Utter Metaphysical Banalities

This title may give rise to misunderstanding.

What I want to speak about is banalities that have a metaphysical value, in the sense that they are the banalities that we all experience. And the supreme banalities that we all experience relate to the fact that we are always in a spatial and a temporal environment, that we are caught in these two environments as in a woven fabric.

This is the theme of the conversation that I propose, and we shall follow an utterly banal schema:

(1) The spatial environment; (2) The temporal environment.

The Spatial Environment

The spatial environment is both closed and open. Biologically speaking, any environment is closed, limited. Everyone has heard of Konrad Lorenz and the way in which he describes the delimitation of the environment of ducks and other small animals; a delimitation that extends to the smallest detail (the end of a branch, a bush, a certain stone, etc.). And so we shall begin our discussion of the spatial environment from this point.

1. Limit. This is no more than my ‘range’, the ‘point’ up to which I can extend myself. By my nature, I am not enclosed merely within corporeal limits; I am not walled within my body. I can move here and there, see up to a certain distance, hear various things. As long as I am awake, I am open to the outside, but I am open in a limited manner. No matter how ‘mobile’ the things I do, they remain limited because it is as limited that I myself in all my being—corporeal, dynamic and intellectual— am. In fact we are limited a priori, in the sense that each of our gestures and actions has a certain predetermined measure. I can take a step of one metre, and if I push myself I can manage a little more, but I am not capable, with my human legs, of taking steps of five metres. I am limited da capo, and so I am from every point of view.

This is so evident that it no longer even enters our consciousness. Many unlimited things appear in our minds, while the consciousness that I am as limited, as something limited, is not clear precisely because it is so very evident. I do not realize that I am the way I am with the clarity with which it would be observed by someone looking down on us from somewhere high above, as we look down on ants, for example, immediately grasping the limits within which they can move.
Moreover, we can do so many things nowadays that my consciousness of limit as my first and supreme determination is far from clear. It is not at all obvious to me all the time that I cannot do anything unlimited.

2. For all that that is how things are, for all that I am limited in all directions, the environment is a plus; it is something more that the sum of my limitations. Going beyond the totality of my limits, it is somehow the consciousness of that totality. I live in this totality qua totality, not as the sum of my margins, and this is what I mean by ‘my range’. It means that the nature of the environment is not concretely physical, although the environment is concretely physical. The environment as my ‘range’ presupposes a modifiable and approximate nature. For people, the environment is mobile; its limits are not fixed as with Lorenz’s animals. They can be changed; my whole environment can be changed; even my language can be changed.

Thus it follows that, though there is a totality of the things that make up my environment, a totality that can be inventoried (the totality of things in the room), the environment is something ‘in the mind’, a totality of a spiritual nature.

3. As the totality of my limits, the environment is at the same time inscribed in something wider: in my ‘horizons’. For, being limited, the environment is limited in relation to something. If the environment is my ‘range’, if it is as far as I can extend myself, that means there is also a beyond in relation to how far things go for me. In this beyond there are things which, being unable to encompass them, I do not know very well or even at all. There may even be an abyss there. But what I know very well is that my environment is inscribed within a much wider circle about which I do not have to be clear at all costs. What matters is to be clear about the things in my immediate environment, not also about those that lie at the other end of the world, of the universe etc. All that matters is to know—and nothing more—that my environment is situated within a larger sphere.

And how exactly is it inscribed? It is always inscribed as my own environment.
The environment always belongs to someone, is someone’s own. It is true that in any environment there are concrete things that interpenetrate, but they are the concrete things of my environment. This fact too is one of those evident matters that are passed over precisely because they are too evident.

This character of ‘one’s own’ of the environment operates in a strange way on the objects that the environment contains: in appropriating them, it causes them to fade. Any environment does this inasmuch as it is my own environment: it frees me from the things that it contains, relegating them to the taken-for-grantedness of their existence, and helps me to save my lucidity for new and important things. If I am able to concentrate on something, if I am able to work in my room, it is because the things I know are laid to one side and allowed to wither into too-well-knownness.
When I sit at my desk, I am not in dialogue with the lamp on the table, with the paper on which I write, or with the computer on which I work. The fact that I completely appropriate what I know, all that is part of the familiarity of my environment, does not take away its existence, only its foreignness.

4. That which is known of a thing means its withering, and this means that one’s own environment implies, as its opposite term, foreignness. This is the opposition: what is one’s own and what is foreign. What is foreign is all that is not in my environment, all that is not known, the beyond. From this point of view, anything can be foreign: an animal, a plant, a thing (a Coca-Cola bottle for a tribe in the tropical forest), all that is unheimlich, unfamiliar, while the classic concrete expression of the familiar environment par excellence is the house, the home, das Heim. I make a house in order to have my own environment, to be at home there. But ‘being at home’ comes before the home itself, from the need to have a secure environment. It is not the house that creates an environment, but the need for an environment that creates a house. The shelter-house, the hotel for example, is not my environment and precisely for that reason I am not ‘at home’ there. Now just as ‘at home’ is a feeling, ein Gefühl, so that which is foreign, foreignness, is a feeling. And if we are attentive and still have some freshness, then the foreign and foreignness appear in any meeting with an unknown person. There is something unheimlich, uncomfortable and thus strange and unpleasant, in any first meeting with a person. This is the case in which we still feel foreignness: that is to say, what is foreign about the other. For in fact few of us still feel the foreignness of a dog—how foreign it is to you –, and even fewer the foreignness of a flower or a tree.

For intellectuals, there is something foreign (and strange) in any new book that you take in your hand. It may conceal who knows what; it is foreign in the sense that it is inhabited by a foreign spirit, which is completely other than yourself. However I repeat: this foreignness is a Gefühl, a sentiment, and does not arise from the fact that I am afraid of a dog or that a flower is unusually beautiful. Moreover, the foreignness of a thing may be felt also in front of something that I have seen hundreds of times, but which only now, suddenly and unexpectedly, jumps out at me. 

What is the difference between any pair of worn boots and Van Gogh’s boots? The latter put on stage, so to speak, the foreignness that in the case of the other boots I have never perceived. It takes Van Gogh’s painting to show me to what extent a pair of boots can be foreign to us, and, as such, strange.

What I want to emphasize is that any foreignness is determined in relation to something that is one’s own—let us continue to call it an ‘environment’ –, and that conversely any environment creates the possibility of something foreign. That is to say, in relation to the environment, in relation to this ‘place’ where the known is (the known that withers), the unknown shows itself. In withering, this known does not make a thing cease to exist; however it makes it no longer perceptible. Because we have seen each other so many times and because we know each other quite well, we no longer perceive each other as vigorously as we would perceive an unknown person who suddenly entered the room. In this environment of ours which is this room, they would be foreignness itself. But I was saying more than this when I mentioned Van Gogh’s boots: that there is a potential for foreignness in anything. If you can take from your eyes the veil of the too-well-known, then anything can appear in its fundamental foreignness, ultimately even you yourself if you look at yourself in the mirror as if you were seeing yourself for the first time. And it is this power to penetrate the space of the known that makes it possible for us to rediscover a thing, a person, a piece of music, a book.

However it remains essential that the foreign is determined in relation to the own—what I have called the ‘environment’—and, conversely, that the environment creates the possibility of the foreign. And these two terms are in a perfect equilibrium, which we grasp when we realize that we have an equal need for an environment and for the foreign, and that the predominance of either one of them leads to a sort of despondency. When the known predominates, the result is boredom; when the foreign predominates, the result is alienation. All of us have experienced this boredom with our own home, with all the things we know, our books, our clothes etc.: that is to say, all the things through which the environment overpowers you with the withering of everything that has lost its bloom for you. And of course we have all experienced alienation when we have gone abroad, to a place where everything, absolutely everything, is foreign, to Nigeria let us say. And then you miss the very things that until then had come to bore you. You miss your town, your home, your bathroom, the armchair in front of the desk where you work. Kierkegaard talks about this balance in one of his books, the Treatise of Despair: despair in the finite and despair in the infinite. And Heidegger deals with boredom in a splendid lecture, in which boredom, Langeweile, appears as a crevice, an abyss.

5. The spatial environment is not chaotic, but ordered, or, more precisely, oriented. I know very well the state of things in my environment, literally and figuratively speaking. Any thing has a place in space, and in the combination of things I can at any time find or create an order. The chaotic and order are not, in this sense, objective. The chaotic often arises from the foreignness of a setting, just as order is often the result of being used to it. No environment is chaotic for the person who lives in it. There is a perfect order on this desk for the person who works at it, although it is overloaded with books, sheets of paper, notes etc., while for the woman who does the cleaning it is completely disordered. Any apparent disorder can be tamed. Supposing that there was disorder in this room, if I spent more time in it and started to get used to the things, I would begin to distinguish in the disorder which struck me at first the order that the person who lives here has imprinted on them. Little by little I myself would penetrate this environment and transform it into my own. On the other hand, where I am and remain foreign, it seems to me that everything is chaotic. A perfectly ordered room can remain totally foreign for me, because for whatever reason I cannot appropriate it spiritually.

6. Orientation is based on the schema of centre and surround, that is to say me and my environment. In fact in our case it would be correct to say that ‘me and my environment’ is the basis of the ‘centre and surround’ (or ‘ordered surround’) schema. I am always in an environment, because I am always ‘outside’: I see, I hear, I take a step… The ‘me–environment’ schema is fundamental, and it ultimately reproduces the simple schema of the cosmos. As understood by the Greeks, the cosmos is that which has a centre, and, precisely for this reason, has a well ordered surround. It is a world. The same schema works with all the breadth and depth of its
treatment in Heidegger’s analysis of being-in-the-world (In-der-Welt-sein), especially in the form of Worum-willen (‘for-the-sake-of-which’). In saying this, I only want to show that these philosophical ideas of great breadth start out from an extremely simple immediate reality. It is sufficient to think a little about the immediate in order to fall upon the great philosophical solutions.

The Temporal Environment

Common sense tells us that our temporal environment is the age in which we live— which, let’s face it, is vague. If the ‘age’ is the century, for example, then the interval is too large and too chrono-arithmetical. And if it is smaller, then how small can it get? Our language describes this short respiration of time in the expression ‘from today till tomorrow’. And in fact it is impossible not to live from today till tomorrow. Each of us knows what we have in mind to do today and what we propose to do tomorrow. I always have a programme, even if the programme is to take it easy. In other words, I am always busy.

But that is what I do with my time. When we discuss the temporal environment, we need to consider what time makes of us.

1. The first thing that must be said is that man lives in a contemporaneity and cannot do otherwise without forcing reality. Contemporaneity is the social environment from a temporal point of view, but it is not the same thing as synchronicity. I cannot live without having a contemporaneity, but it is quite possible for me not to live in contemporaneity understood as synchronicity. Children, for example, are not yet contemporary with contemporaneity, and the elderly have ceased to be so.

Let us pause a little over the case of the elderly. They take into themselves, and carry with them a certain contemporaneity, that of their youth and maturity. And they keep this contemporaneity deep in their heart until they die: the artists who were famous in their time, the music, the food and all that belongs to ‘Ah, back in my day!’. Whence it results that contemporaneity, too, is a sentiment, a Gefühl.

Over and above pure synchronism, an unknown web binds you to the time in which you lived to the full, a web impregnated by all that characterizes that time in relation to the time that immediately followed it. The Greeks did not approach someone’s biography with reference to the years of his birth and of his death, but rather in terms of his ἀκμή, meaning his ‘peak point’, the time of maturity, when the person attains the fullness of his being, the best period of his life. We do not know very well how these affective bonds are woven between us and the peak period of our lives, which we then feel to be contemporaneity.

Of course, someone may say to me, regardless of this Gefühl and this remaining behind that is presupposed by old age, we still all live in contemporaneity: we turn on the radio and hear the news, we watch television, we listen to what this or that person says, we see the same fi lms, read the books that come out, talk together… 

But to what extent do these things become everybody’s ‘web’? To what extent are they all still grafted onto my being and metabolized? For an elderly person, all these things are pale reflections of the similar things that they experienced in their maturity and that inscribed themselves in them with full vivacity. They see a famous dancer of today, but in fact they remain convinced that there is no longer a dancer like Fred Astaire and never will be. They see Richard Gere and exclaim: ‘What a handsome man Gary Cooper was!’ They look at a fashion parade and think nostalgically of the clothes ‘of their day’. Of course they are contemporary with the rest of us, but only in appearance. In reality, they are all the time there, ‘in their day’.

For this reason, contemporaries are not just people who have lived at the same time, but those who have shared a certain temporal environment: a history, habits, technical means, fashion, cultural prejudices. And all these things have inscribed themselves in their hearts, have been co-experienced. And when they change—and hélas, all things change!—they no longer feel at home. Everything that has changed has changed, for them, for the worse, and they have remained foreign in relation to the evolution of the temporal environment. The Germans have a good verb: mitmachen, to make something together, to participate in its birth. Well, the elderly no longer mitmachen, no longer give things a starting push. ‘Er macht das nicht mehr mit.’ ‘I’ve lost him along the way.’ He is no longer, practically and affectively, along-side me. (I am speaking, of course, in general terms, of simple and usual cases. I do not mean to say that there do not exist elderly people who are every bit as contemporary as could be. Dinu Noica, for example, is contemporary, and not just in a mimicking way, but authentically.) This nicht mehr mitmachen sometimes takes insurrectional forms, becoming a protest, a refusal, a deliberate form of non- participation in what is happening. Things being as they are, elderly people are foreign to the world in which they only live de facto, while in their hearts it is foreign to them.

It sometimes happens that we leaf through illustrated magazines of 60 years ago. What strikes us is not just the fact that the world there is different from ours, but that to a large extent it is comical. There is always something comical about the immediate past. This mixture of the tragic and the comic is particularly striking when we happen to meet unknown elderly people in the street. They are left in the world of today like so many revenants, like so many ghosts. Contemporaneity thus gives a certain superiority to the person who knows ‘what…’: what is worn, what is said, what is known, what is done and is not done, what is chic and what is not. It is the superiority of the up-to-date. And this superiority of the one who keeps up with things is much more visible in our times, precisely because the changes are much more rapid. The idea of progress nowadays brings with it an obsession with contemporaneity. This is no longer a point that separates the past from the future, but a ‘now’ that has become absolute in relation to the past. What is past is ipso facto dated, out-of-date; whatever is contemporary becomes the place of the ‘last’ judgement. For being contemporary gives you the right to judge the past. What I mean is that the past comes to be at the beck and call of the present simply by virtue of its temporal position. Such judgements usually start with ‘Nowadays we no longer…’, and they express all the arrogance of the fact of being contemporary. What is now decisive is not logic, but temporal position. We have reached, in our day, a sort of domination on the line of time, in which what is new or seems to be new is superior precisely because it is new. This ‘new’ is raised to the rank of a symbol of the future, and thus raised in its temporal grade. In a symmetrical manner, all that is past becomes antiquated. Of course there is a logical naivety about this way of appreciating things. If nowadays what was superior yesterday is antiquated, then tomorrow what is superior today will be antiquated, and so on. And then there is no point in anything. How can we escape from this provincialism of contemporaneity? The safest solution is to know the thinkers of the past. Why? Because only if we are conscious of them can we reposition contemporaneity in its proper place: that of a chance limit-point in an evolution with which we have to be contemporary. You are contemporary if you have the culture of today not through what is today, but together with the whole unfolding in which ‘today’ is a chance happening that concerns us. The hardest thing is to grasp progress where it is not merely quantitative.

Let us take the example of the computer. The calculating machines that made up the first generation of computers were huge and slow. They are antiquated. There is no doubt that they are out-of-date in relation to the computers of today, which can sit on a single table, can do many more operations, and can be operated easily. All that I have listed so far are quantitative aspects. In the case of the computer, it is absolutely clear that progress is quantitative. As far as I am aware, however, no-one has yet demonstrated that in matters in which quantitative appreciations cannot be made, this force of temporality (the superiority of the new) should operate without any other criterion. However I would like you all to be aware of the power of this temporality, or to be more precise, the superiority that is felt by the person who lives in contemporaneity. Here, in contemporaneity, seems to be the end of the world, or even its culmination. Being a feeling, this is not objective but subjective. All those who live contemporaneity to the full have a tendency to confiscate time. They all have the feeling that they are at the culmination of something. Hegel was not immune to this (der absolute Geist), and nor was Auguste Comte or Nietzsche. For each of us, the completely legitimate feeling that we are at the furthest extreme of the world, that we are the last in time, can transform into the less legitimate, or even utterly illegitimate feeling that the world is coming to fulfilment in us, or at least entering a decisive phase. This (illegitimate) feeling is based on the following reasoning: if we, knowing all that our predecessors have done and thought, do something else, then this ‘something else’ is ipso facto superior to what was done before, since no-one would consciously do something worse. Thus a confusion, in the sense of an unjustified identification, is created between ‘new’ on the one hand, and ‘superior’ or ‘advanced’ on the other. Modern temporality—and we shall see how it came into being—brings about an enhancement of the new as a purely temporal value, an intrinsic value. The new is constituted as new, proclaims itself as such, and, conscious of its temporal value, affirms itself as a negation of the past. The term ‘modern’ is more than a 1000 years old, as is the ‘ancient–modern’ opposition, only that it did not previously have its accent on temporality.

2. Since the word ‘modern’ has become too vague, the ‘ancient–modern’ opposition has been replaced today by the conflict between generations. The opposition on which the psychology of generations is based can be summed up in the expression ‘different from’. Thus the beatniks were ‘different’ from well-brought-up young people. Everything they did was in opposition to what they had been told when they were little. ‘Go and wash your hands! Go and take a shower!’—they didn’t wash anymore. ‘Get a haircut! Can’t you see how long your hair is?’—they didn’t cut their hair anymore. ‘Tell the maid to iron your trousers!’—they didn’t wear ironed trousers anymore, and so on. 

Research has shown that all these beatniks, including those who rioted on university campuses, turned into decent people, with jobs in respectable companies, committed family men who cut their hair, wore ironed trousers etc.

The generation conflict seems to elude engagement in the temporal environment, and it is tempting to see the opposition as one between group solidarities created around certain ideals, beliefs, points of view, or behaviours, implying problems of ‘taste’ rather than of period. But it is not at all so. The generation is always fixed in a certain time and given a date. It cannot escape from time. Previously there was la querelle des Anciens et des Modernes; there were the ancients, who continued to uphold traditionalism, and there were the moderns. Then the generations began to impose themselves: we had the ‘forty-eighters’ (so called from the year 1848), and in France in our own century there was the ‘sixty-eight’ generation, the generation who threw lumps of tarmac at the police in the spring of 1968. Here in Romania, in literature, as far as I understand from the periodicals I read, each decade now has its own generation.

3. In the same way as with the spatial environment that belongs to us, so in the temporal environment in which we live, life unfolds in a predictable way. We live, in other words, with a certain temporal security. But here too, in the temporal environment as in the spatial, the foreign element may intrude: the happening, the event. 'An hour can bring what a year does not,’ goes a well-known saying. The event quite simply explodes against the background of the temporal environment. But the proportion of happening, of event, is dictated by the degree of solidity of the temporal environment. In a traditional, archaic temporal environment, any violence is an event. A common assault there is the subject of discussion for weeks on end, while in New York it passes unnoticed.

Thus if the temporal environment is well ‘sealed’ and things only repeat themselves, happenings are unlikely to occur: this is the place where nothing has happened (as in Sadoveanu’s novel1). In such a reiterative world, whatever happens as a deviation from repetition happens abruptly; it seems like an explosion and takes on huge proportions. In our world, on the other hand, men have to go to the moon for it to be an event on the scale of a knife attack among neighbours in some small village. It all depends on the solidity of the temporal environment. In New York, it is changing all the time. All sorts of new things keep appearing; nothing is predictable as it is in a small community, as it is, for example, in the provinces. Think what a solid temporal environment the citizens of Königsberg lived in when they saw Kant walking every day at the same time.

Intervening as it does, the happening is a sort of opening of time, or rather of the temporal environment. This time that, in the temporal environment, flows regularly, repetitively, and in a familiar manner, is interrupted when the happening breaks its way in. Time that is thus opened acquires another dimension—a vertical dimension in place of the horizontal one—and the present is turned into something overpowering. Not only in the sense of an intensification of the present moment, but also in the sense that time is forced open towards what may be dreadful in the temporal. This is when the feeling arises that anything can happen. The happening has the same degree of unheimlich, of ‘strange-terrible’ as the foreign has in the spatial environment. The temporal structure in which I generally live, one that is familiar to me, in which things are predictable, in which I can make plans and programmes and in which everything happens in order, accustoms me to a mild and gentle face of time.

All of us who have lived in the provinces are familiar with this face of time. When the happening intervenes, the face of time is changed. It takes on a quite different dimension, one you have not suspected up till now. It appears in your life in a quite different form, one that is completely unfamiliar: in the form of the extraordinary, the totally unusual.

And this is the end of my talk on ‘utter metaphysical banalities.’ I wanted to show that we are caught in a spatio-temporal environment exactly as in a trap. This means that our actions are not only limited: they also limit us. The environment is perhaps precisely this turning of our fundamental limitation back on ourselves, a turning back that results in the enclosure of our lives within limits that are no longer physical- natural, but spiritual. I wanted it to be understood somehow that philosophy is not something that deals with the problem of the infinite in the paralogisms of Kant’s pure reason. Oh no! Its place is right here in the immediate. In other words Mr Liiceanu’s ‘limit’ is not a matter of peratology.2 It needs to be thought hic et nunc. It is for this reason that you cannot live without doing philosophy. In a way, we can live without thinking about the infinite, but we cannot live without thinking about our trap. For the simple reason that we live in it. Philosophy is thinking about the trap in which we live. I agree, of course, that there are many ways out of this trap; the principal escape routes are religion, philosophy, science, and art. In the case of philosophy, I escape from the trap exactly to the extent that I want to be clear in my mind about it. You can, of course, live in this trap content that ‘they’ give you warmth and food, I mean without feeling any need for philosophy. But for me that is not a life that I can choose. No! I want to be clear about my world. And this is called doing philosophy.

1 The book referred to is Locul unde nu s-a întâmplat nimic (The place where nothing happened), 1933, by Mihail Sadoveanu (1880–1961), a well-known Romanian novelist.
2 See Gabriel Liiceanu’s chapter ‘The Notebooks from Underground’ in the present volume.

from the book The World We Live In by Alexandru Dragomir (auth.), Gabriel Liiceanu, Catalin Partenie (eds.)