with time, the relationship between the character's "life" (as "being") and his/her notions and/or attitudes toward time.

Benjy is the victim of teeming, unsolicited, unselected, unregulated time; time bearing loss, holding out always available fresh suffering, not modified or moderated by understanding or theorizing or temporizing. Time is not "time" for Benjy; it is a place where being collects, swarms, lives: and disappears.

Compare Father's relationship with time. What he comes to understand about time (it is the mausoleum of hope and desire) hollows it out, i.e., empties it of being, or empties being of its substance. Thus his "life," characterized, as we have seen, by warmth, love, relation, has for him no reality, weight (substance, value); thus his legacy to his children is the memory of affection and gentle discipline, of ideas and words, and of failure, betrayal. A model for the annihilation of time: hollowing it out first by intellectual deconstruction and then emptying it in fact by vacating it. (Sartre took Father's voice for Faulkner's; as Faulknerian as I too find Father's voice to be, I take the voice of the novel as a whole for Faulkner's.)

Compare Quentin's Father-opposing reification of time, his betrayal of every living obligation in total abandonment to the contradictions between time and his desire—or, should we say, between himself and his desire. And here we have uncovered the problem with the equation, in which time and himself occupy the same place. We have noted, in fact, that Quentin is attempting at once to erase both time and self, that one attempt extends to if it does not include the other, as for example in his attempt to evade or obliterate his shadow. Both Father and Quentin set themselves against time intellectually, apparently attempting thereby to set themselves (being) apart from it, to deliver being from time. Yet both, we see, negate themselves when they negate time, lose being as they lose time. The problem is finitude. Time belongs to life. Quentin intends to remove being into the eternal; Father intends to consign being to oblivion. Both, with an eye on the infinite, negate life ("being"). Whatever time is belongs to being ("life").

Compare Jason's self-time denial or repression, his insistent substitution of clocktime (at marketable value) for free time, and his miserable, miserly, and corrupt mismanagement and miscalculation of it. Time is at best the chance to recover what the past (time) robbed him of. Time, a circle of paranoia.

And then return to Dilsey and the preacher. Critics find it difficult to explain or excuse the Shegog sermon. It is the unmitigated Christian redemption and resurrection "message," uncharacteristic of Faulkner and his work, yet it occupies a climactic revelatory space in the novel. Readers sometimes correct for this modernist anomaly by broadening the Christian thematic to general human or existential significance, a re-rendering that diverts if it does not subvert the power in each paradigm. I suggest that a key to the passage may be taken from the effect of Shegog's voice on the congregation.

> The preacher ... began to walk back and forth before the desk, his hands clasped behind him, a meagre figure, hunched over upon itself like that of one long immured in striving with the implacable earth .... He was like a worn small rock whelmed by the successive waves of his voice. With his body he seemed to feed the voice that, succubus like, had fleshed its teeth in him. And the congregation seemed to watch with its own eyes while the voice consumed him, until he was nothing and they were nothing and there was not even a voice but instead their hearts were speaking to one another in chanting measures beyond the need for words, so that when he came to rest against the reading desk, his monkey face lifted and his whole attitude that of a serene, tortured crucifix that transcended its shabbiness and insignificance and made it of no moment, a long moaning expulsion of breath rose from them, and a woman's single soprano: "Yes, Jesus!" (183)

Eric Sundquist caricatures this sermon passage: "Like the bloated, decaying bodies of Dilsey and Benjy ... the book's typological vision ... inflates and bursts into dramatic parody and philosophical nonsense" (13). But something more powerful, more articulate, is manifest in Dilsey's Easter ecstasy. Let us note that the novel has placed _voice_ where we used to expect "truth" to be. That is, narration used to be the place where vision or reason or objectivity provided "meaning" to a story, to "life." But in this novel (in modernism generally) the narrative provides no such ground. The last section, I have said, clarifies what the other sections have obscured, makes steady what the others have destabilized—but not by supplying the missing ground. The last section gives only another voice when voice has been demonstrated to be arbitrary, partial, biased, distorted. What the last section adds to voice for the first time is order (chronology)—and authority, power. Underlying Dilsey's time-unconscious "order" (regularizing, her way of giving "life" or "being" its time) is the ancient power of the Easter story, her source and supply, relayed voice to voice over time. Time is not a conveyor belt passing power or a powerful meaning along, but the ancient power is "present" in the Easter sermon. We can see that the story, carrying disorder, suffering, blood, "life," echoes Dilsey's or the Compsons' story—or vice versa. Is the power of the story grounded in the other-worldly "truth" of the gospel, or in the family's "life"; or is it the other way around? Is the "truth" or the "life" grounded in the power of the story? And where, when, "is" the story?

The story, its power, is when/where the voice is. In the passage, voice is prior to and beyond the speaker and the speaker's words, in time and place and power. Just before the passage quoted above, the preacher's tone, which until now has sounded like a white man's, "level and cold," arresting and holding the congregation with its acrobatic virtuosity (like watching a man on a tightrope—a limited Zarathustra resonance), has changed with one word, "Brethren," "sinking into their hearts and speaking there again when it had ceased in fading and cumulate echoes" (183). As the preacher begins his sermon in the quoted passage, his "meagre" "figure" appears incongruous with his voice, like a farmer bent over the inimical earth or a pebble in the wash of the incessant ocean; the figure of meagreness set against ancient, overwhelming, and natural power. And this is only the initial impression, a figure. As the preacher continues, "tramping" up and down, "hunched, his hands clasped behind him," it is the voice that gains ascendance; "succubus like," "[fleshing] its teeth" in the preacher, it "consumes" him. The voice supposedly "conveying" the Christian Easter story is bringing along the sexual, the illicit, the demon, with it. This "voice" is not subjective or ephemeral, not secondary, not a product or a medium. And its affect and what the affect effects surpasses voice itself and awakens the "heart" to "speaking," to "chanting measures beyond the need for words." The alto horn timbre of voice, the chanting heart, the soprano response, are just the obvious signals that the experience moves like music.

The effect of the voice for Dilsey, "crying rigidly and quietly," is "the annealment14 and the blood of the remembered Lamb." "Anneal" means to subject (metal, glass, earthenware) to a process of firing and cooling in order to temper or strengthen; "Set on fire, inflame," says _The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary_. Annealing fuses, glazes, and burns color into, as well. Perhaps the effect of the monkey preacher's voice may figure the novel's intention: not only to predict doom, but to call to resurrection as the voice awakens, fuses, inflames. It is the voice of the novelist and his novel, like the voice of Shegog and his sermon, that is submitted to—first by the novelist or Shegog, afterwards by Dilsey, Benjy, and the congregation, including the reader. The "ground" of the novel and the sermon is the stuff of voice. The power of the Easter "meaning" lives in this.

> ... it did not matter to either of them [Quentin or Shreve] which one did the talking, since it was not the talking alone which did it ... but some happy marriage of speaking and hearing wherein each before the demand, the requirement, forgave condoned and forgot the faulting of the other—faultings both in the creating of this shade whom they discussed (rather, existed in) and in the hearing and sifting and discarding the false and conserving what seemed true, or fit the preconceived —in order to overpass to love, where there might be paradox and inconsistency but nothing fault nor false (316).

If this is the case, the power flows back into the earlier sections, in unequal, unlike, disturbing distribution. The novel itself is absorbed into voice. The effect is to stimulate, to alarm: perhaps eventually to motivate to existential intervention: to raise (resurrect) voice.

The novel does not thematize time as much as figure it, from Father's gull on the mechanical wire to Quentin's gull suspended against the laws of physics and Jason's economics of resentment. For Dilsey time is globular, inclusive, and its essence and significance and importance are human and moral. For the novelist and the novel time is the possibility of the voice, the chance and the risk of igniting the existential word or deed, arresting the tendency of what is happening. Time is the potentiality of being.

_Absalom, Absalom!_ , written several years after _The Sound and the Fury_ , broaches again the problem this book breaks upon, temporality. In _SF_ there are four "attempts," as Faulkner put it, at "getting it right," as though it were the narrative's job to correspond correctly to the "truth" of the story, itself existent in some wise, _get_ able. In _AA_ there are innumerable narrators coming together in the un"get"tably complex network-ing of narrating, culminating there in one uncanny narrating experience of Quentin's and Shreve's and Quentin-and-Shreve's: the very picture of being and (in?) time: "history" as what is handed over from narrator to narrator, not a linear progress or accumulation but the untraceable, undissociable, inter-conglomeration of narratives. The coming-together of a myriad of voices, not in unison or union, holding-together not as constituents, not in cause-effect relations, but as the con-fusion of the incessant receiving, recovering, repeating—being-there [telling]. In that novel "getting it right" is appropriating it: not Nietzsche-Foucault's will-to-power taking-over, but choosing it in receiving it, deciding, weaving or conjoining in refabrication, re-creation, and in creating proper when there are gaps or when the received narratives conflict or won't do—according to what the "present" narrators are "doing." Recalling the "past" is the very living that the "present" consists in. The coming-together of the voices relaying, in relating, the disparate stories of the "past" is the essence of temporality; this gathering-together and holding-together in always renewing relation is the essence of historizing.

What is missing in _The Sound and the Fury_ is this coming-together, relation. The narrators are cut off from each other in their separate narrations. Though there is much in common among the storytellers—the family, the place, event, need, loss—their narratives do not commingle in their narration; their world, their history, like time, is unhinged, hanging in pieces. The last chapter gives what the others lack: coherence. But it is the coherence of Dilsey's world, and it serves to contrast with the other narratives; it cannot relate them. Of course, this lack of coherence is the very figure for the thematic of the work.

**CODA:** Time and being (and place) are interdependent or interassociated, indissociable. Or they are two (or more) aspects of the same thing. Yet they are concepts strangely incompatible, at odds. Plato's "realm" of ideas, of Reality, is a sort of superstructure or superdimension if it is not a somewhere-else: place of timeless being of not-being. Christianity's heaven or eternity is a blissful Somewhere Afterwards, and Before, interrupted by terrestrial or earthly tests, trials, tribulations: consummate Being interrupted by time. Hinduism, Buddhism, Stoicism, etc., attempt to withdraw from "life" in the midst of it, denying, or denying power to, time and change by transcending them by will and vision. Nietzsche's dwarf, craving revenge against time and its _was_ , receives a vision of time as Moment, i.e., as eternal return of the same. In each case being rejects time. What puts time in conflict with being is the violence time does to being: time's robberies, damages, destructions. Paradoxically, the ultimate devastation that time can wreak on being is: to deny it time. The loss of one is the loss of both: oblivion.

In _Duration and Simultaneity_ Henri Bergson describes the difference between time as duration and time as science, treats it in order to measure it ("science works exclusively with measurements," 57). Time is not measurable, Bergson says, has no units; but science can measure, instead, motions that occur simultaneously in time (motions simultaneous also and primarily "with moments pricked by them along our inner duration," 54). Measuring motions in space, science "measures" coinciding "segments" in time, thus segmenting time into "instants" which can be counted. But these instants are "counted" only as units; the "interval," which is time itself, "escapes," does not show itself. Time could be infinitely accelerated to a stroke or reduced to points on a line or translated to flat images on a canvas; the result would be that space would be inadvertently accorded a fourth dimension, but there would be no disturbance to the mathematics of "time." That is, calculable time is essentially calculation, not time—leaves time essentially unexamined. Insofar as Bergson is right, only philosophers or artists and other naifs who will risk the noncognitive language of Lyotard's "geniuses" can hope to "tell" time directly.

Which returns us to Faulkner's novel, where we find that the way time is "taken" makes a difference in what happens in time. This is no morality play; time doesn't get "told" so much as "untold" here. But for Faulkner (as for Bergson) an unraveling may be a progress when, like Jason, one finds oneself "with his invisible life ravelled out about him like a wornout sock."

If time is not taken to be Quentin's stagecraft manager's machine (or Father's mausoleum or Jason's mercantile medium of exchange or Dilsey's womblike totality), is not taken to "be" anything at all; that is, if "being" is taken instead, setting "time" aside _for the moment_ , can a different sense of time arise? If we "take" being: not as entity, as thing, but as what we can bring to language about what "is" when we "are," then there arises a new sense of being as the realm of the uncanny, undecided, unformed: the deciding/forming always occurring as each/all things influence/inter-in-form each other. _We_ change each other, not "time." _We_ go on, "run," not "time." That we "are" what we did not choose or form seems unquestionable; that patterns of change/exchange occur and recur, that changes we inter-change are irreversible, these matters seem indubitable. That what "has-happened" remains somehow accessible and that what has not-yet happened hovers somehow: that we are in "presence" of what is not strictly "present," that what "is" seems to be contingent on that web of "things" anyone of us lights on from what lies about to weave a world of: such matters begin to show themselves. That is, _for a moment_ the questions that we call "time" stand open. Perhaps this is the disclosure. Perhaps all this opening ... is time.

## Works Cited

Bergson, Henri. _Duration and Simultaneity_. Trans. Leon Jacobson. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965. 57ff.

—. _Matter and Memory_. Trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer. New York: Zone, 1988.

Castille, Philip Dubuisson. "Dilsey's Easter Conversion in Faulkner's _The Sound and the Fury_." SNNTS 24.4 (Winter 1992). 423-33.

Derrida, Jacques. "Linguistics and Grammatology." _Of Grammatology_. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976. 27-73.

—. "Différance." _Margins of Philosophy_. Trans. Alan Bass. U of Chicago P, 1982. 1-27.

Faulkner, William. _Lion in the Garden: Interviews with William Faulkner, 1926-1962_. Ed. James B. Meriwether and Michael Millgate. New York: Random House, 1968. 244-45.

—. _The Sound and the Fury_. Ed. David Minter. 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 1994.

Heidegger, Martin. "The Anaximander Fragment." _Early Greek Thinking: The Dawn of Western Philosophy_. Trans. David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1984. 13-58.

Irwin, John T. _Doubling & Incest/Repetition & Revenge: A Speculative Reading of Faulkner_. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1975. 153-72.

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. "The Sublime and the Avant-Garde." _The Inhuman: Reflections on Time_. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991. 89-107.

—. "Time Today." _The Inhuman: Reflections on Time_. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991. 58-77.

Matthews, John T. "The Discovery of Loss in _The Sound and the Fury_." _The Play of Faulkner's Language_. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1982. 63-114.

Messerli, Douglas. "The Problem of Time in _The Sound and the Fury_ : A Critical Reassessment and Reinterpretation." _Southern Literary Journal_ 6.2 (Spring 1974): 19-41.

Minkowski, Eugéne. _Lived Time: Phenomenological and Pyschopathological Studies_. Trans. Nancy Metzel. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1970.

Radloff, Bernhard. "The Unity of Time in _The Sound and the Fury_." _The Faulkner Journal_ 1.2 (Spring 1986): 56-74.

Ricoeur, Paul. _Time and Narrative_. Trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. 3 vols. U of Chicago P, 1985.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. "Time in Faulkner: _The Sound and the Fury_." Trans. Martine Darmon. _William Faulkner, Three Decades of Criticism_. Eds. Frederick J. Hoffman and Olga W. Vickery. East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 1960. 225-32.

Slaughter, Carolyn Norman. " _Absalom, Absalom!_ : Fluid Cradle of Events (Time)." _The Faulkner Journal_ 6.2 (Spring 1991): 65-84.

Sundquist, Eric J. _Faulkner: The House Divided_. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1983.

Thomas, David Wayne. "Gödel's Theorem and Postmodern Theory." PMLA 119.2 (March 1995): 248-61.

Warren, Marsha. "Time, Space, and Semiotic Discourse in the Feminization/Disintegration of Quentin Compson." _The Faulkner Journal_ (Fall 1988/Spring 1989): 99-111.

Weinstein. Philip M. "If I Could Say Mother": Construing the Unsayable About Faulknerian Maternity." _Faulkner's Subject: A Cosmos No One Owns_. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992. 29-41.

## Appendix

Derrida's _différance_ is a recent revision of the concept.15 _Différance_ deconstructs the notion of time as linear, objective, successive—disrupts it and denies it and stretches it out of sight—though it does not, after all, escape it. (See e.g., "Linguistics and Grammatology," 27ff., " _Différance_ ," 1ff.) The "temporality" that Derrida's thinking intends to revise is not Aristotle's, but Heidegger's _destruktion_ and displacement of Aristotle's. The temporalization in _différance_ and the chain of signifiers it sets off (trace, prewriting, _éperon_ , e.g.) are a revision or reconfiguration of Heidegger's significations: Being-in-the-World, Dasein's ekstases of temporalization, World-Earth and being/Being(not-being), identity/difference. Yet Derrida's proffered notion of temporality as differing/deferring still is embedded in the received Aristotelian concepts: inside-outside surviving in "differing";" succession surviving in "deferring/production." Derrida restructures temporality, but he does not move beyond conceptual thinking. The dead time within the present in the trace, _spacing_ ("the nonpresence of the other inscribed within the sense of the present, ... the relationship with death as the concrete structure of the living present," _Of Grammatology_ 71), the "presence-absence" "play" of production—as generative as these notions are (tempting to physics and psychoanalysis), as provocative and enriching, they do not move us anywhere except where we can go by means of the concept.16 The difference in Heidegger's description of time is that we can follow it only by abandoning conceptual thinking and following the phenomenon itself, as we have experienced (seen/known) or do experience (see/know) it—as Heidegger shows (in, for example "The Anaximander Fragment," 36-37). The "place" of "time" in these descriptions corresponds to our ranging about where/when, strangely, we "are." Each work of Heidegger's reenters such spaces—explores them and brings them to language (is language "where" "I" "am"?). Dasein's ekstatic Being-there is a radical departure from conceptual representations of time.

Jean-Francois Lyotard, in "Time Today," describes a postmodern "transcending" of time. Modern technology, he writes, taken as a natural or rational stage of an evolving complexification in the universe (of which the human mind is "only a transitory support"), may be working its way toward a more and more perfect controlling of time; it gathers the past into one current memory (information-bank), closing off "event" (foreclosing the future). Lyotard follows this ominous projection with a statement of his own resistance to the tyranny of the cognitive over other modes of language. He prefers modes in which "what matters" is to "generate occurrences before knowing the rules of this generativity," sometimes with "no concern for determining those rules" (72)—modes which produce works of what Kant and the Romantics called genius. This "genius" plays a part in producing works of science, as well:

> What these diverse or even heterogeneous forms [the arts and the sciences] have in common is the freedom and the lack of preparation with which language shows itself capable of receiving what can happen in the "speaking medium," and of being accessible to the event.... (73)

Thinking per se opposes whatever would control time, for thinking "consists in receiving the event":

> To think is to question everything, including thought, and question, and the process. To question requires that something happen that reason has not yet known.... One cannot write without bearing witness to the abyss of time in its coming." (74)

In "The Sublime and the Avant-Garde," writing about space, time, and the aesthetic in Kant and about related problems for art in modernity and postmodernity, Lyotard recalls Heidegger's critique of technology (enframing) in its opposition to poetic receptivity. Lyotard writes that this Heideggerian problematic should be revised in view of the refinement of technology since Heidegger wrote about it; i.e., the problem is not, as Heidegger thought, nuclear science, but cybernetic information-processing and communication, which is even more problematic for the experience of space-time; there is no longer a "here" and "now" in which to "place" sensory experience. "Time" is revealed to have been a concept, and it withdraws when the concept is disabled. With the disappearance of "space and time as forms of the donation of what happens" (112) comes the "crisis of the aesthetic" along with the familiar "'crisis of the sciences'" (115). For the moderns, Lyotard continues, the problem was that "there no longer [remained] anything but space and time" (for the postmoderns, "we no longer _even_ have space and time left," 116). Lyotard quotes Hölderlin, "At the extreme limit of distress, there is in fact nothing left but the conditions of time and space" (114); the avant-gardes, Lyotard writes, for a century have been "inflexible witness to the crisis of these foundations" (115).

If we accept Lyotard's warning that time as experienced in a cybernetic multinational communication network does not correspond to our former or current concepts of time, then in that movement away from "time" we get a new perspective on it; we "see" time emerging chrysalis-like from its former form. And we see "where" "time," as we apply the term, is located: in language, in its in/capability of "receiving event."

In Heidegger's works the concept "time" is already violated or abandoned as the "here" ("there") and "now" are transformed into a strange multi-dimensional experience of futural thrownness. If the "future" as we have conceived it is disappearing or changing, the human sense of _being_ remains, "goes on," where/when-ever "on" is. I have presumed to think that strange Heidegger-like openings into "time" (and space) are still opening, as I have attempted to "tell time" here in Faulkner's (modern avant-garde) work of art.

* * *

  1. Douglas Messerli provides a survey.↩︎

  2. I find that Marsha Warren has already asked this question (102).↩︎

  3. It is what Eugéne Minkowski calls the "lived experience" of time as both dynamic and stable, what Messerli calls "the transcendence of time ... within the consciousness, [where] there is no duration-transcendent polarity" (30). For Kant, and later for Heidegger, however, time is considered as more or other than a human or subjective phenomenon.↩︎

  4. Since we think of the mirror as a figure for self-reflexivity, consciousness, the basis for language and the "human," we can take the Benjy-narration as a self/human-reflection; I am so taking it here. We note, however, that in the novel Benjy does not see himself in the mirror, takes the mirror to be a place into which people and the fire, etc., go, from which they come, a place on a plane with other places; this lack of self- "consciousness" is perhaps a primary aspect of his idiocy.↩︎

  5. Bernhard Radloff compares Benjy's "now" to Heidegger's _Being and Time_ characterization of the structure of the moment as significance, dateability, and publicness; he describes the unity of time as it is drawn in Benjy's character, deriving from the three dimensions of time in their interplay, with priority given to the past.↩︎

  6. Slaughter, Carolyn Norman. " _Absalom, Absalom!_ : Fluid Cradle of Events (Time)." _The Faulkner Journal_ 6.2 (Spring 1991): 65-84.↩︎

  7. John T. Irwin has worked out the quintessential Freudian reading of this novel. Marsha Warren's "Time, Space, and Semiotic Discourse in the Feminization/Disintegration of Quentin Compson," refers the novel to Julia Kristeva' s theory of the origin and development of the signifying process. Her reading conflates Quentin's desire for Caddy with his desire for his mother, and both with a desire to return to the pre-linguistic unity with the "maternal semiotic flux" (101), a "space/place anterior to or beyond linear time and the Law of the Father" (the symbolic, linguistic). "Quentin's suicide both results from and enables his disintegration as speaking subject, marking his transference from time into space." In the end, it seems to me that the "failure" that Warren attributes to this section of the novel—Quentin's failure in suicide "to reach beyond the bonds of the symbolic and gendered identity"—is, rather, its theme. Writing from the same context on a related subject, Philip M. Weinstein makes the case for Faulkner's success in this novel and some others to penetrate the impenetrable.↩︎

  8. Compare Derrida's "spacing": the gaps (Heidegger's "nothing" or not-Being) between the letters/lines that render to "writing" its regularity, coherence. Here, though, the gap occurs in the regular, not to betray the irregular in and beneath it but to represent experienced time more closely. It is worth noting that in Derrida the intrusive "other," portrayed in the fiction as recognizable experience, becomes a concept.↩︎

  9. Matthews interprets "Jason's economic rites" more generously as "his unconscious grief" (92) and his commitment to "work" as his protest against suicide's implication that time is worthless. "Work unambiguously establishes the value of time; each minute has a negotiable worth in tangible money" (94).↩︎

  10. Bernhard Radloff gives a similar (and similarly Heideggerian) interpretation, though he identifies Dilsey's experience more closely with Heidegger's authentic resoluteness than I am willing to do. Dilsey's character, her acceptance of responsibility, seems more instinctual or natural than a deliberate and individuated choice; and if her endurance does not spring from faith (I'm not sure that it does, but Radloff thinks so), it is confirmed by it in the Easter sermon scene. Dilsey's view appears more tragic than existential.↩︎

  11. Many readers have so remarked. See for example Messerli 30-1.↩︎

  12. Philip Dubuisson Castille sets out relations among the Passion story, the rhetoric and ritual of Southern Black churches, Faulkner's interest in Frazer's _Golden Bough_ , and forms and themes in the novel. Castille reads a conversion in Dilsey, a turn from her former identification with the Compsons to a new one with her own family. But while I read her acceptance of the (beginning and) end of the Compsons, I find perhaps the most moving and representative image of her character, as I describe it, to be the "Madonna" figure which occurs after this "conversion."↩︎

  13. Ricoeur sets out such a hierarchization in Virginia Woolf's _Mrs. Dalloway_ , vol. 2, l0lff.↩︎

  14. The misspelling of the word in Dilsey's experience of it, like the errors in historical and Biblical allusions that mark the entire sermon passage (and Faulkner's work in general as well as Southern life in general), mark where words and stories slip loose of strict forms and denotations and signal instead the meanings that the speaker or the community gives them with little if any attention to the words themselves. Analysis of the sermon here has turned up interesting relationships among such slips and the matters they have slipped from. My contribution is to add that the effect of the voice described here, where voice reaches its destination when it overpasses words altogether, recalls a breathless rapture of "story" in _Absalom, Absalom!_ , pp. 316ff.↩︎

  15. An excellent Derridean reading of _The Sound and the Fury_ is John T. Matthews' "The Discovery of Loss in _The Sound and the Fury_ ," 63-114. My objection to reading Caddy and writing/articulation as supplement, to reading memory as loss/absence, is that both configurations depend on a concept of time as linear—clocktime; they press that concept to the limit with relentless rigor, thus exposing its limits, its self-contradiction, exposing the limits/tautology of rational, conceptual (logocentric) thought. As important as that Nietzschean project is, it remains caught up this side of the concept, can "speak," then, only negatively of the non-conceptual. What this reading calls "loss" and "absence" are the very means and modes of "having" and "presence" for human experience. Besides, when memory is counted out in this novel, there is no "natural reality" (89) to count in.↩︎

  16. In a recent article in _PMLA_ David Wayne Thomas uses Gödel's incompleteness theorem to analyze the fundamental point of logical instability that has become the trademark of postmodern theory. Thomas argues that Derrida's and other postmodern theorists' works still come to rest on Platonist metaphysical assumptions. I, but also Derrida and the others, agree (as Thomas acknowledges in a footnote). Thomas seems to recover what Heidegger called the tautological circle without "realizing" (Thomas' word) that any nonmetaphysical thinking may proceed from it. Derrida cannot escape metaphysics if he flees to psychoanalysis or physics, which are embedded in rational systems, but Heidegger's attempt is radically different.↩︎

# Kant's Monster: _In the Labyrinth_

The labyrinth, in Alain Robbe-Grillet's _In the Labyrinth_ ,1 is mapped at the end where the novel is reduced or miniaturized (as photographs are) for final perusal. Though Robbe-Grillet's essays2 describe the phenomenological domain of the nouveau novelle with Sartrean immediacy, this novel's schematic is essentially Kantian.

The picture on the wall mediates between the room of the middle-class pseudo-doctor/writer (the "inside") and the soldier, etc. (the "story," what appears of an "outside"). Outside the room it is raining. Inside, insulated from the rain or snow or wind, there appears not the fly but the shadow of the fly reflected onto the ceiling; not even the image of the fly but the image of the filament of the (concealed) lightbulb that produces the image.

The same schema is delineated in more detail at the beginning of the novel. Outside the room is the rain or the sun, the cold, the snow, wind, dust. Outside "you" walk. Shielding your eyes with your hand, you can see only a few yards ahead, where the wind and the sun shape shadows on the walls and pattern the dusty asphalt. Inside "I" am—alone, insulated from all that is outside. The patterns here are the traces of my own meandering back and forth among the few items of furniture I own; the dust in which a few objects mark their presence in time is emitted by these furnishings of mine. The passages "I" make between my room and the outside, where "you" or the soldier and the boy impress your gratuitous and futile intentions in the baffling snow, are broached by way of the picture on the wall. (See the initial description of the picture, its animation and its opening movement into story, 150ff.; see the story's detour through it, 164-65.)

A kind of transcendence is figured by the viewer's entrance to the picture: "[the] main entrance can be nowhere else but in the wall not shown in the print"; the invisible fourth wall is then described in hypothetical detail (164-65).

But genuine transcendence is denied. The end of the novel will re-present the case, recapitulating the novel's preoccupation with perspective and objectivity as it "outlines" the fly's shadow on the ceiling:

> ... half-darkness beyond the circle of light and at a distance of four or five yards, is extremely difficult to make out: first a short, straight segment about half an inch long, followed by a series of rapid undulations, themselves scalloped .... But the image grows blurred by trying to distinguish the outlines, as in the case of the inordinately delicate pattern of the wallpaper and the indeterminate edges of the gleaming paths .... (271-72)

The attempt to distinguish the image is thwarted or precluded owing to (1) the limited area of light (the circle) and, beyond it, limited light (half-darkness), (2) the blurring of the outline "by trying" to make it out, and (3) the intricacy of the task of making out objects of "inordinately delicate pattern" and "indeterminate edges." The problem is subjectivity: the difficulty of "making out" the outlines of things, the distorting effects of "trying," the incommensurate complexities of the image. This image of the indistinguishable image of this fly is repeated (with differences) throughout the novel; the first iteration gives the dilemma most fully (here the problematic could be Plato's before it becomes Kant's):

> ... A fly is moving slowly and steadily around the upper rim of the shade. It casts a distorted shadow on the ceiling in which no element of the original insect can be recognized: neither wings nor body nor feet; the creature has been transformed into a simple threadlike outline, not closed, a broken regular line resembling a hexagon with one side missing: the image of the incandescent filament of the electric bulb.... (144)

And two paragraphs below (145):

> It is the same filament again, that of a similar or slightly larger lamp, which glows so uselessly at the crossroads ... a gas light ... that has been converted into an electric street light.

(It is in this converted street light that we "see" the soldier for the first time.)

The "image" of the fly, available for "outlining," is the reflection of the mechanism of the medium of lighting, not the shadow of the "original" fly itself. The problem of seeing is more than a problem of a flawed receiving apparatus; it is more fundamentally the problem of access denied.

The picture on the wall provides access—but how much? and to what? What is the nature of the work of art?

Or is the picture a work of art? The novel asks and begs the question.

> The picture, in its varnished wood frame, represents a tavern scene. It is a nineteenth-century etching, or a good reproduction of one (150).

The "picture" "represents" a "scene." How many removes? "Picture" is more photographic than artistic; "represents" is one remove from "presents"; a "scene" is not a tavern, but already stands at one artistic remove from one. This "scene" is removed in time by a century, removed from original expression by process (etching), or perhaps it is a copy, indicating no original hand at all.

The working of this work of art is similarly compromised. Though the work seems to bring its subjects—the bartender, the colorful groups of drinkers, the soldiers and the boy—into more than pictorial presence (the people—amid all the secondary description of "arrangements" and "attitudes" and "gestures" and "expressions ... frozen by the drawing, suspended, stopped short"—are, as in the Laocoön, giving a dramatic sense of violence and noise: e.g., "Everywhere hands rise, mouths open, heads turn; fists are clenched, pounded on tables, or brandished in mid-air," 151), and though it soon turns the soldier out into the street and the snow, into whatever sense of "outside" and of "reality" the story provides, it never or rarely approximates "life" or even a "representation" of life, but, like a work of mechanical drafting, "outlines" a series of still pictures or "scenes."

Still the Kantian paradigm, a little ragged, shrunken, and warped, is essentially intact. The doctor-author, who from the beginning calls the outside inaccessible, copies what he does have access to, "scenes"—what he always already has seen: scene (note the effect of variable verb tense throughout the novel). Besides, he does get outside himself, has gotten outside via the picture, and returns/has returned with a few objective things, e.g., the contraband packet and the dagger. In Robbe-Grillet's "outline" the Kantian access to phenomena is secondary and limited at best, often distorted, reduced, or oversimplified; but the work of "art," such as it is, is still working. Of course, the picture-on-the-wall figures the novel itself with its removes, denials, limitations.

The method of the novel is sketched at the end, as it is/has been again and again throughout the book in what I shall still call figures. Here it is drawn in a few lines: the doctor-critic-writer, figuring the author and the reader, is trying to trace (thus, the passage says, is blurring) the outlines of things (of what appears, phenomena): patterns, paths. This passage sketches out what can be sketched: the patterns of the wallpaper, the paths in the dust on the floor, the topography of the novel beyond: "the dark vestibule where the umbrella is leaning against the coat rack, then, once past the entrance door, the series of long hallways, the spiral staircase, the door to the building with its stone stoop, and the whole city behind me" (272): i.e., the labyrinth: the ways and limits of experience. The limits define (as labyrinth) the whole: the novel attempts to outline (sketch out) the limitations of subjectivity.

The limits of subjectivity are phenomenological. What appears (what "is") merely appears. "It" can be described "objectively" only as its effects can be traced, measured, compared. Geometry is the tool, chartography, photography. At best seeing sees, as we have noted, its own method.

The method of composition of the narrative is described by its own figures, each of them repeated (with a difference) many times, each an example and a figure at once, shapes that objects leave in the dust:

> On the polished wood of the table, the dust has marked the places occupied for a while ... by small objects subsequently removed whose outlines are still distinct for some time, a circle, a square, a rectangle, other less simple shapes, some partly overlapping, already blurred or half obliterated as though by a rag. (141)

Or the marks that glasses leave on the tablecloth:

> The glass has left several circular marks on the red-and-white checked oilcloth, but almost all are incomplete, showing a series of more or less closed arcs, occasionally overlapping, almost dry in some places, in others still shiny with the last drops of liquid leaving a film over the blacker deposit already formed, while elsewhere the rings are blurred by being set too close together or even half obliterated by sliding, or else, perhaps, by a quick wipe of a rag. (160)

The objects' outlines and the glass's rings mark directly both the fact and the outlines of the object, and indicate something of the movement, repetition, and duration of its having-been in each place. Thus they give an incomplete description and do not interpret, repeating only the definition of the interface where the object is/was in contact with the table, hinting little about the object's purposes or uses, appearance or constitution. They give an inadequate, inaccurate indication and measure of the object's "existence" because time and dust (and snow) and sliding and sleeves and rags are always erasing or effacing the mark. Yet these traces, if nothing else, are observable, measurable, re-markable.

The narrative defines ("outlines") its own method again in its literary analysis of the "rendering" of the cafe scene in the picture on the wall, mentioned above:

> The contrast between the three soldiers and the crowd is further accentuated by a precision of line, a clarity in rendering.... The artist has shown them with as much concern for detail and almost as much sharpness of outline as if they were sitting in the foreground. But the composition is so involved that this is not apparent at first glance. Particularly the soldier shown full face has been portrayed with a wealth of detail that seems quite out of proportion to the indifference it expresses.... [with] shadows that accentuate the features without, on the other hand, indicating the slightest individual characteristic ... (152-53).

Against the artist's precision of line, clarity in rendering, concern for detail, wealth of detail, sharpness of outline—i.e., involvement (labyrinth) of composition—the commentary contrasts the indifference expressed, the lack of characterization of the slightest individuality. This ironic observation, with which a skeptical reader might have dismissed the work in former times—much ado about nothing—sketches the reduced-Kantian or revised-Sartrean paradigm which Robbe-Grillet has described and defended in his essays.

A concomitant feature of the method is its technique of depiction—not mimesis but mime; not representation of "life," but "outline" or drawing of scenes, frames, still shots or pictures. One salient feature of the method is the perspective, taken regularly, as from outside a picture, restricted from perspectives of inside or other sides, restricted to the right-left, foreground-background relations available to the spectator. The novel seems to delineate subjectivity itself as reflective of reflection, as always already afterward and secondary (or tertiary, etc.), as a series of sketches of a series of snapshots—or of separate frames that comprise a movie—taken or compiled by the mind or eye. In _For a New Novel_ Robbe-Grillet remarks that cinema, even when its intention is to present images for the purpose of evoking "meaning," has the power to expose, instead, just what it presents, in its "reality"—"the gestures themselves, the movements, and the outlines" (20).

Perspective is emphasized in seeming incidental ways: as the diminishing of images with distance (193, 247), the appearance and movement of shadows on the left or right (196), special effects of illumination in combination with darkness (192), and so on. More fundamentally, the plot (or anti-plot) of the novel extends the perspectival method. What-happens appears as descriptions of "settings" and "scenes," occasionally of fragments of events, always momentary and incomplete. If the "story" were rearranged in a chronology, it would be seen to consist of separate moments, or places, described (scenes in the cafe, the insulated room upstairs, the woman's apartment); of a few events, recounted as a series of pictures (trudging through the snow, finding or following the boy). There are a number of exceptional storylike interludes—the account given in the voice of the doctor at the end, the soldier assisting his comrade and the receiving of the box, the motorcycle episode, for example. If the attempt, then, were made to reassemble these pieces sequentially, gaps would separate the scenes and the segments of sparse events.

But the more striking feature of the design would be the overlap among these fragments, the blurring of one with another, the indeterminability of one among others. The scene given in the picture on the wall, for example, is reconstituted again and again, as picture, as event, as memory, as dream—as repetition with a difference (a motif of the novel). The persistent, laborious, futile search the soldier makes for the crossroads—the signal, the promised father, the assignation—recurs in a monotony of feverish frustration but a variety of detail and consequence. The apartment facades, the gutters, the disappearing paths of pedestrians and of the boy repeat themselves in an interminable geometry that leads to or past the same or perhaps a different door ajar, e.g., the familiar hallway or occasionally another one, the stairs with the landings, the swinging electric lightbulbs, and sometimes the woman, the photograph, the boy, sometimes the lame man. The red curtains in the woman's room repeat those of the room on the top floor where "I" write the narrative. The three cries "Halt!" occur in the motorcycle episode and also on the same streets and by the same occupying military when the doctor risks moving the soldier's effects to his own room at the end. And so on. A maze of sameness in which the chance of the difference—the meeting, the return, the deed, the consequent—drives the engine of human repetition, drives the "story" and the reading of the story.

The plot is technically cubist, it could be claimed; something like picture, something like story, has been chopped up and reassembled; time, then, has been chopped up and reassembled along with other rational expectations such as cause-effect and unity or continuity of place. The new composition does not merely "violently juxtapose" discontinuous fragments; it connects them, and in such a way that they could not be disconnected again without violence to what has become integral to the narrative: the movement from one "trace" to another. The "story" (or anti- story) is routed from scene to scene not according to a chronology or a geography, and not only by a collage of subjective associations or by dream or nightmare or hallucination, but also, regardless of any logic of time or space, according to the caprice or genius of the moment of authorship or penmanship, by tour de force (180, 184, 261-62, e.g.), for we are under no illusion of representational "reality"; the novel is situated among and experiments with the many removes that separate it from "life." The "connections" are not rational but narrative, in that it is only in narrative (i.e., in perspective) that the objects, people, and occurrences stand and stand together or near each other.

Thus repetition works to blur the "outline" of the plot: the scenes or episodes, given in short fragments which intersect each other, recombined with irreversible connectors, demand that the reader, vying for coherence, must match detail with detail to decide what s/he is "seeing," when it takes place, and how it relates to the rest. In fact, reading is often reduced to a childish if not absurd combing of the text for the distinguishing detail that will place the scene—e.g., is the serial number on the soldier's collar green or red? is the child holding the box, or the soldier? is there a glass on the table before the soldier or not? is the child the same child? This last question is raised, answered in the negative (223), and re-solved (conditionally) in the affirmative (269). Thus repetition-with-difference describes a reduction of a traditional theme as well. Things come to nothing or not much, to the same.

_In the Labyrinth_ , like other works of its time, delineates what remains or occurs after the loss or degradation or transformation of every element that lingers from the tradition. With the demise of metaphysical or Enlightenment idealism, themes of the hero, honor, fatherhood (Godhood), Christhood (brotherhood), not to mention notions of identity ("name"), individuality, and even chronology (nota: spatiality remains available/accessible and [or as] rational) are redefined as sparely and precisely as the reduced specifications require.

Consider, for example, the story's reductionist use of a traditional Christian thematic—i.e., the Christ or good Samaritan Neighbor figure. The nameless soldier gives his life (note the pain in his side, 240) for someone he "barely [knows]," not a brother or a friend, no one he loves. The nameless boy and the nameless woman and the nameless doctor and even the dissenting nameless "lame" man save the soldier's life, at least temporarily, for similarly disinterested (or unknowable)reasons. An essential difference in the pattern is that distance has displaced love, beginning with the pseudo-doctor-author's separation and insulation from the "outside" except by the limited if not illusory means of the picture on his wall. The relations among characters in the "story" (anti-characters in an anti-story of anti-self sacrifice) are not apparent, nor relations among their "stories" or motivations or meanings, if any (the point is moot; the reader is distanced too, has insufficient access to any of these to make a judgment). Only two "characters" are given definite identity—if names and addresses give identity—and these characters have no importance in themselves and take no part in the story's "action" (anti-plot) except to motivate it. They are the soldier who gives to the protagonist soldier (anti-hero) the box containing his "effects" and then dies, and his typical girlfriend, whose letters figure prominently among these effects. The names and addresses of these non-characters are spelled out clearly on the envelopes that contain the "ordinary," "conventional," "formulaic" letters (love letters) that the girl wrote to the soldier. The doctor's inspection of the soldier's packet at the end discovers and easily dismisses as indeterminable or inconsequential these "proofs" of a concrete objective motivating the soldier and the story. Along with love and relation, names and addresses (the literal function of language) have become ineffectual.

These diminished themes became, of course, the themes of our time; in Robbe-Grillet they marked and marked out an experiment in the _nouveau nouvelle_ , widely appropriated and imitated and eventually assimilated into "the tradition." But I must add an American note of comparison. The causes and effects readily "traced" in and conveniently diagrammed by this novel had been differently (and not indifferently) "traced" in an earlier American work, Faulkner's similarly labyrinthine novel _Absalom, Absalom!_. Indeed, many of the innovations and experiments in _In the Labyrinth_ seem to respond directly to those of Faulkner's novel. Both works experiment with narrative and time, with art (cubism, impressionism), with themes of fatherhood and genealogy, of loss of authority and "truth," of indeterminacy, diminishment. A comparison of the attempts and the achievements of the two works would show a fundamental difference of philosophical intention and effect, the essential difference between works we call "modern" and works we call "postmodern."

Take, for example, the matter of subjectivity. In Faulkner's novel "subjective" passion and meaning are not denied or renounced; it is they that are schematized—not from the "outside" but from the labyrinthine recesses of what cannot even be called an "inside" since it is the vast complexity of the only "side" available: story. But the story is not conventional (until later in the century when such experiments with "story" become the norm).

Like Robbe-Grillet's narrative, Faulkner's has no access to "fact," "objectivity." Faulkner's is a multiplex of stories, always partial and speculative, often contradictory—memory and hearsay intermingling with inventions and lies. Three generations of accumulated re-creations of "story" interact—interplay, intercourse—to create continuously the changing, interchanging substance and event of story.3 In Faulkner the medium of "story" is primarily voice, not vision (optics)—voice that does not eschew "subjectivity" but expresses the human experience about as far as it has ever been articulated.

Though Faulkner's novel is pessimistic, it is not nihilistic. In Robbe-Grillet's _In the Labyrinth_ , on the other hand, though the novel struggles against the acknowledgment, is itself that very struggle, the dominating, revealing image of the novel is this one:

> The footprints of the straggling pedestrian ... appear one by one in the smooth, fresh snow into which they already sink at least a half an inch. And behind him, the snow immediately begins covering up the prints of his hobnail boots, gradually reconstituting the original whiteness of the trampled area, soon restoring its granular, velvety, fragile appearance, blurring the sharp crests of its edges, making its outlines more and more fluid, and at last entirely filling the depression, so that the difference in level becomes indistinguishable from that of the adjoining areas, continuity then being re-established so that the entire surface is again smooth, intact, untouched. (181)

Kant's "romantic" thought engendered its own Frankenstein.

* * *

  1. In _Two Novels by Robbe-Grillet: Jealousy & In the Labyrinth_, trans. Richard Howard, New York: Grove Press, 1965.↩︎

  2. _For A New Novel_ , trans. Richard Howard, New York: Grove Press, 1965.↩︎

  3. I have written a study of time and narrative in that novel, " _Absalom, Absalom!_ : "Fluid Cradle of Events (Time)," _The Faulkner Journal_ VI, 2 (Spring 1991, pub. winter 1993), 65-84.↩︎

# Heidegger's "Time-Space" Vs. Greene's (Einstein's) "Spacetime"

[An Appeal to the Public, cc: Physicists Brian Greene and Stephen Hawking]

[ _From_ ] Carolyn Norman Slaughter

Greetings from space! I mean _this_ one, this space in which we meet here, you and I. It's white space, a manuscript page 8.5" × 11"—yes? Am I correct? Are we on the same page?

Not exactly, for the page you're reading is not a manuscript page as mine is. The page you're reading doesn't actually exist yet, not while I'm writing it. The color and size of the page you're reading have not even been selected. Your page is not in space at all yet. It exists only in my imagination, my hope. It's a mere possibility. ("Where" is _that_?)

Consider, then, the space we definitely _do_ hold in common (if you're still "there"): _these words_. We are meeting here, together, _in the words_ on this page. I write words, you read them, and _Voila_!—we are together, you and I, in the same "space": in the meaning of the words. Isn't that _somewhere_? Are we inhabiting the same space, together, when we meet here in these words? Yes? No?

Consider also: I'm writing these words one at a time. You're reading them one at a time. Do we inhabit this time, this "one at a time" in common? Is there anything "timeless" in the meaning of words so that the meaning is the same for you and me? Or does the meaning of the words drift or shift between the time I write one word and the time I write another, between the time I write the words and the time you read them?

Where are these words, their meaning? Tucson, Arizona, _here_ with me? ( _There_ , with you?)

When are they? July 27, 2007—am I correct? ( _When_ are you?)

In fact, _are_ words—their "meaning," I mean—in space? in time?

_Are_ they—their meaning, I mean? Does meaning _exist_?

If we cannot agree that we are meeting on this page or in these words, where and when "are" we now, here—we the writer and reader?

In spite of the difficulty of explaining the uncanny nature of this meeting, we (you and I) indeed _seem to be_ meeting—here, now.

The nature of space and the nature of time ... seem ..., here, now, ... to be uncanny. As close to us and as familiar, as indubitable, as space and time seem to be, their "nature"—what, where, when, how, whether, they _are_ —seems to elude our ordinary understanding of them.

Would it be easier if we used more concrete scientific language?

Space: Brian Greene, a physics-mathematics professor at Columbia University, gives the obvious definition of space. It is what lies between things. It "provides the medium that separates and distinguishes one object from another." If space lies between two things, they are two things and not one thing. And in order for one object in space to have some effect on another object in space, it must make its way through that space, work out that effect through and by way of that space. This characteristic of space is called "locality."1:

But Greene soon disturbs the peace of these readily graspable definitions, for in this book of his, he's describing the "true nature of reality" (5) as it has been detected and determined over the last century in the science of quantum physics. Space as we take it for granted—that is, as it "appears" to be and (or) as we have been taught to take it—is not space as it "shows" itself to be in modern physics. Space in physics "appears" as uncanny as we found it to be in our experience of it in the opening paragraphs above.

In recent decades, as Greene explains, physics experiments have found that space does not simply separate objects from other objects and thereby determine them to be two things and not one, as we used to think. Indeed, objects may connect or "entangle" with other objects and influence them even when they are on the other side of the room from each other or the other side of the country or, for that matter, on the other side of the universe (!). Objects are not securely "located" in space after all. "Mind-boggling," says Greene (80).

"Spooky," Einstein called it (Greene 80).

Greene and other physicists as well as other kinds of scientists are writing books nowadays to explain to non-scientists some of the ways their "spooky" discoveries are shocking and shifting our ordinary view of the universe and things in it. Some of these specialists express outright their sense of responsibility to help the rest of us understand the changes that science-technology is making in our understanding of the world.

The philosopher I wish to introduce to you in these pages, Martin Heidegger, wrote about these changes too, among other things, from the late 1920's until his death in 1976. But his purpose was not to help us to adjust to the changes that science-technology is bringing into our lives. He wrote from a different point of view and toward a different end. As for science, Heidegger's works teach us to look more carefully at it, at its history (its parentage, its lineage)—and at its method (the way it asks questions and determines answers), and they teach us to see in a new way the changes science-technology is making in the "cosmos" and what the changes portend.

Heidegger's insight into time and space is as "spooky" as physics'. But though his description of what he calls _time-space_ is as uncanny as physics' _spacetime_ , it is essentially different, and what it discovers and opens up is a "world" fundamentally different from Greene's "cosmos."

It is this difference, the difference between Heidegger's "world" and physics' "cosmos" (or, more often, "universe"), that I hope to traverse in this study.

* * *

It is impossible to say what Heidegger says. Though he writes in simple language, he is saying what these simple words have not said before. He recasts language (like casting a spell or, better, a fishing pole) as he attempts to recover it, to recover its power, from the oblivion he claims it has fallen into. Thus, my attempt here to explain his thought in my own language will be clumsy and deficient and faulty, but I wish to go on even so, so important do I feel this work of comparison to be at this time.

By way of introduction to Heidegger's notions of space, and for the sake of contrasting them with Greene's (and physics'), I shall copy a passage from his essay, "Building Dwelling Thinking."2 The essay is drawing distinctions between _locales_ , _sites_ , and _space_ , but we will not need these distinctions here.

In the quoted passage Heidegger describes the space, the distance, from his philosophy classroom at the University of Freiberg to the old bridge at Heidelberg. I add a few more lines from the same paragraph, in which he describes the simple task of walking the distance across the classroom. Our ordinary conception of space gives way, gives up, to the extraordinary in these passages.

> ... If all of us now think, from where we are right here, of the old bridge in Heidelberg, this thinking toward that locale is not a mere experience inside the persons present here; rather, it belongs to the essence of our thinking _of_ that bridge that _in itself_ thinking _persists through_ [ _durchsteht_ ] the distance to that locale. From this spot right here, we are there at the bridge—we are by no means at some representational content in our consciousness. From right here we may even be much nearer to that bridge and to what it makes room for than someone who uses it daily as an indifferent river crossing....

> ...When I go toward the door of the lecture hall, I am already there, and I could not go to it at all if I were not such that I am there. I am never here only, as this encapsulated body; rather, I am there, that is, I already pervade the space of the room, and only thus can I go through it.... ( _Basic Writings_ , 358-59)

As strange as these claims are, literally, there is something stranger in them—a curious familiarity from our own experience, something more deep-seated than our conscious thinking or learning: our sense that remembering-toward the bridge is a particular way of _going_ there, our sense of _being_ across the room before we walk across it.

This reach into unrecognized but familiar experience is an outstanding feature of Heidegger's writing, his thinking. And I shall attempt to show that his bold, unconventional (un-rational but not irrational) thrusts of thought are often strangely resonant, if not consonant, with the "cosmos" that quantum physics is bringing into view.

Heidegger's advantage, though, is that his thought does not cut our "understanding" (thinking) off at the head. That is, as Heidegger views and contemplates All That Is, he does not ignore or bypass the deepest roots and reaches of our "sense of things."

To represent the viewpoint of physics I shall use two texts by Brian Greene, _The Fabric of the Universe_ , mentioned above, and _The Hidden Reality; Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos_3 with occasional commentary from Stephen Hawking's _A Brief History of Time_.4 For Heidegger's views I shall draw from various works of his: from _Being and Time_5, his 1927 opus capable of transporting the reader into a new state of consciousness, from other works such as lectures and essays written until his death in 1976, and from posthumous publications such as _Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning)_ , translated into English in 1999.

I shall hazard the beginning of my project ... at the beginning indeed, i.e., with the very notion of "origin."

* * *

We are familiar with physics' story of the Big Bang: retract the expanding universe to an original point in space. Everything we observe in the universe, the stuff of everything-that-is (things, entities, forces, objectively observable phenomena of all kinds) is bound up in this dense condensation of it all, this infinitesimal "point" from which it sprang. Or, if we use the "inflationary cosmology" model, we can retract a step farther and propose a causeless negative-gravity propulsion to set off the Bang, though here we must presuppose certain conditions that imply a pre-Big Bang universe. In either case, physics does not claim to definitively or with scientific confidence track time back to an origin—to a Beginning or a First Cause (Greene 272f., 285; Hawking 8-9).

A definition of the word "origin" common to philosophy and science is "source." The source of something is the place or the condition from which it comes or derives. The _Oxford English Dictionary_ traces the etymology of "source" through an Old French word meaning "rise, spring" to the Latin _surgere_ : surge. In the Big Bang models we can see a trace of that old root: the universe bursting forth and expanding from one point (in space? in time?).

We shall find this etymological root again, less explosive, more uncanny, in Heidegger's thinking, radically different from the speculations of modern physics. Here there is no "origin of the universe" for there is no "universe"; and time and space are not retractable to a point, for time is not sequential, serial, narrative; nor is space shrinkable, expandable, or measurable. Instead of streaming from one past point of origin (in place or time), "life" springs/ originates in originary _time-space_.

I must unriddle these riddles.

Since Heidegger's word _time-space_ seems to rename intentionally the phenomenon that Einstein called "spacetime," I shall begin my comparison of the universe of physics and the world of Heidegger with a description of Einstein's disruptive, eminently productive hijack of the history of physics in the last century.

I myself have noticed, and I hope this work will demonstrate, that the very act of comparing two things draws both of them into the light more clearly.

* * *

When Einstein proposed his new concept _spacetime_ , he was not addressing the question of origin. But we can better appreciate Heidegger's originating _time-space_ when we view it in comparison with Einstein's new scientific formulation of the same cosmic phenomenon (Greene 44ff.).

To summarize a few major points, then: In 1905 Einstein put to rest a problem that had plagued physics research and had perplexed Einstein himself since he was a teenager: the problem of measuring the speed of light.

The speed of a moving object is calculated as the relation between the object's position at an initial point in time and in space and its position at the point of destination. Speed is a ratio of time (duration of travel) and space (distance traveled). At the time that Einstein took up the problem, this calculation generally assumed that time and space were stationary, absolute, and that the motion of things through that medium could be measured in relation to them as Sir Isaac Newton had established the calculation in the seventeenth century.

However, this assumption was undergoing review. In nineteenth century physics, James Clark Maxwell, developing his new notion of electromagnetism, had identified light as an electro-magnetic wave because it traveled at the rate of 670 million miles per hour as did other electromagnetic waves he had identified.

Now the speed of other electromagnetic waves was measured relative to the medium through which the wave traveled (sound waves through air, e.g., ocean waves through water). And, similarly, since Newton's day it had been assumed that the speed of light could be measured relative to the _aether_ , an undetectable but presumably reliably real, stationary medium in space.

But subsequent research had thrown doubt on the existence of the _aether_. Particularly puzzling were the results of experiments by Albert Michelson and Edward Morley showing that light waves did not behave like other electromagnetic waves, did not vary in speed relative to the movement of the medium through which they passed or relative to the movement of an observer. Instead, the research of these physicists had computed the speed of light at 670 million miles per hour again and again, even when the source points or the observers were moving (Greene 40ff.).

This was an egregious anomaly; it defied reason and mathematics as well as common sense, and it contradicted established knowledge about the nature of gravity. That is, the accepted Newtonian view of gravity held that the force of gravity that phenomena exert on each other varies depending on the distance between the phenomena. Therefore, when an object moves or is moved, the force of gravity it exerts on other objects (and vice versa) changes accordingly (Hawking 28-9). The speed of light, then, should vary when the source point or the point of observation is moved or moving.

Einstein took a new approach to the problem. He began by accepting the observed facts surrounding the behavior of light. What he did not accept were the age-old notions regarding space and time and gravity that prevented a coherent explanation of this behavior. You could say that Einstein "got around" the logical impasse by leaping over it. He resolved the problem not by means of a new discovery or a mathematical breakthrough, but by means of a simple, brash decision, or declaration, based on the established record of observations: the speed of light is 670 million miles per hour "relative to anything and everything" (Greene 45).

But measuring the motion of objects in space and in time in relation to the now-fixed speed of light led to another perplexing problem. Experiments showed that different observers making such measurements, i.e., measuring the speed of a moving object relative to the speed of light (comparing the distance an object in space and a beam of light moved relative to the length of time involved) reported different conclusions—different, Einstein found, according to the difference in the _observers_ ' own respective positions in space and time relative to the event. Einstein attributed the inconsistency in these measurements to the difference in the _perception of different observers_.

Greene describes the implications for us:

> ..., we conclude that _space and time are in the eye of the beholder._ Each of us carries our own clock, our own monitor of the passage of time. Each clock is equally precise, yet when we move relative to one another, these clocks do not agree.... Each of us carries our own yardstick, our own monitor of distance in space. Each yardstick is equally precise, yet when we move relative to one another, these yardsticks do not agree...." (Greene 47; see also Hawking 21).

Does this startling conclusion mean that space and time move out of the realm of science, the _objective_ universe, into the realm of human, personal, _subjective_ "space"?

Well, no, it doesn't. But something subjective does seem to be moving into the objectivity of scientific observation and measurement. Space and time are still taken to be objective—they belong to the physical universe—but their "objective" measurement now belongs to the "subjective" perceptions of human observers.

And indeed we may say that something is happening to the sharp distinction between the two philosophical realms of object and subject. The concepts of objectivity and subjectivity are giving up something of their formerly strict definition, which depended entirely on their fixed opposition to each other.

Henceforth, the parameters of space and time used to calculate the objective measurement of speed are considered to be variable, to be in fact dependent on the physical location of the participating observer.

If with Einstein's theories, which included the observer in the determination of the speed of light, something of the _subjective_ seemed to leak into science's _objectivity_ , we may suspect that something radical was changing in Western thought, that something at the root was breaking up—or coming to light. Certainly this was the case with Western philosophy, as we shall discuss more fully below.

But if human ("subjective") perception was now admitted into objective measurement, it was not recognized as such. The direct confrontation with this fundamental issue would have to wait for the work of Werner Heisenberg, below.

* * *

The new, disruptive theory spread its tentacles throughout old theories. For example, measuring motion according to the new theory brought the striking discovery that time and space were complementary.

> "... _the combined speed of any object's motion through space and its motion through time is always precisely equal to the speed of light_ " (Greene 49).

That is, the speed of a body moving through space is compromised by its simultaneous movement through time, and vice versa.

Greene illustrates this notion with the image of a car traveling toward the east. If it does not go _due_ east—i.e., if it goes in a northeast or southeast direction—its movement toward the east is compromised. If it does travel _due_ east, it will arrive no later than the time light travels, the speed limit of motion in the universe.

Bodies in the universe do not move in time _and_ in space. They travel in a web of the two where the relationship of time and space is fixed.

Thus we broach Einstein's most famous contribution to physics. The muscular thrust that sent a shudder through Newton's Laws of Nature was the concept of relative time, of time related structurally, so to speak, to space. Displacing the previous concepts of absolute space and time, Einstein proposed a new "fixed" parameter for measuring the motion of objects in the universe: "a grand, new, sweepingly absolute concept: _absolute space-time_ " (Greene 51).

The _word_ "spacetime," which Einstein gave to the notion of interrelated space and time, "says" (shows) that space and time are no longer considered to be separate, but are united in the new concept. Former problematic concepts of space and time are overthrown. Space and time are not fixed in place to form an empty stage upon which the natural world appears. Now they begin to appear, themselves, as interconnected, interactive, interdependent actors in the drama.

(Heidegger will later write that this new concept of time does not escape the former Newtonian one but merely "[levels it off] ... [to] what is countable and what makes counting possible," to reestablish it as a "fourth parameter" of space.)

Here is Stephen Hawking's capsule description of Einstein's spacetime:

> ... space-time is not flat ... it is curved, or "warped," by the distribution of mass and energy in it. Bodies like the earth are not made to move on curved orbits by a force called gravity; instead, they follow the nearest thing to a straight path in a curved space, which is called a geodesic.... In general relativity, bodies always follow straight lines in four-dimensional space-time, but they nevertheless appear to us to move along curved paths in our three-dimensional space" ( _A Brief History of Time_ 29-30).

You have seen diagrams depicting the web of spacetime, and the earth caught in the curvature of the web, its mass bending the web ... for gravity makes its way back into the equation on revised terms: _e = mc 2_ ( _e_ = energy; _m_ = mass; _c_ = speed of light).

* * *

In 1915 Einstein posited his fully developed general theory of relativity, including his revolutionary new concept of gravity.

The idea that the force of gravity was due to matter and energy in the universe was not new. Gravity had long been taken to be an attraction that bodies in space exerted on other bodies. A planet's orbit around a star, for example, was set, held, and shaped by the force of the star's gravitational field. Einstein's new theory, though, construed gravity not as a force field but as a dynamic, ongoing interchange between matter/energy and the new phenomenon of spacetime.

According to the new theory, if there were nothing in the universe, no matter, no energy (no sun, moon, planets, etc.), then spacetime would be flat, two-dimensional. But the presence of matter and energy in the universe (objects, bodies, things) changes spacetime. "Things" in spacetime curve and shape it, carve "chutes and valleys" throughout it (Greene 69ff.).

For everything in the universe is caught in the web of spacetime, and like the sun and moon, etc., everything is changing spacetime, marking and shaping it. Bodies and objects move along its chutes and valleys following its curvature, guided and restricted by its warps and shapes, while warping and shaping further as they go. Greene refers to this image of spacetime in the universe, as depicted in diagrams, as the "embodiment," the "incarnation" (75), of Einstein's mathematical equations that set forth his new conception of gravity.

The revolution in our understanding of time is the more remarkable when we consider that until Einstein, not so many decades ago, the notion of time had been essentially unchanged since Aristotle in about 300 B.C. described it as a series of _nun_ 's (now's), a progression of _now_ 's moving onward. For more than two millennia we have visualized time as a sort of wave passing out of the past through the present into the future. Sir Arthur Eddington coined the phrase "the arrow of time" in 1928, referring to this directionality in time (Greene 13).

But nowadays in physics even the venerable "flow" of time—onward, ahead—has lost its simple reliability. The laws of physics do not recognize the "passing" of time as a movement of time, or, for that matter, as a changing of any kind. Instead, they see time as absolute, though not in Newton's sense. They see past, present, and future as a collection of absolute _now_ 's, each one as "real" as the others. Each _now_ is fixed in the spacetime web—and fixed forever. Greene compares the _now_ -"slices" of time with "the still frames in a film" (140). The laws of physics apply just the same to the past and to the future.

> ... the laws of physics that have been articulated from Newton through Maxwell and Einstein, and up until today, show a _complete symmetry between past and future_ .... Nowhere is there any distinction between how the laws look or behave when applied in either direction in time. The laws treat what we call past and future on a completely equal footing. (Greene 144-45)

Greene says that it is our unenlightened habit of visualizing time in a certain way that fixes _us_ in a directional attitude toward the future and blinds us to other and even opposite possibilities in the behavior (or manipulation) of time. Time does not flow, according to the laws of physics, but, Greene explains, our sense of time, our consciousness, joins _now_ to _now_ seamlessly. Yet, he goes on, "Under close scrutiny, the flowing river of time more closely resembles a giant block of ice with every moment forever frozen into place" (141). (Cf. Heidegger's all-encompassing temporality, below, radically new—not literal, discrete, and mechanical, as these slices appear to be.)

And it is not only the web of time that is segmented and frozen forever, but "all of the events in spacetime" at a given moment, at any _now_ -point, are forever fixed in it (139).

(I take it that "events" are by definition objective changes in spacetime—not the personal and historical "events" we usually take to define "life"—since accounts of any one of these vary from person to person, historian to historian, and are revised from time period to time period.)

Furthermore, as I have indicated, these separate, fixed, frozen moments of time are not frozen or fixed in a particular sequence. The laws of physics do not favor one order of sequence (toward the future, e.g.) over another (toward the past, e.g.).

Greene quotes German philosopher Rudolf Carnap (141) describing a conversation he had with Einstein on this issue. It "worried" Einstein, Carnap reports, that man's personal experience of time, which senses a fundamental difference between "now" and the past or future, cannot be "grasped by science."

This problem perplexes Greene too. Read his moving explanations of science's changing conceptualization of time (Part II) as current physics dismantles our traditional understanding of it. Note his remarks discounting our ordinary experience of time, but confessing his own nostalgia for it sometimes in the evening after sundown. "It is possible," he writes, "that some insightful person will one day devise a new way of looking at time and reveal a bona fide physical foundation for a time that flows..." (141).

_NOTA_ : In the next few pages I shall attempt to describe to you that insightful person, that foundation which does not negate our personal experience but awakens it. However, the new foundation is not "physical" and is therefore unavailable to physics research.

Meanwhile it is physics theories such as those I have been describing that bring scientists to consider the possibility of time travel. (You will find upon examination that even this shocking speculation, which seems to break through the confines of our "reality" into an otherworld of the imagination, is approached by physicists in the fixed, limited-mathematical terms in which engineers design a spaceship [see Hawking 162ff.]. The revolution that science has brought to the understanding of time has not transformed our everyday lives yet. Physicists work with the new concepts only in the microcosm, where they developed them. Their theoretical breakthroughs do not break into our ordinary sense of time and space. Our past-to-present-to-future experience is not fazed by the uproar in the microworld.

However, changing notions of time have been sifting into the popular consciousness from philosophy and science for more than a century. They have inspired art and music, poetry, drama, and fiction, and spawned science fiction fantasies which by this time do not alarm us. We are moving together, all of us, into a brave new world whose rough outline is taking shape around us only vaguely.

* * *

In light of these disruptions to traditional knowledge, I may turn without trepidation to compare Heidegger's post-philosophy, setting his _time-space_ in contrast to the spacetime of physics. His usurpation of the traditional concepts of time and space and his installation of the uncanny in their place cannot be unduly disturbing to our changing sensibilities and expectations.

In every point of comparison here I hope to show that the transformation taking place nowadays in our collective psyche and driven by science-technology "progress" is transporting us, removing us, _from ourselves_ , and that a transformation of another, different kind, more wonder-ful still, can occur when we so choose. This alternate transfiguration involves us in a journey for the sake of which we need not leave ourselves behind—indeed, a journey that takes us in the very direction of ourselves at the same time it opens the "universe" anew and rediscovers/re-creates the world. The universe that science is exploring does not disappear, but it is approached, broached, in a radically different way—as we discover and recover ourselves in it all.

We shall test this possibility right away, as we place Heidegger's _time-space_ beside physics' _spacetime_.

* * *

In Heidegger's thinking, as in physics research, time and space and notions related to them are transformed. In Heidegger's thinking too, "Each of us carries our own clock, our own monitor of the passage of time"—except that what we carry that is our own is not a clock, not a monitor. Again, in Heidegger's thinking, "Each of us carries our own yardstick, our own monitor of distance in space"—except that what we carry is not a yardstick, not a monitor. And in Heidegger's thinking all of these elements are reviewed, revised, and transplanted from the "objective universe" to a radically different ground.

In lectures and books, presented and published over his lifetime, Heidegger set forth his radical re-vision of the history and the "meaning" of philosophical—and scientific—concepts, including those of time and space. His first major work, _Being and Time_ (1927), uprooted time from traditional philosophical notions of it and from ordinary clocktime, and reestablished it in relation to the human and to "Being" itself.

We find a prime example of his disruptive "time" in his discussion of "origin." I will point out how it contrasts to the traditional notion of time which, in spite of Einstein's theories to the contrary, lies embedded in physics' Big Bang, sketched above.

For Heidegger the origin is _prior_ to the existence of the "universe," as it is for physics—but for Heidegger it is not prior _in time_. The origin doesn't _precede_ the universe. It does not "occur" before the world comes into existence, as by the splittest of nan-seconds the Big Bang origin does. Nor does the origin _cause_ the world, as the Big Bang does, when that explosion of concentrated gases sends it flying off into perpetual expansion and starts the clock (Greene 171-72). Instead, in Heidegger's version the origin is prior to time and space _as a root is prior to stems_.

In Heidegger's thinking "roots" are more than a metaphor, and uncovering them is not an exercise in biology or even etymology.

Consider the priority of "root." The root doesn't come first in time, before the stems, and does not cause or precipitate the stems, nor do the stems develop from the root. The root and the stems lie inert together at the beginning, intact, entire, and enclosed in the seed from which they develop together at the same time, as one and the same plant. Further, as the root becomes the base that grounds and stabilizes, supports and nourishes the stems, the stems are necessary to the root if it is to be a root. The root and the stems cannot "be" properly (live and grow as the plant that they are) without each other.

Now we apply the analogy to roots in language. Above, I wrote that for Heidegger _the origin_ is prior to time and space _as a root is prior to stems_. What we call by separate names, "time" and "space" are indeed separate, but they are separate stems that belong to a common root, which Heidegger calls "true" _time-space_ —primordial _time-space_ in which we (humans and also everything else that "is") "are," unaware. Heidegger refers to "true" time-space as the "Open." This "opening" or "clearing" is the site where/when all that we call "life"—everything that "is"—occurs, happens.

Heidegger's special usage of the word "prior" which discounts the reference to clocktime shows us that for him the "origin" of everything that "is" is not an event that happened in the past, setting "history" into motion. A fixed factual point does not mark the beginning of the story of the "universe." Time, as Heidegger has it, "goes on" in the "present," as we think of the present, and in what we call the "past" and in the "future" too— _and all simultaneously_.

As bizarre as this suggestion sounds, it is less offensive to our personal sensibilities than physics' notion, mentioned above, that time can be read backward as easily as forward, reading _literally_ , so to speak, i.e., one slice at a time. In fact, Heidegger's re-vision of time seems rather to awaken us to the presence of the extraordinary lying already, unrecognized, in our ordinary experience of time.

It is a daunting task I am undertaking here, to explain Heidegger's notion that the three dimensions of time—present, past, and future—go on "simultaneously." You are surely, and properly, objecting that our very notion of time is contradicted when the three distinctions in time, the three "times" which delineate what we still think of as the very "passing of time," are conflated, dissolved, into one.

But let us ponder more slowly and carefully this "movement" of time as Heidegger views it. First we should consider two characteristics of time or two aspects of its character which he finds not only in time but in things, beings, as well: two features which are essential to every thing and yet, paradoxically, stand in _contradiction_ to each other. The first is the tendency or the necessity of things to cover up, hide; it is called "self-concealment" in the quotation below. The second is the tendency or necessity in things to reach out, reach _to_ each other; Heidegger calls it "nearness." (When physics recognizes such tendencies, it labels and treats them scientifically as parameters.)

Heidegger writes about these opposing tendencies in "The Nature of Language."6 In the passage I quote here, he is explaining his use of the word "nearness," a key word of his to characterize relations among things. He writes:

> ... Goethe, and Morike [German poets] too, like to use the phrase "face-to-face with one another" not only with respect to human beings but also with respect to things of the world. Where this prevails, all things are open to one another in their self-concealment; thus one extends itself to the other, and thus all remain themselves; one is over the other as its guardian watching over the other, over it as its veil. ( _On the Way to Language_ , 104)

In this passage, the oppositions draw our attention first: openness vs. concealing, giving oneself away vs. remaining oneself, watching-over as veiling.

This contradictory relationship that is discovered among "things of the world" is found as well among the dimensions of time. In fact, in these relations it is the oppositions which generate the movement that has been called the "passing" of time.

In _On Time and Being_7(1972, 14-5) Heidegger details this movement. He describes it as a kind of inter-reaching, inter-giving, of the dimensions of present, past, and future:

> ... Dimensionality consists in a reaching out that opens up, in which futural approaching brings about what has been, what has been brings about futural approaching, and the reciprocal relation of both brings about the opening up of openness. Thought in terms of this threefold giving, true time proves to be three-dimensional. Dimension, we repeat, is here thought not only as the area of possible measurement, but rather as reaching throughout, as giving and opening up. Only the latter enables us to represent and delimit an area of measurement. (14-5)

Reprise: Opening and extending themselves to each other, things "encounter" and "face" each other. Yet, concealing themselves, things hold onto themselves, remain intact, "remain themselves."

Each aspect of time—present, past, and future—reaching toward another, is relating to it as it moves it on, opening up another: the future is approaching and replacing the present, which is becoming the past; the present (which is becoming the past) is reaching toward the future (as your own momentary glimpse into your own "present" psyche will affirm; I have no doubt that you are leaning heavily toward the end of this interminable sentence). The past is opening too, does not cease to "be." (Look about. Everything that "is" brings forward the unerased past, extending, reaching toward the future to continue into it: developing or deteriorating.)

It is this chain of exchanges among the dimensions of time, these reachings-out to each other—the present reaching into the future, the future reaching into the present, the past reaching into the future—which is opening up the Open: where you are.

In the paragraph that follows the passage above, Heidegger adds:

> ... the unity of time's three dimensions consists in the interplay of each toward each. This interplay proves to be the true extending, playing in the very heart of time, the fourth dimension, so to speak—not only so to speak, but in the nature of the matter. (15)

We note emphatically that the different aspects of time, which retain their separate integrity, are not frozen, absolute segments, not like blocks of ice, and not reversible. They are reaching, inter-changing, inter-relating "dimensions" of a "unity": time.

Of course the Aristotelian concept of time as a succession of _now_ 's resists such a characterization as this, and modern science's use of time as a parameter in mathematic calculations precludes it. Think of Greene's "slices" of time, absolutely independent of each other. In "The Nature of Language"8 Heidegger emphasizes the point:

> ..., space and time as parameters can neither bring about nor measure nearness. Why not? In the succession of 'nows' one after the other as elements of parametric time, one 'now' is never in open face-to-face encounter with another. In fact, we may not even say that, in this succession, the 'now' coming after and the 'now' coming before are closed off from each other. For closure, too, is still a manner of facing or excluding something being in face-to-face. But this encounter is as such excluded from the parametric concept of time. (104)

I shall at least mention another interesting co-incidence in physics' "time" and Heidegger's. This issue deserves its own space and time for its own appreciation, but I shall only state the point briefly.

As I mentioned above, according to the laws of physics (Greene 144-45), time is a swift sequencing of now-slices, slices flying by like "still frames in a film," each slice absolute, i.e., fixed forever, unchangeable. Now compare (and contrast) another aspect of Heidegger's re-vision of the "interplay" of future, past, and present in the "heart of time":

"But time itself, in the wholeness of its nature, does not move; it rests in stillness.... But space itself, in the wholeness of its nature, does not move; it rests in stillness" (106).

In both re-visions of the ancient concept, Heidegger's and physics', time is no longer understood to be a series of _now_ 's which flows, and flows ineluctably in a futural direction. In physics' version, the _now_ 's are retained but solidified (like "chunks of ice") so that they do not "flow," so that, indeed, they could conceivably be reordered or rearranged. In Heidegger's version, time, as belonging to time-space, remains related to us, our "being," and retains its inter-relating interplaying movement, but maintains also its "unity" which "rests in stillness."

You may be noticing something very odd in Heidegger's description of the operation of time. To speak of time's dimensions as "encountering" each other "face-to-face," as "reaching" and "giving" each other, to speak of their "interplay" "playing in the very heart of time"—all this language treats time as something humanlike. _Of course_ science does not, cannot, take time in this anthropomorphic fashion.

Certainly in scientific "thinking" such language could never be used. (I am placing "thinking" in quotation marks to remind us that science, according to its method, does not "think.") For in science, time, like every object that comes under scientific scrutiny, i.e., like every "object" as such, is considered objectively, not subjectively. The fact that in every scientific study, in every examination of every object whatever, the work is inspired by and carried through by only human observers using the human mind and its mathematic capability seems to count for nothing in the equation.

Heidegger confronts this logical dilemma—that there is no other route to knowledge of the "objective" world than through the "subjective" human mind—in _Being and Time_ , where he calls the problem the _hermeneutical circle_. It is the original tautology: the problem that _thinking_ is _human_ , that as far as we know only humans think, and that thinking cannot untangle _itself_ from what it thinks it thinks _about_. For Heidegger the solution to the problem is not to escape from the circle (we can't) but to learn to use the circle appropriately. His body of work is a working-through of this attempt.

Thus, in Heidegger's revised notion of time, our everyday experience of present and past and future is not dissolved or dismissed; it is our _understanding_ of this experience that changes. We "see" the experience of time (understand it) in a new way, we _re-view_ it.

Now, "experience" is what happens to us. It is what we "feel," "undergo" (OED). But then what we experience depends in part on the understanding we bring with us to the experience in the first place. When we now re-view our customary experience of time, i.e., take a new look at it Heidegger's way, the experience undergoes a metamorphosis. We recover dimensions in the experience which we have been missing.

For Heidegger's description of the dimensions of temporality corresponds to our personal sense of time more closely than the traditional Aristotelian view or physics' modern speculations. Neither of these, when we consider them, can explain what we feel, undergo, as time. The former is too narrow, the latter too technical, too "objective."

Nonsense, you object. My "experience of time" is very simple. I just look at the clock or my cellphone or ipod, etc., or I can turn on the TV or log onto the internet, and I am able in "no time" to check in with the rest of you to the ends of the earth—and to the end of time too, as far as it can be accounted for by historians and newscasters and predicted by forecasters. We don't exactly _experience_ time, you continue. But at any time I wish, I can know what time it is and what's happening "now" everywhere. I can know what people "in the know" know about the past—what has happened in the world—and about the future—what can be expected to happen later. What's to "experience"? you demand. I am accustomed to see my life in intervals of the clock and the calendar, not in intervals of introspection. It's a secondary consideration even to notice the movements of sun, moon, and stars in the sky or the changes in seasons. On the whole, I hardly need to think about it or to look outside my cocoon of virtual reality nestled in instrumentation adequate to my needs, hardly need the natural world at all. I am grateful for the millions of benefits this high-tech synchrony affords me: the world around me, if you like, and the universe as a whole.

But some of you are not satisfied to leave it at that. You are willing to make a little concession. If I look closely at my own personal "experience" of clocktime, you confess, I find that clocktime can be a nuisance. Wherever I am, whatever Now I inhabit, whatever Future I contemplate, whatever Past I consult, the clock hovers or towers, pushing or pulling me into that celebrated synchrony with the rest of you. I'm too early.... It's too late.... I won't have time if I .... A task-master is the clock, correcting my indolence, my separateness, my veering off its course into some uncharted course of my own. A nag is the clock, interrupting the sheer flow of life with its contradicting precise intervals. The clock is certainly not a part of myself, some of you conclude. Its incessant tick, tick, tick exists somewhere "over there," where clocks are, not "here," where I am. Clocktime belongs in the realm of items of knowledge such as telephone numbers and letters of the Greek alphabet—impersonal, inessential.

Let us consider, then, the residue, I reply—your experience of the time that _is_ a part of yourself. Not clocktime, but what I am calling your personal sense of it, that course of your own you tend to veer off into: time "here," as you put it, where the present, the past, and the future _are_ essential. You live intimately "in time." You _are_ , are _doing_ , here, at this point (now), in a space of time oblivious to the clock. That's why you're "late" for the clocktime appointment. You _were_ , _did_ something, "back then," at a point in the past like the one you are in now, or unlike it—by which comparison you recognize and understand (or fail to recognize or understand) this one in the present, and in light of which you are deciding how to deal with this one. You shall _be_ ..., hope to _do_ ..., at some point (in the future), and toward that end you plan and act now.

What would an _experience_ of time be? We don't _see_ the passing of time as it passes. We don't _feel_ it passing incrementally by. We take for granted that it is going on, but we _experience_ it by seeing that change has occurred or is occurring, by anticipating what is going to happen, or by remembering what has happened or what we have learned. _And we "experience" time only and always as all of these at once._

For example, when I decide that I will visit my mother on Tuesday afternoon, I look ahead in time, ordering my schedule, imagining her circumstances, rehearsing the conversation, anticipating her reactions, responses, and the (weighty) consequences. Meanwhile, this plan that predicts the future is freighted with the past, with memories of just such afternoons, Tuesday afternoons, memories of visits to my mother on Tuesday afternoons, etc., etc., and the plan is informed by past choices of just these kinds, along with the memory of their (heavy) consequences. My plan draws on knowledge of social formalities that I carry with me out of the past, and on my understanding (and, oh, memories) of the psychology of my mother and of my relationship with her, and of all these as they relate to Tuesdays, Tuesday visits, and so on. Of course, as I look forward toward the scene, scripting (and dramatizing), making insightful selections among choices of attitude and behavior, I am at every turn applying what I consider to be reason—no doubt habits of reasoning I have accumulated along with memories of their (considerable) consequences, etc., etc.

Meanwhile, I do not need to perform any maneuvers to turn toward the past in one direction (whatever "direction" could mean here) and the future in another. I do not forget the past in order to think about the future, or vice versa. In fact, in my general consciousness I cannot extricate these three "directions" from one another. All this, all I have experienced, seen, done, learned, all I hope, dread, plan, anticipate, and all I see, know, think, do, cannot be parsed into a string of _now_ 's or a sequence or series of clock-points. Instead it seems to be one bundle of "where I am" which I carry about without cease, in which I live—one seamless sense of "t/here."

But hold on, you object. "There" and/or "here" are not locators in time, but in space. You have stumbled into Einstein's spacetime.

No, I reply, for Einstein's spacetime does not locate us "where we are"; it gives a mathematic schematic of the parameters of space and time (revised to spacetime) in the objective universe. What it cannot include is our personal experience of "t/here."

We have not stumbled into Einstein's spacetime, but into Heidegger's _time-_ space. " _T/here_ " is another name Heidegger gives to time-space, the Open, where-we-are. Thus, Heidegger's word for the human is _Da-sein_ : _There-being_. _Being-there_ —there, _where you are._

In Heidegger's thinking, _where you are_ is the site of the origin: _Time-space_ , the Open (also the Moment of Decision, as we shall see below). This is where everything—all that "is"—occurs. It is simultaneously the site of All and the site of the individual Dasein.

If you are thinking that the "All" in my phrase "the site of All," means the totality of existence, then you probably think that it means the "universe," the objective fact of everything that science has discovered. This "realm," you are thinking, the province of science (the physical universe), is the "site" where "beings" exist. You do not think of your own private "site" (where you are, as I have described it) as the site of the whole universe.

You may be incredulous that Heidegger characterizes the All and the individual Dasein, each human being, as the same site. You may object that this conflation blurs or, indeed, eliminates the distinction between the objective (the real, the universe) and the subjective (the personal perspective, the individual human being). Perhaps I have pressed your patience too far, and you want to insist: if this claim isn't simply absurd, it is solipsistic or worse, narcissistic. It equates an individual's private space with the space of the whole universe.

It's the "space" problem again. The phrases "private space" and "space of the whole universe" rely on the old, outmoded definition of "space." Heidegger's _time-space_ , the Open, where-you-are, usurps that limitable, measurable "space."

But your observation that Heidegger blurs or eliminates the subject-object dichotomy is a valid one. He does. He was not the first philosopher to do so. A generation earlier Friedrich Nietzsche, for example, had famously done so. But it is not only philosophy that has loosened its hold on the subject-object distinction in the last century or so. Physics has done so too. We can cite, for example, the well-known Heisenberg principle. Let us consider for a moment this bombshell principle.

In 1927 Werner Heisenberg struck elemental uncertainty into the heart of scientific precision. Science's hopes of constructing a deterministic model of the laws of the universe, from which future events could be predicted, were shattered when it was demonstrated that in the field of quantum physics, phenomena under scientific observation are affected, altered, by the act of observing, itself. It became necessary to factor in to experiments the effects of experimentation itself in each case (Hawking 54-5). But the point is not simply that observing or measuring phenomena disturbs the phenomena and thereby contaminates the observation or the measurement. The principle goes farther.

Absolute precision of measurement is lost in quantum mechanics not only because the human observer influences the observing, but also, and more essentially, because quantum phenomena do not manifest resolute definition. "In quantum mechanics, uncertainty just is," Greene asserts (98). For example, in a typical probability wave of a particle, the location of the particle is uncertain since the particle is spread out in the wave (an uncanny "fact" in itself). Or, rather, and precisely to the point here, the location of the particle is indeterminable until the observer enters into the experiment to take the measurement, when the particle is discovered concentrated in one point, one measurable location. (Greene describes the amazing event, 200ff.; I shall return to it below.). So much for the dream of absolute objectivity.

The Heisenberg principle has been conclusively confirmed and incorporated into quantum physics research, where it is proliferating into, I am tempted to say, "fantastic" or "fabulous" theoretical probabilities (and technological realities).

Thus the concepts of objectivity and subjectivity have lost their former prestige and status of priority in Western science as well as philosophy.

But even if I win your grudging permission to suspend the subject-object difference here, I must ask your indulgence a little further. For it is not only the concepts of subject and object that have lost their prestige and prerogative in Heidegger's thinking. All concepts have done so. Heidegger eschews the _concept_ itself, rejects thinking that thinks in concepts ( _What Calls for Thinking?_ , 210-11).9

Again, it is the roots of language that decide the issue for him. In German the word for "concept," _Begriff_ , also means "to grasp." The concept _grasps_ whatever it names instead of _letting-be_.

Take for example the word _Dasein_ , which I introduced above. Heidegger takes up this word which was previously used in German philosophy to designate almost anything in existence ( _Being and Time_ 27, H11) and uses it to designate the human—or not precisely or solely the human, but primarily so. Now since Aristotle, "man" has been defined as the animal that speaks, the animal distinguished from other animals by the faculty of language. The definition has been modified, amplified or attenuated (in philosophy and by the social sciences, especially anthropology, which takes "man" for its subject), but it remains the basic functioning definition of the "human."

If you find that this definition misses anything essential as it defines _you_ , then you may prefer Heidegger's _Dasein_ , not as it has been defined and used in philosophy, but as it "means" in the root, in the word itself: _Da_ (there) _sein_ (being), _being-t/here_.

The non-concept _Dasein_ —t/here-being, being-t/here—does not "define" you, does not confine _you_ to a precise definition. Still, the word does not miss anything you "are," for it does not try to include everything you are and can be—does not _grasp_ you. It sets you free, as Heidegger puts it—sets you up in the _t/here_ we discovered for ourselves above and lets you "be" there. "Being" is the most comprehensive, exhaustive word for "what you are" in the vocabulary, and it places no limits on your possibilities for "being."

However, at a glance we can see that this definition has no _definition_. It tells us nothing. It could as easily indicate rocks or trees or animals, etc. Everything in the world is "being there." There is nothing about "man" in this epithet.

When we fell into the phrase "being there" in our discussion of time above, the phrase came to us naturally, to describe our sense of "where we are" when we look closely at our "experience" of time. We were musing that although we speak of each time dimension separately (the past and the future operating _in the present_ ), we do not _experience_ them separately, and we could only describe this all-encompassing time-space where we invariably find ourselves, as simply _t/here_ , "where you are." Is the _there_ "where _you_ are" different from the time and space that rocks and trees and animals experience?

But rocks and trees and animals do not "experience" time and space.

So far, at least, philosophy and science agree that only man experiences time _as time_ , space _as space_ , and develops ways of understanding and dealing with them. There is nothing in the world but "man," so far as we know, that _experiences_ this _t_ / _here,_ this _Dasein_. Only man "is" (being) "t/here."

In _Being and Time_ Heidegger makes an exhaustive analysis of the "being" of Dasein. There is, for example, _being-in-the-world_ (a familiarity with and understanding of a "world" of meanings which precedes the explicit understanding of anything in it); there is _being-with_ (a kind of co-being with others that precedes and underlies any relation to them), _being-toward_ (toward one's own being, primarily, and also being-toward death, the kind of understanding that grounds [and enables] all the others). There is much, much more of this radically different analysis of "man." The analysis of _mood_ , for example, provides a comprehensive psychology.

_Dasein_ : _Being-there_ –in space-time, at the origin, in the Open.

* * *

You do not need a scientist or a philosopher to tell you that morning ... dawns, opens, every morning another beginning. The year does the same, season following season. The tides rise into their diurnal coursing, birds into their seasonal migrations. In fact, any moment does: opens, indeed (now!) is opening. This "opening" is always happening _t/here_ ... where you are.

Access to this site, the Open, is not needed. We are always already t/here.

Come with me to the east window where the rays of the invisible sun are streaming above the horizon, midwifing the visible world. Look! ... watch with me ... _be_ here ...

If we face the sunrise _immediately_ , i.e., without preconceptions of it—without the understanding and knowledge, the collective memory, education, to identify and interpret the phenomena that are appearing—what do we see?

To approach the natural world immediately we shall have to revert to the Beginning, to prehistoric time, to an undocumented Genesis predating history, philosophy, science. We shall have to fly back over all the accumulated genealogy of natural evolution and human development we think we "know"–that is, over all that intervenes between us, standing at the window this morning, and the sun "rising" in the east.

Good morning, Adam, Eve! What do you "see"?

We "see" that we cannot see at all. We see that if we relinquish our knowledge and understanding, "seeing" goes blank.

If there is one settled notion that all share today, scientists and philosophers alike—settled in the last century or so and likely to endure—, it is the notion that "the world" is always already "there," somewise interpreted for us before we "approach" it. -Else what would we approach? What would "approach" mean? The word ("approach") would dangle foolishly in the ruffled air after we had expelled it and, with no place to go, no referent, it would fizzle mid-air.

And yet.

Standing here before the sunrise, with two interpretations before us for comparison—physics' and Heidegger's—, we can approach, if not the sunrise, then the interpretations, the approaches.

We have glanced at science's objective approach to phenomena. We glance now at Heidegger's.

First we turn to the window. If you live in Arizona as I do, sunrise comes as the very epitome of Event. It _is happening_! For a while the changing in the sky is subtle. If you linger with it, what is happening, sunrise, happens _to you_ , like an opening realization, a nameless oncoming taking-shape. All the east and with the east all the rest—which reaches from the horizon up to the brink of seeing, i.e., you—is brightening and also changing in its hues, cloud-drifts, -interdriftings, -interchangings. It draws you. Yes, to it, but also into a strangeness, awe, wonder, which like a tempter or temptress withdraws from you as it draws you to it. There is more to the sunrise than you can "get," somehow. Like Hamlet's father's ghost, the sunrise draws you on ... to ... Question.

Sunrise doesn't satisfy you, it awakens.

And so does everything else.

A mountain. The sea. A tree. A leaf, even. A lizard. A rock.

They're lures.

Of course, we rarely take up this invitation things offer, an invitation to Question, for "the answer" meets the sunrise before our eye does:

> Sunrise: another day, i.e., a day like the others: 6 o'clock. Not the sun rising at all, in fact, but the earth turning—producing, from our perspective, certain effects of sunlight on the atmosphere moderated and exacerbated by certain air currents, moisture, temperature, etc., ....

We have been taught to see the sunrise before we look at it, not as a unique and as yet open, unanswered question, but as a phenomenon that is, yes, ongoing, happening, to be sure, and open to further discovery, but a natural phenomenon well understood. To science (our teacher when it comes to the sunrise) the sunrise, and with it all the natural world, is taken, before it appears, as a given complex of objective phenomena which can be questioned and analyzed according to tested and proved principles and methods accumulated and developed, adapted and revised over the ages to explain, interpret, and predict the object and the objective system that "is" nature.

Let us return to the Question at the window (the sun rising), this time to "see" it Heidegger's way.

Again we attempt to approach the event of sunrise bringing no readily available preconceived systems to explain or interpret it. We come to the window, to nature or to the universe or to "life"—to any being or to the question of "being" itself—as to an opening to which we open ourselves. Something is happening (the sun is "rising"). We see it, meet it, as though we were answering a summons, a "calling."

We find, as we did above, that the event and the "meaning" of the event (the nature or significance of it) are just what attract us, draw us, and we find, again, that they escape, elude, us—withdraw. As we have noted, it is perhaps the withdrawal that draws us on—again like the ghost of Hamlet's father summoning and leading Hamlet further into the mists.

> Withdrawal is an event. In fact, what withdraws may even concern and claim man more essentially than anything present that strikes and touches him. Being struck by actuality is what we like to regard as constitutive of the actuality of the actual. However, in being struck by what is actual, man may be debarred precisely from what concerns and touches him—touches him in the surely mysterious way of escaping him by its withdrawal. The event of withdrawal could be what is most present in all our present, and so infinitely exceed the actuality of everything actual. ( _What Is Called Thinking?_ 9).

* * *

And yet .... Can I seriously ask you to consider a "calling" of some kind in the sunrise we observed at the window, a Hamlet's father's ghost-like summons, in the unformalized impressions that emanate from natural beauty? This sense of immediacy with nature in the moment is, we now "know," simply the fact of sensory stimuli on our particular sensorium, merely uncorrected primitive intuition.

And yet ..., day by day, without permission from our teachers we consult our own untutored intuitions, our unmathematical calculations, when we must reach a final judgment on questions of ultimate importance to us. Among the clamoring, conflicting "facts" and "truths" offered to us day by day in video and print media by conflicting authorities with their conflicting "scientific" claims to "truth," we find ourselves eventually face to face with ... ourselves, to make our own decision as to the truth in each case. We work through the present problem, whatever it is, clearing a personal path through the options and obstacles that show up. In our private universe we are always in some sense standing at the window immediately facing the sunrise.

* * *

With _Being and Time_ , Heidegger inaugurates a radically new "way" of thinking. A new way of thinking brings with it a new way of writing and requires a new way of reading. Ideally the book should be read "all at once," for the end and the whole of this work are in play, interplay, from the beginning.

Opening up a new pathway for thinking and setting out upon his "way,"10 Heidegger takes up certain words or nomenclature fundamental in our tradition and empties out their current, customary definitions or meanings in order to restore to each word its original thrust. We have observed this turning back to the root already—for example, in his censure of the word _Begriff_ ( _concept_ ) and in his recovery of the word _Dasein (_ there-being).

The re-viewed, revised nomenclature which Heidegger introduces into philosophy is not derived from and does not depend upon an esoteric source—such as, for example, science's specialized body of knowledge built upon or developed by rational analysis according to a rational method, or Christianity's divine revelation rendered into rational theology over centuries of clerical scholarship.

Instead, Heidegger's language with its new "meanings" ("meaning" takes on new meaning too) is retrieved, recovered, from the roots of language itself—language, which underlies and pervades human existence. The elemental "meanings" in words lie undiscovered or forgotten—unrecognized or unacknowledged and unappropriated—in the "being" of Everyday Dasein, the ordinary, everyday human.

But a caution. Note the words "unrecognized," "unacknowledged," and "unappropriated," "undiscovered or forgotten." Heidegger characterizes Everyday Dasein as "falling." The word "falling" comes from the Christian vocabulary which treats of "fallen" man, man guilty from conception, according to the doctrine of original sin. But the word "fallen" is transformed in Heidegger's appropriation of "falling."

In fact, a demonstration here of the transformation of meaning in this case will serve two purposes at once.

It will in the first place illustrate Heidegger's method of procedure in _Being and Time_ , where again and again he abandons a word (such as "fallen," here) but awakens an essential meaning sleeping in the root of it in order to transplant it to a revised word ("fall _ing_ ," here).

In the second place, this demonstration will point toward an overall project of Heidegger's, which his works continually carry forward, the _Destruktion_ of the philosophical tradition as a whole (the "world" received by all of us in the West simply by dint of being born into it), in order to recover from its root a pre-rational orientation toward Being. This _Destruktion_ amounts to something of a reconstruction. (It should not be confused with Jacques Derrida's more familiar, and derivative, "deconstruction.") The traditional language thus abandoned is salvaged after all, while the underlying human "being" is renewed, recovered from the root.

* * *

The reconstruction of the word "fallen," then, proceeds as follows. In Heidegger's use of the word " _falling_ ," the Christian sense of "falling off" from the "right" condition is retained, but what the right condition is, is transformed, as is the meaning of "right" (and "wrong").

The right standing from which everyday Dasein is always already falling is the condition of standing in an original, authentic, resolute orientation toward one's own potentiality for being. That is, by the time one becomes aware of one's "standing" at all, it is to discover oneself already in a state of "falling," embedded in and surrounded by a veritable web of meanings—a personal and cultural history, a received outlook on "the world" with given sets of ingrained, habituated relations with and attitudes toward and expectations of people and places and things, in general and in particular.

As Heidegger retrieves and renews the Christian _fallen_ , his use of the _present_ participle "fall _ing_ " instead of the Christian past participle _fallen_ changes the meaning of the word. The difference is more than grammatical. For the condition of _falling_ is not fixed in place, as original sin fixes man's _fallen_ condition until grace redeems it. Fall _ing_ is always an active occur _ring_ , is happening t/here where we are. Thus it could, if we so decided, be reversed; it could be _not_ -happening t/here where we are, if we chose.

In this connection, Heidegger also carries over from the Christian vocabulary the words _conscience_ and _guilt_. Conscience, here, is a particular, individualized "calling," an appeal to a particular Dasein's own (i.e., authentic) potentialities for "being." (Compare our experience, above, of being drawn, called, to the sunrise at the window.) The appeal is coming from, and leads back to, a nameless "It gives." There is no "it" behind or beyond this "It gives." The word "It" in this phrase, which grammatically signifies what gives, has no actual referent, refers to no giver. Beyond "It gives" there is no thing (i.e., there is nothing, no being; there is, instead, not-being). There "is," in fine (in the end and in total and on the whole, as in every particular case), only the gift of Being.

We can compare the "given" that is the starting and limiting point for the sciences. For science too the investigation begins with the "given" phenomenon—the entity to be investigated. But the given phenomenon is not a "gift" and it offers no "appeal." For science, the "given" is taken as "object" before it is encountered. There is no "encounter," indeed. It matters not whether one person or another "encounters" the object, for no relationship develops between the particular observer and the particular object. The scientific observer's intuitive or sensory "experience" is immaterial and irrelevant to the objective observation.

To reiterate, for science objectivity is the starting point and the limiting point. Science cannot count or countenance "appeals" from or in or among things of the world except as it can treat them all—intuition and senses included—objectively as objects. Of course, the consequence is that science invalidates our personal access to the world, full of intuitive, sensory experience. Even more decisively, science transforms that access into "facts," into further "objects" for objective investigation—i.e., intuition becomes functions of the brain, available physically (objectively) to analytical research; the senses become physical organs available to the same objectivity. Immediate access to things we "see" (a seeing-relation that is not routed through the concept) becomes inconceivable, _ergo_ unthinkable.

(However, quantum theory, the most exciting, reliable, and technologically prolific branch of science today, finds itself in the peculiar position of professing strict adherence to the objective scientific method while admitting a new, contradictory phenomenon into its field of view: human consciousness. See Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner's account of physics' "skeleton in the closet" in _Quantum Enigma; Physics Encounters Consciousness_ :11 and of the self-deception, evasion, and denial with which physicists attempt to deal with the scandal.)

Both Heidegger and science are stopped, limited, at some point in their search/research. In Heidegger's case, it is Nothing, not-being, that marks the limit. However, it is precisely at the end of the "way," here, at the point to which beings, things (the sunrise), draw us while at the same time withdrawing from our understanding—here against the closedness of not-being—that the _disclosedness_ of the "world" occurs; i.e., here the "world" rises into appearance. Here at the "deadend" we find ourselves again at the beginning, at the origin: _where you are_.

* * *

Of course, we do not usually recognize "where-we-are" as "the origin." For Heidegger, this mis-take, mis-understanding, occurs because, as noted above, the general understanding that belongs to the ordinary, everyday human is not original or authentic, does not arise from the underlying unique Dasein, but is instead a received understanding—received in each case from what we call the individual's social or cultural milieu, a sense of collective consciousness, which Heidegger calls the "they."

We recognize the authority of this familiar "they." It was this "they" that introduced us to the "world" in the first place, that set us upon and guided us along its paths. Later it was this "they" that cautioned us against using or trusting our own intuition and senses to discover the "truth" of things, that taught us eventually to rely on scientific studies, findings, and conclusions (however provisional and temporary they proved to be over time) for authoritative knowledge.

Let us note that in the physical sciences—the "they" of collective knowledge which we take nowadays to be most reliable—the "objective" world outranks and displaces everyday human experience, discounts and supersedes it. You will not find your own "original" experience underlying physics' theories. You yourself cannot reach science's conclusions or verify them except by following science's rational course—through the body of scientific knowledge which is grounded, proved, and corroborated by mathematical principles, at least as far as consensus can be achieved among current investigators.

_Nota_ : it should come as no surprise that mathematical equations validate scientific discoveries or proposals which are built on mathematical principles.

(That is, the same system of mathematical principles that prompts and guides science's formulation of scientific questions and problems [all of these following upon previous answers and solutions]—this same system also devises the approach to the research and the methods to be used [experiments, proofs], and in these ways and by these means both predicts and prescribes _and proscribes_ the results. The mathematical system itself is self-contained and self-limiting. Whatever the configurations of problems and questions and answers, whatever their consequences for the "universe" and for us, in the end it is the system itself that the system is exploring.)

In Heidegger's thinking, however, as we have noted, underneath the received, established "world" of everyday Dasein—our everyday understanding of things and relations among them, our attitudes and patterns of behavior toward them, the beliefs and habits of thought provided by the "they"—there lies the original, authentic Dasein. For this reason every Heideggerian notion can apply and appeal to every reader's own original but unacknowledged human "being."

But, as I admitted above, the notion of returning to an uninterpreted human "being" or to a pre-scientific "world" is, since inconceivable (i.e., non-conceptual), unthinkable—because thinking itself, for us, is shackled to the concept.

(Still, we have noted that the science of physics itself is ranging abroad these days, is sending tentacles out beyond its traditional rational borders.)

* * *

Science is in the ascendency today. Scientific knowledge enjoys more prestige than any other kind. But this is a relatively recent development. In the Academy of the ancient Socratic Greeks, who set philosophy on its rational course, science was not distinguished from philosophy; mathematics and astronomy, etc., were branches of study basic to philosophy. Over following centuries, however, philosophy and science developed two distinct branches of knowledge, eventually became two disciplines in the universities—the sciences and the humanities—and by the nineteenth century had developed a prickly antagonism toward one another.

In the nineteenth century the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche interrupted the progress of history to declare that philosophy was trapped in a rational cul de sac and had retreated from its former purpose—to discover ultimate Truth—losing thereby its previous integrity and prestige. Not merely coincidentally, then, it was in the twentieth century that science won the preeminence over philosophy that it maintains today.

Heidegger was writing in the mid-twentieth-century when philosophers were pronouncing the death of philosophy—a time when, as the poet William Butler Yeats expressed it in 1920, "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."12 The young Heidegger, facing the crisis in philosophy, opted to break open a path ahead by routing through the past (we have observed already that he is fearless before the spectre of contradiction). His intention, as we have seen, was to get back to the roots of Western thinking. He followed the history of thinking back to its beginning in order to rediscover what thinking is, and to recover whatever potentialities and alternatives lay there in the beginning before thinking turned toward the rational (for it was rational thinking that had been rationally discredited, not thinking itself). Heidegger sought to turn, return, to the ground itself and to set out again from there.

As Brian Greene, Stephen Hawking, and other physicists are writing books nowadays to remind non-specialists of the historical development of scientific knowledge which brought us to the present moment and to inform us about current developments, so I am attempting here to give an abbreviated account of the historical development of Western philosophical thinking culminating in the current state and status of philosophy, leaving open the question of the future of "thinking."

* * *

The ground of Western history, to which Heidegger turned in the twentieth century, is the world of the ancient Greeks. This world is evoked in extant fragments of texts written by pre-Socratic thinkers such as Anaximander, Parmenides, and Heraclitus. These rich remnants provide some direct, though limited, access into the Western thinking that preceded the rational philosophy inaugurated by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.

Heidegger's interest in the Greeks is not academic. Their significance for his thinking is not their historical or anthropological or cultural significance. In the first place, Heidegger rejects the ordinary meaning of "historical significance," for he discounts the ordinary sense of "history." His new word for his re-vision of "history" is _historicity_ , and this word carries primary significance throughout his works.

As for the anthropological and cultural significance of the early Greeks, Heidegger discounts our current notions of "anthropology" and "culture" because they have developed inside the rational tradition he is displacing and remain entangled in it, cannot escape or transcend it.

No, for Heidegger the significance of the pre-Socratic Greeks lies in the power he discovers in their pre-rational thinking.

As we know, for Heidegger the roots of thinking are found in the roots of language. Returning to the earliest scraps of Greek philosophy and "following" the language wherever it leads, i.e., approaching the language in his own opening, questioning, listening "way," Heidegger is turning up the roots of the Greek language, buried under the history of usage that followed and developed from them.

And here he discovers a ... _primitive_ world? Only if we think anthropologically. If we approach the world that arises from the language of these texts without preconceptions as far as possible, we find an unfamiliar world, no longer accessible.

The primary distinction and difference for us in the non-rational thinking that is opening up here is the seemingly seamless relation we find between the thinker and the thinking or the thinker and what there is to think about. There seems to be no distance or space, no separation at all, between the think _er_ and the think _ing_ , no question about the questioning itself. The thinker seems to be _immediately_ involved in the thinking; he is always already "there" in it. And there seems to be no distance or separation between the thinking and _what is being thought about_. There is an intimacy and comprehensiveness of "attunement" (as Heidegger calls it) between the thinkers and the world set forth in their thinking.

Still, Heidegger will cite the oversight of the early Greek philosophers, i.e., their overlooking the _site_ of thinking that underlies all thinking. You and I have already become acquainted with this site. Heidegger calls it the "there," the Open; we have called it "where you are."

Let us take a brief overview of the Greek world, following Heidegger's route through the roots of a few of the Greek words that reveal it.

The Greeks used words such as _aletheia, phusis, eidos_ , and _logos_ , which reveal their relation to ... _what is_ , or what we call _things_ or _the natural world_. Heidegger gives thought to these words. We shall take the briefest survey.

The natural world seemed to _arise_ into appearance around these early Greeks, as though "beings" were always (now), arising or awakening from oblivion, _a-letheia_. _Lethe_ is often translated "forgetfulness" and has been associated with death. The word _a-letheia_ ( _from_ \- or _out of-_ Lethe) points to the event of beings arising _from_ or _out of_ that ultimate region from which things arise into being and to which they return.

_Phusis_ , the Greek root for our word _physics_ , referred to these beings themselves, beings (things) which come into being _by themselves_ , i.e., _of_ themselves—beings not constructed, not made by man. In the Greek sense of _phusis_ , physical things "arise into being," as I put it above, describing _aletheia_ ; they arise from "concealment" into "unconcealment"; they _appear_ , or, better, they are actively appear _ing_.

And yet, for the pre-Socratics there was no absolute distinction between _oblivion_ or _death,_ on the one hand, and the _appearing_ or the _rising into appearing_ of physical things, on the other. That is, "concealment" and "unconcealment" were not absolute, opposite states of being; nor were they contradictory _notions_ of states of being. For _ideas_ , as we understand ideas—as the work and the tools of thinking—did not belong to the lexicon of thinking for these thinkers. _Ideas_ , in our sense of the word, would originate later, in the lexicon of Plato's rational thought.

No, according to Heidegger, Heraclitus, e.g. ("Aletheia," _Early Greek Thinking_ 102-23), considered "revealing and concealing—not as two different occurrences merely jammed together, but as one and the Same" (112-13). In fact, he adds later, "self-revealing not only never dispenses with concealing, but actually needs it, in order to occur essentially in the way it occurs ... as dis-closing" (114). We can compare our experience with the sunrise: the sense of being drawn to its mystery (its "appearing") at the same time that the mystery seems to withdraw out of reach as we attempt to approach it.

Today we refer to not-manmade beings as "things of nature," or physical entities. And we take them as science, developing from Plato's and Aristotle's rational thinking, has taught us to take them, i.e., as objective entities, analyzable and classifiable. Such beings were subjects of the "science" of physics for the Greeks too, even in this early historical period, but for the Greeks "science" was a word that denoted _knowledge_ , _knowing_ ; and _knowing_ did not carry the sense of systematic or objective knowledge as it does for us today. _Knowing_ included a primordial _relating_ to the thing _known._ Heidegger explores this _knowing_ in, e.g., "The Anaximander Fragment":

> ... To have seen is the essence of knowing. In "to have seen" there is always something more at play than the completion of an optical process. In it the connection with what is present subsists behind every kind of sensuous or nonsensuous grasping...." ( _Early Greek Thinking_ 36)

The Greek word _eidos_ , "appearing," can help us to understand this primordial _relating_ or _seeing_. In this word Heidegger finds another aspect of the ancient Greek sense of "being."

For the pre-Socratics, "physical" (natural) phenomena arise ( _aletheia_ ), of themselves ( _phusis_ ); and they arise _into appearing_ [ _eidos_ ]. That is, things _bring themselves to appear_ , to appear _as themselves_. In _eidos_ we recognize the word to which Plato would give particular significance: _idea_. Things, beings, come (into existence), arise, present themselves to _view_ —and, again, for these earliest philosophers, not as static, objective things, but as ris _ing_ , appear _ing_ phenomena: each thing as _itself_ , each one declaring or showing itself.

You notice that along with the _appearing_ of physical things a _lighting_ , a _seeing_ , is occurring as well. You recognize again this site of the movement of beings into presence as Heidegger's Open, "where you are." We observe the same "coincidence" as we consider _logos_.

_Logos_ is the Greek word for language. We recognize the root of "logic," but the _logos_ of the pre-Socratic thinkers predates the logic that we attribute to rational thought or reason. The _logos_ of these early Greeks denoted _speech_ , _saying_ , and _what is said_. _Logos_ , the noun, named _speech_ , _what is said_ ; _legein_ , the verb, meant _to speak_ , _to say_.

But the verb _legein_ had another meaning as well: _to lay out_ or _to gather up_. Heidegger retrieves the second meaning along with the first and brings a startling new dimension to the understanding of what we are doing when we put something into language.

To wit: we have said that for these Greeks the "natural world" arose about them ( _aletheia_ ) by itself ( _phusis_ ) into appearing ( _eidos_ ). _Logos_ (speaking, saying) was the _gathering together_ of this rising world into language. The speaker's saying/speaking _gathered up_ and _laid out_ this appearing of the being or beings that lay before him. In speaking or saying, the speaker and the rising being/beings were related, attuned. Above I mentioned Heidegger's aversion to language that "grasps" what it _represents_ (and by grasping obtains the power to manipulate).

We can sense the immediacy of "nature" in such a world: things "arising" into "appearing" before the thinker, as though awaking from sleep. We can sense the immediacy of the human relation with nature that was achieved by way of language that did not _represent_ the world or _refer to_ it secondarily or _interpret_ it, but instead "let it lie before" as it was appearing, gathering it and laying it out in language. Perhaps children still feel this strange, strangely familiar "reality" (perhaps you remember). Besides the sense of immediate intimacy with the world, the pre-Socratics gave the sense of a non-religious holiness or wonder, of mystery, in the being-ness of every being and in the unity or wholeness of the All.

Heidegger's thinking returns to these ancient roots—not to restore or resume this pre-rational thought, but to recover the site from which it arose. On this original site he uncovers a (post-rational) "way" of thinking and breaks open a path ahead.

* * *

Heidegger turns back to the pre-Socratics not to overturn history or to recover a lost world, but to examine the roots of Western thinking and to recover the "origin." In his works he follows the movement of this original relation to Being down to the present day, redefining _historicity_ as he traces shifts and changes in the record of philosophy-science.

He describes the relation to Being in our own time as "technological." We take the natural world to be "standing reserve," he says—a treasury of resources to be managed and exploited for our human purposes, regardless of its own being; and his critique has exerted a powerful influence on us. His thought directly influenced the development of major philosophy in the twentieth century, phenomenological and existentialist, and it marked religious, political, social, and cultural thought and movements. His thinking influenced the period also as it marked the thinking of his students, many of them eminent thinkers of the time, e.g., Hannah Arendt, historian and cultural thinker; Jacques Lacan, psychoanalyst; and Jacques Derrida, philosopher/literary-cultural thinker. The power and potentiality of Heidegger's thinking remain directly available to us today in the numerous volumes of his works, and continue to deepen and widen with the posthumous publication of previously unavailable works.

(Heidegger's record is stained [or damned, many critics believe] by his affiliation with the Nazi Party in the 1930's—he was a member from 1933-45 and by his active participation briefly while he was rector at the University of Freiberg. Indeed, for a time during this period, Heidegger thought and hoped that the emergence of the National Socialist Revolution was the dawning possibility of a renewed authentic human relation to Being13.

(The case against Heidegger is complicated by the fact that Heidegger did not denounce the Nazis publicly after the atrocities of the death camps came to light, nor did he ever publicly renounce his own Nazi participation or explain his silence on the subject. However, a posthumous publication and recent translation of a major work that Heidegger wrote during this period shows, as the translators put it, "clear evidence that he disagreed with the politics of Hitler and National Socialism" (p. xxxix).14 The translators conclude:

> With the availability of _Mindfulness_ and other texts that are now published in GA 16, the whole question concerning Heidegger's political error of the 1930s needs to be reexamined in a manner that is no longer prosecutorial and journalistic but fully considers his being-historical stance toward politics. Such a reexamination is likely to prove that much of the furore of the 1980s that surrounded Heidegger's political error was irrelevant and prejudicial. (xl)

(These controversial matters have been under fresh review and debate since the 2014 publication of Heidegger's _Black Notebooks_15 and editor Peter Trawny's charges of anti-Semitic contamination of his thought.16)

* * *

Heidegger's account of the history of changing human relations to Being in the West moves from the Pre-Socratics to the Socratics themselves. With the works of Plato and Aristotle in the fourth and third centuries B.C., philosophy bursts open a floodgate into a new possibility for thinking.

In the thought of Plato, the significance of _eidos_ undergoes a change. For the pre-Socratic philosophers, as we saw above, _eidos_ signified the _appearing_ of things, their _bringing themselves to appearing_ —their _presencing_. In "The Origin of the Work of Art", Heidegger calls this event their "shining" or "beauty" ( _Basic Writings_ 181). But In Plato's thinking this _appearing_ loses the sense of immediacy that we noted above, the sense of the _happening_ of things here and now, and it takes on the solidity of "form," the permanence of the "real."

For Plato, _eidos_ is still the presencing of appearing, but a space (of difference) opens up between this _appearing_ and the _being_ that is _presencing_. (See _Contributions_ 145-47.) Appear _ing_ changes to appear _ance_. Whereas appear _ing_ was inextricable from the thing itself (the thing came into presence in appear _ing_ ), now the appear _ance_ of a thing takes on a separable, secondary existence of its own. The appearance of things is now the "mere" appearance of things, and belongs in the realm of the natural world. Indeed, the thing in its "appearance" in the natural world (the mountain, that flower, this page) is for Plato a mere reflection, a "copy" of the "real" thing (the form). The _reality_ of things moves out of the natural world into a higher realm: the realm of forms, ideas—and with a new sense of _idea_. We still make a distinction between the way things _look_ and the way they _are_ , between unstable "illusion" and "factual" reality, and, as we shall discuss further below, between subjectivity and objectivity.

Now when the Socratics attribute "reality" to the form or idea of a thing, this new attribution applies not only to things of nature but also to manmade things, i.e., things made for useful or for artistic purposes. In a familiar Platonic dialogue, _Republic_ , there is a well-known passage dealing with the question of the truth of art [Part Ten, Theory of Art, 421ff., esp. 422ff.]. Socrates and Glaucon are discussing the relative "truth" in three kinds of "bed": a bed in a painting, a bed made by a carpenter, and the bed created by God, i.e., the idea of the bed. Of course, the "real" bed is the one in the mind of God. The bed in a painting by an artist is a copy of the carpenter's bed, which is in its turn a copy of the real bed in the mind of God. Art is two removes from truth.

Thus, for Plato the visible (physical) forms in nature are merely the shadows or reflections of the Real—the ideas, the ideal forms—whose invisible realm lies beyond the realm of "appearance" in which we live. The Real comprises the forms of higher intelligible Truth, absolute Truth—ideas of Good, beauty, love, temperance, etc.—and also, in a different category, mathematical forms of reasoning. Thus, the schematic for the idealism of Plato: two realms: the higher realm of ideal forms and the lower realm of sensory experience, the higher realm accessible from the lower only by way of reason.

With their concept of absolute Truth and their concept of thinking as Reason, the Socratic philosophers laid the foundation for the philosophy that has defined Western civilization ever since.

* * *

I shall not attempt to give the history of philosophy from the Greeks to the present time, but I shall sweep across it to pause at the Enlightenment, when a seismic shift in rational thought turned history toward the philosophy and science we are comparing here.

First the "sweep": The rational philosophy founded by Plato (Socrates) and Aristotle moved through the classical Roman translation of it, by which movement, according to Heidegger, it lost the remnants of original Greek thinking that the Socratics had not cast off. (Heidegger points out some of these remnants in Aristotle's physics, as we shall see below.)

With the advent and ascendancy of Christianity, rational thinking became theological; philosophy—indeed, learning itself—became primarily the property and privilege of the Church.

When the Renaissance spread across Europe, however, the hegemony of the Catholic Church was weakened, and learning became charged with a rational humanism. Philosophy (science a constituent of it) developed as a rational, systematic, Christian understanding of the world and the cosmos.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Western thought underwent another major shift. This was the period during which Western thinking veered from its Christian underpinnings in received or divine authority (reliance on divine Scripture and Holy inspiration for source and guaranty of truth) onto the foundation of the _mathematical_ —not of _mathematics_ as a system of numbers and equations, but of the _mathematical_ (something the Greeks called _mathesis_ ) as a kind of understanding of things that derives not from the things themselves but from something in the human understanding itself. Heidegger explains this change in the concept and use of the _mathematical_ in _What is a Thing?_

A section of this book is reprinted as an essay called "Modern Science, Metaphysics, and Mathematics" ( _Basic Writings_ 271-305). In this essay Heidegger cites _Meditationes de prima philosophia_ (1641), a seminal work of Rene Descartes, an eminent seventeenth-century French philosopher-mathematician who followed Galileo and preceded Newton. In this work Heidegger finds a key articulation of the transformation taking place in Western thinking at the time.

Descartes posited a new guarantor of the truth of thinking—i.e., of the truth of propositions, of thought, of knowledge. What constituted and guaranteed the truth of knowledge about things was not to be sought for, after all, in the things themselves and not to be attributed to a transcendental relation between them and the human (that is, it was not simply a "given" human understanding, impossible and unnecessary to explain). No, the ground of the truth of human understanding or knowledge lay, he claimed, in the "I" that posited the thinking, the "I am." The "I" became the "subject" of the first principle—" _cogito—sum_." (Previously the word "subject" had been used to refer to the _thing_ being discussed, while the word "object" had referred to _imaginary_ things, things that did not actually exist but existed only in the mind. In Descartes' thought, these two terms underwent a reversal in definition.) Human thinking, Descartes declared—thinking stemming from the "I": _and this kind of understanding alone_ —could attain to the truth of things with total clarity and certainty.

Heidegger is explicating a work which Descartes never finished and which was not published until long after his death. Nevertheless, Heidegger writes of it: "In [this work] the modern concept of science is coined. Only one who has really thought through this relentlessly sober volume long enough, down to its remotest and coldest corner, fulfills the prerequisite of getting an inkling of what is going on in modern science" (299).

Descartes brought into philosophy a new focus on the concept of the _mathematical_ , a narrowing of the concept which had been taking shape for a century. To the ancients _mathesis_ had indicated a certain kind of mental capability: the capability to learn and to teach, including the learning, the teaching; it had indicated, as well, the matter that was learned, taught. Now learning and teaching came to focus on subject matter that the mind itself in some sense already possessed. That is, if the mind were not able to recognize the subject matter as something already available to it, it could not grasp its concept or explanation. For example, if the mind had no prior understanding of number, it could not learn to count or calculate.

In Descartes' thinking the _mathematical_ itself, seated in the human mind ("I think") with _its own rules_ , is elucidated as the foundation of certain knowledge.

> Concerning the objects before us, we should pursue the questions, not what others have thought, nor what we ourselves conjecture, but what we can clearly and insightfully intuit, or deduce with steps of certainty, for in no other way is knowledge arrived at. (Descartes, qtd. in "Modern Science." _Basic Writings_ 300)

According to the new formulation, the certainty of the truth of knowledge depends on the reliability of human reason, i.e., "[deducing] with steps of certainty" in the quoted passage. The attainment of knowledge, enlightenment, still begins with clear, insightful intuition of things of nature. But from this initial insight there must follow "steps of certainty" leading from the thing itself to certain knowledge of it.

Descartes describes the _method_ :

> Method consists entirely in the order and arrangement of that upon which the sharp vision of the mind must be directed in order to discover some truth. But we will follow such a method only if we lead complex and obscure propositions back step by step to the simpler ones and then to ascend by the same steps from the insight of the very simplest propositions to the knowledge of all the others. (300)

Back and forth the mind must make its way, beginning with the sensory experience of something in nature and the understanding that accompanies it. This understanding must now be disassembled, one step at a time, from complex propositions to simpler and simpler ones by which to retrace the steps, weaving a total complex of propositions, consistent and certain. Thus a system of principles or axioms may be established, a _mathematical_ system consisting of these special formulations, all of which shall rest fundamentally upon the one "indubitable and absolutely certain" ground: reason, the human subject's "I think."

As a result, as Heidegger explains it _(_ 304-05), the definition of "man," the human, is altered as well. Since the time of Aristotle, man had been taken to be the _animal rationale_. But the word _rationale_ takes on special significance with Descartes's formulation of the "I think" as pure reason; the rational becomes the _mathematical_ , in a limited sense.

Further, co-posited along with the new principle and the new method is the principle of non-contradiction, found in philosophy in one form or another since Aristotle. What is posited in the _subject_ (the "I") cannot in reason be contradicted by the predicate, i.e., the assertion posited in relation to the subject. The result according to Heidegger: "The question about the thing is now anchored in pure reason, i.e., in the mathematical unfolding of its principles."

* * *

Physicists today would not attribute the development of the scientific method or modern science to Descartes, perhaps, since he was not a scientist primarily, but a philosopher. Instead they would more readily trace their genealogy to the British scientist and mathematician Sir Isaac Newton (or to Galileo before him), whose _Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica_ (1686-87) set forth the revolutionary system of mathematical principles that laid the groundwork for the movement of Western science away from the Ptolemaic framework (the earth taken to be the center of the cosmos) into the Copernican view (the sun at the center of our galaxy). Newton's new system of mathematic principles and axioms dominated scientific theory until the next revolution, Einstein's. Today the phrase "classical physics" refers to Newton's work.

With Newton, science sets aside the attempt—and thus perhaps the capability—to "see" (understand, know) the world immediately, as it had already set aside its dependence on divine inspiration or authority, and moves uncompromisingly into the realm of the mind itself, the realm of pure reason.

Among the first principles that Newton's physics establishes are axioms dealing with motion, the movement of bodies in space. We can catch a glimpse of different "worlds" created by different kinds of thinking (or, as Heidegger phrased it, different "relations to Being") if we compare a few notions from Aristotle's physics with Newton's. I shall give a little of Heidegger's point by point comparison in "Modern Science, Metaphysics, and Mathematics" ( _Basic Writings_ 271-305).

In Aristotle's physics, things of nature, _phusis_ , move _of themselves_. We found a similar notion of _phusis_ in the discussion of the pre-Socratics above. For Aristotle, things move in different ways according to their own _nature_.

That is, things differ from each other _in kind_. Each kind of thing possesses its own character, capabilities, needs, tendencies, limitations, etc. (its own _nature_ ). Thus each kind of thing belongs in its own _place_ , i.e., in either earth, water, air, or fire (the four elements, ordered spatially according to the scientific configuration of the universe at the time). When a body moves, therefore, it tends to move according to its own nature and toward its own "natural" place. Movement contrary to natural movement is _violent_.

Two examples: It is the nature of heavy things to move downward toward the earth, not because of gravitational attraction (gravity was not yet conceivable), but because heavy things _belong to_ the earth. Likewise, light things—clouds, smoke, fire—tend upwards toward their place in the heavens or the fiery element beyond, where they _belong_. Each thing has its place according to its kind and its nature. Furthermore, places themselves differ in _priority_. For example, the heavens, home to celestial things, are of the highest order.

As for motion in its kinetic sense, according to Aristotle's physics each body has its _own kind_ of _motion_. The "natural" motion of things of the earth, for example, is movement in a straight line toward the center of the earth, while things of the heavens move "naturally" in a circle. Circular motion has priority over earthly, for earthly motion is always incomplete (it reaches an end at some point) while circular motion is always complete in itself. Further, circular motion does not move in relation to the center of the earth as earthly motion does. Things with circular motion move independently, perpetually, completely. Thus the natural _place_ to which things with circular motion belong is _in the motion itself_.

Differences in _velocity_ of motion depend upon this natural attraction of bodies to their own place. The nearer they approach their place, the faster they move. Likewise, if the motion of a thing—a heavy thing moving downward or a light thing moving upward or a thing moving in a circle—is violently (unnaturally) diverted from its course, its movement slows, eventually stops.

We are taking the briefest sampling of Aristotle's physics here, of course (and of Heidegger's discussion of it). Every point described so summarily here multiplies into a world of physical detail as the philosopher/scientist names and analyzes and catalogs phenomena according to their nature.

Aristotle's analysis of the nature of motion sounds quaint or primitive to us today with our everyday familiarity with high-tech motor-generation; spaceflight ( _outer_ -space flight) is a commonplace reality now, and we are not amazed to know that there is ongoing research into time-travel!

Still, it is important to note that century after century philosophers and scientists rediscover the complexity and comprehensiveness of Aristotle's _Organum_ , six philosophic-scientific works of thorough, logical analysis of every aspect of the universe known at the time. His works laid the foundation for the philosophy and science to follow.

Stephen Hawking has it that Aristotle and other philosopher-scientists of his day did not derive their theories from observation of the actual things in nature, a flaw in light of the later emphasis on objectivity in the scientific approach.17 But these early thinkers were indeed mapping the things of nature as they directly observed them. Heidegger emphasizes this point: "Aristotle fought in his time precisely to make thought, inquiry, and assertion always ... [here he quotes Aristotle's Greek phrase and then translates it] '[say] what corresponds to that which shows itself in beings' ( _De caelo_ , III, 7, 306a 6)."18

In fact, we can reverse Hawking's complaint to turn it against Newton instead. Before Newton, Western thinking had developed rationally, along the path opened up by the early Greeks. But with Newton (and Descartes as he grounded knowledge in pure reason, mentioned above), rational thinking itself moved for the first time onto a foundation which is _not_ the things of observable nature or of experience. This difference will appear as we resume our comparison of the laws of motion in the physics of Aristotle and Newton.

We have noted some aspects of Aristotle's analysis of motion. Now we turn to Newton's.

* * *

The first principle of Newton's law of motion:

> Every body continues in its state of rest, or uniform motion in a straight line, unless it is compelled to change that state by force impressed upon it (qtd. in _Basic Writings_ , "Modern Science, Metaphysics, and Mathematics," from rev. transl. by Florian Cajori, 279-80).

It is this "every body" in its unmotivated state which lies _outside the reach of objective scientific inquiry_. It is the _unverifiable_ lynchpin of Newtonian physics.

Newton's first law posits that every "body," i.e., every physical entity once set in motion moves in a straight line at a constant speed unless its motion is stopped or altered by the interference of some force. We note that an alteration or interference in the motion of a body is not considered to be "violent," as Aristotle considered it to be, for the intervention does not violate the body's "nature" (since the meaning of "nature" has changed):

> Now nature is no longer an inner capacity of a body, determining its form of motion and its place. Nature is now the realm of the uniform space-time context of motion, which is outlined in the axiomatic project and in which alone bodies can be bodies as a part of it and anchored in it (292).

Newton's second law states that the motion of a body will stop or it will alter, i.e., accelerate or decelerate, in proportion to the speed and the mass of an interfering force (Hawking 16). That is, the effect that an outside force exerts on the motion of a body is twice as great if the force is twice as great (so long as the two bodies have the same mass, since the effect of the outside force is also dependent on the mass of the moving body). We can again compare Aristotle's physics, in which the difference in the motion of different bodies is due to the differences in the _nature_ of the bodies themselves and their relation to _their own place_.

Again, something fundamental has changed here, something a little surprising considering science's insistence on objectivity of observation and method. The "knowledge" about motion here, according to Newton's second principle, precedes the motion itself, precedes the act of observing the falling body.

If one takes as a given that motion has the new character (or "nature") ascribed to it—that it either remains at rest or it moves uniformly in a straight line unless ..., etc.—then when some thing in nature does not move in a straight line, one now looks for the cause _of the difference_. Why does the moon move in a circular motion _instead of a straight line_? Answer: because it is drawn or driven off course by some force (gravity is posited for the first time). The notion that "every body" moves in a certain way is a _notion_ , an hypothesis, not an objective observation, since no one has ever or can ever observe "every body," cannot know that any body observed _represents_ "every body" observable. Science relocates its foundation of the observed universe of nature to Descartes's ground of the human subject's mind—reason—which foundation, here in Newton's work, becomes a system of mathematic principles that _pre_ scribe and _pre_ dict the (new) "nature" of the universe.

The scientist, a human observer, no longer approaches a moving thing directly. No direct relation sets up between the observer and the thing observed. Any individual personal response that might arise in the person confronting the thing is diverted or preconditioned by the rational preconception. You and I noted this blockage of our own experience when we faced the sunrise together at the window, above.

In Newton's physics of motion, things of nature have no particular motion appropriate to themselves, have no "nature," no place. Everything that moves is governed by the same laws of motion. A blade of grass or the seed of a thistle rises or falls exactly as a beam of steel does, i.e., by the same principles and laws. As the _thing_ (body, entity) loses its "nature" and its "place," _place_ too loses its "own" character. Two miles of Mr. Anderson's farm in Nebraska can be defined and described in the same terms that define or describe two miles of the Orion Nebula, as "place" becomes an interval of space, a measurable span, a matter of distance between points; and the distinguishing characteristics of each "place" become similarly mathematically determinable. For each place (or location) is defined and described by certain principles and laws that have been adopted before the place is perceived, before the measurements are taken—principles and laws that belong to human reason, the language of the scientific point of view.

It is during this revolutionary period in the development of science that the notion of the "mathematical" narrows again. From the Greeks' notion of _mathesis_ (science as a kind of human understanding, knowing) through Descartes's emphasis on human reason as it is applied to intuitive experience, the "mathematical" moves again in Newton's system of principles to the _measurable_ , the _numerical_.

> Because the project establishes a uniformity of all bodies according to relations of space, time, and motion, it also makes possible and requires a universal, uniform measure as an essential determinant of things, i.e., numerical measurement. The mathematical project of Newtonian bodies leads to the development of a certain "mathematics" in the narrow sense (Heidegger, "Modern Science" 292-93).

* * *

With the establishment of Newton's principles, science, following its rational course toward "truth" and enlightenment, was losing its hold on some prior essentials. In fact, what was slipping away was the "essential" itself—what the Socratics had designated as the "nature" (the "essence") of things, what the Medieval Christian philosopher Saint Thomas Aquinas had called the _quidditas_ , the " _this_ -ness," of each thing.

In his philosophical project, Heidegger, returning to the origin, has a new word for the singular "I"-ness of each thing. The word is _Ereignis_ , or Be-ing or, as Emad and Maly translate it in _Contributions_ , "enowning," indicating the "ownness" of every thing that "is." The new name returns to each phenomenon its uniqueness.

Heidegger's thinking, while it undermines Plato's and Aristotle's (and Descartes's and Newton's), retrieves something from the pre-Socratic _phusis_ and _aletheia_ that we sketched above. It recovers the sense of _event,_ of _happening_ , when things (phenomena) come into existence ("rise" into "appearance"). In Heidegger's account, phenomena originate in an event: a confrontation, in fact a _conflict_ , that occurs between, on the one hand, their _unrealized_ potentiality and, on the other hand, a human thinking that is striving to _real-ize_ the phenomena.

Heidegger's description of this uncanny origin of "things" reminds us in a striking way of the uncanny behavior of phenomena that twentieth-century physicists describe in their laboratory experiments. (Compare quantum physics' confrontation with consciousness in _The Quantum Enigma_.) I am thinking especially of phenomena that confound verification of the Schrödinger equation.

> Heidegger's description of this event in _Contributions_ can speak to scientists pointedly ("Time-Space," sections 239-242, esp. pp. 263-271. See also _What Is Called Thinking?_ , Part I, Lecture XI, and "The Origin of the Work of Art," _Basic Writings_ , 143-212).

The Schrödinger equation (posited by Erwin Schrödinger in 1926) is the equation that provided the foundation for quantum mechanics. (We described its disturbing influence on physics research briefly above when we mentioned the Heisenberg principle.) It describes and can accurately predict the development of wavefunctions.

That is, given the location of an electron particle in a wavefunction at a particular time, the equation can predict the probability of the location of the particle at another specified time. (We are all familiar with the fact of waves, wavefunctions, in water and in sound and even light, but quantum mechanics finds wave-behavior in every constituent of matter in the universe—including electron particles.) Physical science has verified and adopted the Schrödinger equation to describe and predict the development of wavefunctions.

But there are two stages in the behavior of wavefunctions. Stage one involves the evolution of the wave, the developing changing of its shape as Schrödinger's equation could reliably describe and predict it. Stage two, however, deals with the next step in the observation: the determination of the location of the electron in the wave. This is the uncanny development I want to cite here.

In the second stage, experiments without fail confirm an unexpected, indeed astounding, fact. To wit: once the scientist/observer makes the measurement to locate the electron, he invariably finds "all of its mass and all of its charge concentrated in one tiny, pointlike region"; i.e., the electro- _wave_ becomes an electron- _particle_ (Greene 88). Until the measurement is taken, however, the electron is not identifiable in the spread-out "mist" of the wave. Only when the observer enters into the event of the electron's behavior does the electron "spike" or "collapse" into a single locatable point. (See Greene's fascinating account of the phenomenon, 200ff.) Of course, this intrusion of the subjective observer into the experiment is a violation of the scientific method.

In 1927 Max Born suggested a resolution of the problem—or not so much a resolution as a re-vision of it: a shift in point of view. He characterized the electron-wave as a "probability wave." The electron is a wave, he claimed; the electron proper is spread throughout the wave until the laboratory scientist intervenes to measure it, when the particle collapses to settle in one precise location.

The experiments with particle-wave behavior disrupted particle theories in the twenties in the same way that Einstein's theories had disrupted theories about space and time earlier in the century. You recall our discussion above of the effect of _the observer's point of view_ on the measurement of the movement of an object in space and in time. We have introduced Heisenberg's "uncertainty principle," as well. Let me reiterate here that when human subjectivity cannot be excluded from science's laboratory experiments, we may suspect that something fundamental to the scientific method is breaking up.

* * *

Immanuel Kant, more perhaps than any other philosopher, gave rational justification for the Cartesian approach to the world. If you read Kant Heidegger's way, you will find emphatic evidence of a retention of basic pre-Socratic intuition, of pre-Newtonian sensory experience ( _What Is a Thing?_ 136, 142), but for Kant this immediate experience does not impart knowledge or understanding of the thing intuited, sensed. No, in order to yield experience or knowledge of things of nature, this intuition must be accompanied by conceptual understanding, human understanding as Descartes prescribed it and Newton systematized it (140).

Kant's main achievement was to cut the human umbilical with the "thing-in-itself" (he called it _noumena_ , the _Ding an sich_ , now considered to be unknowable). Thus he widened the breach that Descartes had opened up between the subject (the thinking "I") and the object of thinking, between subjectivity and objectivity. No longer would philosophy consider human understanding to have direct (immediate) access to "things."

Kant's influence on philosophy has been compared to the influence of Galileo on physics. Galileo Galilei, as you know, was the mathematician-astronomer who invented the telescope in 1609. Up until that time, astronomy had tried to bring its observations of the heavens into accord with divinely authorized "truth" revealed in Holy Scripture. Galileo shifted the point of reference, relocated the source of authority. That is, he sought to bring man's understanding of the heavens into agreement with astronomical observations, now extended and intensified dramatically by means of the new telescope.

Similarly, almost two centuries later, in his _Critique of Pure Reason_ (1781), Kant reversed the logic that had guided the search for knowledge of the universe. The doubt that had inspired Galileo to question received authority Kant now fixed on human observation itself. That is, Kant abandoned the attempt to bring human understanding into agreement with observations of the universe, as though observation gave direct access to it, and turned his attention instead to the underlying presumption that there is a natural or transcendental relation between human understanding and observed phenomena. His _Critique of Pure Reason_ analyzes the mind's capability to understand the universe beyond itself, analyzes differences between the mind and the objects it observes, and concludes that the mind is ultimately different from them. Thus, human "understanding" does not bring the mind into agreement with the observed universe, but, rather, it brings natural phenomena into agreement with itself, with human understanding. The natural world or universe is available to human understanding only in terms of the structures of the understanding itself, i.e., only as the universe is commensurate with pure reason.

What Kant approved in Galileo's experiments was not the emphasis on observation, as though observation could bring the essential object into view, but the emphasis on setting up the plan of the experiment ahead of time, the plan _preceding the observation_. Kant praised Galileo's approach to the encounter with nature: the work of the mind to frame the observation, to focus the event, to demand of nature the answer to a question devised by reason itself.

> Accidental observations, made in obedience to no previously thought-out plan, can never be made to yield a necessary law, which alone reason is concerned to discover. Reason, holding in one hand its principles, according to which alone concordant appearances can be admitted as equivalent to laws, and in the other hand the experiment which it has devised in conformity with these principles, must approach nature in order to be taught by it. It must not, however, do so in the character of a pupil who listens to everything that the teacher chooses to say, but of an appointed judge who compels the witnesses to answer questions which he has himself formulated (qtd. in _Kant and the Nineteenth Century_ 17).

In the work of Kant, the _Ding an sich_ or the object (the _thing_ or the being _as such_ :—the _noumenon_ ) is taken to exist beyond the reach of human observation and understanding. It is only _phenomena_ (Plato's "appearances"), available to human senses and correspondent with human reason, that we may aspire to "know." Is Plato's transcendent realm of ideas abandoned then, you're wondering? No, not totally. In one exceptional case Kant posits a transcendent bridge between human understanding and "truth" or things-in-themselves. The bridge is art, which is able to transcend the divide between human understanding and things-in -themselves and to reach and to render more-than-objective knowledge.

For philosophy and science, however, the "objective" (rational) approach to the _thing_ is validated in Kant's thinking, and the "subjective" (immediate, personal) approach loses authority, even while it remains the underlying conduit to the natural world.

* * *

We have noted the shift in the ground of science/philosophy during the period of the Enlightenment (I separate science and philosophy with only a typing symbol to signify that the two kinds of knowledge were not "two kinds of knowledge" at the time, but one comprehensive science, one body of knowledge).

You may have noticed that in this essay of mine comparing certain notions in physics with corresponding notions in the thought of Heidegger, the word "ground" occurs again and again. There is a reason (or there are "grounds") for this: The difference in scientific research today and Heidegger's thinking stems from the difference in their respective _grounds_.

We know that both science and philosophy have used the word _ground_ to indicate the foundation or basis upon which an assertion is made—the grounds for making a claim or an argument, the grounds for reaching a particular conclusion. In traditional philosophy the ground has been "reason"; in science it has more often been "cause," "evidence for," or "proof."

As I have pointed out, in the recent history of the development of science, traditional scientific concepts have been dramatically and substantially revised, and yet the rational ground remains essentially unchanged. Science no longer relies solely on Newtonian laws of nature, of course, but its basic dependence on Newton's objective, mathematical methods and proofs endures. As we have noted in our discussion of periodic breakthroughs, the "radical" discoveries of modern physics are even yet validated on rational, mathematical "grounds." For all the disturbance these irruptions have brought to the tradition and to the accumulative body of scientific knowledge (and to our practical lives), they spring from the original root.

A system of thinking (when thinking _is_ systematic, e.g., rational) can be turned this way or that, like a map or an architectural schematic; it can be modified and emended or even reversed—if A is affirmative and Z is negative, the poles may be reversed so that A is negative, Z affirmative, to the disturbance of everything between—without violence to the underlying system itself.

Similarly, in philosophy in the late nineteenth century, not so long before Einstein upset the equilibrium of science, Friedrich Nietzsche brought an equally disturbing interruption to the two-thousand-year development of rational philosophy. I discussed this crisis briefly above when I outlined Heidegger's response to it. To show the movement in philosophy, I shall return to the climactic point near the end of the nineteenth century when there appeared this brash trail-blazer of a philosopher with his dangerous heresies, denouncing ideological "truth" per se and, scornfully, "goodness" and the rest of the "virtues." The idealism posited by Plato was negated by Nietzsche's devastating works—negated on the very grounds that Plato had established, i.e., grounds of reason: the ideals could not after all be justified rationally; they were contradicted by the (new) "truth": "life."

I would compare Nietzsche's achievement to the biblical Samson's triumph, since he seemed single-handedly to bring a two-thousand year development of philosophy crashing down around him, except that of course he did not overthrow philosophy single-handedly; philosophy had been moving toward such conclusions as his for a century. And besides, he did not overcome rational thinking after all, but only reversed it—a reversal something like the one I described above in which A and Z are reversed without changing the underlying system to which they belong. Heidegger states the principle:

> ... in reversing the most ruthless and insidious enslaving prevails; that reversing overcomes nothing but merely empowers the reversed and provides it with what it hitherto lacked, namely, consolidation and completion. ( _Contributions to Philosophy_ , 307)

Nietzsche achieved a reversal, and not an uprooting, of the rational tradition in that he used reason to expose the failure of reason to explain or justify "life."

Of course, undermining reason Nietzsche undermined the ground on which he was building his own argument. Nevertheless,Nietzsche's thought sent Western philosophy reeling, unhinging the cultural constructions that had been built upon it and the personal faith and hopes invested in them.

Nietzsche claimed that the future would require a new kind of "man"— _der Obermensch_ —capable of going forward into an uncharted future without relying on the modes of intellectual and emotional reassurance and guidance that philosophy had previously provided: i.e., truths, morals (forms of _ressentiment_ , Nietzsche called them). In _Thus Spake Zarathustra_ he proffered the image of a man balancing on a tightrope crossing an abyss. The human that the times demanded must be capable of negotiating a precipitous passage over the gulf opening up in the path ahead—a dizzying nothingness where formerly there had been truth and faith. On the other side of the gaping abyss lay the future, which appeared to Nietzsche as an unruly, inscrutable perplexity of competing forces (see the last paragraph in _The Will to Power_ ). Having characterized the ultimate nature of "being" as "will to power," he concluded: " _This world is the will to power—and nothing besides!_ And you yourselves are also this will to power—and nothing besides" ( _The Will to Power_ 550).

Nietzsche's influence was broad and profound and enduring. However, the alarm, the urgency, that his works initially evoked across the modernist spectrum of intellectual life, from philosophy to literature and the arts, subsided over time as its ripple-effects spread across the culture, joining forces with the rapidly shifting realities of life. Science-technology developed exponentially, exploding into a dizzying proliferation of discovery and experimentation via technological advances and devices.

* * *

After the fall of faith in founding ideals, philosophers reformulated their thinking in terms of ... of the philosopher in each case, but in each case in terms of loss of the former ground. Philosophy turned, disillusioned, from the search for ultimate Meaning or Truth. The "ground" of thinking and understanding and knowledge must be searched out anew or set up provisionally and stabilized somehow.

The major philosopher following Nietzsche was Martin Heidegger, to whom this tract you're reading is dedicated. Of the other philosophers of the twentieth century I shall cite only two or three examples.

If for Nietzsche the new ground of thinking is Will to Power, for Jean-Paul Sartre the new ground is _existence_. Much twentieth-century philosophy is characterized as "existential," though the philosophy varies from one existentialist to another. In general we can say that all forms of existentialism differ from former philosophy in that they oppose the concept of essence, essentialism, i.e., the Platonic notion that beings have a given, fixed essence—a general "nature" for Aristotle, a "soul" for Christianity; a seed or core from or around which beings develop their original potentialities. Sartre's thinking, because the notion of _existence_ is central in it, can introduce and represent the genre here particularly well.

In Sartre's terms, each person "is" not who s/he _already_ _is_ or even who s/he _intends to become_ , but is instead whoever s/he _proves_ _to be_ —proves by action, i.e., by decisions manifest in deeds. Thus Sartre "proved" his own existence in the works of philosophy and literature that he produced, in his direct military participation in the French resistance to the Nazi Occupation, and by his polemical writings inspiring, persuading, and provoking others to act.

Following Sartre in the last half of the twentieth century, other thinkers influenced by Nietzsche and Heidegger, as Sartre had been, attempted a radical re-thinking of _thinking_ itself, a project which telescoped into the re-thinking of the nature of language. Philosophy until this century had developed more leisurely and rationally, enduring the shocks of history and of science as it evolved, and also incorporating or appropriating them, carrying them along. But now philosophy broke up and scattered: "Things [fell] apart," as the Irish poet William Butler Yeats put it; (mentioned above) "the centre cannot hold."

Jacques Derrida, one of Heidegger's students, mentioned above, initiated a philosophical movement he called Deconstruction (hi-jacking Heidegger's project of _Destruktion_ and carrying it off to his own purpose), a broad, rigorous program of breaking down the founding and guiding concepts of Western thought. Derrida dominated American and Continental thinking for a few decades, diverting philosophy from the radical path of thinking that Heidegger had attempted to break open. Yet Derrida failed to uproot Platonism (underlying his new concepts which depend upon the old verities for their new contradictions) or to break open new grounds for the chance, caprice, arbitrariness of the thinking his own art and genius enjoyed and inspired.

Today mainstream ("analytic") philosophy, discounting the "ground" as an archaic notion, grounds itself in things themselves, facts, scientific and practical realities, and can programmatically accommodate itself to the social sciences' displacement of "ideology."

* * *

Science, on the other hand, was not unsettled by the radical upheaval in philosophy in the last century. Today it still sets forth upon each investigation it undertakes without questioning its own ground—its own presuppositions about the nature of the object of its investigation or the nature of the investigation—but takes for granted the rational ground established by the Socratic Greeks, and the scientific method that has developed on that ground, the method that Newton established and which Kant secured, an approach to the physical universe via objective questioning and experimentation with mathematical verification.

In short, the ground of science is the human capability to reason—developing over time into a specialized mathematical system amplified and multiplied indefinitely by modern computer technology. This ground is, as we speak, receding from our view, our reach, submerging beneath its own overflowing technological "output."

But, as we have seen, there are surprising correspondences between certain aspects of Heidegger's thinking and certain aspects of advances in quantum physics research today. It is such coincidences that prompted the writing of this essay you are reading. The most striking and essential one, to my mind, lies ahead of us now. We shall make our way to it routing through Heidegger's notion of "ground."

* * *

In Heidegger's works the meaning of "ground" is deepened, enlarged, and enriched. _Ground_ is what underlies or supports, but "underlying" and "supporting" are not taken to be _rational_ grounds. _Ground_ is not an abstract term or concept here. _Ground_ is what something comes from and what it depends on—that from which something arises or upon which it stands. It is something _prior_ to something else in the sense in which root was taken to be prior to stems in the description of time and space above.

Thus, the task for human thinking is to determine or discover the ground of something by following the something (the sunrise, for example) ... wherever it leads. Heidegger's phrase for it is "letting [the something] be"—as opposed to "grasping" it by means of a concept [ _Begriff_ ].

Heidegger discusses _ground_ again and again in his works, and in many ways. There are certain esoteric forms of "ground"—for example, there is _ur-ground_ as the [primary ground of _ground_ ], and there is _un-ground_ as the false or mistaken understanding of _ground_ ( _Contributions_ 265). But the Heideggerian "ground" that is the focus of this essay is the ground I mentioned when we discussed the site of the origin in Heidegger's thought, the site which he often calls the "Open" and also calls "ab-ground"—the time-space _where you are_.

It would seem that the "open" space _where you are_ at this moment would need no elucidation. You look about. You "are" "here," and the world surrounds you; you can see it. But we "know" after our whirlwind flyover of the history of Western philosophy, its rise to prominence in world history until its fall before the rising ascendancy of science-technology, that what "seems" obvious at once is in fact a naive oversimplification of any matter we consider.

And yet. Whether naively or originally, the mystery of the universe envelops us right here. The fundamental human questions are arising anew just here: _where we are_.

* * *

The mystery of the universe is by definition that which we can _not_ see, what seems to lie _beyond_ what we see when we look about. We sensed it when we were drawn to the sunrise at the window, feeling that whatever was drawing us (mystery, wonder) was withdrawing from us at the same time. The elusive source of this attraction is what Heidegger is calling the _ab-ground_. ["It"] _Ab_ in Latin means "from" or "away from." The _ab-ground_ is the mystery that eludes us, the ground that is "away."

In Heidegger's phrase "the absence of ground" ( _ab-ground_ ), the word _ground_ has special significance. It means "truth." (You will not be surprised to learn that the word "truth" is emptied of its former "meaning" and renewed from the root.) But if the "ground" in the phrase means "truth," then the phrase presents a logical impasse:

> If truth = the absence of ground,  
>  and ground = truth,  
>  then truth = the absence of truth.

We see that "we are moving in a circle." (This sentence recurs throughout Heidegger's works.)

The circle looks suspiciously like a zero.

But, as I mentioned above, for Heidegger the solution to the problem of the circle is not to get out of the circle. We _cannot_ get out of it—the circle is ours; it belongs to us alone. The solution is to use the zero properly (physicists should take notice). We must examine Heidegger's use of it in this case.

What is the meaning of this claim that "truth" means the absence of ground (truth).

* * *

In my account of the history of philosophy, above, you have already witnessed the disappearance of "truth." I have described the crisis in Western thinking in the last century when "truth" slipped out of the grasp of philosophy.

For the Greeks, "truth" meant "absolute truth," and it always lay out of sight, beyond the "world"—for Plato in another, ideal, realm. For Christianity truth resided in heaven or in the mind of God. And for Newtonian physics after the Enlightenment truth belonged to the abstract mathematics of natural law. The ground, the truth, was out of sight in each case, but it was certain nonetheless, secure; and it ensured the validity of rational thought. However, as I recounted, in the philosophy of the late nineteenth century, "truth" lost its former meaning, lost its certainty, its security.

If there is nothing, or nothing knowable, outside of language/thought that "is"—if there is no "truth" to validate human thinking and understanding and knowledge—then we (humans and language) are adrift in non-sense, language is babble, and "understanding" is an obsolete concept, a delusion.

Does not this bleak prospect represent our very situation today? We cannot _fix_ language, cannot affix it to [ground it in] "truth." When we talk to each other, we hear direct references to and indirect implications of various, multiple "truths." But if truth is truly _true_ , how can there be various, multiple truths? People's language and their lives seem to rely on truths, or at least on facts or principles or tenets that are taken for truths and used as grounds for understanding life and for making the decisions that choose and shape life. And yet when people's "truths" vary, even contradict each other, there is no way to "tell" (distinguish, know, say) the Truth.

* * *

The problem of truth hinges on the language phenomenon.

In the Western rational tradition since the Socratics, language has been taken to be mimetic (it imitates life) or representative (it re-presents, copies life). We have taken "life" to be separate from what we think and say about it, and the correct correspondence between the two has been the guarantee of the truth of what we think and say.

But after Kant, who led us to think that we cannot "see" (know, understand) the _Ding an sich_ (the thing-in-itself), we are faced with this dilemma: if we cannot "see" what life "is," how can we correctly "say" (repeat or represent) it in language? Thus we lose our confidence in the correspondence between what we see and what we say, between life and language.

You can see that this is the very problem that Heidegger traces (as I sketched above) from Descartes through Kant to Nietzsche and into the present. Once _thought_ (Descartes's "I think"), ergo language, became separated conceptually from _the object of thought_ ("life"), the two—philosophy (thinking, language) and life—drifted farther and farther apart, so that today it is uncertain that we can discern or understand the connection between the two or even that we can know that the two _are_ connected.

We have not been able to regain or reconstruct a reliable bridge between our _understanding_ and our _life_. We have been unable to regain or reconstruct a common meaning that can explain "life" or can explain us to each other. "Meaning" has lost its meaning.

* * *

In Heidegger's thought, language and life are securely, intimately, and essentially intertwined from their origin, in the Open. In this view, the work of language is not to imitate or represent life, as though language and life were separate and comparable things, but instead language works as something of a midwife to life, takes part in the original appearing of "things." For Heidegger, the site of the origin, where a being comes to "be," is at the same time the moment of the origin _of language_.

Aristotle's shadow falls across our path again. Ever since Aristotle defined man as the talking animal, speech has been considered the primary characteristic of the human.

But where does the human get language? From noone? nowhere? It just "is"??

(Yes.)

Language, it seems, does not exist or work except as an _already_ existing, working system of language, nor can it exist or work outside a "world" for it to signify (a system of relations _already_ in place and operating among speakers and things). Nietzsche as well as Ferdinand Saussure, a founding scholar of linguistics and semiotics at the turn of the last century, followed by thinkers such as Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, have made the case that humans do not acquire and develop language piecemeal, i.e., by learning single words and accumulating them, but that language must _already_ be working _in toto_ , as a whole, in order for individual words to work to give "meaning."

Heidegger has written extensively on the character of language as the site of the "It gives" at the origin (i.e., in space-time, in the Open). In work after work it is human language, words, decision, that brings things or beings into existence. What is potential or "covered-over," "sheltered," is drawn into the light, into "being," at the human site of _Dasein_ —in the event of language.

If the ideas packed into the last sentence seem to defy credibility (they do), perhaps I can reassure you (or alarm you further) by drawing another couple of comparisons with recent research in physics.

When we cited the Heisenberg principle above, we referred to the dramatic enactment of an event in scientific research as strange as the event of language in Heidegger's thought.

There in the scientific laboratory, where subjective human "contamination" of objective experimentation is eliminated as far as possible, Heisenberg found what amounts to human participation and intervention in the event under observation, as the scientist sets up the parameters, sets the "trap," so to speak, to catch an event as it occurs—for example, particle/wave behavior, mentioned above—and determines precisely what transpires in it and to what effect. Heisenberg's discovery of the "uncertainty principle" and physics' continuing discoveries of uncanny quantum behavior that baffles and tempts modern physics seem to have crossed the line that used to separate the observer from the observed.

In an essay entitled "If Science is Conscious of Its Limits ....," Heisenberg cites as "the essential insight of modern physics" a statement by Sir Arthur Eddington, an eminent astronomer and physicist of the preceding generation:

> We have found that where science has progressed the farthest, the mind has but regained from nature that which the mind has put into nature. We have found a strange footprint on the shore of the unknown. We have devised profound theories, one after another, to account for its origin. At last, we have succeeded in reconstructing the creature that made the footprint. And Lo! It is our own. (Qtd. in _Quantum Questions_ 73.)19

The uncanny "truth" of the matter for both Heidegger and modern physics is that the observer, the human, does not stand outside the event he observes (call it "life"), separate from it, and, further, that in the very act of examining life (in physics) or "saying" it (Heidegger's word), he cannot but take part in it. The human is not a mere observer, a mere witness to events; s/he is a participant. And as an actor s/he cannot escape a share of responsibility for what transpires in the "observing" or "saying."

* * *

Let us return again to the window and the sun rising in the east (or the earth setting in the west). Something unseeable, unsayable, draws us to the event, something that eludes our understanding. I have called this point of encounter the site of the origin, the Open, "where you are."

Heidegger describes the role of the human, Dasein, at the site of the origin in this way: Dasein stands "there" at the interface between what Heidegger calls "Earth" and what he calls "World." "Earth" refers to what is "concealed" (what is only potential as yet)—what lies beyond our questions about what confronts us within and without. "World" refers to that which we do "see," "understand," "know"—the world that has already been brought forward into the light: the human abode.

_Earth_ as the concealed or the "sheltered-over" is what the Greeks called _phusis_. In "The Origin of the Work of Art," Heidegger offers another telling phrase for it. Earth is "irreducible spontaneity" (157, 171-2)—it is potentiality, the possible, the yet-to-be-decided.

In opposition to Earth, _World_ is the "unconcealed"—the world of things which have been _decided_ , i.e., "wrested" out of the concealed bed of potentiality into the Open, _as things_ —knowable, related.

In "The Origin of the Work of Art,"( _Basic Writings_ , 139-212) Heidegger describes the dramatic movement of _Earth_ into _World_ at the site of human decision, here mainly in artworks (see, for example, how a Greek temple gathers, holds, and even today discloses, reopens up, the ancient Greek world, 167-69). Another essay in the same collection, "Building, Dwelling, Thinking" 347-63), shows the same dramatic movement at the same site, this time in the work of designing, engineering, and constructing the world of the human abode, a place for human "dwelling."

For Heidegger the point of origin, the place where things or entities or beings originate, the place where World is real-ized, is not the site of a "natural" event (such as a spontaneous Big Bang), but the Moment of _decision,_ the Moment when Dasein "wrests" the "thing" from Earth into World—from the concealed into the unconcealed, from "irreducible spontaneity" ( _phusis_ , potentiality) into language, from the dark into the light.

* * *

The "Moment" of decision is the very "there" (here, now) of time-space. We find ourselves again at the site of the ab-ground. We know this place. It is the Open, where-you-are, facing the sunrise.

The emptiness of time-space is the site of the origin. But however the emptiness of time-space "calls" or tempts, nothing happens, nothing originates, until Dasein contests the emptiness by dint of its own "there"-being. In the struggle of this contest, "things" appear/occur in the Open in relation to Dasein.

As you see, the meeting or relationship between the emptiness of time-space and Dasein is not a consummating event—a poignant/yearning/needful call met by a joyous response: a marriage of lovers. No, the site of origin at the moment of decision is a site of confrontation, conflict—the encounter of "counter-turning" contestants. Against the "hesitating refusal" of empty time-space Dasein sets its own reticence, its "holding back"; the issue is uncertain, undecided. (You have read accounts of artists, saints, or scientists wrestling with angels through the night, the agony and the ecstasy of discovering/deciding "the answer" to problems their work presents to them.)

_Ergo_ : since Decision is Dasein's, and Dasein is the human as it "is" (being-historically) in relation to "being," then whatever "is" (from being's inexhaustible store of potentiality) depends on our Decision.

* * *

We are deciding today to follow the lead of science as it "decides" our "truth," our "good," on its own terms, i.e., on the basis of a systematic rational process, even though in the last century and a half we have witnessed the philosophical unraveling of reason.

It is as if we think we have cut the umbilical that connects science to philosophy, as though we think we can hold a scientific relation with things and abandon "thinking" (now considered to be "ideology"), as though we think that science operates in a realm of the "real" unrelated to "ideas." The actual—the pragmatic, the practical—has risen in our imagination to dominate our conceptual landscape.

But our scientific landscape is, after all, a conceptual construction, a rational system of concepts that neglects any consideration of the concept itself, _as concept_. We equate the _concept_ with thinking per se. We mistake the concept for a transparent window onto "life." But the concept is a singular way of thinking, a child of Western philosophy. Above we glimpsed Heidegger's unveiling of the concept as a way of _grasping_ what it construes rather than a way of receiving "what calls for thinking," letting it "be" in its own "being."

Nowadays, without recognizing its scope and its significance, we observe the transformation that science-technology is working in our lives. We see, for example, miraculous technological revolutions in communication, transportation, health care, etc., and, thus, in our expectations and hopes for the future. We are being swept up into a world which proliferates into worlds of possibilities that transcend the capabilities and, for that matter, the sensibilities and needs of individual human beings.

The whirlwind, changes which shock and amaze our understanding and move us, whether we choose or not, into new territories before we can gather ourselves together, seem to threaten our very "nature," human nature.

We know that scientific research regards "beings" as objective phenomena, subject to observation, to systematic classification, to experimentation and statistical analysis, to technological modification and exploitation. We know that individual human beings, along with other living beings, are regarded as specimens, the human race as a species.

A signal purpose of this essay is to point out the essential loss that attends this objective approach to "beings": the loss, first, of the individual, unique "own-ness" of each individual "specimen," of each "species." We shake off our habitual, drowsy passivity or apathy to discover that we have lost, surrendered, our own personal access to nature and the world, to our own "nature" and the world's. We no longer trust our own senses, intuition, our experience and understanding, to be the arbiter of "truth," to call forth, guide, and validate our judgment. Instead we concede authority to the latest pronouncements of the latest experts, their latest research, findings, however conditional, temporary, and arbitrary they may appear. Whatever could I, myself, "know" that could counter or contest the "proven" "validity" of specialized scientific knowledge?

Meanwhile, human and non-human experimentation has been conducted by scientific institutions, by private corporations, and by the military establishment. The latter is especially troubling, for this secret (though publicly-sponsored) research has often taken its subjects from among its own ranks or prisoners or, indeed, private citizens (subjects were often unaware that they were subjects). We have discovered, therefore, after the fact, unregulated human experimentation as well as ecological contamination, affecting not only the people involved directly in the experiments but also people in the geographical vicinity (an area impossible to determine or control), and affecting also the earth, its ecological constitution and balance—and its future, along with our own.

Research in the chemical industry, including pharmaceutical research, extends beyond experimental and developmental stages to exploit human subjects when it introduces new drugs for consumption among willing, even eager, participants in "studies" or "trials" and also when it is allowed to bring drugs onto the market where the research is continued, the data gathered into statistics that guide the ongoing "experimentation." The public experimentation continues unchecked until there have been enough devastating effects or deaths to warrant public (and corporate) objections and enough alarm to threaten sales, at which point drugs are taken off the market. (Of course, before it is offered to humans this research, has been applied to animals with the same disregard for their "being" as for human being, since they, more freely and unsparingly than human subjects, are taken as specimens of species.)

Perhaps more invidious yet is the chemical and genetic standardization of the human subject under way at this time under our surveillance and with our tacit or outright approval. That is, the standard for our health and well being set by our medical establishment is the ideal of _norm_ alcy. The blood test report returns results, setting our scores against the range of scores that denote normalcy, ergo health. To move our scores into line we apply medications, therapies, or more severe "interventions." Of course, the process of acculturation and education has always nudged or urged people into agreement, conformity, always tended to reduce or eliminate variant or contrary elements of social behavior, both by accident and intention. But never before has it been possible for society to so easily and militantly effect and enforce such standardization.

This factual, physical standardization of the human, as radical and as irreversible as its effects and their ramifications will prove to be, is an abstract notion available only to intellectual speculation, for the most part, and not to the conscious observation of busy people involved in the immediate practicalities of life. However, the advertised effects that accrue to the process appear to the public as miraculous cures and revolutionary possibilities for sustaining and prolonging life.

In fact, we gladly install actual machine parts—organic as well as structural—in our bodies to substitute for malfunctioning natural parts. Further, we have come to consider fetuses and actual offspring as sources of materiel or spare parts (we have long considered animals so) for building or rebuilding the human machine. At our death, we willingly assign our own bodily parts to be divided up among grateful recipients. The practice has become a "moral" imperative.

* * *

We have been tracing science's story, its origin in rational Greek philosophy and its progress through history, through Christian theology into humanistic Enlightenment philosophy, where it branched off from its broad, comprehensive base and narrowed its mathematic scope to an objective, systematic method of ascertaining and validating knowledge. We followed its subsequent channeling into technology.

I have summarized Heidegger's account of this history, this development of a scientific _method_ of formulating and accumulating knowledge, beginning with the assumption that the "thing" (any entity to be observed, understood, known) is an "object" and that the object is separate from and essentially different from the subjective observer who analyzes it.

In contrast to science's objective _cosmos_ I have attempted to set our human " _experience_ of the _world_ "—experience which is not subjective, but originary, prior to science's cosmos. Thus I have exposed some of the losses our "experience of the world" undergoes as we are drawn these days farther and farther into the scientific-technologic conceptualization of life and farther and farther away from our own personal observations (which are more than perceptions), from our own access to insights (which are more than concepts).

A little pair of essays written by Heidegger in the 1940s and first published in 1959 as _Gelassenheit_ (republished in English in 196620) can serve as an _envoi_ for my treatise here.

The first essay, "Memorial Address," presents a public address Heidegger delivered in Messkirch, Germany, on October 30, 1955, to commemorate the 175th birthday of the composer Conradin Kreutzer (1780-1849). The second essay is a dramatic narrative called "Conversation On a Country Path About Thinking." In this piece Heidegger sets forth—proposes and demonstrates at the same time—his antidote to our age's hyper-technological disorientation: it is meditative thinking.

In the commemoration address Heidegger notes that the enduring work of Kreutzer was rooted in his homeland. We have noted throughout this work the significance that _roots_ and _ground_ have in Heidegger's thinking. In this essay Heidegger points out that such "rootedness" or "autochthony" is threatened or doomed by the overwhelming technological transformation of the world in the atomic age. His dire prediction:

> ... No one can foresee the radical changes to come. But technological advance will move faster and faster and can never be stopped. In all areas of his existence, man will be encircled ever more tightly by the forces of technology. These forces, which everywhere and every minute claim, enchain, drag along, press and impose upon man under the form of some technical contrivance or other—these forces, since man has not made them, have moved long since beyond his will and have outgrown his capacity for decision. ( _Discourse On Thinking_ 51).

His antidote:

> "... We can use technical devices and yet with proper use also keep ourselves so free of them, that we may let go of them any time. We can use technical devices as they ought to be used, and also let them alone as something which does not affect our inner and real core. We can affirm the unavoidable use of technical devices, and also deny them the right to dominate us, and so to warp, confuse, and lay waste our nature" .... I would call this comportment toward technology which expresses "yes" and at the same time "no," by an old word, _releasement toward things_ ... (54).

And so, against the unavoidable onslaught of radical technological change, Heidegger pits the possibility of "a new autochthony which someday even might be fit to recapture the old and now rapidly disappearing autochthony in a changed form" (55). As I indicated above, the new root or ground is introduced as it is being demonstrated in the "Conversation." The new root for human thinking is "our inner and real core." The new ground is "meditative thinking" (56).

Living among technological wonders, the human will be challenged to " _think_ " what technology " _is_." Heidegger writes, " _The meaning pervading technology hides itself_." We have seen, above, that for Heidegger, from the dawn of Western thinking a nameless "It gives" has withdrawn from thinking even as it has "called" for thinking. I have cited as examples of this phenomenon our experience with the sunrise at the window and Hamlet's experience with his father's ghost. In the essay I am discussing here, Heidegger refers to this phenomenon ("That which hides itself from us, and hides itself just in approaching us") as the _mystery_.

Our new comportment toward things in our technological age, then, will have two aspects: (1) "releasement toward things," which is the yes-no attitude toward them described above, and (2) "openness to the mystery," which is a thinking that opens-to and awaits thinking-toward the "meaning pervading technology."

The new thinking that opens up for the scientist, the scholar, and the teacher in their "Conversation" brings new thoughts and vocabulary which come as the speakers open themselves up to the questions they contemplate and discuss together. They are able thus to approach, to "say," a new understanding of, in this case, the nature of man, the nature of thinking, the part that "willing" plays in thinking, as well as "releasement" of the will, a waiting-for and an opening-to thinking.

What we can do is to think meditatively—to pit our own nature against the temptation/compulsion to submit to technological domination.

* * *

  1. Greene, Brian. _The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality_. N. Y.: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. 79-80.↩︎

  2. _Basic Writings_. Trans. and Ed. David Farrell Krell. Rev. and exp. ed. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993, 343-63.↩︎

  3. N.Y.: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011.↩︎

  4. Hawking, Stephen. _A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes_. N.Y.: Bantam Books, 1988.↩︎

  5. Heidegger, Martin. _Being and Time_. Trans. John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson. Harper & Row, 1962.↩︎

  6. Heidegger, Martin. _On the Way to Language_. Trans. Peter D. Hertz. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1971, pp. 57-108.↩︎

  7. _On Time and Being_. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. New York: Harper & Row, 1972.↩︎

  8. _On the Way to Language_. Trans. Peter D. Hertz (San Francisco: Harper & Row), 1959, pp. 57-108.↩︎

  9. Heidegger, Martin. _What Is Called Thinking?_ Trans. J. Glenn Gray. New York: Harper & Row, 1968.↩︎

  10. The word _weg_ , "way," has special significance in Heidegger's works, as indicated in titles of collections of essays such as: _Holzweg_ , _Unterwegs zur Sprache_ , _Wegmarken_.↩︎

  11. New York: Oxford UP, 2006.↩︎

  12. "The Second Coming," _The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats_ , eds. Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach, New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1940, 401-02.↩︎

  13. [See _Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universitat_ ," and _Das Rektorat 1933/34_ , Vittorio Klosterman Frankfurt A. M., 1983].↩︎

  14. Heidegger, Martin. _Mindfulness_. Trans. Parvis Emad and Thomas Kalary. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006.↩︎

  15. _Ponderings II-VI, Black Notebooks 1931-1938_. Trans. Richard Rojcewicz. Ed. Peter Trawny. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2016.↩︎

  16. _Heidegger & the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy_. Trans. Andrew J. Mitchell. Chicago: U. of Chicago P, 2015.↩︎

  17. Hawking 15ff.↩︎

  18. "Modern Science, Metaphysics, and Mathematics," _Basic Writings_ , 281-82.↩︎

  19. Wilber, Ken, ed. _Quantum Questions: Mystical Writings of the World's Great Physicists_. Boulder: New Science Library, 1984.↩︎

  20. _Discourse on Thinking_. Trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund. New York: Harper & Row, 1966.↩︎

