Philosophy Series Contents (to be updated with each new installment)

Philosophy Series 1 – Prelude to the Philosophy Series

Philosophy Series 2 – Introduction

Philosophy Series 3 – Appendix A, Part 1

Philosophy Series 4 – The Pre-Socratics – Hesiod

Philosophy Series 5 – A Detour of Time

Philosophy Series 6 – The Origin

Philosophy Series 7 – Eros

Philosophy Series 8 – Thales

Philosophy Series 9 – An Interlude to Anaximander

Philosophy Series 10 – On the Way to Anaximander: Language and Proximity

Philosophy Series 11 – Aristotle and Modernity: The Eternal and Science

Philosophy Series 12 – Levinas and the Problem of Metaphysics

Philosophy Series 13 – On Origin

Philosophy Series 14 – George Orwell and Emmanuel Levinas Introspective: Socialism and the Other

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Philosophy Series 5

A Detour of Time

The continuation of Hesiod’s cosmogenesis cited here declares,

But afterwards she lay with Heaven and bore deep-swirling Oceanus, Coeus and Crius and Hyperion and Iapetus, Theia and Rhea, Themis and Mnemosyne and gold-crowned Phoebe and lovely Tethys. After them was born Cronos the wily, youngest and most terrible of her children, and he hated his lusty sire.¹

In later Roman mythology Cronus erroneously became chronus (χρόνος², time). In Hesiod, Cronus was a child of Earth and Sky. He was a Titan god. Hesiod described Cronus as “Crooked-counseled and terrible”. Cronus castrated his father, Sky and overthrew him. Cronus impregnated his sister Rhea and then ate all the children except one that Rhea hid, Zeus. The Romans associated Cronus with Saturn. Saturn was extremely popular with the Romans. In fact, the popularity lasts to the present day. The seventh day of the Judaeo-Christian week is in Latin, Dies Saturni (“Day of Saturn”) or Saturday. Virgil, a Roman poet, associated Cronus with a heroic king of Italy³. This association made Cronus a hero and not the detestable figure in Greek mythology. However, Ovid, another Roman poet, was primarily responsible for making Cronus (the Greek Titan) into chronus (time) in his book Metamorphoses. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Saturn reigns in the Golden Age which was marred by continual rebellion against the heavens. Ovid associates these upheavals with the beginning of change and becoming. This association was the beginning of the confusion between Cronus (Saturn) and chronus (time).

This ‘confusion’ or ‘forgetting’ is important as it assigns a false note to the historical opus of what ‘temporal’ means. Even more, it may be here that that chronus is canonized as a sequence or succession of ‘now’ moments which proceed from the past to the future. This is ‘clock’ time. Chronus came to mean quantity of time. However, the Greeks had another important concept of time, the fullness of time, kairos (καιρός). Kairos was quality as opposed to quantity. Kairos was the in-between-moments, the right time. It was time that gathers together, pulls in and ruptures the vulgar notion of time as chronus as Heidegger thought chronus. Kairos was not governed by ‘now’ moments. It could not ‘fit’ into a synchronous⁴ (sýnchronos, equivalent to syn- syn⁵– + chrón ( os ) time + –os⁶ adj. suffix) temporal scheme. “Chronos is that in which there is kairos and kairos is that in which there is little chronos [chronos esti en ho kairos kai kairos esti en to ou pollos chronos].”⁷ This is important because for the Homeric era, temporality was not thought in terms of a neutral, generic grid of sequential ‘now’ moments. Quantity did not hold sway over quality. Moments were not equal in ‘essence’ but had quality, the supreme moment. Kairos gathered in time but did not possess it. It was a ‘between’ time that was not this moment or the last moment or the next moment. Hesiod’s chaos had the quality of kairos. It was not eternal.

The ancient Greeks did not even have a concept of ‘eternity’. Eternity, as we think it, was a later Latin, Christian, extension of chronus. If chronus, which came to be thought as a neutral, grid (the common idea of physical time), never ends the Christian notion of eternity would result. Walter Brogan explains the notion of eternity here:

Aidion is often translated as the eternal or eternity-aeternitas. But the notion of the eternal as opposed to the temporal is a later development of Christian thinking. The literal meaning of the Latin aeternitas is not “atemporal,” but “to return always,” and in this way to be everlasting. The Greek word aidion comes from aei and dios. Dios is a word used by Homer to mean the noblest. Thus, it is the word for Zeus, as well as a word for men and women of excellence and of noble nations. It is also used to depict the powers of nature. It means that which is divine-like. Aei means throughout time. Aidion means that which holds itself through time in the presence of the divine and thus is. The aei is the enduring of a being that maintains itself in its “isness.” Thus, Heidegger says: “And aei means not only `without stopping’ and `continuously,’ but primarily that which is presently there (das Jeweilige)-he who is ruling at the time (ho aei basi- leuon), not some sort of `eternal’ ruling”.⁸

Kairos could not be contained or possessed by a generic ‘now’ moment. It could not be held in presence. Kairos exceeded this notion in a similar fashion to the way Descartes thought the notion of infinity exceeded its concept. It may be that Hesiod thought the first, chaos, as kairos. In Hesiod’s other work, Works and Days, he writes what would later become a famous dictum: μέτρα φυλάσσεσθαι· καιρὸς [kairos] δ’ ἐπὶ πᾶσιν ἄριστος; Observe due measure: and best in all things is the right time (kairos) and right amount⁹. It would not make sense to Hesiod to think of what came before or after kairos. Our contemporary logic would inform us that there must be a before or after to Hesiod’s supreme cosmogonic time but that logic (logos) would not necessarily follow for Hesiod or the Muses. The Muses were full of play and gaiety. They basked in kairos as a child in play. The important thing to remember here is that the very first (protista) is not temporalized into a ‘now’ moment or even a-temporality (not temporal). The very first is the fullness of the supreme, in-between-moment, a quality not contained in neutrality either. I will note it here that kairos will become an interesting problem between Aristotle and the Sophists in later discussions.

Perhaps historically, kairos could speculatively be thought along the lines of Kant’s categorical understanding as a-priori. It is also spoken of in Christianity with regard to the fulfillment or redemption of time that occurred in Christ. The latter philosophical notions of the transcendental may also appropriate its temporality from kairos. For Heidegger¹⁰ and the ancient Greek skeptics the historical epoch (epoché, ἐποχή, epokhē, to hold back, suspension, cessation)¹¹ or age (aon) is not a collection of ‘now’ moments but the quality of an era. Better yet, kairos could be thought along the lines of Heidegger’s notion of pre-cognition or pre-understanding which always, already ‘is’. Heidegger would refer to kairos as “the moment of vision” (augenblick, literally “glance of the eye”). Augenblick is the moment of decision. As such, it is conflict and strife (polemus). For Heidegger, augenblick is an event, Ereignis. Thomas Sheehan writes of Ereignis as:

In ordinary German Ereignis means “event,” but in Heidegger’s retrieval of the unsaid in Aristotle, it becomes a name for the structure of the ontological movement that enables all being-significant. Playing on the adjective eigen (“one’s own”), Heidegger comes up with the neologism Er-eignung: ontological movement as the process of being drawn into what is “one’s own”…¹²

Ereignis is the event that pulls (sways) or appropriates meaning or significance as the ‘there’ of Being. This ‘pulling forth’ is also a withdrawal, an expropriation, of logos or as Sheehan states it, ” a differentially structured semantic field is engendered and sustained, is appropriation-by-absence”.¹³ For Heidegger, Ereignis is not temporality or Being but an in-between which gives (es gibt) time and Being. Ereignis as event is not “simply an occurrence, but that which makes any occurrence possible”.¹⁴ The event is the ‘there is’ (il y a) and ‘it gives’ (es gibt) of time and Being. It is the da (there) of Being. This German idiom, es gibt, denotes a passive and an active voice albeit grammatically neutral.¹⁵ It literally means ‘it gives’ as active but the idiom connotes ‘there is’ as pasive. In ancient Greek and Latin there wasn’t a separate word for ‘it’.¹⁶ However, what is meant by ‘it’ in those languages was not as we understand ‘it’ but ranged in meaning from the irrelevant to the demonic (δαίμων, daimôn).¹⁷ For classical Greece the daimôn was not evil as later Latin thinkers envisioned it. In Socrates the daimôn was an oracle, wisdom from unknown otherness. Therefore, the notion of it was not a dead, neutral ‘thing’ but an indeterminate other. Moreover, with regard to es gibt, ancient Greek grammar has a middle voice. The middle voice does not exist in English, German or modern Greek. The middle voice indicates a simultaneous action on both subject and predicate. The middle voice is not forced into an acting or being acted upon but draws together the meanings of codetermined, mutual determination and active reciprocity. Ereignis is not an event that happens to a subject nor is Ereignis an ‘it’ as a thing. Ereignis is not neutral, already understood as mere ‘thingness’.

The abstract notion of ‘thingness’ which arises from the already understood, ontological, orientation to beings as separate and ultimately divisible ‘stuff’ we know as ‘thing’ comes from the equally abstract notion of temporality as a linear succession of ‘now’ moments. When temporality is pre-understood as equally chopped up packets of ‘now’ moments, the ‘stuff’ of time must also be abstractly considered as well as equal packets of matter (ὕλη, hyle) we think as ‘things’. For modernity, the self-evident, simple and superficial presentation of all stuff as things is a simple ‘given’ from an un-thought history; it is a practical component of everyday life which seems ludicrous to question. However, that is precisely what Heidegger and the ancient Greeks addressed in their thinking of being (ontos).¹⁸ From this abstract notion of ontos it is difficult to understand the ancient Greek notion of kairos. Heidegger shows how our everyday experience of being in the mode of instrumentality (i.e., our being with the hammer is such that the hammer disappears in use) counters the notion of being as present-at-hand (when the hammer breaks and becomes conspicuous as present-at-hand) which is also the mode of ‘thingness’ where we already understand beings as separate objects to be observed in their abstract presence and not in our participation with being. He also showed how lived time has a stretch which may slow as in the experience of boredom or anxiety and speed in moments of joy or exhilaration which counters the abstracted notion of time that thinks in terms of ‘clock time’ as linear ‘now’ moments.¹⁹ Likewise, when kairos as the fullness of the moment is thought in terms of a qualitative gathering of temporality, as holding sway for meaning and significance for beings, epochs and ages, it is difficult from a ‘common sense’, ‘intuitive’ point of view (vista) to concretely get past our historical abstractions of chronus. Perhaps some modern ways to begin to think this is with the birth of a child, the death of a mother, the end of communism or the ‘secularization’ of a religious world. Even what Heidegger calls being-towards-death is a moment that holds sway throughout our lives. These practical experiences of temporality as kairos was, in concrete ways, more practical for ancient Greek thinking of temporality than our modern notion of ‘clock time’. The question of what is really real, kairos or chronus was a question for ontos, being, ontology which concerned Aristotle in what the Latin mind thought as ‘metaphysics’.²⁰ However, the ancient Greeks thought of these questions in terms of phusis; the question of physics as it appears, as idea, and as ‘being as such’ or ‘first cause’. It was difficult for the Latin mind, the Christian weltanschauung, to think of Hesiod’s chaos not as ‘eternal’, chronus existing from all time and through all time, but as kairos, the gathering together and holding sway, the fullness, completeness (telos) of moments which was not ‘a moment’ but the in-between of the moments of chronus. Temporality thought as kairos does depend on the abstract and quantized schema of linear ‘now’ moments proceeding from an infinite past to an infinite future but from concrete and practical qualities which determine (hold sway over) beings and being, civilizations and history, forms (peras) and indefinite (apeiron), origin (archê) and chaos.

Philosophy Series 6 – The Origin

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¹ See Link

² See Link

³ Georgics 1.336; 2.406, 539; 3.93; and Aeneid6.794; 7.49; 8.319; 12.830

⁴ See Link

⁵ See Link

⁶ See Link

⁷ Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, Trans. Patricia Daley (Stanford: Stanford U.P., 2005), page 68-9.

⁸ Walter A. Brogan. Heidegger And Aristotle: The Twofoldness Of Being (Kindle Locations 1035-1041). Kindle Edition.

⁹ Hesiod, Works and Days 694 ;Translation of the Works and Days are based on Evelyn-White 1929

¹⁰ Martin Heidegger, Time and Being, trans. by Joan Stambaugh (Harper and Row, 1972), page 9.

¹¹ See Link

¹² GESCHICHTLICHKEIT /EREIGNIS /KEHRE, Thomas Sheehan, Existentia (Meletai Sophias) [Budapest], XI, 3-4 (2001), 241-251. See Link (pdf page 10)

¹³ GESCHICHTLICHKEIT /EREIGNIS /KEHRE, Thomas Sheehan, Existentia (Meletai Sophias) [Budapest], XI, 3-4 (2001), 241-251. See enowning.blogspot.com/2011/02/thomas-sheehan-on-what-heidegger-means.html

¹⁴ Martin Heidegger, Time and Being, trans. by Joan Stambaugh (Harper and Row, 1972), page 19.

¹⁵ Neutrality is a concern that will be addressed in future discussions of Emmanuel Levinas. However, Heidegger should not quickly be read as denoting es gibt as neutral, a mere it, a thing. Much of his critique of the forgetting of Being since the Greeks is based on thinking of Being in the same type as a ‘thing’. We think we understand the being of a thing as an ‘object’ present-at-hand, something we look at in its pure presence. This understanding of Being as an object or a thing has dominated since the Greeks but Heidegger wants to show that there are other ways of experiencing being such as instrumentality, ready-at-hand, in which we experience the being of a thing such as a hammer in its disappearance in use. We are not looking at the hammer as an object present-at-hand lest we hit our finger. We are using the hammer to accomplish a goal but the hammer itself is not experienced as an object present to our vision. The notion of a hammer in use that is still present-at-hand in some abstract sense is not the concrete way we are experiencing the hammer while using it. Even more, Heidegger wants to make the claim that whenever we ‘see’ being, being retreats, withdraws such that the ‘truth’ of what we see or understand of being is conditioned more by its absence than its presence. Therefore, what we ‘see’ is always embroiled in semblance, appearance, a representation, that cannot capture Being per se. Being cannot be brought to presence even as idea – εἶδος (eidos – that which is seen, form, shape) and ἰδέα (idea – form) . There is always a ex- to being, an excess which cannot be accounted for or brought to light and presence. Therefore, neutrality in es gebt is not so much a neutral article as a referent to Being. It is a further question to ask if Being is third person, neutral or first or second person singular, I or you or plural, we or them. It would be natural to think Being as a kind of high order machine or mechanism but that would fail to understand Heidegger. On the other hand, there is a sense of a determination that Being is either a kind of thing or a kind of person, I (Nietzsche) or other (Levinas). This pathos of thought thinks after the universal. It is the thought that Being is either a type of person (he, she, I, thou, other person, etc.) or a not-person (a substance, thing, matter, mechanism, etc.).

This universal dilemma of one or the other, mutually exclusive, may be a false dilemma. As the ancient Greeks would remind us there is always a both-and or mixture that would constitute a third kind in every binary opposition. There is also a hypothetical, none-of-the-above in every binary opposition which may be thought as ‘abstract’ and not ‘concrete’, possible but not actual or even impossible but nevertheless, hangs on as a persistent ghost of sight. This then poses the question what to do of the ghost, the apparition, the phantasm? Is it mere ‘logic’ to dismiss such tangential nonsense? Has such ‘logic’ ever presented itself historically as the ‘violence of the text’? Has there ever been cases in human history where some people were ‘logically’ considered not-people, erasable, marginalized, deemed irrelevant, silenced, etc.? Are there cases where the canonical text created its own anti-thesis? It certainly seems that this is possible albeit not necessarily so. The tension created in the binary opposition of the person and the not-person is a tension that re-presents itself in idealism (Hegel), realism, positivism, pragmatism, structuralism, modernism and post-modernism (Derrida, Foucault). In both cases of the neutral OR the person, an exclusiveness must be endemic to the argument of the opposing case. It must be shown that one cannot be at the same time with the other. In the history of violence, ‘he’ and ‘she’ sit atop the authenticity of being and not-being is relegated to mere stuff, empty, devoid of qualifications which would evoke the ethical concerns for a ‘he’ or a ‘she’. The way non-human ‘animals’ can qualify for the pronoun ‘he’ or ‘she’ and yet hover closer historically to things than non-things is a clear case of how dialectic logic forces opposites but retain a ghost of an in-between, the uncanny, the phantasm. The in-between, the ghosts of our ‘logic’ face us in our day to day which defy our categorical ontologisms.

This kind of problem occupied much of Greek thinking. Is being one OR many? How can that which is also be that which is not? Can being and not-being be predicated of the same? Can being change or does it persist and endure? What is it that endures or changes such that we can still think it as being? How is movement possible if being is changeless? Aristotle’s answer, as we shall see, was more along the lines of both-and as the two-fold of being (see Walter A. Brogan. Heidegger And Aristotle: The Twofoldness Of Being). Post modernism similar to Marx points to phantasm in the world created by text and artifice which appear as being and what is not, permanence and temporal, human and not, logic and nonsense. Is there a commonality to all these approaches that squelches the Other as other? Levinas would pose the question, how is ethics understood? Are there ways in which the other can be leveled off and totalized into a system? Should we be attentive to this possibility? Is there a history of violence which draws upon components of sameness in every idea-ology, the logos of appearance? Do ideas encapsulate themselves in their own essences? Is the idea system closed or open? Can ideas only open up to other ideas, seeing to other sights, light to other illuminations OR can they point beyond themselves to another type or kind? One answer might be that ideas can only ‘see’ other ideas. If ideas can see ‘other’, wouldn’t that other be an idea? Otherwise, how can seeing see what it can’t see? This inquiry goes back to the same types of questions the ancient Greeks asked. How can being both be and not-be? How can Being be one or many? This is the problem Aristotle addressed in what we now call his work Metaphysics. It is also the direction of Levinas’ inquiry. It is in this tension that we will eventually discover what Jacques Derrida quoting James Joyce tells us, “Jewgreek is greekjew. Extremes meet”

Are we Greeks? Are we Jews? But who, we? Are we (not a chrono- logical, but a pre-logical question) first Jews or first Greeks? And does the strange dialogue between the Jew and the Greek, peace itself, have the form of the absolute, speculative logic of Hegel, the living logic which reconciles formal tautology and empirical heterology after having thought prophetic discourse in the preface to the Phenomenology of the Mind? Or, on the contrary, does this peace have the form of infinite separation and of the unthinkable, unsayable transcendence of the other? To what horizon of peace does the language which asks this question belong? From whence does it draw the energy of its question? Can it account for the historical coupling of Judaism and Hellenism? And what is the legitimacy, what is the meaning of the copula in this proposition from perhaps the most Hegelian of modern novelists: “Jewgreek is greekjew. Extremes meet”?[Writing and Difference, Violence and Metaphysics, ISBN 0-203-99178-8 Master e-book ISBN, page 192]

¹⁶ Martin Heidegger, Time and Being, trans. by Joan Stambaugh (Harper and Row, 1972), page 18.

¹⁷ Martin Heidegger, Time and Being, trans. by Joan Stambaugh (Harper and Row, 1972), page 18.

¹⁸ See this for a relatively easy introduction to Heidegger’s thoughts in Being and Time.

¹⁹ Modern physicists have long since disposed of such simple minded notions of time, Einstein comes to mind, but there are many other intriguing notions of temporality in modern physics which also address the ‘stretch’ of time even with regard to another modern notion – ‘subjectivity’, and its fuzzy relationship with ‘objective’ temporality.

²⁰ See link

The word ‘metaphysics’ is notoriously hard to define. Twentieth-century coinages like ‘meta-language’ and ‘metaphilosophy’ encourage the impression that metaphysics is a study that somehow “goes beyond” physics, a study devoted to matters that transcend the mundane concerns of Newton and Einstein and Heisenberg. This impression is mistaken. The word ‘metaphysics’ is derived from a collective title of the fourteen books by Aristotle that we currently think of as making up “Aristotle’s Metaphysics.” Aristotle himself did not know the word. (He had four names for the branch of philosophy that is the subject-matter of Metaphysics: ‘first philosophy’, ‘first science’, ‘wisdom’, and ‘theology’.) At least one hundred years after Aristotle’s death, an editor of his works (in all probability, Andronicus of Rhodes) entitled those fourteen books “Ta meta ta phusika”—”the after the physicals” or “the ones after the physical ones”—, the “physical ones” being the books contained in what we now call Aristotle’s Physics. The title was probably meant to warn students of Aristotle’s philosophy that they should attempt Metaphysics only after they had mastered “the physical ones,” the books about nature or the natural world—that is to say, about change, for change is the defining feature of the natural world.

This is the probable meaning of the title because Metaphysics is about things that do not change. In one place, Aristotle identifies the subject-matter of first philosophy as “being as such,” and, in another, as “first causes.” It is a nice—and vexed—question what the connection between these two definitions is. Perhaps this is the answer: The unchanging first causes have nothing but being in common with the mutable things they cause—like us and the objects of our experience, they are, and there the resemblance ceases

 The Greek plural noun-phrase ‘ta meta ta phusika‘ became in Medieval Latin the singular noun ‘metaphysica‘—much as the Greek plural ‘ta biblia‘ (‘the books’) became the Latin singular ‘biblia‘ (‘the bible’). The word was used both as a title for Aristotle’s book (now thought of as a single entity) and as the name of the “science” that was its subject-matter. The word for ‘metaphysics’ in every modern European language (‘la métaphysique‘, ‘die Metaphysik‘, ‘la metafisica‘…) is an adaptation of the Latin word to the orthographic and phonetic requirements of that language. This is true even of the non-Indo-European languages (like Finnish and Hungarian) that are spoken in Europe. Works written in some non-European languages, however, use words constructed from native materials both to translate the European word ‘metaphysics’ and to refer to writings in their own philosophical traditions whose subject-matter is similar to the subject-matter of Western metaphysics. For example, the Chinese phrase that is the customary translation of ‘metaphysics’ is an allusion to a statement in the I Ching: “that which is above matter is the Tao”; the phrase can be literally translated as ‘[that which is above matter]-ology’, the final word of the phrase being a “discipline marker” that performs much the same function as the English suffix ‘-ology’. The word that is the usual Arabic translation of ‘metaphysics’ means ‘the science of divine things’. Unlike the Chinese phrase and the Arabic word, however, the European words derived from ‘metaphysica‘ carry no internal indications of their meaning. (The word has, as we have seen, an etymology, but as is so often the case, etymology is no guide to meaning.) It is uncontroversial that these words all mean exactly what ‘metaphysics’ means in English—or, less parochially, that all the European words derived from ‘metaphysica‘ mean exactly the same thing..

Philosophy Series Contents (to be updated with each new installment)

Philosophy Series 1 – Prelude to the Philosophy Series

Philosophy Series 2 – Introduction

Philosophy Series 3 – Appendix A, Part 1

Philosophy Series 4 – The Pre-Socratics – Hesiod

Philosophy Series 5 – A Detour of Time

Philosophy Series 6 – The Origin

Philosophy Series 7 – Eros

Philosophy Series 8 – Thales

Philosophy Series 9 – An Interlude to Anaximander

Philosophy Series 10 – On the Way to Anaximander: Language and Proximity

Philosophy Series 11 – Aristotle and Modernity: The Eternal and Science

Philosophy Series 12 – Levinas and the Problem of Metaphysics

Philosophy Series 13 – On Origin

Philosophy Series 14 – George Orwell and Emmanuel Levinas Introspective: Socialism and the Other

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Philosophy Series 4

The Pre-Socratics¹

Hesiod

Theogony 105-133

χαίρετε, τέκνα Διός, δότε δ᾽ ἱμερόεσσαν ἀοιδήν.
κλείετε δ᾽ ἀθανάτων ἱερὸν γένος αἰὲν ἐόντων,
οἳ Γῆς τ᾽ ἐξεγένοντο καὶ Οὐρανοῦ ἀστερόεντος,
Νυκτός τε δνοφερῆς, οὕς θ᾽ ἁλμυρὸς ἔτρεφε Πόντος.
εἴπατε δ᾽, ὡς τὰ πρῶτα θεοὶ καὶ γαῖα γένοντο
καὶ ποταμοὶ καὶ πόντος ἀπείριτος, οἴδματι θυίων,
ἄστρα τε λαμπετόωντα καὶ οὐρανὸς εὐρὺς ὕπερθεν
οἵ τ᾽ ἐκ τῶν ἐγένοντο θεοί, δωτῆρες ἐάων
ὥς τ᾽ ἄφενος δάσσαντο καὶ ὡς τιμὰς διέλοντο
ἠδὲ καὶ ὡς τὰ πρῶτα πολύπτυχον ἔσχον Ὄλυμπον.
ταῦτά μοι ἔσπετε Μοῦσαι, Ὀλύμπια δώματ᾽ ἔχουσαι
ἐξ ἀρχῆς, καὶ εἴπαθ᾽, ὅ τι πρῶτον γένετ᾽ αὐτῶν.
ἦ τοι μὲν πρώτιστα Χάος γένετ᾽, αὐτὰρ ἔπειτα
Γαῖ᾽ εὐρύστερνος, πάντων ἕδος ἀσφαλὲς αἰεὶ
ἀθανάτων, οἳ ἔχουσι κάρη νιφόεντος Ὀλύμπου,
Τάρταρά τ᾽ ἠερόεντα μυχῷ χθονὸς εὐρυοδείης,
ἠδ᾽ Ἔρος, ὃς κάλλιστος ἐν ἀθανάτοισι θεοῖσι,
λυσιμελής, πάντων δὲ θεῶν πάντων τ᾽ ἀνθρώπων
δάμναται ἐν στήθεσσι νόον καὶ ἐπίφρονα βουλήν.
ἐκ Χάεος δ᾽ Ἔρεβός τε μέλαινά τε Νὺξ ἐγένοντο:
Νυκτὸς δ᾽ αὖτ᾽ Αἰθήρ τε καὶ Ἡμέρη ἐξεγένοντο,
οὓς τέκε κυσαμένη Ἐρέβει φιλότητι μιγεῖσα.
Γαῖα δέ τοι πρῶτον μὲν ἐγείνατο ἶσον ἑαυτῇ
Οὐρανὸν ἀστερόενθ᾽, ἵνα μιν περὶ πάντα καλύπτοι,
ὄφρ᾽ εἴη μακάρεσσι θεοῖς ἕδος ἀσφαλὲς αἰεί.
γείνατο δ᾽ Οὔρεα μακρά, θεῶν χαρίεντας ἐναύλους,
Νυμφέων, αἳ ναίουσιν ἀν᾽ οὔρεα βησσήεντα.
ἣ δὲ καὶ ἀτρύγετον πέλαγος τέκεν, οἴδματι θυῖον,
Πόντον, ἄτερ φιλότητος ἐφιμέρου: αὐτὰρ ἔπειτα
Οὐρανῷ εὐνηθεῖσα τέκ᾽ Ὠκεανὸν βαθυδίνην²

Hail, children of Zeus! Grant lovely song and celebrate the holy race of the deathless gods who are for ever, those that were born of Earth and starry Heaven and gloomy Night and them that briny Sea did rear. Tell how at the first gods and earth came to be, and rivers, and the boundless sea with its raging swell, and the gleaming stars, and the wide heaven above, and the gods who were born of them, givers of good things, and how they divided their wealth, and how they shared their honors amongst them, and also how at the first they took many-folded Olympus³. Tell me all of this, you Muses who have your homes on Olympus, from the beginning [archê, ἀρχῆς], tell who first of them (the gods) came-to-be [genet’, γένετ᾽].

First of all Chaos came-to-be [genet’, γένετ᾽]; but then afterwards Broad-breasted earth, a secure dwelling place forever for all [the immortals who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus], and misty Tartara in the depths under the wide-wayed grounds and Eros who, handsomest among the deathless gods a looser of limbs, in all the gods and in all human beings overpowers in their breasts their intelligence and careful planning. And from Chaos came-to-be both Erebos [ρεβος, the god of deep darkness, shadow] and dark night, and from night, in turn, came-to-be both Aither [the god of upper air, the mist of bright, glowing light, home of the gods] and day, whom she conceived and bore after joining in love with Erebos. But earth first begat, as an equal to herself, starry sky, so that he might cover her on all sides, in order to be a secure dwelling place forever for all the blessed gods, and she begat the tall mountains, pleasing haunts of the goddess-nymphs who make their homes in the forested hills, and also she bore the barren main with its raging swell, the sea, all without any sweet act of love; but then next, having lain with sky, she bore deep-swirling ocean”⁴

This is the beginning of the Hesiod’s Theogony, the birth of the gods, the an-archic, origin of origins, written around 700 BC, more than 2700 years ago. Hesiod was a poet and a contemporary of Homer. The Theogony was probably influenced by Hittite and Babylonian cultural trade influences which were known to have happened a few centuries earlier.⁵ The Theogony was an early and important influence on latter Greek thinking. The traditional understanding of chaos is that it is the separation of the earth and sky. Cornford⁶ and Kirk and Raven⁷ understood the cosmogonic, mythopoeic Theogony as another telling of the Babylonian⁸ and Hebrew⁹ cosmogony with regard to the separation of earth and sky.¹⁰ Both of those cosmogonic accounts refer to a separation of the earth and sky at the beginning of creation. The Babylonian and Hebrew accounts start with a propositional statement of assertion, apophantis, about cosmogenesis (i.e., In the beginning God created the heaven the earth). However, the Theogony starts with Hesiod’s interrogative, the openness of his question to the Muses.

Hesiod asks a question of the Muses. The Muses are female goddesses. They are the birth, origin and keepers of art and knowledge.¹¹ Hesiod asks which of the gods was the first that “came-to-be”. A conundrum is embedded in Hesiod’s question. Namely, how can the first come to be? The Muses were fond of play and gaiety. As such, they reply in kind to Hesiod that “truly” and “verily” the first, Chaos, came-to-be. In the very first reply to Hesiod, the ‘truth’ is at play in the Muses. The Muses here are speaking as one even though there are nine Muses. Even in this, there is already play of the ‘one and the many’, harmony and cacophony, the doubling of the signature¹². What is more, Hesiod’s question preconditions the answer given by the ‘one and the many’ Muses. Hesiod asks, “from the beginning [archê, ἀρχῆς], tell who first of them (the gods) came-to-be [genet’, γένετ᾽]”?

Let’s take a closer look at the Muses reply to Hesiod…

First of all Chaos came-to-be

ή τοι μεν πρώτιστα Χάος γένετ’;

Etoi men protista Xaos genet’;

The gist of the words is:

‘The very first’, πρώτιστα (protista), comes from the Doric-Aeolic dialects of ancient Greece. It was also used in Hesiod’s era known as the Poetic or Homeric. The Aeolic dialect is more archaic than the Attic-Ionic dialect used by later Greek philosophers. Just as we have many words in English that come from older languages, the language of ancient Greece also comes from older languages and a confluence of dialects (for a more detailed discussion of ancient Greek dialects and philosophers see Appendix A, Part 1). Πρώτιστα (protista) here is an adjective, singular, feminine and nominative¹⁸ of protistos, the very first, superlative of protos, first. It is where we get ‘proto’ as in prototype.

Chaos (χάος) is the Greek word χάος. It is not confusion, un-differentiation or an unbounded space or place.¹⁹ It is a gap, yawn, breach, separation or void. As such, it implies radical differentiation. However, it is not space as later philosophers thought it to be. Kirk and Raven made the case that chaos as space, water, or disorder was not Hesiod’s idea but a later notion in Greek philosophy.

Three interpretations may be rejected immediately: (i) Aristotle (Phys. I, 208 b 29) took it to mean space. But this concept is much later than the Theogony, occurring first, probably, in Pythagoras, then more clearly in Zeno of Elea, and most clearly in Plato’s Timaeus. (ii) The Stoics followed Zeno of Citium (e.g. SVF I 103), who perhaps took the idea from Pherecydes of Syros (DK 7BIa), in deriving xaos from χέεσθαι and therefore interpreting it as what is poured, i.e. water. (iii) The common modern sense of chaos as disorder can be seen e.g. in Lucian Amores 32, where Hesiod’s xaos is interpreted as disordered, shapeless matter. This, again, may be Stoic in origin.²⁰

Yένετ’ (genet’) is a verb, 3rd person, singular, middle voice used from the early Homeric and Ionic eras. The middle voice is not in modern Greek or modern languages. It denotes a mutual and simultaneous reciprocity of the subject acting on and being acted upon by something or someone. The middle voice only survives in a few languages other than ancient Greek such as Albanian, Bengali, Fula, Tamil, Sanskrit, Icelandic and Swedish. In this case γένετ’ denotes chaos acted on being and chaos was acted upon by being in the phrase ‘came to be’. Yένετ’ comes from γίγνομαι – come into a new state of being²¹ – γένετ’ is also used in γενετικός (genetikos), “genitive” and that from γένεσις (genesis, “origin, source, beginning, nativity, generation, production, creation”), from γίγνεσθαι second aor. γενέσθαι (“to be produced, become, be”).²² Note: This is also were we get our modern day word ‘genetics’. Yένετ’ and archê will become important concepts for ancient Greek philosophers a short time later (this will be discussed more later in the series).

The Muses tell us that being does not arise from ‘the one’ or from an unchanging, unmoved singularity as in monism nor even from a plurality. Being or ‘isness’ refuses consolidation, summation, absolute closure as given in some metaphysical ‘One’ or some synthesis of being and non-being (or nothingness). The Muses tell us that the gap, radical differentiation came to, acted on, ‘isness’ and that the gap, radical differentiation came upon, was acted upon, by ‘isness’. One important consequence of this is that at the beginning of the ancient Greek quest for phusis, for being, radical differentiation requires otherness first for being. Likewise, otherness is acted upon by being. However, the action upon otherness is a retreat; it is not an equivocal reciprocity which reduces to the same. It is not some kind of Hegelian ‘lifting up’ of the abstractions of being and nothing (aufhebung) into becoming and thus, concrete determinacy from abstraction.²³ This effect on otherness of being is privation, a withdrawal which eludes presence, form and idea. This notion of privation is key to understanding the struggle (polemus, strife, war) at work inside ancient Greek thinkers. Becoming is given by differentiation and radical otherness which cannot be brought fully to presence. Otherness is accentuated²⁴ and highlighted by being in its absence, both abstractly and concretely, in theory (θεωρία) and practice (πρᾶξις), in seeing and acting in its relentless refusal of being.²⁵

The Muses, in notably un-myth like language, do not declare a god as the first. Instead, in one voice they playfully undue their unison by first directly answering Hesiod’s question that chaos was first. The unity of the Muse’s voice is undone in their answer of the first, the primal lack of unity and presence. Chaos in this case is given as differentiation without prerequisite. The gap, separation, breach or void begs the question – between what? What does chaos hold open or serve as a gap? For traditional scholarship, the answer is earth and sky. However, the noted scholar Mitchell Miller points out:

What is it, however, that the coming-into-being of Chaos differentiates from what? It is clear that one side of the gap is ‘broad-breasted earth’, which comes to be ‘next’, immediately after Chaos. What is the other side? Cornford’s response is to look outside the text, on the one hand to cosmogonic myth in a host of archaic cultures, on the other hand to sixth and fifth century Greek poetry. In the latter, in particular in Ibycus, Bacchylides, and Aristophanes, he finds uses of xãow to refer to the space between the upper sky and the ground, the space through which birds fly. In the former, especially in Hebrew and Babylonian myth, he finds stories of the formation of the world through an original separation of earth and sky. And so he proposes that the coming-into-being of Chaos is the separation of earth and sky.6 Does the text support this possibility? Cornford finds both corroboration and apparent resistance. Self-evident corroboration, he thinks, is offered by line 700, where, he asserts without argument, xãow ‘denotes the gap or void space between sky and earth’. But the text, he recognizes, appears to resist his interpretation at lines 126-127 [in the Greek text cited above]: there, only a few lines after telling of the coming-into-being of Chaos, Hesiod tells how ‘earth first bore…starry sky’. If, as he presumes, Chaos is ‘the gap separating heaven and earth’ and it ‘has already come-into-being’, there should be no need for earth to go on to beget sky; that begetting ‘duplicates’ the coming-into-being of sky that must have already occurred with the coming-into-being of Chaos.²⁶

Chaos is a differentiation but of what? No typical poetic trope is given by the Muses in their direct answer. The Muses state plainly that the very first was chaos. Then, with deference to the question they add to “First of all Chaos” with “came-to-be”, genet’. Hesiod is asking for the first, how it came-to-be (genet’), and they tell him chaos but with the same supplement in Hesiod’s question, genet’. The wisdom of this statement is along the lines of “First of all Chaos”. How can chaos come-to-be if it was first? Isn’t this a contradiction? Contradiction would not bother a Muse. However, what would bother a Muse is mere contradiction; so boring. Instead, a deeper thread, a secret meaning was always more fun for a Muse. Perhaps, what they were implying is not only what was first, what had no prior origin or birth, but what ‘come-to-be’ is. ‘Come-to-be’ is becoming. Becoming must always come from difference. Difference ‘first’ allows the possibility for determinateness. The possibility for determinateness is the gap, the opening, which makes becoming possible. Instead of the one and many voices of the Muses giving one answer to Hesiod, they give him two in one…now that is more like a Muse. The Muses are not contradicting themselves or giving an infinite regression but giving Hesiod the answer he wants and more. The answer has exceeded the expectation of the question as it MUST since the question marks a limit to what an answer should be (i.e., does ‘what was the first’ ask for a chicken or an egg and how would the answer ever decide the question?). Instead of a declaratory, apophantic, answer, the Muses transcend the limits of the question with a double answer which the Muses testify to as “now surely, truly, verily” “indeed, of a truth”. Additionally, according to Miller²⁷, Hesiod had no way, given the tools of his mythopoeic language, to think the ‘first’ without a coming-to-be. Additionally, the lapse of the mythopoeic style in this one phrase was not a necessary lapse. Hesiod could have written this in a form more true to the overall style of the poem but he didn’t. This can either be ignored as an omission of Hesiod (or an addition of someone else) or intentional and a mark of an emphasis of some type. Even today, when a song or poetic interlude is stated directly and plainly, without the trappings of the current style, it is meant to bring atypical attention to what is stated.

Could it be that the very first, the beginning (archê) Hesiod asks for, is always incomplete, determinate but without specific determinations to come-to-be…to came-to-be…to evoke chora (khora or chora; χώρα, clearing, opening);²⁸ the evocation gestured in the written supplement – “but then afterwards” (αὐτὰρ ἔπειτα; autar epeita). Autar epeita first gives later, the temporal (sorge), the chora of becoming (genet’)? The gaping void requires, necessitates, determines, place (chora), generation (origin), birth, response (the evocative) and temporality. The chaos differentiates but without anything to differentiate, the opening of difference is broken on the disjunctive, “but then afterwards” (αὐτὰρ ἔπειτα; autar epeita). Drew Hyland makes this remark about autar epeita:

With the autar epeita, Hesiod emphasizes the very separation from the subsequent comings-to-be of earth, Tartaros, and eros. Autar, according to Liddell and Scott, means “but, besides, moreover” and is employed “to introduce a contrast.” Epeita, in turn, means, again quoting Liddell and Scott, “when in strong opposition to the former act or state, with past tenses, `thereafter, afterwards.””‘ Since autar establishes precisely such a contrast with the preceding, I have altered Miller’s translation slightly to try to bring out that contrast; hence my “but then afterwards …” rather than Miller’s less strong “then next.” My point, then, is that not only does Hesiod say “First of all Chaos came-to-be”; with the emphatic autar epeita he clearly distinguishes the coming-to-be of Chaos from what comes afterwards: earth, Tartaros, eros, and then gradually the rest of the articulated cosmos.²⁹

Autar epeita is not generative. Earth, Tartara and Eros are not born from chaos. If the Muses meant ‘born’ they could have used a form of genet’ or γόνος (gonos; that which is born, begotten, child, offspring). The “strong opposition” Hyland writes of does not join what follows but demarcates, refuses the cause and effect of progeny, with what follows. Hesiod’s chaos is not-yet temporal. Temporality begins for the Muses with autar epeita not as later Latin history suggested with Cronus.

It is important that in one of the most important accounts at the dawn of ancient Greek philosophy, how being came to be was answered by the jesting Muses in a rare directness, a full moment (kairos), as radical disjuncture, as chaos. Before logos (where we get our word logic) we find the question of origin, of beginning, is anarchy (an-archê, ἀν-αρχία; no origin). Anarchy founds origin from the impossibility of origin. Origin must generate (gene) being in the absolute void of chaos, the gap. ‘Coming to be’ is not completed in logos but left open by chaos. Ancient Greek philosophy must ever after be read from the riddle of origin. Origin must be said from logos which, in its fullest moment, undoes and erases itself as chaos, an unbridgeable gap. Only in this unsettled and unresolved footing does ancient Greek philosophy acquire its richness and dislodge itself from final closure. In this way, being is held open as existence. Phusis is not closed off by some reductive, anthropomorphic mythos but becoming is first opened by chaos, a radical alterity, a gap generative of inquiry, of logos. History and temporality find their start in “but then afterwards” from the face of what undoes it not from some absolute but from groundless suspension over the void (as Heidegger might suggest). Anarchy is not evasion from rule and domination as Latin later postulated and forever embodied it in the metaphysic of individuality, but in the suspension of finality or origin. Existence is never complete. Completion or fulfillment (telos) can never be final because origin can only cover over its chaotic lack. Existence cannot resolve itself as idea (eidos, the form or appearance of things); not even as ‘it’. The notion of phusis as ‘it’, as third person neuter, can only supplement an unsolvable riddle, a Gordian knot, which can only untie itself by tying another knot. The Idea can only be, always and already, a “but then afterwards” which fills the gap, the yawning gap that must withdraw from sight and appearance. In this riddle, play of the Muses, ancient Greek thought attained astounding depth and richness which both posed and opened the question of appearance and being, phusis and ‘beings as such’ or ‘first cause’ (arche) later in the Latin era called metaphysics.³⁰ The priority of metaphysics for Aristotle was a priority of ontos–ology (the logos or study of being) over idea and appearance. Idea must forever be inchoate in origin and finality, perhaps shadows thrown on cave walls from Forms which can only dance over the void, eternally supplementing themselves from desire, Eros, the in-between of mortal and immortal; this radical otherness which cannot take the Form of a modern ‘it’ nor even an idea (the appearance of) of chaos but can only face us in the other. The good beyond being, the disjunction of the primacy of ontology and the impossibility of the never ending supplementation of the Idea can only ‘be’ in the face of the other which has no origin or completion in our gaze and yet, cannot be ignored.

Philosophy Series 5 – A Detour of Time

_________________

¹ The series on the Pre-Socratics relies heavily on THE PRESOCRATIC PHILOSOPHERS: A CRITICAL HISTORY WITH A SELECTION OF TEXTS, BY G. S. KIRK & J. E. RAVEN, PUBLTSHED BY THE SYNDICS OF THE CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, Bentley House, 200 Euston Road, London, N.W., American Branch: 32 East 57th Street, New York , N.Y., CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1957 and Heidegger And Aristotle: The Twofoldness Of Being, Walter A. Brogan, Kindle Edition and Heidegger and the Greeks: Interpretive Essays, First of all Came Chaos, Drew A. Hyland, Kindle Edition.

² See Link

³ See Link

⁴ Hesiod, “Theogony”, Translated by Drew A. Hyland; “First of All Came Chaos”, Heidegger and the Greeks: Interpretive Essays (Studies in Continental Thought) (p. 9). Kindle Edition; For text see Link, Hes. Th. 115 to 135;

⁵ See Robin Lane Fox’s Travelling Heroes and Walcot’s Hesiod and the Near East

⁶ The Unwritten Philosophy and Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950), later reformulated in Principium Sapientiae: The Origins of Greek Philosophic Thought (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1971)

⁷ G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957). Restated and reaffirmed in Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983)

⁸ See Link

⁹ See Link

¹⁰ G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957)., Section “SEPARATION IN NON-GREEK SOURCES”, page 33-34

¹¹ See Link

¹² John Sallis, Chorology: On Beginning in Plato’s Timaeus (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), see the Prologue; Also Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” Limited Inc, trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman (Evanston, Il: Northwestern University Press, 1988)

¹³ See Link

¹⁴ See Link

¹⁵ πρώτιστα – adj sg fem nom doric aeolic poetic – Link, πρώτιστ-ος, η, ον, also ος, ον h.Cer.157:—poet. and late Prose Sup. of πρῶτος,

A the very first, Il.2.228, 16.656, Od.19.447; πολὺ π. Il.2.702, Od.14.220, etc.; ὁ π. χρόνος, opp. ὁ ἐνεστώς, PEleph.10.4 (iii B.C.); principal, primal, θεὰ π. Νύξ Phld.Piet.14; αἰτία Procl.Inst. 12; τῶν φύσει κρειττόνων π. ὁ δημιουργός Hierocl. in CA3p.424M., cf. Iamb.Comm.Math.4, al., Dexipp.Fr.32(b)J., Agath.3.2: neut. πρώτιστον as Adv., first of all, Od.10.462, 20.60, al., Pi.N.5.25, B.8.11, Ar.Lys.555, D.43.75, Antiph.98: also pl. πρώτιστα Il.1.105, Od.3.419, Hes.Op.109, A.Fr.195, S.OT1439, El.669, Ar.Pl.792; ἐπειδὴ π. now that, Alc.15.7; ὅτε π. when aforetime, Call.Aet.Oxy.2079.21; especially, principally, π. ἁλίσκεται ἐνταῦθα τὸ ὄψον Str.12.3.19: also τὸ π. E.Supp.430; τὰ π. Od.11.168. –
Link

¹⁶ See Link

¹⁷ γένετ’ – verb, 3rd person, middle voice used from the early Homeric time. It comes from γίγνομαι – come into a new state of being (see Link) – γένετ’ is also used in γενετικός [genetikos], “genitive” and that from Ancient Greek γένεσις (genesis, “origin, source, beginning, nativity, generation, production, creation”), from γίγνεσθαι second aor. γενέσθαι (“to be produced, become, be”). Link, from Proto-Indo-European *ǵenh₁, Note: This is also were we get our modern day word ‘genetics’.

¹⁸ See Link for information on the Greek grammar.

¹⁹
‘First of all’: On the Semantics and Ethics of Hesiod’s Cosmogony, Mitchell Miller, Ancient Philosophy 21 (2001), Mathesis Publications, See Link (pdf)

²⁰ G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957)., Section ” 4. THE HESIODIC COSMOGONY, AND THE SEPARATION OF SKY AND EARTH”, page 26-27

²¹ See Link

²² See Link

²³ Consider Hegel’s beginning in The Logic where he states: “Pure Being makes the beginning: because it is on the one hand pure thought, and on the other immediacy itself, simple and indeterminate; and the first beginning cannot be mediated by anything, or be further determined.” See Link, Section 86. This beginning is very different from the Hesiod’s beginning where pure ‘isness’ does not begin as indeterminate immediacy but contrarily ‘isness’ begins as differentiation, a gap, which begins as differentiated. The differentiation here is not yet mediated in Hesiod. Remember that in Hesiod’s cosmogony, meditation only starts after the phrase ‘but then afterwards”. Pure thought as idea (eidos) does not yet appear or take form in Hesiod’s ‘first’. Mediation does not lead to determinacy for Hesiod but determinacy leads to mediation. This is an important distinction which may have led the entire Hegelian genius astray. It certainly deserves consideration at a minimum as, if nothing else, an important difference in Hegelian wissenschaft and post modernism with thinkers such as Derrida and Levinas.

Consider this a little latter in the same section:

When thinking is to begin, we have nothing but thought in its merest indeterminateness: for we cannot determine unless there is both one and another: and in the beginning there is yet no other. The indeterminate, as we have it, is the blank we begin with, not a featurelessness reached by abstraction, not the elimination of all character, but the original featurelessness which precedes all definite character and is the very first of all. And this we call Being. It is not to be felt, or perceived by sense, or pictured in imagination: it is only and merely thought, and as such it forms the beginning. Essence also is indeterminate, but in another sense: it has traversed the process of mediation and contains implicit the determination it has absorbed.

In Hesiod’s beginning there isn’t “the other” but otherness. Not long after Hesiod the struggle began to wrestle with precisely what Hegel is articulating. One answer the Eleatics came up with is that in Hegel’s words “we cannot determine unless there is both one and another”. Therefore, the Eleatics came up with ‘the One’. Hegel believes that they erred in naming this being, “they went too far”, When Hegel states, “The indeterminate, as we have it, is the blank we begin with, not a featurelessness reached by abstraction, not the elimination of all character, but the original featurelessness which precedes all definite character and is the very first of all. And this we call Being” he initially states that the indeterminate is not some “featurelessness reached by abstraction” but then goes on to tell us about “the original featurelessness which precedes all definite character and is the very first of all”. Wouldn’t this require that the “original featurelessness” has also been arrived at by featurelessness abstraction? Would it be sacrilege to suggest that at minimum the “original featurelessness” is made up of language and words which may hint a kind of yet another form of “featurelessness reached by abstraction”. This subtle circularity denies in order to reaffirm albeit more seductively. In any case, the logic of determination without one or another is certainly compelling and it is understandable how one might be lead from here to monism or immediacy. However, the inability of even the word ‘immediacy’ to divest itself of language and therefore mediacy and abstraction violently forces a conclusion which cannot be sustained by virtue of its own terms. Hegel’s immediacy can never be what it assumes something other than language and thereby escape the hermeneutical circularity of language. This impossibility should be preserved in thought not replaced with yet another supplement, a façade or appearance, which has the effect of relieving this absurdity (i.e., immediacy). In the Muse’s refusal to resolve chaos as first undifferentiated but instead differentiated without “both one and another” a questioned is opened which, depending on decision, can either be nonsense or some other (Latinized chaos as disorder or the Greek notion of gap).

²⁴ …could we say with Kierkegaard accentuating passion to the infinite …

²⁵ When determination is derived, it becomes dependent on its determinate whether it is ‘immediacy’, abstraction, etc. When determination is differentiation before ‘objects’, the notion of the other does not depend on derivation but upon, as Levinas might suggest, ‘Ethics’. Levinas might suggest borrowing from Plato’s ‘the good beyond being’ as the good otherwise than being (note the radical disjuncture).

²⁶ ‘First of all’: On the Semantics and Ethics of Hesiod’s Cosmogony, Mitchell Miller, Ancient Philosophy 21 (2001), Mathesis Publications, page 5

²⁷ “…what is remarkable is not that Hesiod says of Chaos that it genet[o], ‘came-to-be’ or, connotatively, ‘was born’; he has little choice. Rather, what is remarkable is that, in face of the assumption that what ‘comes-to-be’ must have a parent, he holds back from naming one and instead declares Chaos to have come-to-be ‘first’.” See Link (pdf, page 21-22)

²⁸ John Sallis, Chorology: On Beginning in Plato’s Timaeus (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999)

²⁹ Drew A. Hyland; “First of All Came Chaos”, Heidegger and the Greeks: Interpretive Essays (p. 13). Kindle Edition, page 13

³⁰ See Link