Notes on Aristotle's Metaphysics (translated by Joe Sachs) Part I
Pratityasamutpada, upaya, and aporia
Prajnaparamita, deified embodiment of the wisdom of emptiness, and the “mother of all Buddhas”
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“Hegel, being, emptiness, etc”
(p. xvi-xviii)
Though I am far from familiar with the “full picture” (e.g. does Hegel qualify these statements later on?), it seems that Hegel has leaned into in utterly one sided conception of being, a conception rooted in the “emptiness” of being. Moreover, he conceptualizes this emptiness (or nothing) in abstract terms. That this emptiness is not abstract, not a mere “emptiness of content”, is manifest precisely through the fullness of being, through being's concretion and particularity. Being, even and especially as “no-thing” (metaphysical non-being, from which it is indistinct), just is what it is in and through the fullness of beings, through their particularity (or, rather, peculiar wholenesses). To suggest otherwise is to say that being ceases to be being when beings are manifest—then it would not be being, to begin with. Thus, this nothing of being is the fullness of beings (cf. “kenosis”). We have taken a roundabout way toward the doctrine of pratityasamutpada. Beings are empty of being because being is empty, and therein lies their peculiar fullness. They are not full of themselves, so they are full of each other. To be empty of being is to be full of everything other than being (and it is in non-being that intelligibility attains its maximum—see my notes on Chittck's Sufi Path of Knowledge). Beings are not (each “individually”, as it were), and that is precisely what they are, and from whence they derive their overflowing, overfull “overbeing”, overfull of one another, an overflow of intelligibility, the being of each exceeding its own boundaries, exceeding that which makes it merely “a being”. Beings are nothing other than manifest non-being. Moreover, this reasoning applies equally on the level of forms of beings (that is, the “dharmas”, too, are empty of being). Moreover, as Aristotle helps us to see, this being of beings is not just a static and formal condition, not just a timeless intelligibility, but also a temporal activity—entelecheia. Thus, by extension, “nothing”, is certainly not just abstraction empty of content, but a living situation. Thus far for metaphysical non-being.
Transcendental non-being (or rather, “nothing”), is another, albeit related, matter—indeed, rather intimately related. In order to explain the nature of this relationship, I would need to reconsider much of my metaphysical speculation up to this point, regarding e.g. primordial intellection etc. This is not because these speculations are in any way invalidated, but because a distinction is necessary between the “metaphysics of fullness” (generally the sort that Guenon elaborates) and a “metaphysics of emptiness” (as in pratityasamutpada and the madhyamaka). These points of view are tactillectively distinct. I have heretofore mostly considered the significance of transcendental nothing for the “metaphysics of fullness”. Less space has been dedicated to its significance for the “metaphysics of emptiness”.
Transcendental non-being, in the sense of a merely discursively posited “sheer nothingness”, a pure virtuality, is at one and the same time a discursive imitation of metaphysical non-being and, as the emptiest virtuality, a confession by the transcendental condition of its own character. It is no accident that “being”, when conceived within the limits of the transcendental horizon, “becomes nothing”. There is, in a manner of speaking, nothing less transcendental than being, when taken in its primary (transcendent) sense. In reducing that which is least transcendental to the transcendental horizon, that which is least susceptible, in itself, of being transposed into the transcendental horizon, one is left with nothing at all. The translation of being from transcendence into transcendentality leaves one only with “the emptiest concept”, with nothing at all. How can there be nothing at all? The transcendental subject sought to bring being to its own level, and failed—very well, being was not successfully brought down, but that subject, at least is there, the subject remains with itself. Indeed, that is not so. The transcendental subject is no entity, is nothing at all. Its failure to bring being down to its own level reveals a “nothing at all” which is, in fact, itself, though appearing indirectly as the transcendental concept, the virtuality, of “nothing”. The failure to bring being into the transcendental horizon reveals the nothingness of the transcendental subject itself in the guise of a conceptual object called “nothing”. This “failure” should not be understood in a pessimistic sense, however. It is the origin and precondition of scientific inquiry. The plasticity of the “emptiest concept” (being as concept) is a prototype of the power of conceptual transformation, our capacity to adjust concepts toward practical and theoretical ends.
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“Aristotle's study of being is a working out of the cryptic claim in Plato's Republic (509B) that the good is beyond being, and is responsible both for the being of what is and the being-known of what is known. Socrates warns us that one cannot see well the greatest of learnable things by means of his images of the sun, the divided line, and the cave, but only by 'another, longer way around'”
(p. xx)
The “shorter way” is that being already is and knowledge already knows. There is nothing to “do”. The obviousness of being (and knowledge), however, is too dazzling. Therefore we mystify it, and by obscuring lead toward it. I have already begun to describe this dynamic in the third part of my reflection on Socratic dialectic. This passage is a nice confirmation of my initial conjectures. To fully appreciate this insight we must, at least in the present context, divest “mysticism” of its more pejorative connotations. To “mystify”, in this context, is not purely and simply to obscure, let alone to deceive, but to cover over with a very “special” kind of image, an image (or symbol) that is analogically bound to what it symbolizes. It is an indirect manner of being what one is without any lessening in this being what one is. The authentic “symbol” is indirect being—and indirect being still is being. It has not, in any respect, ceased to be, by virtue of indirection. Crucially—the symbol is not arbitrary. It is, at the same time, but a “skillful means” (upaya), or, in my terminology, tactillection. That means, also, that this “upaya”, this tactillection, in order to be effective, therefore must not be arbitrary, cannot be “mere upaya”. Not just any and every means is worthy of the apellative “skillful”. A mandala is not a doodle. The structure of tactillection is meaningful, which is to say—intelligible, symbolic, analogical. It is meaningful indirection, an indirection that somehow manages to point in the right direction, but “the finger is not the moon”.
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“As the cause of many particulars, the form cannot itself exist as a concrete particular, but since it is the cause of the thinghood of these, the form cannot be an abstraction or a universal. Similarly, the form is not one of the parts of a thing, nor the sum of its parts. It is this analysis of thinghood as form that shows that there must be a way of being that takes precedence over what exists and what is merely thought”
(p. xxii)
These “clues” should indicate for us that “form” (qua form) cannot be approached analytically or conceptually. Through analysis of form, we have talked about form, a talking which is far from useless, but which, nevertheless, will never bring us to form. Form is participatory. To know it, we too must participate in it (and we agree with Plato when he says, through his mouthpiece Socrates, that one should not make a big fuss about the notion of “participation”—take the term loosely, as one finds it, without pedantry, as it is but a figure of speech). That, of course, should be trivial—we always already just do participate in it. If we do “know” this, then it seems that we must know it so well that we do not even know that we know it. Therefore, the solution, paradoxically, is to muddle that knowing somehow. All living things love to know, Aristotle says. That is why the path to knowledge is so rarely trodden—it begins by doing that which all creatures hate, namely, unknowing. This “muddling” of knowledge must be done in such a way that our knowing does not cease to be a knowing, at the same time that it is not so obvious that it eludes us. We must unknow knowingly. We must unknow skillfully, that is, tactillectively. There are two forms, as it were, of this muddled knowing (that can still call themselves a “knowing” in an eminent sense)—that of passive intellection and that of active intellection.
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“Genus—a divisible kind or class. It might arise from arbitrary acts of classification, in contrast to eidos or species”
(p. liv)
The genus is a nothing which circumscribes indifferently to the intelligible contours of being, or seemingly indifferently, albeit often with a certain rationale that, qua rationale, suggests that the rational genus is a “flattened image” of the intelligible being, of some intelligible portion of being or another. So, there is both a necessary and intelligible aspect to the designation of genera, and an arbitrary one. “Arbitration”, we should recall, is the same thing as freedom (though “freedom” is generically ambiguous, and bears other meanings, at the same time), the power which cuts across natural necessity (that this arbitrarity of genera is only arbitrary in a relative sense, is something which I briefly discuss in my notes on Houlgate's Introduction to Hegel). This arbitrary power power is at work in the technical and social infrastructure which underlies our present world (it would be worthwhile, perhaps, to make comparisons with Heidegger's “The Question Concerning Technology”). This “arbitrary” intervention of technology (or, more precisely, of technological development), then, is continuous with the social classifications (the genera) that correspond to it in the process of the re-production of society. The proletariat are not only the genus of modernity, par excellence, but the genus of technology par excellence. The proletariat are the generality of technoscientific society, the society in which that nothing which transgresses and masters essentiality asserts itself most audaciously. Communism is the “real movement” of this generality and the theoretical framework of its self-organization. Thus, communism is not a “universalism” (at least not primarily, though there is still a question here of “Atlantis” and of the “communist essence”[1]), for it belongs to the generality, the triumphant human genus, the proletarian class. Note that this “arbitration” of the genus is not just any arbitration unqualified, but the arbitration of division (divisible classes), that is, of analysis, of the nothing in its basic “interventionist” form. The proletarian class are this power of arbitrary division (“the ruthless criticism of all that exists”) embodied in such an arbitrary division (a “class”), the product of the dominance of arbitrary division through the historical development of technology and social forms premised in human reasoning. Which is all to say—the proletarian class are human freedom made socially and historically manifest. Other, non-human varieties of freedom (e.g. freedom in divine or theological sense), are another matter.
Note: “species” seems like an odd translation choice for “eidos”, or at least a misleading one on the level of meaning, even if “technically” correct.
1: Very briefly, “communist essence” refers to the intelligible universality which happens to be internal to proletarian dictatorship, the center of the proletarian class' world, as a ruling class especially (though also implicit in its life under capitalism, in its comradery and solidarity through struggle, and generally through what I have elsewhere called the “class community”). “Atlantis” refers to that form of proletarian dictatorship in which its Promethean audacity in seizing heavenly fire expresses itself most conspicuously, self-consciously, in which it appropriates metaphysics, in its fullest sense, as its own instrument.
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“...myth is in a certain way philosophic, since a myth is composed of wonders...Their object of concern itself opened a road for them, and contributed to forcing to inquire along it”
(p. 4, 7-8)
Here philosophical development is characterized as an “immanent critique” that takes place in the wake of an aporia, that is, through the intervention of a nothing. This aporia is directly compared with myth, and Aristotle even attributes a philosophic value to the latter. Myth and perplexity (aporia) are two sorts of nothing that clothe intelligibility, a “shimmering coat of many colors” for a “dreamer who dreams”. It will be a particular point of interest to see how this account of immanent critique via aporia, will compare with the Hegelian. After all, contradiction and aporia are close kin, if not frequently identical in essence. The concept of “contradiction”, however, can be leveraged in such a way that its rational explicability is emphasized at the expense of its puzzling nothingness. In any case, a closer examination of Hegel will be needed before pursuing these comparisons any further.
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One interesting implication of the account of immanent critique which proceeds via aporia is that it seems to suggest that our most original accounts (of which myth is the essential type given by Aristotle) already possess the truth in its totality. The chief flaw of these accounts is not so much any erroneousness but an excessively intelligible obviousness. That is precisely why development must occur through aporia, and only aporia. Excess obviousness is the chief obstacle to inquiry and that is why Aristotle compares the philosopher to the lover of myth—the philosopher loves perplexity, and finds over-clarity frustrating and somehow insufficient. One can observe the same dynamic repeating itself at different “levels” of philosophical development and historical stages of inquiry. Certain all-too-obvious readings of the Presocratics call forth the perplexity which birthed their more elaborate philosophical successors. These successors (e.g. Plato) themselves at first glance also tend to inspire readings which are all-too-obvious to the point of crudity (e.g. a literal “realm of Forms”; Aristotle as “empiricist”). These crude readings can only be surpassed through aporia, a condition which rarely manifests with sufficient rigor except in philosophic spirits, in lovers of myth. This surpassing can either take on the form of the development of a new doctrine or of a deeper reading of the original, though sometimes these can amount to more or less the same thing. It would really be just as crude to dismiss entirely the crude readings of Heraclitus or Plato as it would be to constitute those readings as the horizon of interpretation. These crude readings are an intrinsic component of these thinker's work, a genuine “level of interpretation” with its own relevant applications. These readings are not merely accidental or external to their body of work. These philosophers are perhaps not as divine as we would like to think. Each and every one of them has a satyr-like exterior. Consider, for instance, the imagery of Socrates given by Alcibiades in the Symposium, namely his satyr-like character—it is as if Socrates himself anticipated the principle by which crudity of interpretation precedes the production of new meaning, and took the initiative by re-presenting himself directly as satyr-like, a kind of buffon and self-satire. Therefore, no one could reduce him to anything. In dialogue, one lowers one's defenses when confronted with a buffoon, and before we know it we have entered into him, and he is interpreting us. It is only appropriate that philosophy proper should have begun with a satyr who self-satyrized.
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“Again by the truth itself as we say, people were forced to look for the next kind of source...So when someone said an intellect was present, just as in animals, also in nature as the cause of the cosmos and of all order, he looked like a sober man next to people who had been speaking incoherently beforehand”
(p. 8-9)
Here is a particularly excellent demonstration of development through aporia, excellent because intellect itself is introduced explicitly, made present, as a constitutive element of a metaphysico-cosmological account. Which is to say, it was already present prior to this, but in way too obvious, or only hinted at through a glass darkly (Heraclitus' Logos)—it was merely present, and not yet made present. Indeed, it must have been present insofar as these preceding accounts were themselves intelligible to one degree or another, and especially when we consider that these earlier accounts more and more resemble myth the further back we push them, and myth is nothing other than a wellspring of intelligibility. In the history of philosophy, this making intellect present is the temporal locale of the incision which cut primordial intellect—the aptly named “axial age” (an axis being a kind of line, and such a line not being unlike a “theoretical incision”). Intellect's explicit presence is only possible as active or passive intellect, and especially as its expression through Logos, through an account of itself, whether in a primarily discursive or primarily symbolic mode. Thus, this development which Aristotle narrativizes here (that is, he has turned that which was not initially a narrative into a narrative), is not just any development in the history of philosophy, but a critical one, perhaps even the most critical. Hegel was probably right to recognize in Anaxagoras the father of philosophy proper. The political links of Anaxagoras with Pericles, a father of Athenian democracy, also possess a certain significance (actually, Cleisthenes was the founder of democracy in Athens, but Pericles is obviously linked with Athens' militant variety of democracy in a significant way). The masses (whether the “imperialist” masses of Athens, or the revolutionary masses of industrial modernity) are the generality, a species of that nothing which alone is capable of impossibly manifesting intellect in an explicit way [1].
1: Which is not to say that the masses of Athens were somehow responsible for the manifesting, for the making present, of intellect—that was done by a philosopher, by Anaxagoras (at least in the West, or in a meaningful way as part of the narrative of the history of philosophy)—but it is to say that intellect was made present through the intervention of a nothing (in this case, aporia), and that the masses, qua generality, are also a kind of nothing. There is therefore a kind of kinship here between masses as “the generality” and aporia as the preliminary of (scientific) inquiry.
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“For Anaxagoras uses the intellect as a makeshift contrivance for cosmos production, and whenever he comes to an impasse about why something is necessarily a certain way, he drags it in”
(p. 10)
This seems to mark a significant stage in philosophical development, generally—“deus ex machina” as a covering for aporia. That which Anaxagoras drew out of the aporia implicit to his predecessors, namely, intellect, becomes a covering for the aporia implicit to his own thought. Whenever perplexity and questioning raise their heads, this deus ex machina descends and finds some new way to patch up the rupture, preserving the integrity of the philosophical edifice. Nonetheless, this deus ex machina is a deus, that is, an eminently intelligible reality. Its explanatory force should not be dismissed offhand. The problem really lies in the excess obviousness of its explanations. The philosopher, as a lover of myth and perplexity, does not like to see this perplexity covered over. The invocation of “intellect”, offered by Anaxagoras as a solution, subsequently becomes but another problem for inquiry.
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“As material, then, the great and the small were the sources, and as thinghood, the one”
(p. 15)
Hence, for Plato and the Pythagoreans, magnitude (multiplicity, diversity, etc) is material (hyle) and unity is essence (ousia). This is a particularly apt characterization that seems to grasp at the very essence of what essence is. To posit essence just is to posit a unity, an intelligible “self-nature” (as opposed to the self-nature of ahamkara, taken exclusively, a merely identifying and positing “this is a self” minus any intelligible participation). Essentiality is the “point of view” through which self-natures are “legitimized”, as it were, granted a unified and independent (relatively independent) status, a status whose legitimacy is in proportion to its intelligibility. The Platonic-Pythagorean tendency, however, does not remain content with simply positing essentiality. It does not let essentiality simply be essentiality, in its simple way, the essentiality of this or that, in this or that circumstance. This philosophical tendency makes essentiality itself essential. That is, it grants essentiality its own independent unity apart from materiality. It says “essentiality itself, and not just the essentiality of this or the essentiality of that, is a real self-nature, and materiality is not”. This, of course, is a problem insofar as we have identified essence with unity since unity always implies magnitude—unity is a magnitude. It may be objected that, after all, “Divine Unity” is no magnitude, but how quickly we forget that “Divine Unity” is only spoken of as a “unity” by a metaphysical analogy—that is, expressions like “Divine Unity” are an upaya, a tactillection. Likewise, the “Divine Essence” is no ordinary essence—“my thoughts are not your thoughts”. Thus, the “Divine Unity” is as much like unity as it is not like unity, a unity which is not unity “per se” (and perhaps more a unity than unity “per se”). To the extent that we encounter “Divine Unity” as a unity in a comprehensible sense, we encounter it clothed in some (imaginal) materiality. That is why, as pertains to the summit of metaphysics, the term “non-dual” is generally considered more rigorous than “unity”. Like unity and magnitude, then, essentiality and materiality imply each other, are somehow “dependently co-emergent”. To posit an essence is always also to posit the materiality in which it manifests its essentiality (even if the “materiality” in question is only an imaginal one). I posit the “idea” of “horse”—but horse just is horse as materially manifest horse. A horse which is only the idea of a horse is not really a horse at all (and yet, the idea of horse is more essentially horse than any individual horse). That is not to say that the Platonic standpoint is wrong without qualification. It is an “upaya”, one which is tactillectively oriented toward contemplative ascent, a theoretical technology (the distinction between theoretical science and and technology, too, may be collapsed!). In positing the independence of essence it facilitates an ascent toward it (and we should also recall that, though emphasizing the standpoint of ascent, the Platonic philosophy does give a fair hearing to the standpoint of descent as well, as in the Timaeus). After all, there is an asymmetry here—materiality (according to this tactillection) is not a self-nature. One cannot “hold on” to materiality at all, even if one were so inclined. One has no choice but to ascend in contemplation. The Platonic method is a protracted process of being compelled by knowledge, of letting it force one's hand. In that respect we should recall that even the Aristotelian philosophy is an “upaya”, even if its aims and “phenomenological topography” are constituted differently.
Note: even the essentiality of essences is not independent (from other essences, and perhaps indeed from anything else whatsoever). Even essences, paradoxically, do not have any “self-nature” which is simply and independently their own (as demonstrated by Nagarjuna). We posit essentiality in the form of independent self-natures for tactillective reasons.
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“While the forms answering to the species of things around us are fewer than the things are, the number of forms multiplies when they are posited for every kind of class characteristic, such as red things, scalene triangles etc. Aristotle agrees that there are forms in the first sense, but not in the second”
(p. 21, footnote)
Aristotle's solution to the problem of the indefinite multiplication of form seems to be that only that which is characterized by entelecheia (being-at-work-staying-itself) gets to count as a form (my best guess at this point), or rather that only that which is characterized by entelecheia possesses genuine thinghood (ousia) and form is something which pertains to such a “thing”. If that is not the case, then I am not sure what criterion he invokes in order to designate what does or does not count as a “thinghood”. It seems, however, that we may not even need to draw such lines in the sand of form, to begin with. We can accept, like the Buddhists, that forms (“dharmas”), are in a state of flux. Perhaps, indeed, it is precisely such a “multiplication” that is meant when one says that “the dharmas are in flux”. One may claim that this “multiplication” only appears to be such from the point of view of the knower who, noting this or that subsidiary characteristic, eo ipso invokes a corresponding form—but then, the “dharmas”, or forms, just are precisely that which is known, even that which, as per Aristotle, are “most knowable”. Thus, if they appear in flux, for the knower, then they may as well be considered to be in flux “as such”—knower and known are an intrinsic pair. Moreover, we can also take into consideration the added Madhyamika critique (i.e. the pratityasamutpada) that these forms (“dharmas”) themselves have no independent self-nature. What happens then? For one, the problem of “multiplication” has been superseded entirely. Obviously, there can be no question of “multiplication” where independent unities are excluded. A whole new conceptualization of what “form” is and means, to begin with, is needed in order to accommodate this theoretical change. In the Platonic and Aristotelian schemes, there is an intrinsic tendency to conceive “form” as a multitude of discrete unities, even if certain aspects of their thought intervene in order to militate against this—these conceptual interventions only prove the presence of such an innate tendency against which they are invoked as a stopgap. Thus, if “form” constitutes a multitude of discrete unities, we will always, innately, somehow associate it with the possibility of multiplication. The association has been established in advance by the way form is conceived in the Platonic and Aristotelian philosophies. As many stopgaps as the Neoplatonic and Scholastic traditions erect, the tendency remains. A new conceptualization of form is needed in order to solve this problem, one which takes this conceptualization of form as multitude as its starting point but then supersedes it. That seems to be just what happens with the Madhyamaka—the sublation of form as multitude. How, then, is form understood in light of this transformation (trans-form-ation! cf. Guenon's remarks on Shiva as the “trans-form-er”)? If form before consisted in a multitude of discrete unities, it now itself seems to be a unified way of being in which multitudinous forms collapse into one another, as though their multiplication continually canceled itself in advance. The reason that this new way of relating to form must take “form as multitude” as its starting point is that we already just do occupy this starting point. There is no use pretending otherwise. It is a “historical default” for human thought.
Note: There is an alternate solution to the above “problem” in simply becoming “comfortable” with indefinitude. This is the Promethean and developmental approach, in which we traverse the sea of indefinitude along a trajectory of “progress”, with periodic revolutions that reduce a certain range of experience to quintessence.
Note: frankly, I have no idea what “in flux” could even mean if not such a “multiplication of form”. Otherwise, it seems to suggest some incoherent “process philosophy” jibber jabber. A “multiplication of form” strikes me as a much more philosophically meaningful account of what it means for the “dharmas” to be in “flux”, an account that is more eminently knowable (because it is formulated directly in relation to a knower). “Process philosophy” presents itself as a crudely simple account of the “way stuff just happens” apart from any relation to a knower, an account of a forest full of falling trees with no one there to see them.
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“To say that [the forms] are patterns and other things participate in them is to speak without content and in poetic metaphor”
(p. 23)
Plato himself already insists that “participation” is a figure of speech and should not be taken in any pedantic sense (Phaedo 100d). From Aristotle seems to stem the philosophical superstition that “poetic” and metaphorical (or, better yet, symbolic) language can be replaced by some purely technical precision, by perfectly calibrated jargon. What actually results, however, is just more a convoluted and roundabout deployment of metaphor, an increasingly labyrinthine web of overlapping metaphors. All of our concepts are symbols and metaphors, at bottom. Is this Aristotelian tendency pure foolishness, then? Not at all. It is an instance of development through aporia, and, more than that, a significant historical stage in this development. It is the stage at which symbol and metaphor truly begin to recede into the background, still entirely operative but in an increasingly inconspicuous manner. Technical jargon is metaphor travelling incognito, with discursivity as its disguise. To be sure, this development is only rudimentary with Aristotle, but it is with him that this tendency seems to take off in earnest. This conceptual complication (through aporia) is also an unfolding of the impossibilities which make modern science and technology possible.
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It seems that a major reason that Aristotle invokes the notion of “being-at-work-staying-itself” (entelecheia) is in order to solve the problem of the intersection of form and cause (see p.23-8). This, however, restricts the scope of what gets to count as form—namely, it restricts it to living things, on one side, and “the universe as a whole”, on the other, but, as every good occultist knows, many inanimate things are genuine forms, even in an eminent sense, such as metals like gold or iron, or landscapes like mountains or lakes. Moreover, there is no doubt that even technologies become, in the course of time, genuinely intelligible forms (e.g. swords, wheel and axle, etc). It seems that intelligibility should constitute the benchmark of form, on whatever ground intelligibility happens to tread, whether imaginal or corporeal or even pure contemplation. Preceding considerations about form (= intelligibility) as a way of being as against form as a multitude apply here (see above). There is no reason to even obviate the problem of the indefinite multiplication of form. This indefinite dispersion of form as multitude from out of form as a way of being is the unfolding of an impossibility from out of the latter [1] through the intervention of a nothing. This problem should be solved not by covering it over or conceptually segregating it (for instance, by legitimizing only forms characterized by entelecheia) but by acknowledging it as a real problem plaguing intelligibility itself. One may be inclined to say “this is our problem, our misperception” (and not a problem for intelligibility “per se”), but what are we if not the site of intelligibility?
1: have we not said previously that “form as a way of being” was (for us, and historically) the sublation of form as multitude, i.e. that the former takes the latter as it foundation? On the other hand, an inversion of this derivation may be perfectly justified, tactillectively. Indeed, the one derivation is historical in its character, whereas the other is more justified from an ontological standpoint. The active and passive distinction vis a vis intellection should also be taken into account here. “Way of being” does suggest a primarily passive modality of intellect, as indeed seems to be in keeping with the general character of Buddhism, or at least of certain instances of it. At the same time, there can hardly be any question that in “philosophies” like Platonism, wherein such multitudes of form are contemplated, an active mode of intellection predominates. I think, therefore, it would be fair to say that the first derivation would not necessarily be a historical one only, but could be said to possess its own distinctive ontological character, as a kind of “ontological collapse” of formal multiplicity through exposing the delusion of “self-nature”. At the same time, what is “historical default” in one part of the Earth, is not necessarily so elsewhere. “Form as multitude” may be a default for the West, but that does not necessarily hold in the East. Things are therefore a good deal more complex than I originally depicted them.
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“In just the way that the eyes of bats are related to the light of mid-day, so also is the intellect of our soul related to the things that are by nature the most evident of all”
(p. 29)
Confirming my thesis of “excess intelligibility”. It is also noteworthy that Aquinas, in his commentary on this passage, references such an interpretation, though he seems (?) to reject it.
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“For just as becoming is always between being and non-being...”
(p. 31)
This is what Guenon has in mind when he speaks of the limitations of metaphysics in the West, for whom “non-being” is a synonym for “nothingness”, and it is notable that Hegel seems to have inherited this precise formula which he “coincidentally” happens to retrace through his “presuppositionless” method in the Logic. How remarkable that Hegel, beginning in sheer purity, with no presuppositions to guide him, arrives at a cliché of Western metaphysics! But no, it is, on the contrary, being which lies between non-being and becoming [1]. That said, a distinction between the “two nights” (see Guenon's Initiation and Spiritual Realization) is both possible and necessary here. “Non-being” is generically ambiguous [2].
1: that is, if we are to arrange them hierarchically, as states to be achieved by an aspirant, by a “philosopher” in the strict sense. From the standpoint of “metaphysical simultaneity”, as it were, non-being is non-different from being, neither higher nor lower (whereas becoming is “illusion”). Such spatial symbolism is perfectly intelligible, albeit relevant only to the contingent standpoint of a being aspiring after a knowledge which it does not yet possess.
2: and, by the by, the crucial difference between mere equivocation and generic ambiguity is that equivocation does not necessarily imply that the distinct meanings suggested by a term have any but the most accidental relation with one another, a merely semantic relation. Generic ambiguity more specifically posits an actual relationship (primarily analogical) between these distinct meanings, meanings somehow impossibly united through a mere genera. Science of the modern kind and science of the traditional kind are both signified by “science”, and these sciences are meaningfully, indeed ontologically (and historically), related to one another. They do not merely happen to share a certain word in common.
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“Aporia as knot”
(p. 35)
This imagery is remarkably significant. A tangled knot appears to us as a kind of unity, a heap of interlacings (cf. Celtic knot imagery; also those intricate lacings Guenon references as related to the “sutratma” in his Symbols of Sacred Science). An interlacing of what? A rope with two ends: a polarity or a line of inquiry (however you prefer). That is we see some intelligible unity, in its “topographical intricacy”, entangled for us. We want to somehow convert this instantaneous unity into a directed line of inquiry—after all, we are rational beings, and that is what we do. We want to go somewhere, and with instantaneous unity we can go nowhere. It is too complete, too obvious, resting in its own perfection—a Gordian knot which refuses a beginning and an end, a clear-cut this to be distinguished from a that. As soon as we see this unity in its capacity as a “knot”, we have problematized it, rendered it perplexing, an aporia. We might even suppose that, “in practice”, the horseshoe of oppositions, as symbol (or myth), looks more like this:
Lying between its oppositions, one discovers not merely “neutral” magnitudes which express varying degrees of each pole, but a whole world of intricate expressions sheltered within the horizon of a qualitative opposition. The symbol, as unity of opposites, is a topographically complex unity—a paradox, to be sure, but a paradox which receives phenomenological confirmation. The rational inquirer does not want to stop and rest in this world. This world has already become a problem for him. His task becomes somehow untangling this knot, this unified heap, and converting it into a line of inquiry. It bears pointing out, in case the above literary reference has eluded anyone, that this untangling cannot be accomplished. Hence, the rational inquirer, unlike Alexander, does the impossible—which is also to say, that they do not do anything, since the impossible (which they do) cannot be done. They both do and do not untangle this knot. This blatant contradiction eventually resolves itself into its approximation—the indefinite untangling of a knot, a task without finality, except where we set limits on it, for our own provisional convenience.
The knot, like all symbols, is essentially double, a symbol of unity and a complex interlacing of oppositions.