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The Greek View as Political Experience
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
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Whether it is a question of apprehension, grasp, or simple contact, the vocabulary of perception clearly points towards the materiality of touch through what we usually think of as just a metaphorical variation. This is what ancient Greek thought recognized, or dimly felt, as a sometimes hidden constant in its history and its project: sensation, which describes the primary access to being, is first of all and above all a way of touching. Far from indicating a simple perceptual realism, this acknowledgement implies a specific idea about the presence of things in the world: touch assumes a surface, and every being, in order to appear and be seen, must therefore be entirely surface, be articulated within a boundary that describes it perfectly.
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1. This should be understood chronologically and ontologically; see Heidegger (1986), Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer), p. 33.
2. The conceptual alternative between seeing and believing has hardly any meaning here, since touch must be everything but immediate, and belief, on the other hand, is the locus of a complex mediation of which tragedy will offer the jagged and painful spectacle. Thus the example of Oedipus, a central instance of the ambivalence of sight, whose excessive crazy temptation makes him lose sight of the primary tactility of a light that is experienced only through its stable contact and defined contours. "Oh light, invisible yet long mine, today my body feels your touch for the last time" (Sophocles, Oedipus Rex, vv. 1549-50). The more one sees, the less clearly one sees. Clarity, and the truth that takes its shape, are to do with presence, which is measured by the defined arrangement of touch. This is also why the measurement referred to here has an eminently ethical significance, which tragic downfall in fact displays.
3. See Empedocles, fragment B109 Diels-Kranz, in Jean Bollack (1992), Empédocle, II (Paris: Gallimard), p. 191.
4. Translated into French by Bollack, ibid., p. 144, quotation from De sensibus, §1 (my italics).
5. Phaedrus, 250d2.
6. Timaeus, 47b-c (trans. Robin). See also 64e on the subject of objects with which sight "through the rays it sends out, achieves contact". In the area of sensation as contact, theories of sight as receiving (effluvia or simulacra) and sight as emitting (rays) are not so much opposite as complementary.
7. On this topic, see Hipparcus's way of putting it: "rays extend outwards from both eyes and their ends, feeling external bodies like hands touching, bring back perception of them to the faculty of sight" (my italics). See G. Romeyer-Dherbey (1999), "Voir et toucher, le problème de la prééminence d'un sens chez Aristote", in La parole Archaïque (Paris: PUF), pp. 270-89.
8. On this, see G. Romeyer-Dherbey (1999), "'Les yeux porteurs de lumière.' Théorie platonicienne et théorie euclidienne de la vision", ibid. pp. 150-66.
9. See Plato, Menon, 76a: "The boundary up to which a solid extends, this is what constitutes the shape."
10. De Anima, III, 3, 429a2.
11. Metaphysics, A, I, 980a25.
12. De Sensu, 2, 438b1 et seq.
13. Ibid, 439b30. So if Aristotle criticizes Democritus or Empedocles for having reduced all sensation to touch (De Sensu, 440a et seq.), it is in order to advance the necessary presence, proved everywhere, of the metaxu, the tactile link par excellence, by means of which external things are perceived. Thus it is because they have hands that human beings are the smartest. See Heidegger (1992), Qu'appelle-t-on penser? (Paris: PUF), p. 90: "Penser est un travail de la main" (Thinking is manual work).
14. See De Anima, II, 7, 419a12-13: "If the coloured object is placed directly on the organ of sight, it cannot be seen." So the action of an intermediary is necessary for the contact of sight to be achieved.
15. R. Brague (1988), Aristote et la question du monde, (Paris: PUF) pp. 372-3, emphasizes the analogy between this dual action of touch and the activity of the intellect, that thinks and also thinks itself, which clarifies further the use of the term tiggein, touch, to describe this activity (Metaphysics, 10, 1051b24).
16. The movement from potential to action (and especially the theory of sensation as a mutual act on the part of the sense and the sensed) is rooted in this same distance that the being carries within itself, here the gap between what it is not yet and what it is to become. It has to become through action what it truly is.
17. And not as if it was in a picture, Kant's phrase, whose meaning is quite different, and decisive in another way.
18. On this point see E. Martineau (1977), Malévitch et la philosophie, Lausanne: L'Age d'Homme, p. 147 et seq., as well as his reference to Heidegger, op. cit., p. 358.
19. See Martineau, op. cit., p. 150: "Voir ne veut rien dire" (seeing means nothing) echoes Malévitch's phrase: "l'absurde doctrine selon laquelle nos yeux pourraient voir" (the absurd theory that our eyes might be able to see).
20. In Greek to have an experience means to be within the boundary. This "within" does not refer to any spatial notion but is to be understood in the light of the Greek sense of the word "place", which Aristotle says is simply the boundary of the body (Physics, IV, 211b12-14). To experience is to be at the body's limit, hence the link with touch. Furthermore each body has its natural place, towards which it moves as if towards its form and self-realization (De Caelo, IV, 3, 311a4). But this place is first of all external (if fire moves upwards, this is because it does not start there) so that this form, what it truly is, is outside it. On this point see Brague, op. cit., pp. 273 et seq.
21. Which is a relationship whose terms do not pre-exist it, at least not as such; Aristotle's theory of the common act of sense and sensed makes this clearly explicit.
22. In accordance with which teleology would resurface, and therefore a position, even it were deferred.
23. This is what Aristotle, when characterizing completion in the form, entelecheia, calls movement in the form. The form is also a movement that is opened by the limit discovered in this way.
24. In fact, according to Aristotle, sensation defines the dimensions of things (in front, behind, up, down; see Marche, 4, 705b8-13), by situating them between a forward towards which it is directed (see Youth, 1,467b30) and a behind whose absence makes a discontinuous gap in perception. It is in this gap that the situation of human beings in the world is played out.
25. Imitation via the look is also used in Plato to describe the contemplation of intelligibles: "If a god invented the present of sight for us, it was so that, having watched the periodic movements of intelligence in the sky, we might use them to regulate the circular movements of our own thought, which are of the same kind" (Timaeus, 47b-c). In this ecstatic vision it is not a question of returning to the self but becoming what ideas are.
26. Indeed it is as a series of poroi (pores) that Empedocles describes the makeup of the organs of sense, the eyes especially.
27. H. Arendt (1986), "Qu'est-ce que la liberté?", in La crise de la culture (Paris: Gallimard), pp. 186-222.
28. Ibid., p. 191. This is a kind of birth of consciousness, self to self being the only crucial relationship.
29. Matter and the finite become the site of an infinite alterity (a paradox that initiates our politics).
30. And if this freedom is first experienced as negative, in resistance to the will, it is less an imitation than the mark and the richness of a reduction that opens to consciousness the complexity of a depth that cannot be plumbed and the mirror to what it contains.
31. Here expose does not mean pose outside oneself, which would amount to giving the characteristics of interiority. It means a movement of going out that does not establish any self, exteriority being in itself unexposable.
32. This is the finite nature of this exposure: being exposed without any sense other than this exposure, leaving the self which it is impossible to leave, and impossible to enter.
33. Not in the infinity of a going beyond, which we find in the baroque body, and as early as Michelangleo.
34. J. L. Nancy (2000), Corpus (Paris: Métailié), p. 117.
35. Ibid., p. 118. The body feels, and so it "feels like an outside" (p. 123).
36. Politics, I, 2, 1253a15-18 (my italics). Sense/feeling here is aisthèsis, that is, sensation.
37. Aristotle, Politics, I, 2, 1253a25, as action comes before power. See also a27: "the man who is incapable of being a member of a community, or who does not feel any need to because he is self-sufficient, in no way belongs to the city, and thus is either a brute or a god."
38. R. Brague, op. cit., p. 362.
39. Aristotle, Metaphysics, A, 1, 981b10-13. It tells us fire is hot, not why.
40. Ethics for Nicomachus, I, 1, 1094a23. See F. Volpi (1993), "Le problème de l'aisthèsis chez Aristote", Etudes phénomenologiques (Brussels: OUSIA), no. 17.
41. H. G. Gadamer (1994), L'idée du Bien comme enjeu platonico-aristotélicien (Paris: Vrin), p. 147.
42. Ibid., p. 169.
43. Like that of Plato's philosopher in the allegory of the cave, which goes to meet the truth. On the difference between immortality and eternity, and its political significance, see H. Arendt (1994), Condition de l'homme moderne (Paris: Calmann-Lévy), pp. 53 et seq.
44. Aristotle, Ethics for Nicomachus, X, 7, 1177b31. On this topic, see H. Arendt, op. cit., pp. 96 et seq.
45. On individual-community relations, see J.-P. Vernant (1989), "L'individu dans la cité", in L'individu, l'amour, la mort. Soi-même et l'autre en Grèce ancienne (Paris: Gallimard), pp. 211-32.
46. H. Arendt, op. cit., p. 80: "In other words, the public domain was reserved for individuality; it was the only area that allowed human beings to show what they really were, what was irreplaceable about them."
47. Which results, among other things, from perception through contact with the parent; see Plato, Timaeus, 63b-c.
48. See the fragment 53 DK from Heraclitus on combat as the "father of all things".
49. H. Arendt (2001), Qu'est-ce que la politique? (Paris: Seuil), p. 142.
50. Ibid., p. 146.
51. This is why the figure of Empedocles is so seminal in Hölderlin's work.
52. Here certain features will be recognized from the work of J. L. Nancy, as he lays out its development, particularly in Etre singulier pluriel or La communauté désoeuvrée.
53. J. L. Nancy (1999), La communauté désoeuvrée (Paris: Galilée), p. 188.
54. Ibid., p. 208: "Thus it is a becoming-another that does not include any mediation of the same and the other."
55. Ibid., p. 225.
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