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Facing Nature: the Infinite in the Flesh

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Facing Nature: the Infinite in the Flesh Facing Nature: The Infinite in the Flesh Robert Daniel Victorin-Vangerud, B.A., M.Div. This thesis is presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of. Murdoch University Perth, Western Australia 2004 I declare that this thesis is my own account of my research. ------------------------------------- Robert Daniel Victorin-Vangerud i Abstract “Facing Nature: The Infinite in the Flesh” by Robert Victorin-Vangerud This thesis explores the relation between two interpretations of chôra, drawn from a reading of Plato’s Timaeus. The first I label the elemental chôra. The second, I call the social chôra. The first chapter addresses the elements in Ionian philosophy, with an eye toward the political and social backdrop of the important cosmological notion of isonomia, law of equals. Here social and elemental are continuous. Chapter two looks at the next phase of Presocratic thought, Elea, specifically Parmenides and his influence on later thought, then turns to Heidegger’s reading of Parmenides’ through the key word of alêtheia. Finally, I offer a reading of Parmenides through a different key word— trust. The third chapter examines Plato’s cosmology in the Timaeus, focusing on the way the beginning of this dialogue inflects the dialogue in a political/social direction, putting the social chôra in tension with the elemental chôra that the body of the Timaeus’ discusses. In the fourth chapter, which examines the Phaedrus, this tension is inverted, since this dialogue on writing and justice set in what proves to be the mesmerizing and erotic elemental milieu of the world outside the walls of the polis. The second half of the dissertation turns to some modern thinkers within the phenomenological tradition or its wake who write about elementals. Chapter five examines Gaston Bachelard’s reveries on imagination which dream the natural world of fire, air, water, and earth from the standpoint of what he calls material and dynamic imagination, concepts that imply a strong sense of embodiment. Chapter six treats Levinas’ description of the elemental and fixes it in a stark relation to the human. I will suggest some possible points of contact between the elemental and the social in Levinas. Chapter seven turns to John Sallis’ analysis of the imagination as the means of access proper to the elemental in ways that differ from Bachelard. He position the earth as a fundamental other. I will suggest that in the end his position inherits Heidegger’s lack of emphasis on embodied and needy humanity. Alphonso Lingis offers his own unique reading of the elemental in a more Levinasian and Merleau-Pontian vein, speaking of the directives the world, both human and natural, puts to us, and returning to a philosophy of substance that puts the body in the picture. Chapter eight uses his thought to focus the issue of the dissertation. ii For Karen 1956-2002 For Aaron 1991- and William 1997- iii (The sun shines.) --Martin Heidegger1 Never would it be possible for a stone, no more than for an airplane, to elevate itself toward the sun in jubilation and to move like a lark, which nevertheless does not see the open. --Heidegger2 Words cannot express the joy that the sun brings to all living things. --Carl Linnaeus3 Sola skinner likt, på fattig folk og rikt. The sun shines the same on poor people and rich. --Norwegian proverb Mine, thine.--‘This dog is mine,’ said those poor children; ‘that is my place in the sun.’ Here is the beginning and the image of the usurpation of all the earth. --Pascal4 Prior to the practical perception that draws out a practicable layout and pursues objectives, there is the appetite for the elements. -- Alphonso Lingis5 1 Parmenides, André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz, trans. (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1992), p. 107. 2 Ibid, p. 160. 3 Journals, Wilfrid Blunt, trans., 1971, cited in The Oxford Book of Nature Writing, Richard Mabey, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 51. 4 Pensees, 295. 5 The Imperative (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1998), p. 17. iv Table of Contents Abstract p. ii Acknowledgements p. vi Introduction p. 1 Chapter 1: Reading Anaximander p. 26 Chapter 2: Letting the Same Lie: Parmenides and Heidegger p. 72 Chapter 3: Strangers, Bastards, and Roots: The Beginning of Plato’s Timaeus p. 146 Chapter 4: Soul in Place: The Phaedrus p. 195 Chapter 5: Dancing with Zeno: Gaston Bachelard’s Aesthetic Cosmology p. 242 Chapter 6: Destroying the Sacred Groves: Levinas on the Elemental p. 281 Chapter 7: John Sallis: Other and Earth p. 326 Chapter 8: Directed Flesh: Alphonso Lingis p. 367 Conclusion p. 403 Bibliography p. 411 v Acknowledgments I would like to acknowledge my sons, Aaron and Will, for inspiration in various forms. In the years to come I aspire to live out an apology for the way this project has distracted me from them, I hope not too much to their detriment. My wife, Nancy, has supported me at every step. She is a grace to me. I thank Paul MacDonald for offering consistently sound advice on matters both practical and theoretical. This project would not have materialized without his help and would have been much better had I followed his advice more consistently. I thank Martin McAvoy for helping me launch this venture in its early years. Gratitude also is due to Peta Bowden for suggestions and encouragement and to Lubica Ucnik for the same and for recommending I read Patočka. I have appreciated the inspiration of the Sir Walter’s gang at Murdoch University, any of whom I would be glad to call a friend. I have also benefited from time with Horst Ruthrof, Arnold Thompson, Barry Maund, Andrew Brennan, and Niall Lucy, all of whose comments and questions along the way led me to think more clearly. Professor John Llewelyn’s encouragement and generosity of spirit proved essential to this project reaching this stage. In addition, I have tried to do justice to comments from Beatrice Han-Pilé and Ulrich Haas. Thanks go to many people who would have had less direct interest in the content of this work, but whose friendship has so often led them to inquire about its progress. Their voices have bolstered and intrigued me. In particular, I thank my parents for their encouragement to their son. vi In spite of their philosophical differences, Levinas said of Sartre’s personal generosity, “that is the human.” All these persons I have named represent to me the vast pleasure and responsibility of being in debt to the generosity of others. Finally, I must thank Murdoch University for providing the opportunity for this work and the financial support for projects along the way. Also thanks go to the staff of the Cambridge, MN public library and the libraries at the University of Minnesota, St. John’s University, Collegeville MN, and St. Benedict’s University, St. Joseph, MN. I dedicate this work to my sister, Karen Hadland, who died too soon, of cancer, some three years past now, and to my sons whose futures remain open. It is my hope that the force of the hyphens on the page of dedication might not be overlooked. Prospect Park, Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.A. vii Introduction In the fifth century BCE, Xenophanes insisted that the universe did not inhale (mê mentoi anapnein).1 In the twentieth century Emmanuel Levinas muses, “yet we must now ask if even the difference that separates essence in war from essence in peace does not presuppose that breathlessness of the spirit, or the spirit holding its breath, in which since Plato what is beyond the essence is conceived and expressed: And ask if this breathlessness or holding back is not the extreme possibility of the Spirit, bearing a sense of what is beyond the essence?”2 Xenophanes’ comment demonstrates his distaste for anthropomorphic deities and a passion for perfect completeness that took off in the work of Parmenides. For the cosmos to have begun with an inhalation, as certain Greek cosmogonies seemed to believe, would have meant the presence of something outside of it to be inhaled, something more than all that is, that exceeds Parmenides’ ‘what is.’ This beyond is a puzzling notion. Xenophanes seems to have been denying the ‘beyond all that is.’ Levinas, one suspects, sought to hear this ‘otherwise,’ and the image of “holding its breath,” preserves the sense that this beyond is not actualized as real, like being, but it is still within proximity, what he calls the infinite. Xenophanes’ passion for wholeness and aseity manifested itself in various ways in ancient Greece: Collectively it appeared in claims about the wholeness of the cosmos (if not ‘the’ ontos), such as Parmenides’ image of a sphere, and distributively it can be seen in the revulsion provoked by Zeno’s paradoxes and the notion of infinite divisibility. The word that seems to form some continuity between these two moments, 1 Theo Gerard Sinnige, Matter and Infinity in the Presocratic Schools and Plato (Assen, Netherlands: Koninklijke Van Gorcum, 1968), p. 59. 1 the collective and the distributive, is ‘apeiron.’ Apeiron gets translated as the ‘boundless’ or the ‘infinite,’ but also as ‘indeterminate.’ The Pythagoreans associated the word with evil. A.W. Moore distinguishes two senses of the infinite.3 He calls the first sense the ‘metaphysical’ infinite, the whole, in the sense of unbounded by anything beyond it. The second sense, which comes to be associated with Zeno, he names the ‘mathematical’ infinite. The metaphysical infinite is completeness, the sense of ‘no more.’ In regard to apeiron, this ‘no more’ plays out in the view that the cosmos is unbounded, not exceeded by anything outside of it.
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